Indispensable Eyesores: An Anthropology of Undesired Buildings 9781845459215

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Indispensable Eyesores

REMAPPING CULTURAL HISTORY Series Editor: Jo Labanyi, Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, New York University Editorial Committee: John Foot, University College, London; Panivong Norindr, University of Southern California; Ellen Sapega, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Svetlana Slapsˇak, Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis, Ljubljana This series aims to challenge theoretical paradigms by exploring areas of culture that have previously received little attention. Preference will be given to volumes that discuss parts of the world that do not easily fit within dominant northern European or North American theoretical models, or that make a significant contribution to rethinking the ways in which cultural history is theorised and narrated. Volume 1 Cultural Encounters: European Travel Writing in the 1930s Charles Burdett and Derek Duncan Volume 2 Images of Power: Iconography, Culture and the State in Latin America Jens Andermann and William Rowe Volume 3 The Art of the Project: Projects and Experiments in Modern French Culture Johnnie Gratton and Michael Sheringham Volume 4 Locating Memory: Photographic Acts Annette Kuhn and Kirsten Emiko McAllister Volume 5 Intersected Identities: Strategies of Visualisation in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Mexican Culture Erica Segre

Volume 6 Fetishes and Monuments: AfroBrazilian Art and Culture in the Twentieth Century Roger Sansi Volume 7 Journeys Through Fascism: Italian Travel-Writing between the Wars Charles Burdett Volume 8 Border Interrogations: Questioning Spanish Frontiers Benita Sampedro and Simon Doubleday Volume 9 Love and the Idea of Europe Luisa Passerini Volume 10 Indispensable Eyesores: An Anthropology of Undesired Buildings Mélanie van der Hoorn

Indispensable Eyesores An Anthropology of Undesired Buildings

Mélanie van der Hoorn

Berghahn Books Books Berghahn Providence NEW Y O R K • • OOxford X FOR D

First published in 2009 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2009 Mélanie van der Hoorn All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed in the United States on acid-free paper. ISBN 978-1-84545-530-9 (hardback)

Contents

List of Illustrations

vii

Foreword

ix

1. Dragons, Tunnels, Gold and Russians: Narrative Introductions into the Bowels of ‘Corrupt’ Architecture

1

2. Between Pragmatic Clearance and Pure Iconoclasm: Theoretical Perspectives on the Life and Death of Undesired Buildings

11

3. 13 May 2001, 8.01 A.M. – 1 Building, 20,000 People and 450 Kilograms of Explosives: The Elimination of the Kaiserbau in Troisdorf as a Secular Sacrifice

39

4. Witnessing Urbicide: Contested Destruction in Sarajevo

58

5. From Nuclear Waste to a Temple of Consumerism: The Recuperation and Neutralization of the Ex-would-be Nuclear Power Plant in Kalkar

80

6. Consuming the ‘Platte’ in East Berlin: The Revaluation of Former GDR Architecture

99

7. If Not Clearing, Then At Least Thinking Them Away: The Significance of Unrealized Proposals and the Viennese Flaktürme

120

8. ‘L’ like ‘Left to Its Own Devices’: The Progressive Dilapidation of the Kulturhaus in Zinnowitz

138

9. Exorcizing Remains: Architectural Fragments as Intermediaries between History and Individual Experience

153

10. In Fond Memory of a Rejected Edifice: Reaffirming Agency by Rehabilitating Vanished Eyesores

171

vi

Contents

11. Eyesores Are Indispensable: Concluding Remarks

191

Epilogue. Taboos on the Multi-Sensory Materiality of Buildings and Their Agency

202

Notes

214

Bibliography

238

Index

255

List of Illustrations

F.1. Visualization of the notion of Indispensable Eyesores. Cartoon by Joost Swarte, design by Michael Kolf. 3.1. Detonation: a total sensory experience. Photo by Alex We Hillgemann, www.auge-und-ohr.de. 4.1. Postcard representing Vije´cnica, the National and University Library. Photo by Zoran Filipovi´c. 4.2. Postcard representing the ruined Oslobod¯enje headquarters. Photo by unknown photographer. 5.1. ‘This is the site of a new reactor ruin. Construction started 1978, projected demolition 1985’. Cartoon by Jupp Wolter (by courtesy of Haus der Geschichte, Bonn). 5.2. The decorated cooling tower as climbing wall in Kernwasser Wunderland. Photo by Mélanie van der Hoorn. 6.1. Erik Schmidt’s apartment: bare walls and minimalist furniture, stage for commercials. Photo by Mélanie van der Hoorn. 6.2. The view from Ulli Uphaus’ apartment: ‘The higher, the better’. Photos by Mélanie van der Hoorn. 6.3. Project in an empty Plattenbau in Halle-Neustadt in 2003. Photo by Mélanie van der Hoorn. 7.1. Flakturm in the Augarten. Photo by Mélanie van der Hoorn. 7.2. Project for a hotel and multi-storey car park in a Flakturm. Project and photo by Kurt Vana. 7.3. Flakturm as sculpture in romantic scenery. Design by Sascha Büchi. 8.1. The Kulturhaus in the 1960s. Photo by unknown photographer (by courtesy of Historische Gesellschaft, Zinnowitz). 8.2. The Kulturhaus’ theatre in 2004. Photo by Mélanie van der Hoorn. 8.3. The Kulturhaus’ prominent facade. Photo by Mélanie van der Hoorn.

xi 48 63 76

92 96

105 106 116 123 133 136

139 142 146

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List of Illustrations

9.1. The National Socialist seaside resort in Prora. Photo by Mélanie van der Hoorn. 154 9.2. Clip card with a Berlin Wall fragment. Photo by Mélanie van der Hoorn. 155 9.3. Works of art by Klaus Böllhoff: Prora Putzen, Proradies, Oproration, Prorarität (‘Prorarity’). Photos by Mélanie van der Hoorn. 166 10.1. Monument to the Church of the Holy Mary. Photo by Mélanie van der Hoorn. 173 10.2. Former Parisiana Nightclub in 1908, 1921, 1952, 1962 and 1990: putting time into brackets. First three photos by unknown photographer (second and third by courtesy of Hungarian Architecture Museum, Budapest); last two photos by Gábor Barka. 178–9 10.3. New Hungarian National Theatre, with plaster cast of the facade of the old theatre. Photo by Mélanie van der Hoorn. 186 E.1. Le Roy’s Eco-Cathedral: abandoning oneself to ‘thing-ly’ agency. Photo by Mélanie van der Hoorn. 205

Foreword

Scientific writings cannot be a purely individual product; they always grow out of concerted action: thanks to the precious contribution of people confident enough to support hesitant research proposals still ‘in the egg’, others patient enough to carefully read and comment on earlier drafts, still others willing to disclose the required information, and, last but not least, a variable constellation of people – whether professionals or laymen – repeatedly manifesting their interest for the subject. Without all of them, authors would have a hard life. I would like to express my gratitude to all those who supported the realization of Indispensable Eyesores. This book, initially a doctoral thesis, came into being as part of the research programme Scenarios for the Humanities, which was initiated at the Research Institute for History and Culture, Utrecht University, in 1999. The present research took shape within a subprogramme entitled Art and Architecture as Representations of the Past. I would like to thank all those who contributed to developing and enabling this forwardlooking and broad-minded programme, and Wiljan van den Akker and Wim Denslagen in particular, for giving me the chance and freedom to pursue a line of thought that still needed to crystallize out. Their confidence and enthusiasm were very valuable. At several occasions, the Research Institute for History and Culture (in the person of Frans Ruiter) and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research kindly granted me additional financial support, either for participation in conferences or for the indispensable personal visits to the eyesores under scrutiny. For one thing, this allowed me to meet colleagues based in other countries and discuss earlier drafts with them, which was of great help in developing my approach and linking various cases together. For another, I got the opportunity to spend a satisfactory length of time at each of the eyesore locations – and visit almost all of them twice. Knowing that fieldwork is not as self-evident in the humanities as in the social sciences, I particularly appreciated that the necessity of these investigations in situ was benevolently recognized.

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Jojada Verrips, from the Anthropological Sociological Centre, University of Amsterdam, was closely associated with the project from the very beginning. His contagiously passionate eye for unconventional themes and perspectives as well as his ability to unmask cryptic and unthought-of connections formed an exceptional source of inspiration. Our always invigorating meetings, an indefinable sort of top-class mental sport which I often left both more puzzled and possessed than I could ever have imagined, are unforgettable. During the first few years of my research, it was very inspiring and comforting to regularly meet colleagues from the so-called ‘Aio-Clubje’, all well-disposed towards each other and thus enabling unseasoned ideas to ripen in a comforting climate. Also, earlier versions of parts of this book were presented as conference papers and/or published in the form of articles. Conferences proved to be very challenging forums for discussion, and going through a publication process was always a great means to obtain unbiased and constructive criticism. In this respect I am especially grateful to Alison Clarke, and would like to extend my word of thanks to the editors and anonymous peer reviewers of the Journal of Material Culture, of Home Cultures: Design, Architecture and Domestic Space as well as Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology. As members of my PhD-jury, Dario Gamboni, Kevin Hetherington, Victor Buchli and Henk Schulte-Nordholt took the time to read the text from beginning to end and formulate thought-provoking comments and questions which led me to add an entirely new chapter. Finally, I am very grateful to the editorial team of Berghahn Books for the pleasant cooperation, and to various reviewers for patiently and meticulously providing the typescript with corrections and suggestions. Also, I would like to evoke the form in which this text was initially printed, thanks to strip cartoonist Joost Swarte and graphic designer Michael Kolf. As appealing as their content may be, scientific writings, regrettably, are often presented in an uninviting form from which, sometimes, even the necessary illustrations have been banned. In an attempt to experiment with what a conspicuous form could positively contribute, I asked Joost Swarte to translate the abstract and seemingly contradictory notion of Indispensable Eyesores into an image, which resulted in the design presented on the adjoining photograph. Understandably, it could not be adopted one-to-one here since it would not have fitted with the layout of the Remapping Cultural History series, yet it deserves to be mentioned in this preface as an integral part of the research project. Besides those who had a professional connection to my investigation, I would like to mention a number of other persons without whom this

Foreword

xi

Fig. F.1 Visualization of the notion of Indispensable Eyesores. Cartoon by Joost Swarte, design by Michael Kolf.

project would have been unthinkable. First of all, as a cultural anthropologist, I could not have conducted this research without the precious helpfulness of a large number of interviewees and informants in and around Vienna, Troisdorf, Sarajevo, Kalkar, Berlin, Zinnowitz, Prora and Budapest. Further, carrying out this project was not only a rewarding and challenging professional activity but also a fascinating ‘hobby’ and passion to share with the ‘home front’. Without the watchful eye of Bert van der Hoorn, I would not even have known about Scenarios for the Humanities, and without his encouragement, would not have dared to present an idea which, at that time, had only emerged. Michael Schwaiger very ‘diplomatically’ aroused my interest for architecture and continued to nourish this common passion with a constant supply of innovative ideas and possible cases. Geneviève and Sabine van der Hoorn faithfully visited me at many of my fieldwork and

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Foreword

conference destinations. The unremitting interest of all four of them, and their never-fading enthusiasm for clambering over fences and exploring still another dark grey wreck, added greatly to the delight taken in this project.

Chapter 1

Dragons, Tunnels, Gold and Russians Narrative Introductions into the Bowels of ‘Corrupt’ Architecture

This book is about buildings that people reject, or would like to reject. It describes how people come to perceive specific buildings as undesired elements in their built environment, as well as how they dispose of them, or imagine doing so. How do people affect undesired architecture, and how does undesired architecture affect them? Buildings, especially mysterious and inaccessible edifices which find themselves in a marginal state, appear to be very inspiring: they call up narratives in the form of ghost stories, crime novels, urban legends or even tourist guides. Such narratives form a valuable source of information about the significance of the life and death of so-called architectural eyesores for people who live or work in or near them. They not only reflect the multitude of meanings that can be attached to pieces of architecture – complex significances that contribute to making eyesores ‘indispensable’ – but these same narratives also indirectly relate to questions of durability and the nature of the ephemeral. One of the most exciting stories I ever heard about architectural eyesores relates to the Viennese Flaktürme, six monolithic towers made of reinforced concrete, about forty to fifty metres high, with walls standing several metres thick. They were built on orders from Hitler in 1942, ostensibly for the planning of counterattacks and civil defence against air raids.1 Since the end of the Second World War, these mammoth edifices have remained almost completely unaffected, unmistakably present in the townscape, but almost hermetically closed

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Indispensable Eyesores

to potential visitors.2 Nonetheless, or perhaps precisely because of that, several myths related to the inside of these mysterious places are circulating among Vienna’s inhabitants. Klaus Steiner, former project manager at the municipal city planning department and Flakturmspecialist, told me following story: Suddenly the rumour appeared that there was medical equipment and medicine in some of the towers: powders and phials with medicine from the Nazi era, and that they had remained there since the Nazi period, for decades, and that unknown chemical reactions had started to occur, and that therefore one could not tell whether a dragon would be living in there, and that the towers should not be reopened, because it could have terrible consequences.3

This example of ‘corrupt’ architecture is not unique. Some buildings are seen to have come about in a corrupt manner: either the choice for a particular design was dictated by favouritism, or construction was not carried out entirely legally. Some others are considered corrupt in themselves: the Viennese Flaktürme, or the Palace of the Republic in Berlin, a main cultural meeting point during the time of the GDR, which was found polluted by asbestos in 1990 and eventually dismantled in 2006, after years of intensive debates. Described by Brian Ladd in his book The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape, the late history of the edifice illustrates the double etymologic meaning of the term ‘corrupt’: decayed, rotten, perverted on the one hand, and dishonest, depraved, reprehensible on the other: ‘[A]n official inspection declared the building hopelessly contaminated with asbestos and ordered it closed and sealed. And so it continued to stand for years, in many eyes the symbolic legacy of a poisonous state’ (1997: 59). In the first sense of the term, ‘spoilt’ or ‘contaminated’ buildings can suffer from so-called ‘sick building syndrome’, often related to synthetic materials, or from a variety of structural diseases such as subsiding floors or major construction defects with catastrophic consequences. Some ‘pathogens’, such as asbestos, can be clearly identified, whereas others have more the character of urban legends (Harris 1999: 128–30). Especially in the latter case, it is interesting to investigate which kind of metaphors refer to the pathology of buildings, as well as which meanings they reveal. In its second sense, the notion of corruption refers to buildings that are supposedly no good because they are perceived as concrete embodiments of a wrong ideology or dark period in history. When, additionally, potential visitors are carefully held off, people often give their imagination free rein and start creating stories about the edifices’ true colours: what the latter conceal in their entrails, and to which negative radiations they could possibly expose their users.

Narrative Introductions

3

In a book entitled Building Lives: Constructing Rites and Passages, Neil Harris has described various types of diseases that buildings can contract, and insisted on the difference between physical and psychological disorders. He recognizes that a building’s ‘soul’ can be affected, and wonders why so little attention is paid to ill psyche: ‘If buildings can be physically sick, why can’t they be mentally ill as well? … [W]hile many are ready to acknowledge building disease, few are prepared to cross over this next boundary’ (1999: 130). Yet are mental disorders really so often neglected? Or do people simply not name them explicitly, but rather in the form of metaphors? Susan Sontag (1978) already remarked that supposedly embarrassing, taboo diseases are generally considered to embody the evil in society or in the world, and that, rather than referring to them directly, people prefer to use extensive imagery. This introductory chapter presents a number of architectural eyesores which, considered harmful by a considerable majority, have been rejected, and find themselves in a marginal state. Often fenced off, they nonetheless occupy a prominent place in the townscape. Perhaps it would be very natural to turn one’s back on them, but evidence is otherwise: all these edifices give rise to numerous rumours and legends. Yet where do these narratives come from? Is there anything that makes supposedly corrupt buildings more suitable for such stories? Or, the other way round, do buildings become corrupt in the course of such storytelling?

The Anatomy of Quarantined Buildings Numerous stories related to perverted architecture are based on alleged physical features of the buildings in question, such as tunnels and other subterranean spaces. For example, Fridolin Schönwiese, author of the documentary film Luft-Räume: Ein Film über Flaktürme, die Stadt und den Krieg (1991), told me a myth about the Viennese Flaktürme, according to which the towers would have been built like tumblers which, if they were bombed from one side and stood crooked, would stand up straight by themselves again: The myth is told that this edifice goes down into the earth as far as it sticks up above the ground, and that it has been built like this, so that it would function like a tumbler: … there are toy clowns like that for children, with a little ball on the underside, and when you tip them over, they stand up straight by themselves again. Thus, when bombs would come flying from one side and the tower would lean over, it could straighten itself up again.4

Another myth says that the towers are all connected together with secret tunnels. Very similar stories circulate with regard to the National

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Socialist seaside resort in Prora (north-east Germany), which has remained a no-go area for more than forty years, since the end of the Second World War.5 The 4.5-kilometre-long, six-storey edifice is not only supposed to have basements with the same dimensions, but also a replica on the South American coast. These narratives focus on threedimensional objects that have occupied prominent places in the sociocultural life of their surroundings until, all of a sudden, all openings were barricaded, and buildings quarantined. Storytelling, then, can be an important means to (re)gain access – if not physically, then at least virtually – and to make the bowels of the objects under taboo more tangible. Some stories are easily verifiable; others, such as the rumours about a South American replica of the seaside resort in Prora, present more difficulty. Some contemporaries of the building’s genesis are adamant that floor plans were sold to Argentine entrepreneurs in the 1930s, whereas others vehemently dispute this (Rostock and Zadnicˇek 2001: 108). Thomas Wolff, staff member of a small museum about Prora, very convincingly explained to me how these particular rumours were spread: in the 1930s, a film by Harry Piel, entitled Der Dschungel ruft (‘The Jungle Calls’) (1935) was shot in Prora.6 According to Wolff, spectators started to confuse Prora’s reality with jungle fiction, and grew more and more convinced of the existence of a similar edifice on another continent. Nonetheless, further investigation reveals that Wolff ’s argument does not hold either: the edifice does not appear on the screen, not surprisingly, because the film was shot prior to the start of construction in 1936. Besides that, the film is set in Malaysia, so the reference to South America seems to be totally unfounded. The mystery around the replica remains complete, but this example illustrates that people not only tell stories about the anatomy of buildings, but also speculate about the origins and veracity of these very stories, so that storytelling leads to further storytelling. As Fridolin Schönwiese mentioned, when an area is completely closed to the public, it is not surprising that myths circulate regarding the inside of the mysterious place: ‘Where things are closed, inaccessible, where no information is available, myths come into being. Therefore, it is natural that with regard to such an object, which is so taboo and so vehemently ignored, things come into being that have nothing to do with reality’.7 Naturally, myths do not correspond to the concrete, material reality inside the towers but Schönwiese’s statement that they ‘have nothing to do with reality’, is erroneous. For lack of knowledge about, and (physical) experience of, part of their built environment, people attempt to force an entry to these places by means of their imagination.

Narrative Introductions

5

The veracity of the reality to which the stories refer is not of paramount importance, because the stories already form a reality in themselves. Storytelling constitutes a direct exploration of, and confrontation with, part of the built environment that is (temporarily) inaccessible, or finds itself in a liminal status, and in so being calls up all sorts of associations. The imagination and description of underground spaces reflects a love-hate relationship between banished edifices and their surroundings. Rosalind Williams has already noticed, in her book Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination, that subterranean worlds can provoke fears (of the damp, dark and amorphous), as well as fascination and admiration. More specifically, she has described the advent of the sublime underground in art and literature around 1800 as something, ‘obscure but pleasingly obscure, terrible but delightfully so’ (1990: 83). On the one hand, people continue to perceive specific buildings as the concrete and repugnant embodiments of a deplorable period in history, and on the other hand, these objects are part of a local, sociocultural identity. Their elimination would literally and figuratively leave a large gap. Furthermore, the bowels of sidetracked edifices are not necessarily supposed to host dark tunnels, but sometimes also gold and treasures – which again reveals a combination of attraction and revulsion. For example, in Vienna, it is told that the Nazis bricked in enormous quantities of gold in the severalmetre-thick walls of the Flaktürme. Similarly, the towers are still indelibly stamped on (mainly older) people’s memory as bomb shelters that offered protection not only to people, but also to valuable cultural heritage. In Berlin, a Flakturm in Friedrichshain was used as an art depot for several years before being dynamited shortly after the war. Until today, complete mystery reigns with regard to the disappearance of some paintings (notably three Caravaggios) in the postwar chaos. The secret of these world-famous art treasures most probably lies, concealed for ever, under a grass-covered mountain of bunker debris in a park in Berlin. In an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Bodo Mrozek (2001) compares the attraction that emanates from these myths and legends to the mysterious aura surrounding Egyptian pyramids, and presents the numerous question marks that subsist around this case as ‘a historical crime story of international significance’.8 There are also actual crime novels which have their main setting in a quarantined edifice. For example, in Der Fluch der Gene: Auf Rügen vermißt, by Ulrich Koehler (2001), the desolate seaside resort in Prora accommodates rather dubious genetic engineering, and Wie die Tiere, by Wolf Haas (2001), is set in and around one of the Viennese Flaktürme. It is remarkable that in

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both these books, protagonists need to actually enter the taboo edifices in order to obtain the key to all mysteries. In sum, forcing one’s way into such edifices by virtually giving shape to their mysterious entrails is a means to gain access to another reality. In this sense, crime fictions about these buildings are neither more nor less ‘true’ or ‘real’ than other, more or less mythical stories: they call up all sorts of associations, stimulate thinking about rejected architecture, and contribute to keeping the latter alive. Physical features ascribed to so-called corrupt architecture actually reveal mental diseases. Corrupt and dictatorial regimes are suspected of having unofficially devised tunnels and other underground worlds, which supposedly still accommodate reprehensible activities; the size, complexity and steadiness of these places embody the durability of evil. In a performance around one of the Viennese Flaktürme in 1993, Kurt Palm, a television programme maker, explicitly explored such psychosomatic relations between a building’s shape and the evil it supposedly comprises. He visualized the Flakturm’s despicableness by projecting a film of its inside onto its outside: pictures of absolute decay, embodied by innumerable incestuous pigeons and several metres of thick dung.9

Protagonists in and around Marginalized Edifices Certain stories stage protagonists, either by name or anonymously. For example, there are two well-known stories set in the IG Farben Haus in Frankfurt am Main, starring Dwight D. Eisenhower and his wife. The edifice, erected in the 1930s, accommodated one of the world’s largest paint and chemicals concerns and, under National Socialist regime, hosted most dubious negotiations with far-reaching consequences.10 After 1945, it served as headquarters for the U.S. Army and Secret Service. Until 1995, when the Americans left the place again, it was repeatedly fenced and inaccessible to all but staff members. Although Eisenhower’s stay, as commander of the U.S. Army, did not exceed half a year, it nevertheless sufficed to provoke persistent rumours. People affirmed that the edifice was spared by the bombings of 1943–44, because Eisenhower had already decided to take up office there. However, precision bombing at that time still had a long way to go, and the edifice’s preservation could just as well be owed to the presence of a neighbouring refugee camp and dwellings (Kirkpatrick 1999: 106). Another myth explained why the sculpture Am Wasser (‘By the Waterside’) had disappeared from the garden between 1945 and 1956; it

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was told that the nude water nymph caused a quarrel between Eisenhower and his wife, who insisted that such sculpture would be inappropriate for a military institute, and personally took care that it would be removed (Kirkpatrick 1999: 117; Loewy 2001: 4). When stories related to corrupt architecture feature protagonists, they express an active and collective imagination of what happens, or has happened, in inaccessible edifices, and they grant the latter’s anatomy a supplementary and dynamic dimension. Not only are closed doors (virtually) opened, but people – and thus human intervention – are also projected into the building. Michael Jackson, in his book The Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression, and Intersubjectivity, has emphasized that storytelling is merely a social process. What he has described as ‘the action of meaning-making’ is at least as relevant as the product of such action, i.e., the content of stories (2002: 18, emphasis in original). According to Jackson, storytelling is not a passive recollection of events, but their active processing, through an interaction between collective and individual imagination (ibid.: 16). It does not make much sense, then, to verify such stories, because their major relevance originates from the act of telling them, which allows people to get a grip again on a reality from which they had become alienated (ibid.: 17). A recurrent element consists of designating a scapegoat, as illustrated by the myth of the missing Caravaggios. At least three different versions comment on the events in the tower in Berlin Friedrichshain. Following the official, but contested narrative, members of the SS opted for a scorched-earth policy and committed arson with flame-throwers, thus preventing the art treasures from falling into Russian hands. Secondly, the fire may also have been a means to conceal an art theft of unprecedented dimensions. Were the paintings transported to Russia? Would museum executives have approved? Finally, it is suggested that shortly after the end of the war, the U.S. Army could still have seized the opportunity to evacuate art treasures that would very soon belong to the Russian occupation zone (Mrozek 2001). None of these narratives can be proved or refuted for certain, rather between them they constitute a kind of panel discussion in which various protagonists are played off against one another, and everyone tries to give personal interpretation of a transition characterized by unclear power relationships and uncertainty about the future. Jean-Noël Kapferer, in his book Rumors: Uses, Interpretations and Images, has written that most rumours feature a scapegoat, and that demands for information – whether reliable or not – remarkably increase in a context of ‘secrecy’, ‘uncertainty about the future’, or ‘prolonged states of boredom’ (1990: 93). Kapferer’s ideas also apply to stories told

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about architecture: buildings which have been laid off, relegated to a marginal status, and which are invested with an uncanny aura, often act as catalysts for the development of rumours. Finally, Kapferer confirms that verification of the truthfulness of myths is not only relatively senseless, but also frequently unwanted, because belief in these stories stimulates social cohesion (ibid.: 104). Finally, certain rumours may be spread purposefully, in order to bring something about, or to legitimize something. Klaus Steiner has suggested that the story about medicine provoking uncontrollable chemical reactions in some of the Viennese Flaktürme, was initiated ‘from higher authority’ to keep neo-Nazis from breaking into the towers. Similarly, myths suggesting the existence of a submarine pen in Prora might have been created by the postwar communist regime to legitimize the edifice’s confiscation and occupation (Rostock and Zadnicˇek 2001: 102).

Undesired Architecture as Mental Map So far, all stories presented relate to buildings that have been provisionally quarantined, but not affected: they have been rejected, but not (yet) transformed or eliminated. The relation between their form and their function has changed: since their initial purpose has been annulled, some of them have remained vacant, unused, and others are (or have been) fenced off. Deprived of their initial function, however, they have not been reduced to mere formal signifiers; they do not simply ‘stand for’ something. Rather, as three-dimensional public objects, they still serve useful purposes and act as concrete, tangible catalysts for storytelling. In the course of this dynamic social process, people try to grasp a larger, more abstract and alienating reality. Stories can be purposefully exploited or unconsciously passed on; they constitute an active discussion panel in which various people concerned are played off against one another. Storytelling is a means to grant corrupt buildings a place in a society that repudiates them. Its vital importance comes to the fore when a building is made physically accessible, but appropriate stories are lacking. Indeed, storytelling – or virtually forcing one’s way into closed edifices – can replace a merely physical experience, but not the other way round. For instance, Corinna Snyder (1995) has described the day when KGB headquarters in Vilnius were opened for the very first time. Prior to the opening of the doors, Snyder depicts an upset and indignant crowd, resolved to fight its way into, and appropriate, the place. Yet as soon as people gain physical access to the empty shell, deprived of its

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‘inhabitants’, the crowd falls silent, and attentively listens to the explanation of various rooms and procedures. Then, as in a mad acceleration, people start running through the building in search of its very core: the entrails of the corrupt edifice, the cells and interrogation rooms: This public moved into the building and gained speed as they sensed their approach to where they thought the source of this place’s power lay, in its cell-filled bowels. They ran to it and then they ran through it, momentarily engaging with its material only to find it lacking, and then rushing past the dead residue of this institution’s past, dissatisfied with their inability to confront and engage with these simultaneously partial and overabundant objects of history so as to bring the past directly and untransformed into the present, dissatisfied with the necessity of a space between this building and what it stood for. (1995: 28)

Snyder’s account shows that the KGB building, as a three-dimensional object, exerted great attraction despite, or perhaps precisely because of, the atrocious crimes it embodied. People were very keen on experiencing the three-dimensional anatomy of corruption from within, once divested of its threatening aura. Nonetheless, the building in itself, without appropriate, fitting stories, appeared to be a lifeless, empty shell that people left again without further reactions. In sum, the social process of storytelling is indispensable for actively coping with the history that a building embodies – if the latter is temporarily inaccessible, an imaginary visit can even amply replace physical experience. The stories act as mental maps: they are a means to orient oneself in obscure circumstances. Williams’s remarks with regard to the underground apply to corrupt architecture in general: ‘The subterranean environment is … a mental landscape, a social terrain and an ideological map’ (1990: 21). The other way round, however, physically entering an edifice, is not enough to grant the latter significance. As Snyder’s report has illustrated, if no one lets the walls speak, if stories lag behind, or have not (yet) been actualized, then stone objects remain empty spaces, and people are disorientated.

Conclusion Quarantined buildings do not cease to be relevant; rather, they challenge people’s imagination and act as fantasy spaces. They show that material and symbolic aspects are complexly interwoven: inaccessible edifices continue to exert an attraction on people, who try to gain virtual access by means of storytelling in order to keep a grip on these objects. Further, the previous examples have illustrated two recurrent issues with regard to the rejection of undesired buildings. Firstly, it is not always as easy as

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it may seem to distinguish between advocates and opponents of an edifice’s preservation. Certain edifices are perceived and presented as undesirable objects, but no one, apparently, feels called to draw obvious and radical conclusions – after all, it seems, the buildings ‘belong’ to the identity of the place. Such situations of undecidedness can last for many years. The love-hate relationship that finds vivid expression in an extensive mythical imagery is actually inherent to the perception and presentation of many buildings, even when the sense of a merely physical intervention seems to be univocal. It is reflected in the form of a seeming contradiction in the title of this book: Indispensable Eyesores. Secondly, the most direct and intensive confrontations do not necessarily occur in the form of physically far-reaching interventions. For instance, it has been suggested that Russian soldiers were hanged (and are still hanging) in some of the Viennese Flaktürme. These and similar myths not only embody fears (notably that history could repeat itself), but also active negotiations with regard to historic periods in which many things got literally and figuratively out of hand. In this sense, the confrontation with corrupt architecture is perhaps more direct and face-to-face by means of storytelling than in the form of transformation or elimination. As long as people have no reason to believe that the building in question will soon disappear, they have to learn to live with it. Yet as the building is (momentarily) inaccessible, they have lost any grip on it, and possibly feel alienated. Edifices that have been relegated to the margins are often perceived and presented as a latent disease from which emanates permanent threat, and with which people must learn to cope. Storytelling, then, enables people to grant these rejected or rejectable (but nonetheless indispensable) buildings an acceptable place, and to assess their value. As a means to negotiate the significance of such architecture, storytelling gives entry to a reality where, basically, anything is possible – even dragons, tunnels, gold and hanged Russians.

Chapter 2

Between Pragmatic Clearance and Pure Iconoclasm Theoretical Perspectives on the Life and Death of Undesired Buildings

As expressed in the title Indispensable Eyesores, this book focuses on the seemingly inherent contradictions that surface in situations where the disposal of buildings is taken into consideration. For several reasons, undesirability is no synonym for irrelevance. Firstly, it challenges people to express themselves, to justify and motivate the rejection of buildings which, until that time, have belonged to the status quo.1 It is not only politicians, investors, architects or city planners who have ideas about what the built environment should (not) look like; journalists, (former) tenants or neighbours, or people otherwise concerned by the fate of a building also intervene in such discussions, projecting divergent meanings, claims or doubts onto the edifice. Secondly, the rejection of a specific building is often a symptom of dissociation from the persons who commissioned it, from the activities it has hosted or the period to which it refers. Rejected buildings embody clashes; and as such, they materialize issues that matter to people. Thirdly, definitions of the ‘ideal’ environment, as well as what is to be understood as undesirable elements in this context, are very variable and illustrative of changes in the broader societal context. In this respect, the three-dimensional, public materiality of architecture serves to concretize more abstract and intangible themes. Broader developments can find a material counterpart in architecture and, the other way round, attacks on architecture can urge or visualize important shifts. Finally, the fate of undesired architecture touches on issues such as the presumed life expectancy of objects in general, the meaning of ephemeral or vanishing materiality, the creation

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and destruction of value, as well as the disposal of supposedly worn out objects. The starting point for this research was an analysis of the postwar reception of the Viennese Flaktürme (Van der Hoorn 1999). Both in interviews and in newspaper articles, people referred to these edifices as repulsive blots on their cherished city, but the possibility of eliminating them, despite being regularly mentioned, has apparently never been seriously envisaged. I analysed this apparent contradiction against the context of postwar Austrian self-perception and presentation, according to which the country was seen to have fallen prey to Nazi Germany as an innocent victim. The dominant discourse in the postwar period, dictated by the urgent need to define a relatively ‘clean’ image of Austria, presented the towers as absolute monsters built by the Germans against the will of the Austrians. I concluded that the Flaktürme were needed as irrefutable ‘proofs’ of Austria’s ‘victim alibi’, in the sense that people could say: look what the Germans did to Austria. Their existence was indispensable, precisely for the necessity of projecting notions of undesirability onto them. It was part of nationalistic discourse to say that they were unwanted, but this discourse, and the resulting reputation strengthened through the discourse, was made possible by their maintenance. Investigating the fates and meanings of undesired buildings also presents, however, certain difficulties. Different buildings are variously appreciated by different people at different moments. What appears as a self-evident, inevitable or necessary removal to some is perceived as a revolting act of barbarism by others. Undesired for whom? How to approach so-called indispensable eyesores as a unitary subject when the very notion of undesirability can not even be univocally defined? Further, the relations between materiality and human intervention need to be clarified. How to approach the matter without erroneously ascribing agency to inanimate objects, whilst nevertheless recognizing that their fate can make deep impressions on people? Clearly buildings, and their meanings, are shaped by human beings, but we should not lose sight of their specific three-dimensional materiality, and how people are influenced by the buildings that they live and work in and around. Finally, physical harm to buildings is perhaps not always proportional to their ‘degree’ of undesirability. When a building gets dynamited, this is not always indicative of absolute repulsion and, vice versa, extremely undesired buildings are not always eliminated. As for the motivations to approach undesired buildings from a mainly anthropological perspective, I join Alfred Gell in thinking that, ‘Anthropology is, to put it bluntly, considered good at providing close-

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grained analyses of apparently irrational behaviour, performances, utterances, etc.’ (1998: 10, emphasis in original). All the following chapters have arisen from amazement at how people deal with pieces of architecture they (would like to) reject from their built environment. What brings people to attend en masse the demolition of an obsolete building? How is it possible to reorient an extremely controversial and inflexible edifice towards an alternative use, while hardly facing any objections? Why do people feel the urge to touch and collect the remaining fragments of dismissed buildings? What brings people to commemorate buildings that ‘passed away too early’ as if the buildings themselves were human beings? These and similar questions structure the following chapters in which I analyse possible fates and meanings of undesired buildings, as well as their eventual afterlife.

Anthropology and (Undesired) Architecture In the past fifteen years, several authors have attempted to determine what architecture and anthropology can contribute to each other, as well as how architectural objects can be approached from an interdisciplinary perspective.2 Mari-Jose Amerlinck, in the introduction to her book Architectural Anthropology, has defined ‘architectural space’ as ‘a threedimensional built object that results both from a process of physical construction with material means and from a process of social appropriation and constant recreation by society’ (2001: 2). Most authors seem to agree that buildings receive all signification and relevance through processes of social interaction (Coleman and Collins 1996; Lawrence-Zúñiga 2001),3 but this could wrongfully suggest that material items only matter through the claims and meanings projected onto them. As buildings are things without a proper soul and own will, we tend to see the social, cultural, ideological or political dimensions that people project onto them as primary, and to neglect their materiality and the influence they exert as three-dimensional, public objects capable of touching, moving, challenging or incensing people. In recognition of these additional factors, Denise Lawrence-Zúñiga writes that, ‘Architectural forms have power – they invite human interest and evoke response; they guide behaviour, shape values, and act as repositories for meanings that shift and change’ (2001: 171). Of all the authors preoccupied by the mutual influence of people and things, however, Gell (1998), in his Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory, has masterly succeeded in analysing not only how people can mould artefacts to their

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own will, but also, the other way around, in which sense and to what extent agency can be ascribed to artefacts. Buildings and Agency

Gell illustrates his concept of agency through the example of a soldier with a gun or with a box of mines. Naturally, a gun does not have a will of its own, neither can it bring anything about without a human agent to activate it. Nevertheless, a man could not act as a soldier without his gun enabling him to do so; in other words, the agent ‘soldier’ lends the gun his intention but inversely, the gun lends him its materiality, without which his intention would remain unrealized, and unperceived. These thoughts can easily be translated to buildings. Without their threedimensional, public materiality, there would be no other forms on which people could rely to embody so expressively their social organization, historic background, cultural, religious and political values. Gell’s notion of artefacts as (secondary) agents is based on the idea that, ‘Whatever happens, human agency is exercised within the material world’ (1998: 20). Without the material world to function as a mediator, we could never implement our intentions nor witness those of other people. As things are a sine qua non for the enactment of human agency, part of this agency must be attributed to their so-called ‘thing-ly causal properties’ (ibid.). Pursuing his analysis of the agent ‘soldier + mine’, Gell repeatedly admits that, for lack of an own will, artefacts cannot be perceived as primary agents who initiate happenings, but he adds that, as secondary agents (and this also applies to buildings), ‘they are objective embodiments of the power or capacity to will their use, and hence moral entities in themselves’ (ibid.: 21, emphasis in original). Despite the additional complexity with regard to architecture, Gell’s theory on works of art is very useful in identifying how many different entities contribute – and in which capacity – to the impact of a work of art or building in a specific context. Further, his theory clarifies the mutually dependent influence of things and people. Both persons and things can function as either ‘agents’ or ‘patients’. Who, or what, acts as an agent or as a patient depends on the circumstances and is ‘exclusively relational: for any agent, there is a patient, and conversely, for any patient, there is an agent’ (ibid.: 22). Entities can be agents in one situation, and patients in another. When a building, for instance, acts as an agent on its users, neighbours, on people who identify with the place or feel, for whatever reason, concerned by its fate – so-called ‘recipients’, in other words, who ‘[submit] to its power, appeal, or fascination’ (ibid.: 31) – this is, according to Gell, a classic case of

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‘passive spectatorship’. In the situation of a ‘spectator as agent’ (ibid.: 33), on the other hand, recipients exert their agency on a building, for example, by determining its value, repudiating or dismissing it, or representing it in a specific way. These thoughts will prove valuable, notably in order to understand how remaining fragments can continue to exert a significant influence long after a building has vanished, or started to vanish, or for investigating the role of apparently passive witnesses in granting radical alterations or even eliminations a specific meaning. Questioned Existences

Allen Carlson (1994) has written that architecture, more than any other art form, poses the question of its own existence: ‘We ask ourselves: Might it not be better for this not to have existed? Might it not be better for the place, for the skyline, for the city, for the world?’ (1994: 143). Not only are people keen on imagining buildings differently, but also on imagining them away (ibid.). In other words, it is in architecture’s ‘nature’, despite, or perhaps precisely because of its supposedly durable three-dimensional materiality and its presence in public space, to potentially embody or provoke polemics. Naturally, architectural constructions are not always contested, but they all have an inherent potential to become controversial.4 Undesired architecture, thus, consists of those buildings or projects whose existence is being openly questioned, and sometimes also physically affected. The most evident illustration is, perhaps, given by unbuilt projects, because their existence was questioned and rejected before they could even be realized. It would be interesting, for example, to draw the map of a city with, instead of its actual edifices, all the unbuilt projects which altogether embody all that was ever rejected from its (idealized) built environment. Undesired architecture further includes buildings that were destroyed, damaged or abandoned to progressive dilapidation, transformed, removed or hidden by other constructions, but also buildings that remained intact despite a persistent (public) contest against their existence. Returning to Gell’s theory, when a building’s existence is questioned, this corresponds to a shift in the building’s capacity from mainly an agent, to mainly a patient. As soon as people begin to call the building into question, it is torn into the spotlight and its value is assessed by a range of recipients turning from ‘passive spectators’ into ‘spectators as agents’. Depending on the situation, notably if people have very divergent or even conflicting ideas regarding the future of the edifice, it can be that, despite literally standing at the core of all discussions, the

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building chiefly constitutes a materialization of more abstract controversies. Such considerations do not allow us to predict how, concretely, the edifice will be affected, but depending on which claims are essentially at stake, the building can become a secondary patient through which a primary patient (a more abstract issue) is supposed to be reached. Last but not least, as Lawrence-Zúñiga has already pointed out: ‘An anthropology of architecture must also regard built forms, as long as they are inhabited, as never completed or finalized, nor are the relationships humans have with them’ (2001: 174). After a building’s value has been, at least temporarily, assessed, and its appearance or purpose possibly altered, it can start a new life and regain its status as an agent, until people, perhaps, start questioning its existence again. There are buildings which, following this pattern, have been repeatedly and significantly face-lifted. Postsocialist Countries as a Laboratory

Strikingly, some of the most interesting recent anthropological reflections on architecture are based on case studies in postsocialist countries. This is not surprising, since the important political transformations ensuing after the fall of the Berlin Wall have been accompanied by a highly mediated clearance of undesired statues and monuments from public space in these countries. Such events, with antecedents in the French Revolution (Gamboni 1997), encouraged a number of authors to investigate the potential transience of architecture, as well as the shifting relations people have with their built environment in contexts of crisis or change (Diers 1997; Kramer 1992; Lewis 1991; Mulvey 1999; Verdery 1999). In the introduction to her book The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change, Katherine Verdery has noted that: ‘Because political order has something to do with both landscape and history, changing the political order, no matter where, often means changing the bronzed human beings who both stabilize the landscape and temporally freeze particular values in it’ (1999: 6). The relationships between political order, landscape and history find an expression not only in statues and monuments, but also in buildings. Several authors, describing people’s shifting relations with buildings in a context of radical sociopolitical changes, have focused on the apparent contradictions embodied by specific buildings such as a newly completed kindergarten that remains (almost) empty (Pelkmans 2003); or villas conferring a new status to people who do not even inhabit them (Humphrey 2002); or again a ‘grand modernist Soviet project’ (Buchli

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1999: 2) in which individual inhabitants display ‘achingly antagonistic and contradictory objects’ (ibid.: 4) in ultra-standardized interiors. In an article entitled ‘The Social Life of Empty Buildings: Imagining the Transition in Post-Soviet Ajaria’, Mathijs Pelkmans has implicitly offered a valuable illustration of how Gell’s notion of agency can be understood to emanate from buildings. In Batumi, the capital of Georgia’s south-western Autonomous Republic, he focuses on the case of a kindergarten which, two years after its completion and furnishing, still remains (almost) empty – like many other new buildings in the area. Investigating the reasons for this situation, Pelkmans concludes that the kindergarten does not constitute, as one may suppose, a senseless empty shell waiting to be filled with life, but that its (almost) emptiness makes a lot of sense, and that the material object as it stands is far more important than its potential utilitarian purpose (2003: 128). In the context of the social, political and economic transition that Batumi was going through at the time of Pelkmans’ research,5 the new buildings’ (almost) emptiness embodied ‘a future of fulfilled dreams’ (ibid.: 129): ‘That the buildings were empty was perhaps even a precondition of the maintenance of that dream, because as long as they were empty they belonged to the future and therefore remained potentially accessible to everyone’ (ibid.). In completing his analysis, Pelkmans emphasized that the new buildings were not completely, but rather almost empty. The kindergarten notably, was not only (metaphorically) filled with stories, but also (concretely) furnished, thus permanently reenacting the imminence of fulfilled dreams. In other words: ‘Keeping the kindergarten almost empty thus not only managed to keep the future bright and accessible for everyone, but also, it tied this future closely to the present’ (ibid.: 130). This example illustrates the essential relevance of architectural materiality even when it is denied of any concrete function, as well as what an anthropological perspective can potentially contribute to an analysis of the complex mutual influences between buildings and people. Caroline Humphrey, in her analysis of post-Soviet Russia, has also considered buildings that remain empty most of the time, namely the numerous spectacular villas built for the ‘new rich’ on the outskirts of Russian cities in the last decade of the twentieth century. In line with previous remarks about the agency of buildings, Humphrey has noticed that people not only ascribe meaning to architecture, but also the other way round, in the form of ‘“content consumption”, that is, content as distinguished from form. With this process, rather than cultural identity being created through reinterpreting objects, the goods themselves confer their identity on the people (“the man with the Mercedes”, “I am

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the sort of person who has a kottedzh”)’ (2002: 183). Humphrey’s ideas can be expanded, in the sense that buildings confer identity not only on their owners but also on people who are otherwise concerned by them. A village or town can be known in the surroundings as ‘the place with the dilapidated edifice’, or its inhabitants can express the fear that outsiders would start to associate them with such a repulsive object. Apart from this, Humphrey has explained how one and the same (category of) object can incorporate a number of different meanings. With regard to the buildings she has examined, the sense in which the villas embody the wealth of the ‘new Russians’ is not simply due to the fact that they are ‘glaringly expensive’ (ibid.: 190), nor to their ‘new and evolving architectural style’ (ibid.: 175), nor even to the ‘slippage between the mental image and the physical fact of the building’ (ibid.: 176), nor to the ‘acts of demonstrative negligence, even sabotage’ (ibid.) to which they have fallen prey. In reality, the villas have grown into what they are – and they continue to do so – as a combination of all these different influences (ibid.: 200). From Humphrey’s case study we can deduce that, unlike (certain) works of art, buildings can hardly be perceived as symbols or signifiers that univocally refer to a signified. This results from the fact that architecture, apart from a representative function, also has a utilitarian function. Besides this, it comes into being through the joint efforts of a number of different people and is never independent from its surrounding. Finally, Humphrey’s remarks stem from a perception of culture not as a context that helps to elucidate people’s relations with material things, but rather as something that is permanently achieved and re-achieved (ibid.: 179) – notably through relations with these very objects. Rather than symbolizing something unambiguously, buildings embody a number of things successively and simultaneously, especially with regard to ‘identity as conferred by others and identity as felt and expressed from inside’ (ibid.: 175). The notion of embodiment seems appropriate since it does not imply a simple or direct reference to an external entity, but essentially a (physical) implication of the material object in itself. Apart from this, it also suggests why the destruction of architecture cannot be seen as a simple iconoclastic gesture, attacking the signified by confronting the signifier. In order to completely annihilate a building’s agency as well as the complexity of influences it embodies, its physical alteration needs to be correspondingly complex. Victor Buchli’s An Archaeology of Socialism analyses along similar lines a case study of the Narkomfin Communal House in Moscow, ‘the foundational project of the Soviet state’ (1999: 2). From the outset, Buchli calls attention to the dynamics of cultural change and the

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instability of social life as embodied by architectural forms. He announces his intention ‘to demonstrate … the utility of shifting away from our preoccupation with presence (the material record and material culture in general) towards one of absence; that is, to move … towards … a sensibility that embraces radical discontinuity, “undecidability” and conflict’ (ibid.: 5). He describes a tendency, among many material culture analysts, to attempt to ‘read’ material culture as if it would have text-like qualities. Studies displaying such an approach suggest that material objects are directly shaped by their prevailing social, cultural, ideological or political context, and that their analysis consists of a simple ‘reading’, reducing things to what their context has ‘inscribed’ in them.6 As illustrated by his case study of the Narkomfin Communal House, Buchli instead insists on ‘the dynamics of cultural change that belie the continuity of cosmologies and structures believed to be “inscribed” within the material world waiting to be “detected” or “recovered”’ (ibid.: 6).7 Several observations follow from these remarks. Firstly, there is a discrepancy between a building’s (supposedly durable) materiality, and all the gaps and rifts it embodies. On the one hand, Buchli writes that: ‘Of all the material cultures produced by societies, architecture is probably the most durable, long-lasting and easily retrievable’ (ibid.: 1). On the other hand, his analysis illustrates that architecture can, perhaps, represent consensus, harmony and stability because of its supposedly durable materiality, but that it always embodies a number of contradictions, disjunctions and cross-purposes because it cannot be understood in terms of pure and ‘passive’ materiality. Secondly, Buchli’s investigation demonstrates that not only architects, politicians, investors or other people with official rights and duties towards the built environment, but anyone who feels in some way or another concerned by the fate of an edifice can mould it, and grant it a meaning. It is, thus, very important to pay attention not only to those officially empowered to alter buildings, but also to those who seem to be, at first sight, nothing but witnesses, but who in fact can be surprisingly determinant (ibid.: 6). Thirdly, Buchli brings issues of durability and ephemerality to the fore when he notices, with regard to ‘the dynamics of social action and cultural change’, that ‘the material articulation of these dynamics is often quite ephemeral’ (ibid.: 187). Altering an edifice because of its supposed undesirability consists of removing not only the cause for claims to its undesirability, but also – perhaps most importantly – the grounds for these claims. It has already been exemplified by Pelkmans’ empty buildings and by the Viennese Flaktürme that certain apparently irrational situations must endure in order to legitimate the essential claims to their undesirability.

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This is a non-negligible aspect of a building’s materiality, namely that it can both embody its own undesirability and, at the same time, prevent people from overthrowing this undesirability.

Imagining Demolition Among all aspects of undesired architecture, demolition occupies a central place, whether it is effectively carried out or only taken into consideration. Architectural deaths have a great potential to fascinate people and have often been accompanied by a range of rituals, as described, notably, by Neil Harris: The death of particular buildings has, within the past hundred years or so, been invested with a new and elaborate set of rituals, reflecting the values of societies that are simultaneously energetic reshapers of their physical environments and elegiac about the settings and structures they are efficiently reducing to rubble. The energy, attention, and awareness put into a building’s last days, along with the effort to preserve its memory, are often far greater than anything received during its period of youth and maturity. (1999: 134)

Demolitions are often largely documented in texts and images, especially when a symbolically relevant building is concerned – such events often play an important role in the collective memory of a place. But as will appear in various case studies in the following chapters, even when a building is not eliminated, the possibility of imagining disposing of it is of crucial importance in the relation between people and their built environment. From this perspective it is not surprising that existing literature with regard to undesired architecture – and other undesired elements in the built environment such as statues – is focused, to a large extent, on acts of removal and demolition. Within anthropology, analyses of this specific subject are very scarce (Svasˇek 1996; Verdery 1999), but insights in more general themes such as the creation and destruction of value, the recycling and disposal of objects, and relations between memory and material culture, can be fruitfully applied. Besides this, undesired architecture appears in a number of works from other disciplines such as history, art history or sociology. Authors have often approached the disposal of architecture either from the perspective of socalled perpetrators in trying to get a grip on their motives, or by limiting themselves to a particular period in time or a specific place, analysing the social, cultural and historical context in order to understand people’s attitude towards one particular category of undesired buildings (Huse 1997; Kramer 1992; Rosenfeld 2000). More abstract and, for the present

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purpose, more valuable approaches are found with regard to the destruction of art or monuments which, to a certain extent, can be translated to the case of architecture. Reprehensible Imbeciles

Strikingly, the few books that explicitly deal with the destruction of architecture often have the term ‘vandalism’ in their title and present it as a reprehensible act. The most characteristic in this regard is perhaps Histoire du vandalisme: Les monuments détruits de l’art français by Louis Réau, first published in 1958. Réau considers demolished monuments as valuable works of art, sprinkling sources of happiness and spiritual exaltation, that have fallen prey to bestiality, cupidity or envy and been unfairly treated in comparison to their still existing alter egos (1994 [1958]: 13). For Réau, the demolition of monuments is an assault on what could have been ‘a joy forever’ (ibid.).8 Additionally, he states, demolished monuments are subject to an undeserved lack of attention; he calls for a rehabilitation of their memory as an indispensable complement to the current history of art of French monuments (ibid.: 5). He explicitly condemns the performers of demolition as barbarians, murderers or inferior human beings who are taking revenge on something that goes beyond their limited and savage soul (ibid.: 14), and sets himself up as the defender of a good cause. The editors of the 1994 edition, in their foreword, by no means distance themselves from this approach (Fleury and Leproux 1994). Much more pragmatically, from a more socio-psychological – instead of art historical – perspective, Colin Ward (1973c) has edited and coauthored a book entitled Vandalism, in which he and others try to understand destructive behaviour, and seek for ways to prevent this social problem. In the introduction, Ward not only expresses the hope that his book will help designers to create less vulnerable buildings (1973a: 13), but more generally, that it will be ‘an incitement to informed and rational action by the community’ (ibid.: 22), in which he includes architects, sociologists, administrators, revolutionaries and citizens. Despite a very interesting discussion on the labelling properties of the term ‘vandalism’ to which I will return, and despite encompassing chapters on ‘planners as vandals’ and ‘developers as vandals’ and the suggestion that sometimes ‘vandalism can be an indication not of social malaise but of moral health’ (1973b: 283), the book is primarily meant to analyse and solve what the authors perceive and condemn as problematic behaviour.

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Finally, in the most recent of these three books, entitled Vandalismus: Gewalt gegen Kultur, Alexander Demandt seems, at first glance, to adopt an opposite viewpoint to that of Réau when he suggests a valuefree approach to the phenomenon of vandalism and rejects the distinction between politically correct and morally objectionable vandalism (1997: 15). He further recognizes that the term ‘vandalism’ implies an external perspective: people who are not themselves involved call acts of destruction or damage ‘vandalistic’, whereas performers themselves would never label their acts as such (ibid.: 251).9 Nevertheless, Demandt hardly lives up to these principles and admits in the first chapter that to write about vandalism is to write against it (ibid.: 31). In his perception, there are clearly victims and perpetrators, where the latter are self-empowered missionaries in the name of God, Justice or Progress, who attempt to erase or manipulate collective memory (ibid.: 24). An additional problem with Demandt’s approach is that, like Réau’s, it is based on a simplified definition of works of art and monuments. A work of art, Demandt argues, reveals the work of a master; it has grown out of a combination of exceptional skills and inspiration. Beyond its possibly practical function, it deserves admiration for its beauty and power of expression, for it captivates and enriches its audience (ibid.: 23). Despite the variability of norms and values, art is ‘recognizable’ (ibid.: 31). There are enough cases where both the value of the work of art and the reprehensibility of its destruction are indisputable. All other diagnoses of (more ambiguous) vandalism can be based on a comparison with these exemplary cases (ibid.: 27). Demandt’s description of the work of art freshly delivered by the master provides a distorted image; it takes the object out of the complex and dynamic reality to which it belongs.10 Even if Ward and Demandt have a more nuanced perspective than Réau’s, all three authors tend to approach the destruction of buildings as crimes committed by blameworthy culprits whose motives need to be traced in order to understand and combat their behaviour. Nevertheless, in his introduction, Ward already remarks – without further developing this thought, unfortunately – that: ‘We all know the vandal. He is somebody else’ (1973a: 13). Stanley Cohen, in another chapter in Ward’s book entitled ‘Property Destruction: Motives and Meanings’, specifies these ideas and extensively argues against a perception of vandalism as homogeneous and meaningless behaviour (1973: 41). He recognizes the term ‘vandalism’ is used by people purposefully not only to name, but at the same time to reject what they consider to be a regrettable or reprehensible phenomenon (ibid.: 34). These thoughts about the partiality and appropriateness of the term are not futile, but show that the

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subject is highly emotive.11 Cohen goes on to explain what makes vandalism so difficult to discuss: In a society dominated by utilitarianism and property motives, few can find any rationality in behaviour which does not appear to be directed to economic ends. A few more people, though, will understand that in the case of property destruction connected with explicit ideological conflict (racial, religious, class) descriptions such as ‘reckless, ignorant vandals’ or ‘sheer vandalism’ are political in that they tend to deny the legitimacy of the motives behind the behaviour. (ibid.)

The reluctance towards possibly value-free analyses of the destruction of buildings can be placed not only against the background of some utilitarian world views in which the end of objects’ life, or cases of vanishing or altered materiality are considered, at best, loss-making side effects. It also has to do with the supposed durability that is generally ascribed to architecture. As will be shown in the following chapters it can sometimes even be rooted in a deeper fear that analysing the behaviour of reprehensible individuals would consist of identifying with them. Contested Legitimacy

I suggest refraining from using the term ‘vandalism’ altogether and shifting the main focus of attention from so-called perpetrators, with their supposedly deviant motives and behaviour, to the fate of architectural objects as shaped by a range of – sometimes conflicting, sometimes cooperating – people.12 The former approach consists of searching for personal motives in the personality or social environment of so-called vandals in order to explain physical alterations to the built environment as an end in itself, or even a means without end.13 Instead I propose investigating what the (physically altered) architectural object embodies, and try to identify the aims and messages previously referred to as the so-called agency of architectural objects. Cohen already insisted on the need to widen the view from purely destructive acts to what they are supposed to bring about, such as, ‘to revenge, or draw attention to a specific grievance, to gain publicity for a general cause, to challenge symbolically, or insult a particular individual or group’ (1973: 39). Instead of asking, ‘What brought these people to do this?’ the starting point for investigation is, ‘What happens to these so-called architectural eyesores?’ and, ‘What is this supposed to bring about?’This implies other questions, such as, ‘What makes these buildings eyesores in the first place?’ and, ‘How do some people legitimate what happens, and how do others experience it?’ These questions encompass both the building’s materiality and the context in which it is embedded – in

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particular, what kind of claims, meanings and controversies people are concerned with when trying to influence its fate. Finally, in the same way that a work of art would not be a work of art without an audience to recognize it as such, a building’s alteration or destruction would make no sense without people to witness it.14 These people can, and do, appropriate the building, whether literally or figuratively. Réau, Ward and Demandt neglect the crucial, and very specific, role of these witnesses in their condemnation of so-called violent acts, sometimes confounding it with their own role as analysts. Ingo Schröder and Bettina Schmidt have noted that an analyst very seldom has the possibility to observe violent acts directly. Due to these circumstances he ‘extracts his information from participants’ narratives after the fact’, and ‘just adds another – although usually more detached – perspective’ (2001: 13, emphasis in original). When the academic analyst does not only analyse but also condemn so-called violent acts, he appropriates the perspective of indignant witnesses as his own and keeps from developing another, more detached one. He thereby obscures one of the most fundamental characteristics of violent acts, namely their contested legitimacy.15 The notion of violence entails the same pitfalls as that of vandalism in that it is ‘very much a word of those who witness, or who are victims of certain acts, rather than of those who perform them’ (Riches 1986: 3). In the introduction to The Anthropology of Violence David Riches focuses precisely on this very aspect and depicts violent acts as inherently controversial. His definition of violence as ‘an act of physical hurt deemed legitimate by the performer and illegitimate by (some) witnesses’ (ibid.: 8), can be fruitfully translated to the rejection of buildings. Just as violence not only encompasses murder but more often injury, so Riches’ ideas not only apply to the – more or less spectacular – elimination of buildings, but also to their alteration, and even to their continued existence in the same form, while the threat of destruction or change suggests a potential execution (ibid.: 22). Those who question a building’s existence, or its current significance, therefore tend to be aware that their claims are likely to be contested and that they need to legitimate their intended acts properly. Riches further observes that people always have other means than violence at their disposal, but nevertheless have very specific reasons for resorting to violence. Reasons given include that violence is ‘highly appropriate both for practical (instrumental) and for symbolic (expressive) purposes: as a means of transforming the social environment (instrumental purpose), and dramatizing the importance of key social ideas (expressive purpose)’ (ibid.: 11, emphasis in original). Riches

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explains the expressive potency of violence by its visibility and recognizability, namely that ‘in its key sense, as the “contestable giving of physical hurt”, violence is unlikely to be mistaken’ (ibid.). Similarly, to affect a supposedly undesired building consists of altering its material form so that it can be used for a different purpose, or so that something else can be constructed instead, but the act in itself also has a very strong expressive potency due to the building’s presence in public space and the identities, memories and controversies it embodies. The rejection of architectural eyesores and the material traces it leaves are universal phenomena that excite, fascinate, attract and puzzle people. One of the reasons for this recognizability might be that, as Dario Gamboni has argued with regard to art, qualification and disqualification are in reality two sides of the same coin. Oscillating between Pragmatic Clearance and Pure Iconoclasm

In his work The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution, Gamboni (1997) has innovatively presented, through an impressive multitude of examples, elimination and preservation as two intimately interwoven phenomena. Unlike the authors mentioned before, he has adopted a relativistic perspective, and purposefully approached attacks against works of art as integral and enlightening, instead of threatening elements in any history of art.16 Apart from extensively analysing and linking a wide range of concrete cases, Gamboni has also developed theoretical ideas whose validity does not remain limited to mere works of art. Gamboni distinguishes a work of art’s physical properties – its material constituents, physical context and uses – from its representative value, and relates their degree of amalgamation to the object’s life expectancy. In other terms, the object is both something ‘in itself’ as well as a signifier that refers to an external signified. Its latter capacity significantly influences its ‘best-before date’ in that ‘the symbolic relationship … tends to make the object share the fluctuating fate of what it symbolizes’ (1997: 27). This is how revolutionary upheavals, for example, can coincide with the rejection of a range of objects suddenly perceived as unwanted references to an obsolete ideology. Gamboni explains that: [I]nsofar as what it stands for (person, institution, belief, value, norm) is endowed with a permanence and as its relation to it remains effective, the object may benefit from the permanence in question and thus escape the general effects of physical, technical and aesthetic obsolescence, i.e. replacement or destruction, or relegation to a ‘baser’, less specific use or to a less central place. … But the solidarity and interaction between the

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object and what it symbolizes (as well as between sign and signified in general) can work in both directions. (ibid.: 26–27)

These last remarks apply even more to buildings, which always have a utilitarian as well as a representative function. In each of the cases presented in the following chapters, both of these functions, to varying degrees, influence the fate of the investigated buildings. Whereas works of art are generally attacked for what they represent – a person or figure, an artistic movement, an ideological or religious belief – this symbolic aspect, in the case of architecture, will always be either counterbalanced or amplified by its practical value. For example, the impossibility to ascribe an alternative function to a building whose symbolic significance has become outdated or undesired can hasten its disposal – and vice versa. On the other hand, people can feign ignorance of its practical value and reduce the object to a purely symbolic and supposedly threatening element that needs to be suppressed at any cost. Finally, the relationship between the material object and its representative character helps to clarify why people opt for either transformation or disposal. This has to do with the object’s capacity to act as a (material) repository of its own history, which Gamboni already observed with regard to works of art; that is: [A] work may be ‘damaged’ rather than ‘destroyed’ in order to make it a token of the violence it was subjected to and of the infamy of anything with which it was associated; or it may be ‘destroyed’ rather than ‘degraded’ in order to eliminate any trace of these and of the intention that had lain behind its creation and installation. (ibid.: 19)

A fortiori buildings, as three-dimensional public forms, have their biography engraved in their ‘flesh’ and can be, for this reason, eliminated, preserved, or, indeed, ‘degraded’ as hulking ruins with ‘Keep out’ signs all around. An additional dimension to the weighing of arguments in favour of rejection or recuperation, when considering architecture, is that the transformation of a building does not usually challenge the edifice’s integrity to the same extent as change affects a work of art. Transforming is, therefore, a solution to coping with architectural eyesores that can be considered and carried out without necessarily posing a logistical or symbolic threat. On the other hand, eliminating a building is a major operation, when compared to eliminating most works of art (ibid.: 69). Elimination can, nonetheless, be used intentionally as an extremely expressive and efficient means of communicating a message to an innumerable amount of people. Finally, to add to the complexity of the situation, the choice between the elimination or transformation of a building is, generally, tightly interwoven with the need (or wish) to

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defend (or impose) the so-called legitimacy of these actions, which is always susceptible to contestation. Bearing in mind the double character of buildings due to their physical and representative properties, an analysis of their eventual rejection can accordingly focus for the most part on the building as an object, or on what it represents as a signifier. Translated to Gell’s notion of agency, the building is either a primary patient, or a secondary patient through which a primary patient is meant to be reached. As a primary patient, a building stands in the way of another, or has become too expensive, or its infrastructure is no longer appropriate. In this case the primary patient experiences a very concrete and pragmatic clearance. Reasons for its removal are all related to the building in itself. In the latter case, as a secondary patient, the building is perceived, presented and rejected as a mere representation, reducing its material form to a mere reference. In this case, ‘pure’ iconoclasm (‘image breaking’) takes place. I have already argued, notably with Humphrey (2002) and Buchli (1999), that in reality such ‘pure’ forms hardly exist. They are, rather, to be seen as the theoretical extremes of a scale with a multitude of cases in between, where both aspects simultaneously intervene and countervail against each other. The oscillation between ‘pragmatic clearance’ and ‘pure iconoclasm’, in other words, is related to the ambivalent character of any building, which comes to the fore in any kind of rejection with various degrees of intensity.17 The Ambiguities of Architectural Destructions

The catalogue to the exhibition Detonation Deutschland (held in the Orangerie am Chinesischen Turm in Munich), edited by Julian Rosefeldt and Piero Steinle (1996b), is very insightful in dealing explicitly with the materiality of buildings in the course of being dynamited. Gamboni has already shown that even with regard to works of art, one can not limit oneself to their purely representative qualities; with architecture it is even less so. The exhibition Detonation Deutschland exclusively presented a series of video fragments of collapsing buildings ‘just’ for the sake of communicating the overwhelming physicality of such events to the public. Some edifices were falling over, others falling in, and still others breaking into pieces. In the catalogue, Gottfried Knapp gives a very lively and sensory account of such a collapse, in an attempt to put images into words: The tension mounts. The telephoto lens gets hold of the tremendous edifice until it fills the picture completely. Close up, the colossal building looks invincible. Its exact geometry seems to be designed for eternity. Suddenly, the short, penetrating sound of the

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warning signal. Voices die down. The silence is almost deafening. A short, dry command – then the exciting moment: the miniscule jerk that goes through the edifice and presses dust through the cracks; the physical attack, the stunning violence of detonations. In slow motion, the horrible, comic spectacle of destruction. At the base of the edifice, clouds of dust begin to ball; the strict geometry of the façade suddenly softens; window frames organically twist, the eaves snap, the truss topples. Floors collapse in a choreography of doughy movements, until the upwhirling dust clouds have devoured all hard shapes. Then the picture turns quiet again, and the sky appears above the slowly sinking clouds. The house has disappeared. (1996: 8)

This long description shows that whatever the building embodies, its collapse is always, in the end, an inherently material event. In the very moment of detonation, whatever the symbolic connotations may be, buildings mainly distinguish themselves by their building material and constructive structure, which determine the speed and movement of their collapse. Knapp goes on to describe the shock and fascination that people experience when they see that what once resulted from an intellectual, artistic and technical challenge can be reduced to an amorphous mass within a few seconds. In the same catalogue, Jochen Köhler argues that dynamiting a building consists of handling an artefact that sprang out of human creation, like a natural product (1996: 49). As opposed to ruins – works of Man that were gradually reappropriated by nature, and in which the tension between nature and culture persists – dynamited buildings return to nature in the form of mere waste (ibid.: 50). The act of dynamiting visualizes how much, in comparison to other artistic modes of expression, architecture remains imprisoned in material constraints, purposes and interests (ibid.: 51). From an almost opposing perspective, in a seminal work on the reception of art entitled The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response, David Freedberg has devoted a chapter to ‘Idolatry and Iconoclasm’ in which he analyses what brings people to smash effigies and images in order to attack what they represent. This is only one aspect in the disposal of architecture, but not an insignificant one: even if an act of demolition is intensely physical, its expressive potency cannot be disconnected from the symbolic properties attributed to the building.18 In the course of its existence the latter has come to embody, to name just a few examples, people’s relation to a historic period, an event, the representatives of a political regime or an undesired ideology. As Freedberg confirms, the relationship between the audience and the object, ‘that speaks to those who see, that gazes at those who speak’ (1989: 419), is two-sided.19 The power of images or objects on their audience comes into full sight at the occasion of their demolition, and provokes fear and a reaction of denial (ibid.: 407, 423).

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According to Freedberg, any iconoclastic gesture presupposes a fusion of signifier and signified. People believe that destruction affects not only the object, but has also a considerable impact on what the latter represents. Freedberg even suggests that in the very moment of destruction, people hardly perceive the difference between the object and what it embodies. With regard to architecture – more an embodiment than a representation – it would perhaps be more correct to say that, in case of a more ‘iconoclastic’ (rather than ‘pragmatic’) elimination, people tend to reduce a building to its representative properties and ignore its utilitarian value. Nevertheless, Freedberg’s remarks are useful in clarifying what happens: Often – if not most of the time – we remain aware of the status of the image as representation. But the case of the iconoclast dramatizes these issues. He sees the image before him. It represents a body to which, for whatever reason, he is hostile. Either he sees it as living, or he treats it as living. Or – perhaps frighteningly – what should be absent (or unknown) is present (or known). In either event, it is on these bases that he feels he can somehow diminish the power of the represented by destroying the representation or by mutilating it. (ibid.: 406)

Freedberg also exposes some of the deep paradoxes at the origin of destruction. He writes that both love and hate towards art stem from the same belief in art’s representative powers (ibid.: 388). In other words, when people are aware of the agency of things (whether art or architecture), this can either exert a great attraction on them, or scare them to death – or, most probably, both at the same time. Freedberg and Gamboni both present love and hate towards art as two sides of the same coin, the former on a micro-, the latter on a macrolevel. Gamboni suggests that love and hate counterbalance each other within the larger ‘world of art’. Firstly, love for one object always implies dislike, or at least inferiority or neglect of another (Gamboni 1997: 329).20 Secondly, what some people reject happens to be cherished by others (ibid.). Thirdly, similar arguments can be used both in favour of some objects, and against some others (ibid.: 330). And fourthly, Gamboni has suggested that one and the same act of disposal can be inherently contradictory in terms of destructiveness and constructiveness. This is exemplified by the notion of tabula rasa, usually related to major conflicts, that allows the protagonists to start again with a clean slate and is greeted as a unique chance within an ideology of progress (Gamboni 1997: 215, 2002: 90; Knapp 1996; Rosefeldt and Steinle 1996a). Finally, perception can evolve in the course of disposal. The most illustrative examples of this are found in situations of radical upheaval such as the elimination of monumental and architectural

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representatives of the former regime, when what would have previously been considered an act of blasphemy, soon becomes redemptive. The paradoxical character of any ‘image breaking’, as exemplified by the notion of tabula rasa, is highlighted in the catalogue to the exhibition Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art (held in the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe). The term ‘iconoclash’ designates a situation ‘when one does not know, one hesitates, one is troubled by an action for which there is no way to know, without further enquiry, whether it is destructive or constructive’ (Latour 2002: 16). Following Latour, both the ambiguous character of the object and that of the ‘smasher’ contribute to the paradoxical nature of any iconoclash. Firstly, it is unclear whether the object consists of ‘mere stones’ or has a power of its own. With regard to religious idols, Latour writes, ‘[N]o one knows whether those idols can be smashed without any consequences … or whether they have to be destroyed because they are so powerful, so ominous’ (ibid.: 21, emphasis in original). In other words, there is some ambiguity regarding the object’s agency: Does it exist? If yes, what does it consist of? What is it aimed at? Secondly, there is some ambivalence surrounding the ‘smasher’. Again with regard to a (religious) ‘idol smasher’, Latour suggests: ‘[E]ither he … is in full command of his hands, but then what he has produced is “simply” the “mere” consequence of his own force and weakness projected into matter since he is unable to produce more output than his input … Or else he is in the hands of a transcendent, unmade divinity’ (ibid.: 23–24). In other words, either the perpetrator acts as a primary agent, or he is under the influence of another agent. In essence, assessing a building’s value also consists of negotiating agency, whether human or that of the building. The ambiguity of architectural (icono-)clashes seems to reside in the undetermined character of this so-called purgatorial period, a stretch of time that cannot properly come to an end before the material and representational properties of the edifice are aligned with each other.21

Disposal and Farewell In conclusion, several of the previously discussed notions are significant key concepts for the following investigation. Gell’s notion of agency, and his premise that, ‘Whatever happens, human agency is exercised within the material world’ (1998: 20), are very helpful in clarifying the ambiguous nature of buildings as both material and representational objects. As exemplified by Pelkmans (2003), Humphrey (2002) and Buchli

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(1999), buildings literally and figuratively constitute ‘concrete embodiments’ of the ‘corruption’ experienced in their social, cultural, political and ideological context.22 With Riches’ perspective on violence, the destruction of buildings can be approached as an inherently controversial act, ‘deemed legitimate by the performer and illegitimate by (some) witnesses’ (1986: 8). Therefore, in every situation, it is very important to identify not only those who question (and sometimes affect) a building’s existence and try to legitimate these claims, but also all those (who rarely form a homogeneous group) who witness, feel concerned and either contest or applaud what happens. Finally, it is through the work of Gamboni (1997) and Freedberg (1989) that we can sense how the profound ambiguity and controversy of many acts of disposal is played off in a permanent oscillation between materiality and representativeness. In the following chapters, all cases relate to the possible disposal of architectural objects considered to be unwanted, outdated or even harmful. They touch on issues such as the assessment of value, the ephemerality and durability of material culture, as well as ways of recycling, recuperating, or parting with things. It is essentially through a growing interest in these issues that anthropology can significantly contribute to a better understanding of the fates and significances of undesired buildings. Disposal and the Assessment of Value

Since Arjun Appadurai’s The Social Life of Things (1986), the variable appreciation and valuation of things in the course of their biography has become a major point of interest within material culture studies. Nevertheless, until the late 1990s, apart from a few seminal works (Douglas 2002 [1966]; Rathje and Murphy 1992; Thompson 1979), the disposal, divestment, recycling and recuperation of rejected or worn-out items – alternatively called ‘rubbish’, ‘waste’, ‘garbage’ or ‘dirt’ – received relatively little attention. Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld, looking back, noted that: ‘The social life of things (and value) has long squeezed out consideration of their social death’ (2003: 246). It is only recently that the ageing and retirement of objects and their afterlife in the form of rejuvenation, resuscitation or discard rose higher on the material culture agenda (Buchli and Lucas 2001c; Gregson and Crewe 2003; Hawkins and Muecke 2002b; Neville and Villeneuve 2002; Strasser 1999). In the introduction to The Material Culture Reader, Buchli has devoted a special part to ‘Waste, Change and Ephemerality’ and noted an important shift in attention from materiality to ‘processes of

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materialization’ in which ‘material culture itself is just a peculiar moment’ (2002: 16). In other words, Buchli describes a (promising) tendency to move away from objects as fixed and permanent material items with changing meanings and values, towards ‘actions of one sort or another that facilitate a transformation of the materiality of material culture in terms of durability and visibility’ (ibid.).23 Reemphasizing this growing interest, the Journal of Material Culture published a special issue on ephemerality and material loss in 2003. In the introduction, Colloredo-Mansfeld insisted that ‘actions that use things up have special significance for intersubjective experience, negotiating relationships, and the pacing of human interaction’ (2003: 252). Since Michael Thompson’s Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value, notions of rubbish, encompassing objects ‘of zero and unchanging value’ (1979: 9), generally no longer refer to an end stage, but to a passage. Rubbish, according to Thompson, constitutes a transitory category, into which so-called transient objects, which ‘decrease in value over time and have finite life-spans’ (ibid.: 7), can pass, and from which durable objects, which ‘increase in value over time and have (ideally) infinite life-spans’ (ibid.), can emerge. Despite having been repeatedly criticized or annotated (Hetherington 2004; Lucas 2002; Moser 2002), Thompson’s theory has served as a source of inspiration for many a publication on disposal. As Gavin Lucas has argued, however, terms like ‘rubbish’ or ‘waste’ nevertheless need to be further differentiated. More specifically, in an article called ‘Disposability and Dispossession in the Twentieth Century’, he explains that Thompson’s emphasis on ‘the reconstitutive force of rubbish’ (2002: 16) obscures the fact that being relegated to the category of rubbish often ‘de-constitutes objects, removes them from any system altogether so that in effect, they no longer exist, as matter’ (ibid.: 8). In other words, whereas Thompson constantly stresses the transitoriness and dynamics of waste, according to Lucas, its definitiveness and absoluteness could (and should) just as well be accentuated. This other – complementary – perception of waste, focuses on de-constitution rather than reconstitution: Throwing something away, putting it in the bin, would seem to have a finality which is not present in other forms of disposal; the finality of de-constitution, de-mattering an object, both structurally and symbolically. … [T]he absoluteness of the bin as a deconstituting place articulates the recognition that we no longer need/desire/want this object and it places a certainty on this ‘no-longer’, that is irrevocable. (ibid.: 19)

Similarly, with regard to undesired architecture, a complete removal, irrevocably reducing a building to rubble, always belongs to the possibilities – presupposing, however, various financial, organizational and technical contributions. The notion of disposal, in sum, refers to a

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complex process of distancing oneself from an object one no longer needs, desires or wants, at least in its actual state. This process always involves an assessment of the object’s value, which lasts for an extremely variable period of time. Indeterminacy, ambiguity, and transitoriness typically characterize this phase. Its final issue, however, can either be definitive and absolute as in the case of discard, or rather reconstituent as with recuperation and recycling. Deserving a Proper Burial

Various authors have drawn parallels between the disposal of objects and the burial of human beings (Harris 1999; Verdery 1999; Hetherington 2004). Admittedly, there are some important physical and philosophical differences. For instance, when people are bereaved of a fellow human being, they not only have to cope with an important personal loss, but are also confronted with their own mortality. The need to reassure some kind of continuity through burial rituals, subsequently, directly relates to the ephemerality of human nature as well as to people’s personal identity. Further, buildings can easily outlive people; therefore the pace of a building’s biography is perceived as accordingly slower – paradoxically though, because in reality, many building lives are significantly shorter than human lives. The element of chance or fate plays a more significant role in human lives. Especially against the background of the actual restoration and preservation skills and technology, it is hard to imagine any building whose life could not be rescued – or at least prolonged. People have the ability to control a building’s life span; when a building passes away, it is the result of human (lack of) intervention. Despite these differences, however, reasons to compare human and architectural burials are manifold, both from an emic point of view (respondents themselves frequently draw such parallels) and from an etic point of view (extensive literature on human burials can help to clarify the significance of architectural burials). In Chapter 1, it was discussed how buildings, like human beings, can be considered sick either physically or mentally. Similarities in people’s attitudes and reactions with regard to human lives continue towards the end of a building’s life. The following chapters describe, for instance, people paying a last (mortuary) visit to a building on the verge of being dynamited; witnesses projecting thoughts about humanity’s own mortality onto collapsing buildings; still others getting upset about the agony of a cherished building; or even erecting memorials for buildings that passed away ‘too early’. Harris has structured an entire book around the rites and passages accompanying a building’s life cycle, from its

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birth (‘Meeting the World’), through various significant events and transitions (‘Signs of Life’), until its death and burial (‘Saying GoodBye’). In the latter part, Harris has extensively illustrated that ‘when the mortal illness of an important structure is discovered’ there are ‘stages, as occur in human terminal disease, stages that include denial, the search for miracle cures, resignation, and then, quite often, a series of lifeaffirming gestures devised to make sense out of the time that remains’ (1999: 135). Not only can architectural and human biographies be divided in similar stages; there are also interesting comparisons to be made regarding the appreciation of what is supposed to have caused a building’s death: age, (heroic) sacrifice, euthanasia, murder, terrorist attack, and so on. Naturally people’s reactions vary, accordingly, from resigned acceptance to indignant claims for justice to be done, murderers and motives to be identified, or even (in a situation of extreme conflict) revenge to be taken by destroying a building of the enemy. Related to such claims are very anthropomorphic notions about the need for a proper burial in order for the edifice to rest in peace. Verdery has insisted that, ‘Because the living not only mourn their dead but also fear them as sources of possible harm, special efforts are made to propitiate them by burying them properly’ (1999: 42). Perhaps the rules for a proper building burial are not as strict, but there are nevertheless interesting comparisons to be made. As will be discussed in greater detail later on, Kevin Hetherington has explicitly drawn a parallel between, respectively, human body and soul on the one hand, and an object’s form and value – ‘use value and sentimental value as much as exchange or sign value’ (2004: 169) – on the other. In this line of thought, the notion of proper burial for a building can be translated as: assessing and acknowledging its value, as well as giving it proper (physical) treatment so that material and representational properties are conciliated. In the following chapters, various cases will illustrate that an acceptable explanation for a building’s decease can ease the process of mourning. On the other hand, in a situation of conflict, where people have to be reconciled with regard to the building’s fate, proper burial can be a hard task. To a certain extent, these remarks also apply to the transformation of buildings where a change of shape effects a resuscitation or reincarnation.24 Finally, various cases will exemplify that when people fail to meet the conditions for proper burial, buildings can turn over in their grave, and so-called revenants resurge at a later date.

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Six Exciting Fates

The six different cases of undesired architecture presented in Chapters 3 to 8 have been classified according to the degree of how radical the material intervention was. Chapter 3 depicts what seems to be, at first sight, the most far-reaching alteration: the total elimination of an edifice. The reason for beginning with removal is that the suggestion of this option plays a significant role in all other cases as well, even when it is not carried through. People acknowledge the possibility, propose it, plead for it or, on the contrary, fear it and try to avoid it. They evoke it, keep it in mind, search for an alternative or only imagine it. Whether real or virtual, demolition is a very expressive and impressive phenomenon. It questions the durability generally ascribed to architecture, allows people to convey fundamental messages to a number of witnesses, and it often marks a crisis, or the end of a period. Its almost universal force of attraction or fascination is exemplified by the enormous crowd that attended the demolition of the so-called Kaiserbau, a mega-hotel in the West German town of Troisdorf. The massive concrete skeleton was dynamited in 2001, having stood there for more than two decades, structurally complete, but never put into use. The fundamental contribution of witnesses to the meaning of an edifice’s physical alteration is confirmed in Chapter 4, where testimonies and reactions are presented to the fate of the very heavily damaged headquarters of the independent newspaper Oslobod¯enje during the siege of Sarajevo (1992–96). Enmeshed in an extreme conflict, the building literally and figuratively came to embody the deteriorated relationships between Muslims, Croats and Serbs with regard to the independence of Bosnia-Herzegovina. This example illustrates, on the one hand, the perseverant force of material forms, even when some people overstrain themselves to wipe them off the map and, on the other hand, the astonishing relevance of witnesses’ contributions in construing the significance of such phenomena. Chapter 5 looks at recuperation, as was the fate of the would-be nuclear power plant in Kalkar, near the Dutch–German border. The plant was completed but never commissioned, and was finally transformed into an amusement park, which was inaugurated in 1996. This case illustrates the ambivalence and temporality that generally characterize the assessment of an edifice’s value, whether economic, utilitarian, (art) historical or sentimental, and which essentially takes place between the questioning of the building’s existence and the moment its fate is sealed. Furthermore, it appears that the acceptance levels reached by the general public for any given eyesore alternative (in this case, an amusement

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park), not only depend on the radical nature of the intervention, but also largely on the presentation and legitimation of the alternative by those who carry it out. The importance of different perceptions is emphasized again in Chapter 6 with the recuperation and rejuvenation of prefabricated apartment blocks in former East Berlin. Without actually changing anything significantly, supposedly unbiased newcomers approach, present and represent a building from a completely different perspective than people who relate them to a specific history, or those professionally concerned who display a certain detachment in the matter. This chapter shows the importance of different approaches and the ensuing images, but also underlines the ‘feedback’ that a building can give, even to people who were not related to it beforehand. Moving to examples of an apparently less fundamental or active physical intervention, Chapter 7 bears evidence of the relevance of virtual alterations. Analysing the multitude of unbuilt projects that were developed for the Viennese Flaktürme since the early postwar years, it shows that even imaginary alterations can be a means to come to terms with undesired buildings. The evolution in the character of these designs reflects the changing attitudes that architects – and with them other inhabitants – have displayed towards these towers as well as the historic period they embody. Compared to the Viennese Flaktürme, few projects have been worked out for the last rejected building to be discussed in Chapter 8: the Kulturhaus (‘Cultural Centre’) in Zinnowitz, on the island of Usedom in north-east Germany. This edifice, severely dilapidated, is said to have been entirely abandoned to its own fate since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the political and economic reorganization that followed. Not doing anything to an edifice – at least officially – should not be interpreted too quickly as passive disinterest. It can arouse feelings of deep frustration in terms of unjustified waste – feelings which, in the end, can perhaps only be wiped out by removing the building altogether. The Afterlife of Eyesores

Chapter 9 and 10 discuss an additional, dynamic dimension to processes of disposal. A building’s biography does not end with its elimination, but continues to have significant consequences afterwards. Besides, definitions of undesirability are subject to constant change, so that the fate that was enforced on a building can be reconsidered years later, when old spectres make their reappearance. As Lucas remarked, disposal is intimately linked with concepts of past and future or what he refers to

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as ‘a temporality of desire which is never present to its object but always future or past’ (2002: 16). The afterlife of eyesores has much to do with remembering and forgetting, but also with rediscovery and rehabilitation, bridging between past and future by enacting something in the present. Chapter 9 and 10 basically distinguish themselves from one another in terms of continuity and discontinuity: Chapter 9 shows that even against the background of radical breaks, and even when edifices are seriously affected, there is certain continuity in dealing with their material form: the fate of remains forms a continuation of the edifice’s biography. People insist on material continuity despite representative discontinuity. Chapter 10, on the other hand, focuses on situations marked by dissatisfaction with regard to the fate inflicted on specific buildings, where people start seeking for new (material) forms in order to perpetuate a building’s significance. People insist on representative continuity despite material discontinuity. Chapter 9 focuses on how a building’s agency continues to be disputed after its elimination, transformation or abandonment; how remaining fragments are related to the complete building, as well as the roles they play as intermediaries between history and individual experience. Perhaps more than ever before, a direct tactile experience of materiality appears to be of crucial importance, especially in coming to terms with what the building previously embodied – whether the latter is experienced as valuable or condemnable. A building’s previous life is also extrapolated in the form of newly created objects (with recuperated old material) referring to the old edifice. Chapter 10 presents a number of situations where acceptance failed to be achieved and people came to regret the fate inflicted on former eyesores, which kept haunting them years afterwards. Budapest abounds in such examples, where people have tried to rehabilitate the memory of former eyesores. Broadly speaking, rehabilitation can occur in three different (but combinable) forms: reconstitution, replacement (sometimes integrating fragments of the old building), and the creation of contemporary references. All three of them are intended to serve different purposes. Firstly, the apparent destructiveness of elimination can be echoed by the apparent constructiveness of reconstitution. Such reconstitution can be partial or complete, and it can relate to a building that was eliminated, damaged or transformed. It is usually meant to make the course of events, at least apparently, undone. In Budapest, for instance, the former Parisiana Nightclub, nowadays a theatre, was repeatedly face-lifted since its construction in the early twentieth century, ultimately beyond recognition. It was finally brought back to its

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initial appearance in the early 1990s. Secondly, a building can be replaced by a contemporary alter ego with a different material form, possibly with integrated fragments of the old edifice, such as in the new Regnum Marianum Templom (‘Church of the Holy Mary’) in Budapest, the Versöhnungskapelle (‘Chapel of Reconciliation’) in Berlin, or the New Synagogue in Dresden. In these cases, the formerly rejected edifice is acknowledged, but no attempts are made at turning the clock back. The integration of a metonymic reference to the old edifice confers a certain legitimacy and identity to the new one. Thirdly, people can also denounce what happened and encourage a revised perception by commemorating a vanished building in the form of a contemporary reference, without trying to resuscitate or reincarnate the old edifice. This is illustrated by the plaster cast of the facade of the demolished Hungarian National Theatre in the pond in front of the new one, as well as photos of the old edifice on the facade of a contemporary building on the square where it used to stand. The examples presented in this section seriously challenge approaches to the so-called memorizing capacities of material forms, where ‘remembering’ is equated to ‘physical completeness’ (or ‘reconstitution’), and ‘forgetting’ to ‘alteration’.

Chapter 3

13 May 2001, 8.01 A.M. – 1 Building, 20,000 People and 450 Kilograms of Explosives The Elimination of the Kaiserbau in Troisdorf as a Secular Sacrifice

In all cases of undesired architecture, elimination occupies a central place. The deliberate destruction or waste of goods that are not completely finished has often been related to the expression and acquisition of power. Not only must the destroyer be in the position to permit such luxury, but vice versa (and cumulatively), ‘the conspicuous waste of goods always confers power and authority on their destroyer’ (Connor 1992: 75). In the realm of architecture, too, destruction and disposal have an important significance. People who have the power to reduce buildings to rubble can effectively express their control over the built environment. Even when it is not subsequently carried out, the mere suggestion of destruction can significantly influence the course of events.1 For instance, mighty destroyers can damage as well as threaten to eradicate their opponents’ representative edifices in order to impose their authority; or, on the other hand, people who would like to dispose of an edifice, but lack the means (e.g., authority, finances or technology), are challenged to start seeking alternatives. The radical elimination of significant buildings is often attended en masse and elaborately described in the mass media. In Las Vegas, it has repeatedly been combined with New Year fireworks into a dazzling and impressive spectacle. As the concrete embodiment of a crisis or transition, the disposal of buildings can also take on the character of a purification ritual, a necessary condition for starting with a clean slate.

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Julian Rosefeldt and Piero Steinle have presented dynamiting as a metaphor for the mortality of systems, ideologies, power relations and their status symbols (1996a: 7). In the same book, Gottfried Knapp has even affirmed that the chastening elimination of Nazi references in postwar Germany was absolutely indispensable in order to turn over a new leaf. Finally, a world-famous elimination is that of the Pruitt-Igoe Housing Scheme in St Louis, in 1972, which went down in art history as ‘the death of modern architecture’ (Jencks 1987: 9). Demolition is often largely documented in texts and images, especially when it concerns a symbolically relevant building. This event can then become an important element in the collective memory of a place, sometimes still remembered years later as if it were yesterday. The so-called Kaiserbau in Troisdorf, near the highway between Cologne and Bonn, was a structurally complete, nineteen-storey concrete building from the 1970s, initially planned as the largest hotel in West Germany, and named after its contractor Franz Kaiser. Having been part of the local history of Troisdorf and its surroundings for more than twenty-five years, the concrete structure was dynamited on 13 May 2001 at eight o’clock in the morning in no more than two or three seconds – a spectacle attended by no less than twenty thousand people, despite the ungodly hour at which it took place. Camera teams from all over the country and even far beyond the national borders came to document this impressive event. The arrival of crowds demanded an enormous organization, security management and intensive communication with all people concerned. What made these twenty thousand people get up on a Sunday morning so early to watch a building being blown up in less than no time? Did people in and around Troisdorf develop a special relationship to this edifice that had become inextricably bound up with their built environment although it was regularly portrayed in the local newspapers as a negative symbolic marker? Or does such radical elimination have certain (universal) characteristics that make the event appealing in itself, or fascinating to a large number of people, regardless of what building it is? Finally, should we see this event as an ending, or as a process: does it radically alter the meaning or relevance of the architecture in question? Does this clarify the spectators’ motivation to be there and witness what happens?

Troisdorf’s Negative Marker Did people attend the demolition of the Kaiserbau because of the specific relation they had developed to this edifice over the course of

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several decades? A first explanation for the massive attendance at this event can be sought in the building’s significant representative aspects: how can people’s attitude towards the edifice be described, and what value did the latter have in their eyes? Such an approach presupposes a mainly sociological perspective on the reception of architecture, to be derived, notably, from the work of Howard Becker (1982) and Vera Zolberg (1990) on art. It distinguishes itself from a more humanistic tradition, to which Louis Réau (1994 [1958]) and Alexander Demandt (1997) clearly belong with their books on vandalism in the realms of architecture and art. Zolberg has characterized this latter approach as typically based on a view from within and on the assumptions ‘that a work of art is a unique object; that it is conceived and made by a single creator; and that it is in these works that the artist spontaneously expresses his genius’ (1990: 53). The translation and application of such premises to the realm of architecture, and particularly to the rejection of specific buildings, bear various risks. Firstly, such an approach presupposes that art and non-art can be self-evidently and naturally distinguished from one another (ibid.: 5). Similarly, then, there would also be two types of buildings: architecture and non-architecture.2 Subsequently, a significant number of edifices, conceived by construction engineers instead of architects or simply not recognized as (‘high quality’) architecture, would not even be taken into consideration, and their elimination considered irrelevant. The Kaiserbau, art historically not a very ‘exciting’ design, would most certainly not even be given a second thought. Secondly, as exemplified by Réau and Demandt, an approach that sees true art or architecture as ‘a joy forever’ tends to condemn those who challenge the latter’s existence as reprehensible vandals. It passes over the contested legitimacy that is inherent to most acts of disposal, and crucial to their understanding. In order to overcome the difficulties sketched, it seems preferable to adopt a more sociological perspective that sees works of art as ‘products of collective work efforts’ (Zolberg 1990: 80) which need to be contextualized, whether socioculturally, politically or ideologically. In the present case, such a viewpoint notably focuses on how, and why, the Kaiserbau has come to be perceived as an eyesore to be dynamited. Its appreciation and significance, then, can only be grasped by taking into consideration a whole variety of feelings, memories, experiences and observations. Generally, the decision to blow up the Kaiserbau was received with widespread approval or at least consensus, yet it took many years to reach this point.

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Disproportioned Ambitions

The Kaiserbau was very much a product of its time. Former city manager Heinz-Bernward Gerhardus explained to me that in the late 1960s, after two decades of a somewhat uncertain identity, Bonn seemed to have acquired a permanent status as West Germany’s capital city, and its surroundings were developing in accordance. In the same period, the Municipality of Troisdorf fused with neighbouring villages into a small town, favourably located along a new highway connecting the local airport to the capital. Urgent needs for increased hotel accommodation were felt. Gerhardus recalled that: ‘There was a time around 1969, 1970, 1971 in which ideas arose which were later labelled “gigantomania”, which were too large by today’s standards. But at the time we all thought that way’.3 Shortly after having completed the building structurally, the contractor went bankrupt, and construction was interrupted until further notice. Kaiser was summoned to return the plot of land to the municipality, which subsequently tried – in vain – to find a new investor. Yet with the construction of other new hotels in the 1970s as well as the removal of the government infrastructure from Bonn to Berlin after 1990, the potential Troisdorfer mega-hotel had become entirely superfluous. Due to its extremely inflexible construction, where most partition walls were supporting walls, it would have been very difficult to adapt the building to a new function. Also, for judicial reasons, it had become almost impossible for the municipality to sell it, and the costs of disposal were estimated at two million German marks (one million Euros). Soon, the edifice started to be seen as the concrete embodiment of various failures: the failure to realize a very ambitious project emerging from the hope that the surroundings of Bonn would witness a booming development; the failure to make Troisdorf a relevant name on the map of Germany; and the failure to adapt to changing circumstances and turn the previous failures into a success story. Local newspapers repeatedly referred to the Kaiserbau as Troisdorf’s negative marker, which seems to be, indeed, the prevalent image most people had. A primary explanation for the building’s bad name that all my respondents mentioned is the fact that several young people died at the Kaiserbau, either by accident or suicide. As each incident was always reported in the local newspapers, people knew about it, and these tragedies have always shed a negative light on the building’s reputation. From an aesthetic point of view, the Kaiserbau was mainly disproportionate to its location, boring in its structure and not very ‘pretty’ in its material realization – nothing else, actually, than a ‘concrete skeleton’ (Bode 1995; Effern-Salhoub 1993; Stanetschek

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1990; Tüllmann 1993). Had its architecture been more ‘attractive’, then it could possibly have counter-balanced the arguments raised against preservation, and it would perhaps have brought people to resist its demolition.4 Shortly before the Kaiserbau was blown up, it was found to be contaminated by asbestos: one more confirmation of the building’s undesirability. The edifice’s ‘extreme’ nature, in other words, made it very vulnerable to rejection or, in the eyes of many, undesirable. René Girard, in The Scapegoat, has analysed collective persecutions throughout history and stated that in a stereotype accusation ‘persecutors always convince themselves that a small number of people, or even a single individual, despite his relative weakness, is extremely harmful to the whole of society’ (1986: 15). Certain individuals, specifically those with extreme qualities, are particularly subject to such accusations: the extremely rich and the extremely poor, the extremely successful or unsuccessful, beautiful or ugly, vicious or virtuous, the extremely attractive or repulsive (ibid.: 19). All these terms can easily be transferred to pieces of architecture. The Kaiserbau, in particular, was no inconspicuous building: it was an enormous edifice made of concrete that should have become the largest, and one of the most prestigious, hotels in West Germany. It was doomed to inspire not only admiration and longing, but also envy, jealousy and animosity. Border Experiences

In addition, as construction had been interrupted, the building remained for many years in an unclear ‘in between’ status, when nobody could tell whether it would be finished or not, whether it would be given another function or not, whether the owner would change or not, and whether it would be demolished or not. It belonged to Troisdorf, but remained on the margin – as did many of its ‘inhabitants’: punks, homeless persons, members of counter-cultures. Even a positive valuation of the Kaiserbau was inextricably bound up with its ambiguous status. The edifice became a meeting point for young people from Troisdorf and its surroundings, who organized parties and barbecues, sometimes even slept there. They appropriated the walls with numerous graffiti, and some of them still present themselves as the so-called ‘Kaiserbau Generation’. In the (online) announcement for a small photo exhibition in memory of the Kaiserbau in 2003, Alex We Hillgemann (2002), a young woman who spent much time in the empty Kaiserbau in her early twenties, remembered: ‘The Kaiserbau was for many people like a monument, an emblem, also a place of pilgrimage. This somehow fearand respect-inspiring concrete giant housed in its day often whole

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crowds of earthlings: curious teenagers, homeless people, lovers, punks, innumerable pigeons, etc.’. According to Hillgemann and her friend Francis Hall, if the Kaiserbau had been any ‘normal’ building, it would never have acquired the same relevance: ‘If everything had gone as planned and it had become an airport hotel, then probably no one would have given it a second thought. … [I]t would not have been part of my reality – perhaps not for our entire generation, because it would have been just another commercially exploited building, a hotel’. What exactly made the Kaiserbau attractive is difficult to put into words, but it has something to do with its status as an architectural outcast and the fact that it did not – or not in the same way – provide shelter and security like most other buildings do. Hillgemann still clearly remembers the last time she went on the roof: There were days when you could not go too close to the edge or you would have been blown off. If you slipped up there, that was really tricky. I can imagine that some people felt compelled up there to commit suicide. I have experienced up there a sudden strong wind and a thunderstorm that started brewing; I got very scared that I would not be able to get down again, a really stupid feeling. Once we had gone down the stairs, I had the thought – and it was indeed the last time I went up there – that something would happen if I went up there again.

Visiting the Kaiserbau, in other words, was literally and figuratively a border experience. As Mary Douglas has exposed in Purity and Danger, marginality is frequently associated with danger. Transposing her insights with regard to persons in a marginal state to the present case, we could say that marginal buildings – either at the margins of society or in a transitory period between two identities – are classificatory anomalies; they are ‘placeless. They may be doing nothing morally wrong, but their status is indefinable’ (2002 [1966]: 118). This marginality makes them both vulnerable and dangerous because, ‘To have been in the margins is to have been in contact with danger, to have been at a source of power’ (ibid.: 120). Actually, this is a kind of vicious circle since the questioning of a building’s existence relegates it to a marginal condition, while simultaneously this ambiguous status (combined, in the present case, with extreme qualities) renders it more susceptible to being rejected , as well as making it logical prey to the hammer of potential persecutors. Happy and Sad

All in all, except for a small minority of people, the Kaiserbau’s presence was contemplated with indifference at best.5 Perhaps the best summary was given in Julia Horn’s documentary Der große Knall aus dem Leben

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eines Sprengmeisters (2002): ‘Many cursed the Kaiserbau, others liked it, most just drove on past’. Still, the building’s generally bad name is not enough to explain the extent of public attendance at its demolition. Despite its uncanny aura, people in the surroundings had also got used to its presence: several mentioned to me that on their way back from their holidays, the sight of the Kaiserbau would let them know from far away that they were almost at home. ‘Although it was ugly, it somehow belonged to Troisdorf’, is what many people said. People disliked its outward appearance, but it did not arouse an extreme hatred as certain buildings can do, for example, after a radical social upheaval or ideological break. The Kaiserbau had a multiplicity of meanings, and people felt concerned by its demolition for various reasons: some of them were simply seeking free entertainment, some wanted to witness the elimination of what they saw as a blot to their city. Hillgemann and other members of the Kaiserbau Generation, on the other hand, compared the event to a burial or an execution; to them, it was a very sad day. The multiplicity of Kaiserbau images in people’s minds explains why the explosion was such an ambiguous event, a true ‘iconoclash’ indeed, where ‘one does not know, one hesitates, one is troubled by an action for which there is no way to know, without further enquiry, whether it is destructive or constructive’ (Latour 2002: 16). People not only attributed various meanings to the edifice, they also (physically) experienced it in fundamentally divergent ways. Most people had a rather distant, indirect, merely visual and largely shared perception of its outside, whereas so-called habitués experienced the inside of the Kaiserbau in a much more intimate, unmediated, multisensory and unconventional, individual way. These two types of relation between people and (elements in) their architectural environment correspond to what Tim Edensor has described as, on the one hand, ‘embodied conventions’, that generally govern movement and behaviour across built space and, on the other, the subversive potential of what the author terms ‘Performance and Sensation in Ruined Space’ (2005: 79). Generally, Edensor depicts our – merely visual – experience of the built environment as ‘unreflexive, routinised sequences of movement’, which ‘tend to reinforce notions about what constitutes the common-sense and the unquestioned’ (ibid.: 80). The experience of ruined space, on the contrary, stands in sheer contrast to these conventional and desensitized routines; it is much more arbitrary, ‘disorganised’ and markedly multisensory (ibid.: 87) and it often includes ‘entry in to a host of spaces not usually designed for bodies or prohibited to all but a few’ (ibid.: 88).

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In the following, it will be shown that, for those who attended the demolition of the Kaiserbau, the two types of experience distinguished by Edensor converged in the moment of detonation. Regular visitors of the Kaiserbau, who were used to an unmediated, free and multifaceted experience of the ‘given up’ edifice, were dragged into a meticulously staged event, where hardly anything was left to chance. Those with a more conventional relation to the building, on the other hand, suddenly faced, and were immersed in, an unknown and unexpected, ‘all-round’ material force.

Overwhelming Materiality So far I have attempted to explain the massive attendance at the Kaiserbau’s elimination through an analysis of merely representative aspects. Yet Gosewijn Van Beek, in a discussion of book burnings, suggests that such an analysis cannot be entirely satisfactory, because it passes over the crucial importance of the materiality of objects: ‘The effort to remove (eradicate would be the better word) objects, be it human or otherwise, from the face of the earth escapes such disembodied notions of meaning. It must in some way involve the embodied, material aspect of the “objects”, their autonomous “being there” upon and above their ethereal “meaning”’ (1996: 16). There are several reasons – both empirical and theoretical – why the significance of the Kaiserbau’s elimination cannot be grasped in terms of pure semiotics like that of a supposedly typical iconoclastic gesture. Firstly, as Van Beek has justly remarked, if everything could be reduced to questions of meaning, then this would imply that things (and their disposal) do not really matter (ibid.). This hypothesis is convincingly contradicted, for example, by people’s frequent and fervent desire and efforts to get rid of certain things. We could argue with Freedberg (1989) that the difference between signifier and signified can be so seriously blurred that people really perceive the former as the latter, and that despite physically altering the thing, they actually really think that they are acting against a reprehensible meaning, idea or concept (rather than against a material object). This, perhaps, holds true for the destruction of many works of art, but buildings also have a very essential reality as public, three-dimensional, material and utilitarian objects, which cannot be reduced to textual metaphors. The second argument against a purely semiotic approach is an awareness of the agency of buildings, as derived from Gell’s insights into works of art (1998). Whatever meaning an edifice embodies, it does, indeed, precisely em-body it: this meaning is

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intensely connected to, or engraved in, the building’s material shape – it depends on the thing in order to be. Since buildings are simultaneously symbolic and material objects, their potential elimination also has both a symbolic and material character. Finally, if the Kaiserbau’s elimination had been a purely representative act, then it could hardly have brought together so many different people in a joint experience, because people’s relations to the edifice were too divergent for that. These objections against a purely semiotic approach engender the next supposition: that the crowd was drawn by certain universal and fascinating characteristics, rooted in the materiality of the event, and common to all (or most) destructions, independent of the specific significance of the object. Almost Supernatural and Intensely Sensory

When people were asked in Der große Knall why they were so keen on witnessing the explosion of the Kaiserbau, many of them referred to the power of the event in itself, mentioning it was a unique opportunity to watch something exceptional and very exciting; something as impressive as the force of nature, that could otherwise never be seen during a time of peace. Several confirmed this to me, and described a very solemn, exceptional atmosphere, starting in the days preceding the explosion. Heike Glomb, for example, who lived opposite the Kaiserbau for one and a half years, recalled that in the last few days before detonation, preparation work continued by night. There was no electricity in the edifice, so workers had to use torches to pursue their work. In the dark, when they were on the higher floors, it looked from a certain distance almost like a heavenly light or some kind of supernatural phenomenon – ‘Very, very eerie’. Although she had no particular relation to the building, except for the fact that she lived in the same street, Glomb went to pay it a last visit with her family and friends on the evening before the explosion. She described the building to me almost like an agonizing friend: ‘We took our leave of the building, went to it and looked at it once more, how it stood there with all its cables’. Roman Hümbs, photographer and ex-inhabitant of Troisdorf, described the unusual, grave and reverential atmosphere on the day itself, in particular the absolute silence of the crowd in the minutes before detonation: ‘No one dared say anything; everyone felt a real, internal tension. It suddenly went quiet, no birds singing, nothing, it was really still, as if everything was actually waiting for a big event’. The explosion in itself was a total sensory experience. Hümbs gave me a detailed description of what happened after the first signal (‘leave

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Fig. 3.1 Detonation: a total sensory experience. Photo by Alex We Hillgemann, www.auge-und-ohr.de.

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security zone – detonation in sixty seconds’) and the second signal (‘detonation is imminent’): It took two or three seconds, and then it was gone. By the time we heard the blast, it was already in rubble. First you see a bit of smoke, and then it just starts to shake. I’ve never lived through a real earthquake, but everything was simply shaking! And as I said, then comes the sound, and you notice that the shaking goes completely through the earth. Terrific.

Enormous dust clouds, which left the firemen completely helpless, and the trembling of the earth when the 42-thousand-ton colossus hit the ground, completed these strong audio-visual sensations. Everything was covered with a thick layer of dust, and all the people looked like extraterrestrials dropped into a bucketful of chalk. Some people were crying, others were clapping, and no one could leave the place because the roads were closed to all traffic. This situation of total chaos was further increased by the masses of people who set out for the smoking ruins in search of debris, for a tactile experience of the deceased giant.6 Mastering Detonation

In the course of disposal, the edifice overwhelmingly came to the fore in all its materiality: it had been placed in the spotlights for many weeks as a colossus that needed to be overpowered; detonation brought its materiality into the reach of all senses; and the tons of debris that remained had to be handled with powerful bulldozers and excavators. The overwhelming physical potency of the event made it necessary to closely direct it, and, inversely, this careful orchestration brought materiality to the fore. In other words, materiality and performativity mutually reinforced each other. Edward Schieffelin, in his article ‘Problematizing Performance’, has written that performativity is something inherent to social life, and indispensable to the social construction of reality. It manifests itself in ‘the expressive aspect of the “way” something is done on a particular occasion: the particular orchestration of the pacing, tension, evocation, emphasis, mode of participation, etc., in the way a practice (at that moment) is “practised”, that is, “brought off ”’ (1998: 199). Schieffelin’s approach seems very appropriate for the present case, since it recognizes that the orchestration of the Kaiserbau’s demolition was not self-evident, that the interaction between performers, witnesses and the building was very relevant in this respect, and that the performance could also have failed: [F]rom the observance of the correct procedures to the resonance of the symbolism, the heightening of emotion, the sense of transformation, all depend on whether the performers and other participants can ‘bring it off’. … Thus ‘performance’ is always

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inherently interactive, and fundamentally risky. Amongst the various people involved (who often have different agendas) there is always something aesthetically and/or practically at stake, and something can always go wrong. (ibid.: 198, emphasis in original)

With such a perspective on performance, we are not pinned down to one specific meaning carried out in ritualistic form. Rather, meanings are unpredictable and created in the course of performance, in mutual interaction between performers and other participants. While remaining attentive to the pitfalls of overly symbolic analyses of rituals, several remarkable parallels might be drawn between the demolition of the Kaiserbau and sacrificial ceremonies as analysed by Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss in their seminal work Sacrifice. Firstly, both consist of the careful orchestration of a public event, centred on the destruction, or consumption, of a valuable item – an act which can only be carried out by a specialist (1964 [1898]: 35). Secondly, both are very similarly structured temporally (with destruction as an absolute climax), spatially (in concentric circles in which the closer to the centre, the fewer people are allowed), and organizationally (discerning a victim, a sacrifier who commissions the sacrifice, often a sacrificer to carry it out, and witnesses) (ibid.: 29). And thirdly, architectural eradications often aim at goals comparable to those of a sacrifice: to get rid of an impure status or to reach a superior one (ibid.: 9). Especially in, or after, a period of revolutionary upheaval, eliminations can attain the character of real purification rituals: officiants and witnesses together sacrifice the threedimensional representatives of a dark period in history, to remove the stain on their collective identity, get rid of the burden of corruption, and attain a new, ‘clean’ status. A priori, this is perhaps less obvious in the case of the Kaiserbau, which was not in the first place connected to a specific ideology or sociocultural background. Yet the event, centred round destruction, was very clearly structured in terms of space, time and personal roles, in a similar way to the rituals described by Hubert and Mauss. The Sprengmeister, literally ‘master of detonation’, had been commissioned by the municipality to act as their ‘sacrificer’: an intermediate, initiated in the secrets of dynamite.7 As Hümbs notably told me, the ‘master of detonation’ was the one and only ‘big hero’ on that day. He had been chosen through an official competition and had come all the way from Dresden to flex his skills. Everybody knew him by name, since he had regularly appeared on television in the weeks before. He and his crew had taken possession of the building six weeks before the explosion to install 450 kilograms of explosives, and on the day itself, all eyes were focused on him: he was coordinating the whole event; he was ordering the police, helicopters and other security forces

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to check if all security zones were really free of people; he was giving the warning signals; and finally he pressed the button for detonation – after he himself had, like the captain on a ship, finally left the central security zone. For the ‘master of detonation’, there was more at stake than purely the removal of the Kaiserbau; he also had to make up for the failure of his colleagues to eliminate the city hall in nearby Sieglar a few years before when, after detonation, half of the building was still standing. It was now up to him to restore his profession’s good name and, inferentially, the reputation of those who commissioned the previous demolition. Here lies another significant parallel with Hubert and Mauss, who noted that ‘the priest becomes … the mandatory of the sacrifier, whose condition he shares and whose sin he bears’ (1964 [1898]: 23). During the few hours before and after the explosion, the tension mounted, granting the occasion a very special atmosphere. All people living in a radius of three hundred metres of the edifice had to leave their houses one hour before detonation; many of them were worried and spoke of a real evacuation. They were treated like VIPs and accommodated in special areas together with journalists and local government representatives – who had completely handed over their power to the ‘master of detonation’. At this point, the normal order of things had been turned upside down, and the situation was similar to that of a state of emergency; lots of police, firemen, security agents, obstructed traffic and forbidden zones.

Needful Legitimacy Given that materiality and performative structure jointly contributed to make the occasion special, where people sensed that ‘something’ exceptional was going on, we might rightfully then ask, what precisely happened? At the moment of detonation, no one knew what life would be like without the Kaiserbau, or what would be built in its place. Very soon, while many were still submerged by clouds of dust, people started clapping or cheering, while others blinked tears away. Hillgemann was really upset when people started clapping. If she had felt, for a moment, a kind of solidarity with a young couple in front of her who were also very touched by the event, as soon as others started to express enthusiasm for the downfall, she wanted to distance herself from the crowd: ‘Some people rejoiced: “Yes! Finally!” That really arouses hatred. Those people were much younger than we were, had never created a connection with the building, they just visited it at some time

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with their parents and thought it ugly, a nuisance and repulsive. They had never even been inside it’. People began to negotiate the meaning of what had happened after some moments of simply being overwhelmed by the intense sensory experience. The negotiation carried on in the days and weeks that followed. Indeed, the elimination of a building is not necessarily an end in itself; it is also very often a means to reach an end, or just one step in a larger process. Schieffelin has insisted that performances, typically, are ephemeral; they ‘create their effects and then are gone – leaving their reverberations (fresh insights, reconstituted selves, new statuses, altered realities) behind them’ (1998: 198). What was the demolition of the Kaiserbau meant to accomplish? Should we see the explosion as an ending, or as one stage in a larger process? Identifications

As Hubert and Mauss have emphasized, a sacrifice generally has an effect on many more people than just the one who commissioned it. Notably it affects those who witness the ceremony and identify with it (1964 [1898]: 9–10). Like the sacrifier, they can either reach a higher status of purity or eradicate an impure status. With regard to the Kaiserbau, at first glance it is rather difficult to tell whether those who identified with the explosion intended to attain a higher status or get rid of an unwanted one, and whether it was a constructive or destructive act. The ambiguous character of the event – an ‘iconoclash’ in the truest sense of the term – was reflected, particularly, by the wish or refusal of various firms to have their name and image associated with the detonation. When, in 1999, artist H.A. Schult realized his project Hotel Europa and hung over a hundred portraits of famous people in front of each room on one side of the ex-would-be hotel, one of the walls was painted in yellow with a big black post horn: the logo of the German post office, the main sponsor. In expectation of the building’s elimination however, the wall was painted over because the post office did not want to have its image associated with – in their eyes – such a destructive event. Interestingly, the Internet firm Ich-Zieh-Um (‘I am moving’) would have been willing to pay ten thousand German marks (five thousand Euros) for permission to place an enormous banner with their logo on the building on the day of its demolition. This organization, which provides firms with organizational support when they are moving, has made it a trademark to have its name on dynamited buildings. Apparently to them, detonation is synonymous with a clean slate, a new start.

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Acceptance

Similarly, the possibility of destroying H.A. Schult’s portraits along with the building was envisaged, but rejected. Politically, this was probably the cleverest option. After its artistic face-lift as Hotel Europa, people had become aware that the Kaiserbau could also have a more attractive look if it was given a chance; during this last period, its reputation improved significantly. For the Christian-Democratic majority in the municipal government, who had commissioned the edifice’s demolition, it would not have been very diplomatic to explode a work of art – even with the artist’s approval. Before detonation the building therefore had to be returned to its unattractive, pre- or non-artistic state. As Gay Hawkins has observed in The Ethics of Waste, ‘In order to be able to reject we have to convert objects into worthless rubbish simply meeting its fate’ (2006: 80). For the Christian-Democrats, eliminating the Kaiserbau was a political act, an attempt to improve their reputation by freeing the Troisdorfer citizens from a blot on their cherished townscape. In the weeks that followed demolition, representatives of the municipality were very busy thanking all participants for their help or interest in the event. Fragments of the Kaiserbau with an authenticity certificate were distributed as an expression of gratitude, as well as a so-called Daumenkino or ‘flip book’: a miniature book that, when thumbed through very quickly, showed the end of the Kaiserbau – or, in reverse, its virtual resurrection. Clearly, local politicians wanted to present the edifice’s demolition as something undoubtedly constructive. Before removal, promises were made regarding an industrial estate to be built on the plot; demolition should not be seen as an end, a break, but instead continuity should be warranted. Some were already sceptical at that time, and indeed, two years later a large quantity of fragments still had to be removed, while nothing new had been constructed. Nonetheless, at the time, the argument of continuity of ‘use’ of the Kaiserbau piece of land was needed to help people accept demolition. Furthermore, it was important to present the end of the Kaiserbau as a ‘natural death’. Neil Harris has observed that, ‘Great buildings are generally assumed to have been murdered; the idea of their dying a natural death seems unacceptable’ (1999: 166). For the local government it was very important to prevent this kind of accusation; therefore, the mayor regularly appeared on television and included in each of his speeches an expression of regret for the loss of a symbolic marker that somehow belonged to Troisdorf, while conveying the message of an inescapable end, since this ugly and sick landmark had been standing

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without a function for almost thirty years. The mayor did not hide himself like a murderer, quite the contrary: after the explosion, he went to shake hands with the ‘master of detonation’ and congratulated him on excellent work carried out; each time, he appeared as someone who commissioned a regrettable, but necessary change. Demolition was the final issue of more than twenty-five years of negotiations and attempts to reorient the edifice to another function and find a new investor. This relatively long duration significantly contributed to making disposal acceptable. Had the building been eliminated earlier, then people would probably have reproached politicians with rash and unnecessary wastage.8 More abstractly, the very moment of detonation was a moment of total freedom presenting innumerable possibilities. It was a glimpse into unknown potentialities; in those brief seconds, history could still be written, performance could still fail, or man’s control over the built environment be confirmed. At the same time, deliberate destruction tends to be highly controversial, requiring, as previously documented, careful justification. Both aspects of expansive freedom and careful planning are, in this case, fundamentally complementary. Indeed, both the elimination of buildings and religious sacrifices consist of the deliberate destruction or consumption of an item that has not yet been ‘used up’; this makes the performance of elimination inherently controversial, and susceptible to failure. Their risky aspect has much to do with the notion of expenditure that lies at their core. In A Theory of Shopping, Daniel Miller built on the work of Hubert and Mauss, and Georges Bataille, to accentuate this idea of expenditure understood against the backdrop of sacrifice. He insists, with Bataille, upon the high value of the sacrificial victim,9 which causes its imminent destruction to be seen, in a first stage, as a ‘vision of excess’ (1998b: 90), which, in a second stage, must be negated (ibid.: 100) in order to ‘subsume the general sense of expenditure or spending within an economy of devotion’ (ibid.: 83). Similarly, those who question a building’s existence are usually well aware that their claims are likely to be contested and that they need to legitimate their acts properly. The most desirable situation is when they can present disposal as an unavoidable or even liberating issue. This corresponds, in David Riches’s terms, to ‘the ultimate defence for all violent acts’, namely, ‘the unimpeachable necessity of immediately halting some aspect of the social activities of the person to whom violence is imparted’ (1986: 5–6). In the same way, the argumentation in favour of the disposal of buildings often revolves around dealing with a supposedly threatening aspect which needs to be disarmed. Decisive

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arguments for the elimination of a building are often found in issues of safety: concretely in the form of potentially collapsing ceilings that would injure visitors, or more abstractly in the reference to a dictatorial regime that commissioned it and could continue to cause damage through the building’s survival. While the destruction of the Kaiserbau did not require the latter argument in the sense of symbolically eradicating the memory of a former regime, there was still a crucial political and symbolic aspect to the eventual demolition. Grace or Purification

Hubert and Mauss recognized that sacrifices essentially consist of a transformation: whether they are intended to benefit the persons who carry them out or the objects with which these people are concerned, in any case, the beneficiary ‘has raised himself to a state of grace or has emerged from a state of sin’ (1964 [1898]: 10). In their further analysis, Hubert and Mauss observed that sacrifices present a curved structure, in which all participants progressively ascend to a culminating state of religiosity at the moment of destruction, and then progressively descend into a more profane sphere (ibid.: 45–49). The duration of each stage varies, depending on the function of sacrifice: when it confers a superior state to the beneficiary, the phase prior to destruction is generally more elaborate; when the beneficiary eradicates an impure status, practices of exit are usually highly evident. Finally, Hubert and Mauss added that in reality, sacralization and desacralization are often ‘so closely interdependent that the one cannot exist without the other’ (ibid.: 95). The elimination of buildings often combines the rise to a state of grace with the purification from a state of sin – it is, thus, rather difficult to distinguish so-called ‘pure’ cases. Nonetheless, in line with Hubert and Mauss, practices meant to elevate participants to a superior state generally take place prior to elimination. A long period of assessment and negotiations is usually necessary to achieve acceptance of disposal as the one and only issue – and destroyers as welcome liberators. In a situation of conflict or war, on the other hand, this stage is often almost entirely lacking, and destruction much more ‘ad hoc’; acts of purification following revolutionary upheavals also frequently occur impulsively, or at least without the opportunity or willingness for long deliberations and negotiations. In these situations, meaning is generally negotiated after the event has taken place. Attitudes after detonation often present remarkable parallels with a situation of mourning, varying between resignation and indignation according to the extent of acceptance. In Troisdorf, undecidedly coping

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with the loss of the Kaiserbau, people started gathering souvenirs, in the form of authentic Kaiserbau fragments. Probably inspired by the phenomenon of ‘Wall peckers’ after the fall of the Berlin Wall, where authentic debris was avidly collected, an announcement by the municipal government indicating that fragments of the building would be available was issued days before detonation. Harris would call this ‘a prepaid burial arrangement’ (1999: 147). Real Kaiserbau fans nevertheless did not want to have remains collected by those who commissioned the building’s demolition and as a result the fragments from this source were, in their eyes, corrupt. They preferred to go by themselves and collect what they considered to be some ‘real, authentic’ relics, like Klaus Schlich, a habitué of the Kaiserbau, who gathered some pieces with traces of his own graffiti. Spectators also took many photos, both before and during detonation; Harris has compared the photographing of doomed buildings to photographing corpses, ‘to retain memories of loved ones whose earthly lives had been brief’ (ibid.: 136). The so-called Kaiserbau Generation would probably have been the most likely group to criticize the building’s elimination, even in retrospect. Actually, they mainly strove to rehabilitate its memory, rather than contest its disposal. One year after the explosion, Hillgemann organized an exhibition with photos from before, during and after detonation. Photos were exchanged, and other artists reflected on the Kaiserbau heritage; various projects inspired by the Kaiserbau were brought together on the occasion of the second Memorial Day in May 2003, attended by no less that one hundred and fifty people. The third (and provisionally last) Memorial Day took place in June 2004, when an enlarged version of the exhibition of 2003 was presented in the Troisdorfer town hall, officially granting the Kaiserbau a place in local history. Hall, who continued to keep me informed of the latest developments, concluded one of his e-mails with the sentence, ‘The Kaiserbau is dead; long live the Kaiserbau!’

Conclusion Elimination placed the Kaiserbau in the spotlight; after many years at the periphery of society, it became the centre of much discussion and excitement; after years of habituation, it became a visible and threedimensional issue again. The case of the Kaiserbau has illustrated that if extreme qualities and a marginal status can make a building more vulnerable, they do not entirely explain its rejection. Actually, demolition is often a very

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ambiguous event: it can be seen as a brutal attack by some people, whereas others consider it a necessary act to construct something new. People had extremely diverse reasons for attending the demolition of the Kaiserbau, but in the moment of detonation they were all overwhelmed by intense sensory stimuli and tangible materiality, intensified by the structure of the performance, which greatly resembled a sacrificial ceremony. This thrilling experience was for many people an important motivation for attending the event. In sum, the performance’s structure and the diversity of the crowd in terms of people’s relation to the building were indispensable to each other: the performance’s structure allowed participants a shared experience, while the diversity of backgrounds, experiences and interpretations before and after detonation were needed to make the event relevant enough for twenty thousand people to attend it. The spectators’ presence also permitted them to participate in the negotiation of meanings, and it was crucial in order to determine whether acceptance would be achieved or not. Elimination is not an end in itself; what needs to be accomplished is not a simple physical act (which could also fail, as was shown in nearby Sieglar) but principally the acceptance of disposal as something needed and wanted, rather than unnecessary wastage. Here resides the controversial and ambivalent character of many acts of disposal. Detonation is a passage that acquires its relevance thanks to a careful orchestration of the event in which an unwanted piece of architecture is thrown into the public spotlight proffering a glimpse of a multiplicity of possibilities, whilst simultaneously providing a remarkably powerful dual experience of the durability and ephemerality of man-made structures. The questions that this experience raises are also evident in even the simple consideration of demolition. When a building is ultimately preserved or only partly transformed, therefore, the possibility of demolition still has a central symbolic significance. A final significant factor is that through elimination a building is sometimes granted a form of (secular) martyrdom, a status that would never have been conferred during the time when it stood. Once the threat of the Kaiserbau’s direct, three-dimensional and inescapable presence had disappeared, it was relatively easy for some to start claiming its ‘innocence’ and nostalgically remember the good times that were had within its walls. In other words, radical eliminations are the only means, in the long term, to ‘canonize’ so-called corrupt architecture.

Chapter 4

Witnessing Urbicide Contested Destruction in Sarajevo

Following an analysis of the staging and significance of complete elimination in a situation of relative consensus in the preceding chapter, the present chapter focuses on the threat of destruction and damage in a context of extreme conflict. During the siege of Sarajevo, which lasted from April 1992 until February 1996, widespread and very serious damage was caused to innumerable buildings in the city, and a number of edifices in the surroundings were completely eradicated. For the inhabitants of Sarajevo, that certain pieces of architecture would be totally cleared away from the townscape emerged as a very serious threat. We might be tempted to think that the fate of buildings in besieged Sarajevo was not as irreversible as that of the Kaiserbau, because physical alteration is not as radical and definitive as blowing a building up. Yet, despite the fact that in Sarajevo no buildings were totally destroyed, the suggestion of definitive erasure, nonetheless, constantly hung over the city like a sword of Damocles. This chapter will illustrate to what extent the destruction of architecture and the menace of disappearance can be used as a means to play people off against one another in a cut-throat competition for power. It will further show the potential contribution of seemingly passive or powerless witnesses in granting these events a meaning. The siege of Sarajevo was part of a war opposing Bosnian Muslims, Croats and Serbs with regard to the independence of BosniaHerzegovina. The catalogue to the exhibition Urbicide Sarajevo, realized by the Association of Architects from Sarajevo, gives a good impression of the scale and intensity of destruction during the siege (DAS-SABIH 1994). Five architects have described and documented the damage to some 415 representative buildings of all kinds in Sarajevo.

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For each of the four periods in architectural history to which these edifices could be ascribed, the authors have given an indication of the percentage of damage: ranging from forty-three per cent for the interwar period to seventy-five per cent for the Oriental period (until 1878). After the end of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, András Riedlmayer, a recognized Harvard expert on the heritage of the Ottoman-era Balkans, was commissioned by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague to make an inventory of destruction in the whole region. In his report, Riedlmayer wrote that ninety-two per cent of the 277 mosques and seventy-five per cent of the 57 Roman Catholic churches documented in the survey had been ‘heavily damaged’ or even ‘destroyed’ (2002: 10, 16).1 The siege of Sarajevo and, more generally, the situation of war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, represented a traumatic experience for millions of people. The exceptional status of a traumatic experience, defined by Michael Roth and Charles Salas as ‘a painful occurrence so intense that it exceeds one’s capacities to experience it in the usual ways’ (2001: 1), makes it hard to represent: ‘On the one hand, its intensity cannot be ignored; on the other hand, any representation pales before the intensity of the trauma’ (ibid.: 2). Buildings, however, occupy a special place in this context, because they are never mere representations – rather, their fate materializes, and becomes part of, traumatic experience.2 Several authors, in an attempt to understand the meaning and consequences of the destruction of architecture, have raised questions about the relation between the killing of people and the ‘killing’ of buildings (Adams 1993; Bevan 2006: 8; Demandt 1997: 36). Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakuli´c, for example, commented upon the destruction of the Mostar Bridge, and compared it with the cruel massacre of a woman. She wondered: Why do I feel more pain looking at the image of the destroyed bridge than the image of the woman? Perhaps it is because I see my own mortality in the collapse of the bridge, not in the death of the woman. We expect people to die. We count on our own lives to end. The destruction of a monument to civilization is something else. The bridge, in all its beauty and grace, was built to outlive us; it was an attempt to grasp eternity. Because it was the product of both individual creativity and collective experience, it transcended our individual destiny. A dead woman is one of us – but the bridge is all of us, forever. (1996: 97)3

More abstractly, the starting point for investigation that emerges out of these remarks is: to what extent does the experience of a severely damaged built environment, the overwhelming sight of so many wrecked buildings, emphasize, and contribute to creating and intensifying, trauma? How do people cope with these concrete embodiments of conflict and violence?

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At the same time, a situation of extreme conflict is one where it is very appropriate to focus on the contested legitimacy of alterations to the built environment. How did besiegers affect representative buildings in Sarajevo, and how did witnesses experience and describe these destructions? Or, to put it differently: whose destruction was it? Were witnesses completely overwhelmed and paralysed, or could they still contribute anything to what happened? Not only inhabitants with various ethnic backgrounds, but also members of the rest of former Yugoslavia and the larger international community witnessed what happened in Sarajevo in the years of the siege. This analysis will focus on testimonies related to the fate of specific buildings, such as the National and University Library and the headquarters of the independent newspaper Oslobod¯enje, or to the city as an urban and architectural entity. The choice for these cases in a book on ‘eyesores’, and following a chapter on the Kaiserbau in Troisdorf – which was, materially, not much more than an empty skeleton – perhaps requires some additional justification. In Troisdorf, not even those who loved the edifice considered it particularly beautiful or functional – they were attached to it despite, or even because of its predominantly negative assessment as an ‘undesirable’ or ‘senseless’ object. In Sarajevo, on the contrary, both the Library and the Oslobod¯enje headquarters were in use at the moment of their destruction; their existence, in this sense, did not require justification. Moreover, the Library could even be characterized as a generally recognized ‘architectural highlight’. Contrary to the Kaiserbau example, the edifices in Sarajevo were damaged despite, or even because of their assessment as functional, useful or even beloved objects. They were no ‘eyesores’, yet their generally positive appreciation, it will be argued, made them ‘a sore in the eyes’ (or a thorn in the flesh) of the Serbian besiegers.4 As such, thus, the present chapter illustrates once again that concrete definitions of undesirability are often intangible, subjective, and relative rather than absolute. Decisions and acts following these definitions may therefore, at first sight, seem very irrational. Ivan Straus (1994), a famous architect from Sarajevo, kept a diary of the events from September 1991 until September 1992, in which he described how all the buildings that he had conceptualized in previous decennia were, one by one, damaged or set on fire. Zlatko Dizdarevi´c, news desk editor and then executive director for foreign affairs at Oslobod¯enje, published various books about the siege, in which he reported on the newspaper’s struggle for survival and the gradual dismantlement of its headquarters (1993; Dizdarevi´c and Rondeau 1996). The photo exhibition Urbicide Sarajevo, organized by members

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of DAS-SABIH (1994), was displayed in various places in Western Europe and the United States to show the scale and level of destructions. It was part of the larger project Warchitecture that also included a special issue of ARH, a local architecture journal, with a collection of essays from tens of people professionally related to, or personally interested in architecture. The journal covered themes ranging from ‘Global Aspects of Town Destruction’ to ‘War Daily Routine’, specific categories of buildings particularly touched by the war, as well as individual perspectives on these events (Jamakovi´c 1993). These and several other writings form the basis for an analysis of how witnesses have experienced, and which meanings they have attached to, the destruction of architecture. Written testimonies are supplemented with excerpts from interviews conducted by the author in Sarajevo in August 2003. Apart from these more personal writings in the form of diaries and essays, a large number of scientific books and articles have been published on the destruction of Sarajevo, some of which will be used in this chapter. However, it must be noted that the main intention here is not to further expand the knowledge on this specific conflict or to reflect once again on the particular fate of architecture in war times. Gathering or analysing empirical information on the Sarajevo case, here, is not a goal in itself, but rather a means to reach a (more abstract) goal, namely to get more insight into definitions and possible alterations of undesired architecture in general as well as in the seeming antithesis implied by the terms ‘indispensable eyesores’. Embedded in a larger theoretical framework, the Library and the Oslobod¯enje headquarters will exemplify radical alteration in the form of direct physical damage with the threat of elimination – materially the second most radical intervention after complete removal, and before (partial) transformation. This will allow us to better understand, in particular, the possible role of witnesses in (co-)determining what edifices embody, as well as what the agency of buildings consists of, and how both things together determine whether acceptance of the edifice’s material fate is reached or not.

Buildings as a Support to Overcome Liminality War can basically be seen as a passage from one status to another, and as a ‘radical disruption of the ordinary social rules by which a community was governed prior to the war situation’ (Zulaika 1988: 34). Sarajevo, formerly a multi-ethnic Yugoslav city with some five hundred thousand inhabitants, became the capital city of Bosnia-Herzegovina, with some three hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, and lost much

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of its multi-ethnic character. The war, which simultaneously separated and linked these two statuses, was a period of liminality in the sense that Victor Turner has given to the term. Turner essentially described the liminal character of (human) entities in the course of rites of passage: ‘During the intervening “liminal” period, the characteristics of the ritual subject (the “passenger”) are ambiguous; he passes through a cultural realm that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state’ (1969: 94). Further, such passages are generally accompanied with ‘ordeals and humiliations, often of a grossly physiological character’ (ibid.: 103). Turner has insisted that the alternation of very structured periods with clearly defined statuses on the one hand, and ambiguous, ‘unstructured or very rudimentarily structured’, (liminal) periods on the other, does not only apply to individual life, but to social life as well. The lack of similarity with previous or future statuses, and the suffering and challenges imposed by this transition, could also be identified in Sarajevo. People had the feeling that nothing was like before anymore, and that nothing could ever become like before anymore.5 In an article entitled ‘Attempts at (War) Reading the Town’, Sabahudin Špilja describes the exceptional character of this period of liminality: ‘At the moment the town as a real concept simply does not exist; it reveals itself in time past as a recollection or a pathetic reminiscence, or in time future as an elusive and unrealistic projection’ (1993: 20). In other words, people could only remember the past, or imagine the future, but a present was felt to be lacking or undetermined. Distractions

Architecture, although it has the scars of war inscribed in its flesh (or perhaps precisely because of this), can play an important role in overcoming the ambiguity of such a liminal period. Various testimonies indicate that focusing on the survival of a building was an excellent means for people to distract their minds from the exceptional circumstances in which they found themselves. When the Vije´cnica, or National and University Library, had been set on fire, despite constant shelling, inhabitants formed a human chain outside the building and tried to rescue at least some of the books that were passed through the ground-floor windows (Bollag 2003).6 After the fire, the edifice became ‘as famous as a wrecked building can be: a symbol, variously, of the war’s savagery, of the blotting out of a shared culture, and of the indomitability of the human spirit’ (Barry 1999: 109). Enes Kujundz˘i´c, still director of the library after the siege, continued to work throughout

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Fig. 4.1 Postcard representing Vije´cnica, the National and University Library. Photo by Zoran Filipovi´c.

the war, and subsequently made it to his lifework to resuscitate both the building and the institution. Other people confirm that the care for a building could be a crucial distraction from on-going events. D ¯ enana Buturovi´c, director of the National Museum of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was located almost at the front line, recalled that in all their helplessness, museum employees cared in the first place about the museum and its collection. They spent an enormous amount of time on very basic tasks in order to protect the building and objects – borrowing leaves from the tobacco factory to protect textiles from humidity, for example, and keeping cats to go ratting. Buturovi´c added that in the circumstances at the time, it was not very relevant to whom the building would belong in the future – the most important thing was to preserve the object in itself: ‘In such an extreme situation, you act like in a hospital. First you save the patient, and later you decide if he should go to court. It was the same in our situation: first you protect the object, and only then you decide to which country it belongs’.7 Midhat Cesovi´c, one of the key figures behind the exhibition Urbicide Sarajevo, told me how extremely difficult it was to get twenty litres of fuel that were needed for the printing press to produce the exhibition’s catalogue, ‘but in this situation of war, the project was our only goal’.8

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Reassessments

As Drakuli´c observed with regard to the Mostar Bridge, monuments, as three-dimensional, collective, material bearers of history, are expected to have a life span much longer than our own. Not only does the built environment help to remember life ‘before’, but people also realized that, even if human lives cannot be regained, buildings can be reconstructed (Straus 1994: 82). Paradoxically, buildings bear multiple scars, but they also remember that wounds can heal and that a war, seen in the context of a city’s centuries-old history, is ‘just a drop of water in an everlasting stream of this city, a drop of very dirty water inexorably dissolving in the main stream becoming clean and clear again’ (Ćuri´c 1993: 95). The built environment, in other words, evolves much more slowly than human beings. Buildings are not only expected to live longer, but they are also frequently taken over by new occupants when a change in regime occurs; as such, they embody the continuity of a community. This also explains why architecture could function as a support to overcome liminality. The very special role that may be ascribed to architecture during the siege of Sarajevo is also to do with the fact that the disposal of buildings rarely occurs all at once, but rather in various stages. Certain buildings were very severely damaged, but they had not yet been removed: their material form had been seriously challenged, but they remained with their fate not yet sealed. In other words, the buildings themselves were in a kind of liminal state: they had suffered significant alterations and they would never be seen and appreciated in the same way as before, but no one could tell yet what exactly would happen with them, and how they would be appreciated. Assessment would still have to take place, as Buturovi´c very expressively evoked, but attitudes were already shifting. Especially, people got more attached to their built environment and to specific buildings in particular. Maja Povrzanovi´c Frykman has described the same phenomenon in Dubrovnik: ‘Together with the most obvious shock and anger, such violence intensifies the relationship between people and place and provokes a complex and very pronounced feeling of self being fused with the sense of place’ (2002: 70). Mehmed Halilovi´c, chief editor of daily newspaper Oslobod¯enje in the last years of the siege, told me that their headquarters did not mean anything special to them before the war, but acquired a very special meaning through the siege: Without the war I would not feel so connected to this building. Before, it was just our working place, a modern building, a little unusual but nothing special. People did not

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really like it, because it was located far away from the city centre. But because of the war and the destructions, our working place, this building, got a very special meaning for us.

In more general terms, Borislav Ćuri´c (1993) has observed that people ‘massively stop LOOKING and start to SEE all what [sic] their city bears; all these beauties and urban qualities get suddenly a new meaning’ (1993: 95, capitalization in original).

Targets, Witnesses, but No Performers In the introduction to The Anthropology of Violence, David Riches (1986) has proposed distinguishing between not only a victim and a performer, but also witnesses – the latter of fundamental importance in granting violent acts a meaning. The radical disapproval which witnesses generally feel and voice (whether the violence is directed at people or buildings) characterizes how people in Sarajevo, increasingly attached to the architecture in their home town, reacted to its destruction. Nevertheless, brief comment needs to be made on Riches’ analysis of violent acts in terms of victim, performer and witness, in order to avoid an over-simplified view of the situation in Sarajevo. Distorting Innocence

Often used with regard to acts of terrorism, the notion of ‘victim’ unnecessarily implies a notion of innocence and is biased by ‘an element of sympathy’ (Le Vine 1997: 57). More specifically, victims ‘acquire what could be termed a “presumption of innocence”, that is, because they did not deserve to be punished/violated/injured/killed, they are assumed to be blameless of whatever wrongs the terrorist(s) might ascribe to them’ (ibid.: 58, emphasis in original). Victor Le Vine has, therefore, proposed replacing the notion of victim with that of target. According to Le Vine, the notion of (innocent) victim is not only unnecessary to the definition and analysis of acts of terrorism, but also obscures the main real motivation for terrorists’ choice of their targets, namely, ‘the shock value their death or injury may have’ (ibid.: 55).9 Le Vine’s remarks are all the more relevant in the context of the Sarajevo analysis, where the focus lies on material, architectural, non human targets of aggression, to which it would not be possible to attribute any objective sense of innocence or guilt.10

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Invisible Performers

The second difficulty with using Riches’ analysis is that the intentions of performers11 are relatively hard to trace in the present case: witnesses have clearly identified them as the Bosnian Serb Army or, in more general terms, as the besiegers of the city (Kurto 1993; Leggewie 1995; Mustafi´c 1993; Riedlmayer 2002), yet performers have only sporadically openly claimed responsibility or been seen in the act of destruction, and frequently denied their acts altogether. At the ICTY in The Hague, the systematic destruction of Islamic and Catholic cultural heritage in Bosnia-Herzegovina has been largely discussed in the trial against Slobodan Milos˘evi´c on 9 July 2003, when Riedlmayer testified (ICTY 2003). The transcription of this session, together with Riedlmayer’s report on the destruction carried out, offers an interesting insight into the official, international judicial way of dealing with the matter. Milos˘evi´c, in his role of ‘the Accused’, is considered as (one of) the main responsible person(s) for criminal acts that took place during the 1992–1996 conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The acts include the ‘seizure of, destruction or wilful damage done to institutions dedicated to religion, charity and education, the arts and sciences, historic monuments and works of art and science’ (ICTY 2006). Riedlmayer’s report consists of an immense quantity of evidence to prove these criminal acts: photos, statistics and a classification and description of almost four hundred architectural sites (2002: 7–8). This means that destruction and damage are documented and proved by traces left on the remains or, in the case of complete removal, by a comparison of pre- and postwar photos in combination with testimonies collected from eye witnesses. Riedlmayer has quoted only one performer (from a newspaper article): Simo Drljaca, regional Civil and Secret Police chief in the Prijedor area at the time, who ostensibly motivated the removal of Islamic cultural heritage in the following terms in August 1992: ‘With their mosques, you must not just break the minarets. … You’ve got to shake up the foundations because that means they cannot build another. Do that, and they’ll want to go. They’ll just leave by themselves’ (ibid.: 12). Apart from this isolated statement, the motivation of those who carried out the destruction can mainly be derived and interpreted from the physical results of their acts. When Milos˘evi´c was confronted with Riedlmayer’s detailed presentation in court, and was invited to ask Riedlmayer questions during crossexamination, he tried to suggest, on the one hand, that Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats reciprocally ruined each other’s cultural heritage (ICTY 2003: 23849–50). On the other hand, admitting implicitly that

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Bosnian Serb and Serbian occupying forces were responsible for destruction, Milos˘evi´c suggested that they were acting in self-defence, and that ‘mutual destruction of religious sites of the two warring sides’ (ibid.: 23848) is a regrettable but unavoidable phenomenon in a situation of war. More specifically, with regard to the destruction of the Institute for Oriental Studies and the National and University Library in Sarajevo, Milos˘evi´c (rhetorically) asked Riedlmayer: ‘Do you have information that these facilities were used either as shelter or as firing positions by forces acting against Serb positions? … [W]ould they be considered legitimate military targets in that case?’ (ibid.: 23872). The Serbian press agency went even further, asserting that Bosnian Muslims themselves were destroying Islamic architecture, and that the Yugoslav National Army had only lent them some weapons (Straus 1994: 115). Several authors have refuted these explanations.12 François Chaslin, architecture critic and author of Une haine monumentale: Essai sur la destruction des villes en ex-Yougoslavie, has suggested that the destruction of a few exceptional and particularly representative monuments such as the National Library or the Mostar Bridge could possibly have been the result of individual initiatives, not necessarily commissioned by Serbian commanding forces. Nevertheless, Chaslin also insisted that even if this would have been the case, Serbian authorities never expressed regret in any form, nor brought any charges against those responsible for the acts (1997: 67). Regarding the widespread destruction of buildings in Bosnia, Martin Coward has identified three common types of interpretation. Milos˘evi´c’s perspective corresponds to the first one, which focuses on ‘collateral damage and military necessity’ (2004: 159) and sees destruction as something regrettable but unintended. Apart from the counter-arguments given by the character of destruction (its scale, and the frequency and deliberateness with which non-military buildings were hit), Coward rejects this explanation on account of its anthropocentrism.13 According to Coward, urbicide – the ‘widespread, and yet intentional, destruction of the urban environment’ (2004: 157) – has often unjustly been understood in relation to genocide, rather than as a phenomenon in its own right (ibid.: 158). He insists that: ‘The urban fabric of Bosnia was targeted deliberately, a fact attested to by the manner in which the violence against the architecture of Bosnia was disproportionate to the task of killing the people of Bosnia’ (ibid.). Still following Coward, destructive acts always have a material as well as a representative component in that, ‘What is at stake in urbicide – the destruction of the buildings which establish common/shared spaces in which plural communities live their lives – is thus the destruction of the conditions of possibility of

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heterogeneity’ (ibid.: 166). In sum, the limitations of purely semiotic approaches that were already discussed in previous chapters are confirmed: urbicide cannot be seen as a series of merely symbolic acts that seek to annihilate certain meanings. Rather, performers deliberately want to attack real material, three-dimensional spaces in which community members from divergent ethnic backgrounds used to meet, work, communicate, and exchange.14 On the other hand, targets are not chosen at random, but produce an effect because they specifically embody realities and potentials of heterogeneity in Bosnian society. Coward’s investigation is limited, like the present one, by the lack of statements from performers themselves on the matter. Nonetheless, as an analysis of the motivations of performers, it is rather unique, and presents interesting parallels with what Riches has described as the efficacy of violent acts, namely that the latter constitute remarkable means of ‘transforming the social environment (instrumental purpose), and dramatizing the importance of key social ideas (expressive purpose)’ (1986: 11). In the present case, as the available material to document the performers’ motivations remains limited to physical traces (or the absence of traces in case of complete removal), it mainly serves to show the instrumental purposes of these acts. In order to analyse expressive purposes, we must take into consideration the larger social and political context, as well as testimonies from people who lived in Sarajevo before, during and after the siege. It will be shown that, although the performers’ point of view is almost completely absent, this has not withheld witnesses from imagining and stereotyping the ‘Other’ who attempted to annihilate their built environment. The destruction of architecture acted as a main catalyst for defining cleavages between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ and portraying the Others – who were not, until that time, perceived as such – as backward barbarians. It is not within the reach, nor among the purposes, of this analysis to find out who really shot at whom, and at whose buildings, yet it was certainly in the interest of the besieged witnesses, in their testimonies, to minimize any sign of aggression from their own side. Finally, the remarkable absence of a performers’ viewpoint can perhaps also be explained by a taboo on trying to understand their way of thinking. Joseba Zulaika and William Douglass have written about the many parallels between terror and taboo in their common work Terror and Taboo: The Follies, Fables, and Faces of Terrorism. Both phenomena are intimately linked to the transgression of norms; therefore not only physical danger emanates from close contacts with terrorists, but also a more symbolic threat in trying to get a grip on their behaviour: ‘One characteristic of the work of terrorism experts is the very

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prohibition upon personal discourse with their subjects. … [T]errorists are by their very nature “untouchables”, highly dangerous, polluting persons with whom contact is to be avoided at all costs’ (1996: 179, emphasis in original). In order to understand the Other’s thoughts and actions, one would always need to place oneself in the Other’s position, in an attempt to analyse him ‘from within’. This identification, although imagined and meant for interpretive purposes, would carry the risk of intermingling with harmful elements, and would amount to entering the danger area oneself.15 Multiple Witnesses

Finally, having evoked targets and performers, a few remarks must be added with regard to Riches’ definition of witnesses, which he considers of key relevance in contributing to the expressive meaning of violent acts. In transcriptions of the Milos˘evi´c trial, Riedlmayer is mentioned as ‘the Witness’. For him, testifying consisted of providing the tribunal with an immense quantity of facts, to prove all the concrete damage that was done to Islamic and Catholic cultural heritage by the Bosnian Serb and Serbian occupying forces during the conflict. In this judicial context, where judges have to categorize very concrete acts along various, fixed indictments, the social and/or psychological impact on the inhabitants who experienced violence directly is not of primary concern. Nor is the broader context, such as the destruction of Christian Orthodox cultural heritage, or only insofar as it contributes to prove the systematic and deliberately tormenting character of destruction, and the absence of ‘overriding military necessity’ (Riedlmayer 2002: 3). According to Riches, the role of witness reaches far beyond this purely judicial meaning to include all those that ‘make a judgement not just that the action concerned causes physical hurt but also that it is illegitimate’ (1986: 3). In a more recent book on violence, Pamela Stewart and Andrew Strathern have insisted on the diversity of witnesses, notably, ‘depending on whether they identify with the performer or the victim’ (2002: 35). Furthermore, ‘[A]ll witnesses are also potential victims and everyone may be suspected of being in some sense a performer’ (ibid.: 37). The complexity of the notion of witness is embodied by Bogdan Bogdanovi´c, architect and former mayor of Belgrade, who has repeatedly taken position against the massive destructions commissioned and/or carried out by his fellow-countrymen, and was the first one to refer to the systematic elimination of cities as ‘urbicide’. Bogdanovi´c has published a collection of essays entitled Die Stadt und der Tod, illustrating the very peculiar position in which he, and

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many other witnesses, found themselves. Very striking is his use of the term ‘we’, referring to ‘the Serbian side’ to which he officially belongs as a Serbian citizen, but from which he would prefer to distance himself when witnessing the results of their acts: We will – especially we, the Serbian side – we will be remembered as the city destroyers, the new Hun. The dismay of Western Man is understandable. For centuries he has not even distinguished the notions of ‘city’ and ‘civilization’ etymologically. He cannot understand the senseless destruction of cities other than as a manifest, violent revolt against the highest values of civilization. (1993: 33)

Moreover certain witnesses were perhaps never expected to become witnesses, and some of them, as will be shown, have interpreted their role much more actively than mere passive registrars of events.

Facing the Other in the Form of Destroyed Edifices Referring once again to Riches’ triangle of violence, we may notice that direct relationships did not exist between all three corners of the triangle: especially the contact between performers and witnesses was very seriously disturbed. Besiegers were either attacking from the hills surrounding the city, or they were hidden on the top floors of conquered buildings; they hardly had any face-to-face contact with the people who witnessed their acts. Nevertheless, both performers and witnesses had a relation to the city as an urban space and its constituent buildings. Attackers attempted to destroy it, annihilate it, while inhabitants acknowledged and interpreted the results of these acts and, from these, derived an image of the aggressors. The relationship between performers and witnesses was thus basically an indirect one, founded on each other’s relation to various architectural targets. Neil Jarman has described a comparable situation in Northern Ireland, where, in the shape of wall murals, ‘The otherwise invisible threat of violence is given a material form as it seems to emerge from the very fabric of the urban landscape’ (1996: 40). Two aspects are important here: Firstly, material culture is able to embody, in a three-dimensional, visible form, the agency of an invisible enemy. And secondly, this material culture not only bears the scars of past acts of violence, but also emits the menace of future violence.16 Jarman further exposes how the exploitation of wall murals in reports about the violence in Northern Ireland goes together with the enforcement of strict dichotomies (especially between countryside and city), and intense stereotyping. In this process, it is very interesting to note that a correlation is suggested between ‘the individual or the community’s character and the nature of

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their environment’ (ibid.: 44). This means that the material environment not only embodies, or concretizes, the aggressor’s agency, but that a form of agency is also attributed the other way round, to the material environment itself, in determining the aggressor’s (violent) character. To put it bluntly: you are where you come from. Polarizations

At the ICTY, Riedlmayer mentioned ‘one instance where local Serbs attempted to mitigate the destruction of cultural property and records of their neighbours who were of different faiths’ (2003: 23824). Such differentiations are definitely very rare among the strongly polarized testimonies, in which strict dichotomies prevail. Zulaika, in his work Basque Violence, has described extreme polarization as a common element in narratives about the local experience of war situations. In particular, he remarked that: ‘There is an injunction by which no individual can escape this antagonistic structure. … [S]omeone who is not of “ours” is assigned automatically, by exclusion, to “theirs”’ (1988: 32). Polarization such as this is not limited to the testimonies of direct witnesses, but extends to the interpretation of (scientific) analysts as well. Straus’s war journal Sarajevo, l’architecte et les barbares illustrates how each step in the destruction of a common architectural environment provokes more and more distance and hate from the witnesses towards those who are responsible for these acts. In the months prior to the siege of Sarajevo, commenting upon the events in Croatia, Straus still explained the events by a kind of collective psychosis or general insanity that went completely out of control; ‘widespread homicidal mania’; ‘insane instinct to annihilation’ (1994: 24); ‘madness of massacre, devastation and destruction, shame, intolerance, savagery and barbarism’ (ibid.: 32). Very soon however, Straus started identifying and naming the performers of violence as a category of people in every respect inferior to his own: one of the herd (without individuality and capacity for critical thought), primitive, wild, backward, illiterate, undeveloped, very close to Nature (not yet cultivated), and displaying almost bestial instincts.17 The polarization between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ not only opposes ‘Culture’ to ‘Nature’, but also ‘civilization’ to ‘primitivism’, and ‘city’ to ‘countryside’ (Straus 1994: 39–40; Perisˇi´c 1993: 66). In the perspective of many witnesses, the systematic destruction of architecture showed that performers had no idea whatsoever of the (higher) values of urban civilization. Therefore, increased damage to architecture reflected an

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increased cleavage between ‘Us, civilized townsmen’, and ‘Them, primitive peasants’. In an extremely pejorative article entitled ‘Megalopolis or Necropolis’, Nedzˇad Kurto, a famous architectural historian from Sarajevo, wrote that the Serbs (or, ‘Serbian Hominidae’) had an ‘evolutional level … not exceeding the mentality of a hunter’ (1993: 32) and that they were systematically destroying anything urban, because they were frustrated by their own inability to build up ‘real’ towns.18 The Agency of Destroyed Buildings

Witnessing the damage done to their built environment, but deprived of any face-to-face confrontation with those supposedly responsible for it, the inhabitants of Sarajevo and other witnesses of destruction thus constructed an increasingly simplified and hostile picture of its authors. If there was clearly no interest in depicting the ‘destroyers’ realistically, what, then, were the issues at stake in these testimonies? More specifically focusing on the destruction of art in situations of conflict, Dario Gamboni already noted that during the Second World War, with the appearance of ever more efficacious weapons, it was difficult to tell whether objectives had been deliberately targeted or accidentally hit, but that ‘accusing the enemy of having done so became a major propaganda weapon’ (1997: 42). Delving deeper into psychological motives, David Freedberg (1989) observed that the motives of iconoclasts are frequently ignored altogether, because they would reveal the ‘power of images’, which is frightening and embarrassing – also to the analysts of iconoclastic gestures. This power, to which Gell (1998) has referred as the agency of art, is something that we all know of, according to Freedberg, but prefer to deny, and defer to ostensibly ‘deranged’ vandals.19 In Sarajevo, besiegers used the urban fabric to materialize their ethnonationalist ideals. In an analysis of the burning of books, Gosewijn Van Beek has provided an insightful explanation of the agency of destroyed objects: With the burning of the Satanic Verses by others, non-readers, we in the Western nonIslamic world, are also ‘fixed’ in our relation to the Verses. We lose degrees of freedom so to speak. In the light of the burnings our possession becomes a statement. The burners, confirming their own autonomy with flames, have ensured that we have lost part of ours. (1996: 18)

With this analysis, Van Beek gives us more insight into the indirect relationship between so-called performers and witnesses. Despite the fact that they are not facing each other directly, the former can

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efficaciously reach the latter, via their respective relationship to architectural targets – and, more surprisingly, the other way round, it will be shown that witnesses can also influence the efficaciousness of the performers’ acts. What is principally at stake in case of destruction, thus, is not in the first place the object in itself, but its agency: an agency which, by definition, is secondary, and involves people’s capacity to exert their own agency through the material world. In other words, when occupants target edifices, they mobilize the latter’s ‘thing-ly’ agency in order to exert their own agency on the besieged. In Sarajevo, even if witnesses of the destructions refused to be involved in the ethnonationalistic discourse of the besiegers, they were forced to revise their attitude towards their urban environment by force of circumstances, and spared no effort to try to regain some of their lost agency – if not directly, then at least indirectly, through authority over the agency of objects.

Distorting Performers’ Messages When commenting upon the exact character of the damage done to specific buildings and the motivations of those supposedly responsible for these acts, witnesses were particularly indignant about two aspects of destruction in particular: first, that especially monuments were singled out as targets, and second, that attackers threatened not only to damage buildings, but also to remove them completely – which was the fate of many mosques in smaller towns of Bosnia-Herzegovina.20 For Mevlida Serdarevi´c, director of the Municipal Museum of Sarajevo, it was not a coincidence that precisely the National Library and the Institute for Oriental Studies were set on fire, whereas other representative edifices that stood very close were damaged but not burnt, although it would have been easy to destroy them completely. According to Serdarevi´c, one of the most shocking aspects of these destructions is that they were specifically aimed at monuments because they were monuments: If I destroy your house because you are my enemy, this is part of a situation of war. But it is much worse if I destroy it simply because it is a monument. This is not a normal situation in the twentieth century, because we are all aware of the importance of monuments, which is that you will better understand your own culture if you understand mine.

The idea that monuments were singled out for destruction was confirmed by Cesovi´c, who told me that the UNESCO flags, meant to visualize and thus protect monuments, became privileged targets.

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As Coward (2004) has discussed, the argument that monuments were specifically targeted reduces a very complex web of causation for the benefit of one central statement. This simplification occurred in a very polarized context, and was nourished by the menace of complete eradication of certain buildings. Yet most importantly, it was an attempt to regain agency over the built environment by contesting the legitimacy of its alteration. Fear of Removal

In the previous chapter, it was shown that the essence of destruction is not solely of an instrumental kind, but that its widespread acceptance is of crucial importance as well. Clearly, in a situation of conflict, mutual agreement often seems impossible to reach and yet, even then, in many cases: ‘[P]erpetrators of violence do not necessarily seek complete political dissociation from the group they oppose. … [T]he perpetrated violence will have to be considered illegitimate by the other side, but it should not be completely indiscriminate and “beyond the pale”’ (Riches 1986: 15). Translated to the case of architecture, since the major concern is not simply with the object in itself, but also with the message its destruction conveys, the object should generally not be entirely destroyed, because it has to function as a support for the message. In other words, ‘The wound gives evidence of the act of injuring’ (Sturken 1991: 133). Yet in Sarajevo, numerous witnesses interpreted the destruction of monuments as attempts by the Bosnian Serbs and Serbian occupying forces to create a clean slate and efface all traces of Muslim culture and Bosnian multi-ethnicity.21 Kujundzˇi´c commented: ‘Muslim culture had to be annihilated. You destroy all mosques and you build bus stations instead; you create a kind of Orwellian reality in that way, you simply ignore that it has existed. And then the rain comes and washes skulls, blood and bones away, and you have a nice, clean and beautiful land’. The fear of complete removal was not unfounded. Riedlmayer has listed municipalities in Bosnia-Herzegovina where a number of mosques, sometimes together with their foundations, were completely removed.22 Sites of razed mosques in a number of Serb-controlled towns were turned into ‘rubbish tips, bus stations, parking lots, automobile repair shops, or flea markets’ (2002: 14), or new buildings were erected instead. In an article entitled ‘Le coeur de la ville’, Dzˇevad Karahasan has written: ‘A city exists … as long as what symbolizes its durability subsists’ (1993: 21). When monuments, which embody a culture’s duration, are systematically damaged or destroyed, it thus seriously raises the

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question if the culture in itself will be able to survive. In Sarajevo, the fact that no buildings were completely removed can perhaps be explained by the presence of international media (Serdarevi´c 1993: 25) or by the intention of the Bosnian Serbs to adopt Sarajevo as their own capital city after the war (Chaslin 1997: 70). Nonetheless, witnesses’ attempts to rescue monuments such as the National Library were seriously hampered, since the fire brigade found itself under fire, and the city water supply had been cut off just prior to the shelling (ICTY 2003: 23796–97). Architecture’s capacity to bear the scars of war without succumbing to its wounds was thus very seriously challenged, and the following question forced itself on the witnesses: ‘How much of a former house must still stand, so that something plausible can be reconstructed from its remains?’ (Karahasan 1995: 99).23 Regained Agency

Paradoxically, facing extreme destruction and the threat of complete removal of buildings, witnesses often simultaneously expressed deepest indignation as well as confidence that in the end, they would still be stronger than their enemies.24 This can be explained if we widen our perspective on the role of witnesses. Confronted with destruction, inhabitants of Sarajevo became aware that they cherished their monuments, but also that the latter embodied some very fundamental cultural roots. Does this mean that culture depends on concrete embodiments to be expressed? And does the appropriation of monuments – if not literally, then by means of their annihilation – enable the Other to appropriate one’s culture? The Oslobod¯enje headquarters seem to tell a different story. The image of this severely damaged building – and that of the National and University Library – appears in many books about the siege of Sarajevo and the wars in former Yugoslavia (Filipovi´c 1994; Jamakovi´c 1993; Prstojevi´c 1994; Straus 1994). Nowadays, it is still sold in the form of posters or postcards in the city centre of Sarajevo, as an illustration of the long-lasting and intensive destruction of architecture by Bosnian Serb and Serbian attackers. As such it appears as an icon of the suffering in these years, and of the importance of these events for the local population. At the end of socalled Snipers’ Alley, the ruined Oslobod¯enje headquarters came to embody the survival of an independent press with a multi-ethnic crew, a survival which largely contributed to maintaining some hope among local inhabitants that at some point, the siege would finally come to an end.

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Fig. 4.2 Postcard representing the ruined Oslobod¯enje headquarters. Photo by unknown photographer.

From the beginning of the siege, the Oslobod¯enje headquarters were constantly under fire; after a few months, all offices had been destroyed. Yet despite continuous and ever intensified attacks on the building, a united team of journalists, who had sought refuge in the underground nuclear shelter, miraculously managed to realize a daily edition throughout the siege. Halilovi´c explained to me that the aim of the aggressors was to shut down an independent voice, disliked by (ethnonationalistic) political forces, and to annihilate something typical of Bosnia-Herzegovina: a multi-ethnic staff, with multi-ethnic ideas. On 14 May 1992, when the building suffered one of the heaviest attacks, it was not possible to publish, but a double issue was produced the next day as compensation. On 20 June 1992, people could see on television the building burning all night long. Dizdarevi´c recalled that people were

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crying on the street when they saw that the newspaper was issued in spite of this (Dizdarevi´c and Rondeau 1996). In his Sarajevo: A War Journal, he described the newspaper’s ultimate victory: Oslobod¯enje has emerged victorious, as it was bound to, because its existence does not depend on the building that burned, nor does it depend on the spared location, the place from which, this morning, a new issue appeared, its price doubled from yesterday’s. … [W]e don’t need that building now. We have our paper, and we have Sarajevo, a city that needs our paper. (1993: 58–60)

The image of the Oslobod¯enje building was particularly strong, because it was understood as a proof that the newspaper could exist independently from its material embodiment. The newspaper’s survival showed that the aggressors’ violence did not fulfil its instrumental purpose (to prevent journalists from doing their work) – and thus could not serve its expressive purpose either (to shut an independent, multi-ethnic voice). In this situation, witnesses did not thus play a passive role. The Oslobod¯enje crew subverted performers’ actions and reconquered agency over the edifice: instead of symbolizing the newspaper’s fall, the ruined headquarters came to emphasize its extraordinary strength. Halilovi´c recalled that the fate of the building was even telling the inhabitants of Sarajevo something about their own, personal fate in that, ‘If Oslobod¯enje can continue to exist even in these conditions, then we all have a chance to survive’. Humiliation, one of the main experiences that people undergo in a period of liminality, was clearly rejected.

Conclusion In summary, the destruction of architecture in a situation of conflict receives much of its symbolic meaning through witnesses’ testimonies. The intentions of performers are often hard to trace directly, which can be partly explained by a taboo by both witnesses and analysts on trying to understand their thoughts, but maybe also by reluctance on the part of performers themselves to elucidate their acts. Performers most certainly realize that the legitimacy of their acts is contested – fearing the reaction of new leaders after a change of regime, perhaps they prefer to be careful. Yet, with the efforts they make to destroy specific buildings, they implicitly admit the buildings’ value. Dizdarevi´c quotes the ironic comments of an inhabitant on the destruction of the Oslobod¯enje headquarters that illustrates this point: ‘God, it’s great to know they hate you so much that they’re willing to use up all that ammunition, over so many days, just to hurt you. Imagine what you must have done to them, for them to consider you so important’ (1993: 58). Finally, it is important

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to bear in mind that although motives may be hard to trace, this does not mean that they do not exist; extreme polarization also contributes to a presentation of the acts of the enemy as senseless and meaningless, as an oversimplification of the Other’s intentions and as a means of demonizing him. Many aspects cumulate in the example of Oslobod¯enje: the cleavage which is created and reinforced between performers and witnesses; the remarkable potential of buildings to help people overcome the liminality of war; and the visibility of damaged, three-dimensional architectural objects, which acquires a (new) meaning for a whole community through the testimony of witnesses. If one of the main characteristics of violent acts is that they are very visible and almost universally understandable, the example of Oslobod¯enje shows that witnesses can manage to distort this into another kind of visibility since, ‘The destiny of Oslobod¯enje is also the destiny of hundreds of people who would have remained anonymous if there had not been the imposing carcass of the building on the outskirts of the town’ (Dizdarevi´c and Rondeau 1996: 12). The question of how much of a building needs to be destroyed in order to annihilate what it embodies, remains rather difficult to answer. From the perspective of performers, complete destruction and removal unequivocally show that they do not intend to take over these buildings and thus, that they have absolutely no need for them. In that sense, destruction affirms power. On the other hand, as was mentioned before, all the energy put in a large-scale, systematic destruction proves that these buildings are not irrelevant to the performers – otherwise they could easily remain, or they could simply be left to natural deterioration. From the perspective of witnesses, Nina Pirnat-Spahi´c has affirmed that, ‘More than ever before, the citizens have surpassed spiritually their initial fears and sorrows and have proved that the urban modus vivendi cannot be destroyed and abolished even by the most lethal weapons’ (1993: 56). And yet, assuming that destruction almost instinctively provokes reactions of resistance, Kujundzˇi´c bitterly added, ‘But you can only offer resistance as long as you survive, which is not always selfevident’. Finally, the further history of Oslobod¯enje shows that the fear of annihilation can also return at a later, unexpected moment. Halilovi´c proposed to keep the ruined headquarters as a monument for journalists who fell during the war, and as a reminder of the siege and Sarajevo’s struggle for survival. The carcass, indeed, still embodies Sarajevo’s survival, as indicated by the numerous postcards representing it. Nevertheless, after the war, Oslobod¯enje had to face economic recession, a

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lack of financial support from abroad, deep cleavages inside the country, and the competition of the newly created newspaper Dnevni Avaz, an initiative of the Bosnian nationalist party, resulting in a continuously decreasing readership. In the early twenty-first century, Dnevni Avaz even bought the Oslobod¯enje carcass and started to give it a completely new shape, ‘so that people would not always continue to say that it was Oslobod¯enje’, according to Halilovi´c. After the newspaper managed to survive the war, the construction of a different building on the foundations of the old one will probably prove to be much more ‘effective’ in effacing its struggle for survival.

Chapter 5

From Nuclear Waste to a Temple of Consumerism The Recuperation and Neutralization of the Ex-would-be Nuclear Power Plant in Kalkar

When people reject a so-called architectural eyesore, they tend to imagine the site without the undesired building. At one point or another, its elimination appears as a possible option. There are many situations, however, in which this is not ultimately realistic or desirable, and people start conceiving plans for alternative uses and a related transformation of the building. Such a situation forms the focus of the present chapter. The recent history of the nuclear power plant in Kalkar, near the Dutch–German border, strikingly illustrates how a so-called architectural eyesore can be stripped of its negative connotations, and disarmed of its threatening aura, by means of a transformation. In 1972, the German government decided that a highly progressive nuclear power plant would be built in Kalkar; a sodium-cooled fast-breeder reactor, which would constitute an inexhaustible energy source with minimal wastage. From the very beginning, this project simultaneously embodied immense confidence in the progress of modern technology, as well as a deeply rooted fear of the potential dangers related to this unknown perpetuum mobile. Very soon, large-scale demonstrations attracted tens of thousands of opponents to the operation of the nuclear power station from Germany and abroad. Despite this and numerous lawsuits, construction was completed in 1986, but following the catastrophe in Chernobyl and political shifts in Germany, the German government decided in 1991 that it would never be commissioned. By that time, people had already raised the question of what could be done with this disturbing piece of rubbish: a premature ruin in which the equivalent of

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almost four thousand million Euros had been invested. Finally, in 1995, Henny Van der Most, a Dutch entrepreneur, acquired the site for the official price of less than three million, and transformed it into an amusement park called Kernwasser Wunderland (‘Nuclear Water Wonderland’), which has been visited by hundreds of thousands of people every year since its opening in 1996. In a documentary entitled Der König von Kalkar (‘The King of Kalkar’), commissioned by German broadcasting cooperation ARD, director Wiel Verlinden gives a fairy-tale version of the genesis of Kernwasser Wunderland. The opening scene shows Van der Most in his white, private helicopter, appearing in Kalkar’s blue sky as a ministering angel. This narrative is exemplary of Van der Most’s portrayal in the media as a personification of the building’s second life. Just as Kalkar had become synonymous with fast-breeder reactors in the 1970s and 1980s, so Van der Most and Kernwasser Wunderland are now mentioned in one and the same breath. Whereas most people were initially very sceptical about the leisure entrepreneur’s plans, he is now portrayed as an extremely successful self-made man, regarded by many as ‘Kalkar’s saviour’, or as a contemporary alchemist, able to transform scrap into gold. The making into a hero of Van der Most the ‘recuperator’ or Van der Most the ‘transformer’ in many ways resembles that of the so-called ‘master of detonation’ or ‘eliminator’ described in the Kaiserbau case. Although the latter neutralizes what the former cannot annihilate, both identities share a privileged access to, or control over, the durability of architectural objects. Van der Most was faced with a task similar to that of a ‘master of detonation’ – his action was supposed to rehabilitate a site corrupted by an undesired piece of architecture – but he had a different set of coordinates to deal with in the never-used power plant, and he had different means at his disposal. Indeed, the biography of the Kaiserbau illustrates that elimination can grant a building a kind of martyrdom that it could never attain during its lifetime. Once the threat of direct, three-dimensional and inescapable presence has disappeared, it is relatively easy to start claiming that the building has an ‘innocence’.1 In contrast, the building Van der Most acquired had been bitterly contested and its perception was heavily emotionally charged. It had cost thousands of millions of Euros and ravaged social structures in the surrounding villages. All those directly involved in the project had lost face. Most of all, it was enormous and immovable; it was designed to resist bombs and earthquakes. Given these facts, creating or offering a ‘sacrifice’, as in the Kaiserbau case, was not an option. Van der Most would literally have to face up to the nuclear power plant, and face it out

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– to dispose of its negativity, without physically removing it. The difficulties Van der Most experienced, and his eventual ‘success’, beg the questions: what makes the recuperation and recycling of an undesired building ‘successful’? What makes the altered building more desirable than its predecessor? What guarantees that a majority of people will not perceive it as yet another eyesore?

For Sale: Nuclear Ruin, Any Price In early 1995, a surprising announcement appeared in Die Welt (Schneller-Brüter-Kernkraftwerksgesellschaft 1995), the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and various European newspapers. The power company that built Kalkar’s nuclear power plant offered it for sale: a surface area of 290,000 m2 with a power plant, offices, workshops, garages and storage spaces, a connection to the high-tension electricity network, and its own water treatment plant. All potential buyers were invited to register and present their plans. People in Kalkar and its surroundings reacted with surprise that the energy company could offer such a place ‘like a fish-and-chips stand’. Apparently, in their opinion, it did not belong to the same category of saleable items. In the advertisement, no price was mentioned, suggesting that any reasonable offer would be accepted. It would have been extremely difficult, at that moment, to estimate the building’s value. The equivalent of almost four thousand million Euros had been invested, but the plant itself had never been opened, and never would be. What was it worth, divested of its initial purpose? Rubbish Theory

Michael Thompson, in his Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value, has developed a dynamic model to analyse how socalled ‘transient’ objects, which ‘decrease in value over time and have finite life-spans’, relate to so-called ‘durable’ objects, which ‘increase in value over time and have (ideally) infinite life-spans’ (1979: 7). His theory clarifies the relation between these two categories thanks to a third, flexible category named ‘rubbish’, that consists of objects ‘of zero and unchanging value’ (ibid.: 9). Rubbish, as Thompson classifies, is the category in which transient objects can end up, and from which durable objects can emerge. The differences between rubbish and durable objects are listed in terms of dichotomies: ‘Either an item is invisible or visible, is timeless or has an expected life-span, is polluting or is pure, is an

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eyesore or a sight for sore eyes’ (ibid.: 26). With regard to architecture, the question of a building’s visibility is more complex than Thompson suggests when he emphasizes the covert character of the rubbish category, as opposed to the overt character of the transient and durable categories. Unlike a painting or piece of furniture, an obsolete building cannot disappear into a dark attic to be rediscovered and make a comeback a few decades later. Even if, for a while, it is not given particular publicity, or even if people consciously ignore it, it will always remain as a visible and three-dimensional object. There is thus more continuity in a building’s transition from one of Thompson’s categories to another; a building’s biography is not interrupted by rubbish periods during which it would, as it were, go underground. Further, a building’s permanent visibility makes it perhaps more difficult to reflect on its value independently of its three-dimensional presence. Thompson suggests that in the (overt) transient and durable category, an object’s value (i.e., its representative aspects) influences to a large extent how people deal with its material form. In the (covert) rubbish category, on the other hand, people’s concrete actions (e.g., the recuperation of objects that were disposed of) largely determine how these objects are subsequently valued (ibid.: 8). Regarding buildings, I would rather say that, due to their greater presence as three-dimensional (public) objects, world views to a large extent determine action in the rubbish category as well. Nonetheless, Thompson’s innovative perception of rubbish as a transitory category, rather than as an endpoint in itself, can be applied to the situation in Kalkar as Van der Most encountered it in 1995. Following Thompson’s theory, the decreasing value of the power plant would indicate its accelerated reclassification from the transient category to the rubbish category. Harald Koch, former chief of the control room and subsequent manager of Kernwasser Wunderland, explained to me that ninety-nine per cent of the technical equipment, although brand new, had suddenly become scrap, because big industries would never take the risk of buying such material second-hand.2 A few months after the place was put up for sale, Van der Most acquired it for less than 0.1 per cent of the four thousand million Euros initially invested. The costs of a potential demolition, estimated at between 100 and 150 million Euros as early as 1988 (Seher 1988), suggest that the worthless building, without a new function, would even have had a negative value, due to the considerable cost required to dispose of it. From the late 1970s, newspaper articles show that people were aware of this potential negative value, and worried about what could be done with the concrete millstone on the banks of the Rhine. As early as 1977,

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in a period when the project was facing an insecure future, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung was asking: ‘Is the fast-breeder reactor also on the way to becoming a ruin?’ (Bewerunge 1977). After the power plant had been decommissioned, local and national newspapers regularly asked what could or should happen with it and headlined: ‘Fast-breeder reactor initially remains a ruin’ (Puyn 1993); ‘Return fast-breeder reactor site to farmland’ (Zurek 1993); ‘Fast-breeder reactor as work of art?’ (Zurek 1994). The building had, by that time, little or no (monetary) value, and people felt powerless to do anything about it. Compared to other undesired buildings, the situation in Kalkar was particularly tricky because people could hardly intervene in the building’s fate. Thompson writes that ‘the qualities objects have are conferred upon them by society itself and … nature (as opposed to our idea of nature) plays only the supporting and negative role of rejecting those qualities that happen to be physically impossible’ (1979: 9). He specifies this idea in his chapter about real estate, when he emphasizes that a house’s life span is not determined by nature, but by the maintenance it receives as a result of its classification in a specific cultural category (ibid.: 37). This would also apply, of course, to the power plant in Kalkar, which is entirely the result of human action, but clearly, once it was built, the materials that were used (reinforced concrete, precious metal) would not easily deteriorate. Even after years of overdue maintenance it could not be said to have fallen into disrepair, and such an enormous mass of concrete would be extremely hard to remove. In other words, the exceptionally long ‘natural’ durability of the building significantly reduced the potential for human intervention, and for disposal of this undesired piece of architecture. In sum, from the early 1990s, Kalkar’s power plant was considered by more and more people as a piece of rubbish, a polluting eyesore whose life span should be limited. Yet, as in many cases, its rapidly decreasing value cannot only be cast in economic or material terms, but also depends on its architectural characteristics, its function, and to a large extent its social context. What did the building embody architecturally, technologically and socially? Which of these aspects was specific to this case, and which would apply to other buildings as well? Tower of Babel

As already discussed with regard to the Kaiserbau, the value attached to a specific building does not solely arise from its formal qualities; thus, size, proportion, material, colour, and so on do not imperatively determine a building’s appreciation and fate. Yet questions of taste should also

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not be ignored altogether, since the extent to which people appreciate a building’s appearance can accelerate or slow down its evolution across Thompson’s categories. In Kalkar, the outward appearance of the power station (especially its size and material) could hardly counterbalance negative perceptions of any other kind. Specifically focusing on the architecture of nuclear power stations in a book entitled Les maisons de l’atome (‘Atomic Houses’), architect Claude Parent (1983) has presented the results of an innovative and intensive cooperation between architects and engineers on the construction of a dozen nuclear power plants in France. In the introduction, Rémy Carle, one of the directors of French Electricity Company EDF acknowledges that power plants and industrial buildings often damage the natural environment, are generally ‘ugly’, and contrast sharply with their surroundings. For engineers, a technological installation is primarily a functional item that needs to guarantee the best possible technological reliability, economic competitiveness, as well as security for employees and local residents (1983: 6–7).3 The material adaptation and integration into the existing environment are always taken into consideration, but aesthetic aspects clearly do not have priority. Parent, who tried to improve the aesthetics of French nuclear power plants, claims that a number of conditions are unalterable, such as the shape of cooling towers (which architects can, at the best, propose painting), but architects can nevertheless intervene in details that significantly influence the experience of such a building. He writes that if, from far away, enormous building blocks are all that can be perceived, details gain an important significance for people moving through these blocks on the site: meticulously designed details give them something to hold on to, in a universe that surpasses them (1983: 33). In Kalkar, no particular efforts were made to improve the building’s appearance, and anyway, most people would not have been allowed to approach it, and thus could only perceive it at a distance, as an enormous block. Klaus Bender, evangelical priest and absolute opponent, told me that due to all the negative association the building still evokes in him, he gives it a wide berth and would never take a step onto the piece of land. During various demonstrations in which he tried to act as a neutral and peacekeeping intermediate, he noticed the attraction that such a structure could exert on people, beyond its function as a power plant. After several kilometres of a peaceful protest march towards the moat around the building, it was at the moment when people were prevented from reaching their goal and redirected to a nearby field that everything got out of hand: ‘It was precisely then that I realized the power such architecture exerts on people, even on the inside’. Bender attributes his

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reciting Mass immediately opposite the building to its agency as an overwhelming piece of architecture, a contemporary Tower of Babel: That building is actually, even if it were empty, a manifesto for the broken fantasies of twentieth century people, for the belief in progress and that energy is unlimited. … This architecture and technology were for me always a symbol of the destruction of creation by people. … ‘They cast their madness in concrete and their injustice in laws’: I have used this sentence so often in religious services, and I still find it right and appropriate.

In a closing remark, Bender expressed once more how much, in his perception, the building and the danger that emanates from it are tied together: ‘The danger is of course that we don’t know what ideas people will come up with, if this building is still around’. Implying that the building in itself influences our behaviour, Bender represents one of the most extreme attitudes towards the former power plant. It must be noted, nevertheless, that he is by no means the only one who still refuses to approach the place. Both supporters and opponents of the power plant expressed the same disgust at its architecture. Karl-Ludwig Van Dornick, former mayor of Kalkar and absolute supporter, confessed that, although he still regrets that the power plant was never put to use, and although he considers Kernwasser Wunderland to be a successful alternative, he is still irritated when looking at this eyesore: ‘I get annoyed every day when I see it, not because it isn’t working, not because it will not fulfil its original purpose or because it has now been transformed, definitely not, instead because for me, aesthetically, it was and still is a crazy block of concrete, which is completely out of place in its isolation’. A Question of Faith

Buildings distinguish themselves from most other material items by their permanent visibility and presence in public space. Further, due to their size and exposure, as soon as they lose their initial function, their survival depends on finding an alternative function for them. A building that no one uses will have an increasingly limited life span. In the Kalkar power plant case, the entirely technological function of the building made people initially react with ambivalent feelings and, subsequently, made it more difficult to reorient it to a new function. In a newspaper article in early 1991, a local journalist wrote that, ‘The fast-breeder reactor, its boiler room, its cooling tower make the Franconian church dedicated to the holy Regenfledis, which dominated the village for centuries, shrink almost to a wayside chapel in the landscape’ (Puyn 1991). Later in the same article, the author recalled that in the 1980s, in the villages surrounding the power plant, selling a plot of

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land to the power company had become a true ‘confession of faith’. The article referred to the schism that arose when the church council in Kalkar refused to sell a plot of land to the power company and was, consequently, dismissed by the Bishop of Münster and replaced by a more obedient one. The close involvement of the local church is but one aspect that gave the construction of the nuclear power station religious connotations. Likewise, the project was denoted as ‘blasphemous’ (Zurek 1991), and the edifice as ‘pandemonium’ (Boddenberg 1973) and ‘hellfire’ (Jörges 1986); two engineers were compared to ‘believers in a cathedral’ (Rueb 1986). If we are to believe David Noble, these connections between technology and religion were nothing but gratuitous. In his book The Religion of Technology, he refutes the common assumption that the development of modern technology is something purely rational and secular: ‘For modern technology and modern faith … are merged, and always have been, the technological enterprise being, at the same time, an essentially religious endeavor’ (1998: 4–5). Nuclear technology, in particular, simultaneously arouses deeply rooted dreams and nightmares since it promises ‘history-shattering, transcendent leaps of doom and deliverance’ (1998: 104). In Kalkar, very soon, supporters and opponents were categorized as believers and non-believers, and the project came to embody both progress and ‘electro-fascism’ or ‘industrial dictatorship’ (Morgenbrod 1975); for some a ‘technological miracle’, for others a ‘devil’s thing’ (Zurek 1991). Not only did the nuclear power station arouse mixed feelings with long-term consequences, its very specific function also made it difficult to find an alternative purpose for the edifice after the initial project had been cancelled. For a long time, people remained very doubtful about Van der Most’s plans. After four years of trying to sell the unused exwould-be power station, it is possible that it was desperation that drove the power company and the municipality to put their confidence in the entrepreneur. Even Koch, who had worked there since 1981 and knew the power plant like the back of his hand, and who was also one of Van der Most’s closest collaborators from the beginning, told me that his eyes nearly popped out of his head when he first heard about it: ‘There can hardly be a greater contrast than that between a nuclear power plant and a leisure centre. Anyone who was told that his child was playing in a nuclear power plant would have replied: “Absolutely not”’. Naturally, the nuclear power plant embodied a specific technological function. Even in the case of buildings without such a determinant shape, however, people associate a specific purpose with the material object, sometimes so strongly that they simply cannot imagine it with an alternative function.4

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Ravaged Social Structures

Having noted the evident ambivalence towards nuclear technology, it is not surprising that the planning and construction of the Kalkar nuclear power station divided entire villages and families, in the process raising existential doubts in more than one person’s mind. Both Bender and Willibald Kunisch, a representative of the Green Party, remember this period as an attack on the foundation of democracy. Authorities tried to prevent protest marches, phone calls were monitored, and letters opened. Only direct residents were permitted to take legal action against the project, but most of them were so frightened or despairing that they did not dare to express themselves. Other residents would perhaps deny such a critical account of the facts, but it is beyond dispute that social structures were affected. Both newspaper articles and witnesses testify to sharp cleavages between supporters and opponents. Neighbours did not speak to each other anymore; some people even sold their house and moved to another region. Social relationships were affected by the prospective power station; people had to reassert their identity in response to images mirrored from outside; but perhaps most of all, people were also internally divided. Bender stated that: ‘There were either supporters or opponents, and nothing in between. You could not be neutral’. Already in 1971, a local newspaper reported on ‘Kalkar’s “Jein” zum Brüter’ (Hußmann 1971), that is, Kalkar’s ambivalent mixture of ‘For’ and ‘Against’ regarding the nuclear power station. Fifteen years later, a local resident who made a decent living thanks to the power plant testified that, ‘On the inside we are against it, on the outside we are for it’ (Jörges 1986).

Phased Disposal Given this many-sided and escalated situation of conflict and despair, how did Van der Most manage a successful transformation of the nuclear power plant? Thompson noted that the ability to take items out of the rubbish category is not granted to everyone, but relates to issues of power and social order (1979: 8). The fame of ‘King of Kalkar’ Van der Most, clearly derives from his ability to confer a second life on rubbish buildings, such as he had previously performed with a hospital, a potato flour mill and a weaving mill in The Netherlands – transformed, respectively, into a hotel, a leisure centre and a recreation ground. Nonetheless, to say that Van der Most’s reputation is rooted in recognition of his rehabilitation of the Kalkar power plant, still does not

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explain how he attained this goal; to find out we need to go deeper into Thompson’s theory. Entering and Leaving the Rubbish Category

Thompson relates the three categories – transient, rubbish, and durable – to processes of production and consumption (1979: 113). Items can evolve from transient to rubbish, and from rubbish to durable, but several other transfers are also possible: items can enter any of the three categories as freshly produced objects (from production to transient, rubbish, or durable); they can leave these categories through a process of consumption. According to Thompson, there are two ways to enter the rubbish category: First, he describes the ‘production to rubbish transfer’ as ‘all that is produced that is persistent and useless’, and he adds that this transfer ‘corresponds to pollution’ (ibid.: 114). Naturally, no one would purposely aim to produce rubbish, but somehow it is an unintended byproduct of many production processes. This transfer would have been the fate of the Kalkar nuclear power station if the edifice had not been redirected towards an alternative function. Typically, such transfer is illustrated by the case of the Kaiserbau. Second, it is more common to enter the rubbish category as a transient item that was not consumed. The transient category consists of ‘useful things’, whose ‘essential feature is that as they get used they get used up and as they get used up they make the transfer from transient to consumption’ (ibid.). Apart from this very ‘normal route’, even useful things can stop being useful before being used up, and thus end up in the rubbish category. In particular, this can happen to buildings which are still in a good state but no longer provide the required size or infrastructure, or whose representative aspects have become outdated. Eliminating such buildings would often be considered premature and a shame, although their initial value has become superseded. The power plant in Kalkar illustrates such a situation: it was completely ready to be commissioned, so it would have been useful, but it was decommissioned before it could even start to be used up. Why can durables not become rubbish? Following Thompson, this would be a contradiction in terms (because durables, by definition, increase in value), but one may doubt whether this also applies to architecture. The value attributed to specific buildings can be so dependent on political circumstances that a sudden change of regime can suffice to relegate former durables to the scrap heap. One only needs to think of the numerous pieces of National Socialist architecture supposed

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to embody Hitler’s so-called ‘thousand-year Reich’ that were levelled to the ground in the early postwar years. According to Thompson, there are also two ways to leave the rubbish category. First, items written off can be rediscovered, and leave the rubbish category as durables: in the realm of architecture, this is exemplified by processes of gentrification.5 Second, another common way to leave the rubbish category is via consumption: this is what ‘occurs whenever rubbish is got rid of’ (ibid.: 115), as in the case of the Kaiserbau. Finally, Thompson identifies an impossible transfer out of the rubbish category, namely from rubbish to transient. Yet, here again, this does not necessarily apply to architecture. Obsolete buildings can be taken out of their ‘mutism’ by a new group of tenants such as artists or students, who do not necessarily transform them into durables, but ascribe to them a temporary function, and postpone their definitive transfer into rubbish. One last transfer in Thompson’s theory links consumption to production, notably via ‘productive consumption’, defined as ‘the use of a product in a new process of production’ (ibid.: 112). With this transfer, Thompson adds a dynamic dimension, and warns that ‘in the case of all those sequences that end with consumption, we must distinguish between those that really end with consumption and those which are simply artificial abstractions from what is really a cyclical sequence in which consumption is again linked to production via the processes of consumptive production and productive consumption’ (ibid.: 126–27). With regard to architecture, this reflects the difference between the elimination and transformation of undesired buildings. It brings us one step closer to similarities and differences between a ‘recuperator’ like Van der Most, and an eliminator – ‘master of detonation’ – as in the Kaiserbau case. Following Thompson, the recuperator has one more transfer to carry out than the eliminator: not just from rubbish to consumption in getting rid of the object, but also from consumption to production, via ‘productive consumption’ as defined above. In other words, the recuperator does not only ‘kill’ the undesired object (in its initial form), but he also resuscitates it (in a new form, as a new object). This explains the additional difficulties he has to face: deprived of the means of ‘sacrifice’ to purify the object, he cannot force its entry into a kind of redemptive martyrdom by ‘simply’ annihilating it. Besides that, by transforming the former eyesore into something new, the recuperator also runs the risk of creating a new eyesore if his work is not appreciated.

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The Black Box of the Rubbish Category

Having clarified the entry into, and the exit from, the rubbish category, the question of what happens within the black box of this category, as well as what determines how an item will leave it again, still remains unsolved. Kevin Hetherington, in an attempt to answer these questions, equates the value of an object – ‘use value and sentimental value as much as exchange or sign value’ (2004: 169) – with its soul, and its disposal with a two-stage burial. For objects smaller than buildings, the first burial would correspond to ‘the bookcase, the recycle bin on a computer, the garage, the potting shed, the fridge, the wardrobe, even the bin’ (ibid.) as a kind of purgatory before the second burial in an incinerator, landfill or channel (ibid.). Hetherington insists on the fundamental necessity of this lapse between first and second burial, stating that: Only when all forms of value have been exhausted or translated and thereby stabilised will the object be permitted to undergo its second burial. … The gap is the space where things are held in a state denying their wastage – where they are held at our disposal for a second time so that we can attain a settlement with their remaining value. (ibid.: 169–70, emphasis in original)

Paralleling Hetherington’s perspective with Thompson’s theory, what the former calls ‘first’ and ‘second burial’ corresponds, respectively, to the various ways to enter into the rubbish category and to leave it again. Hetherington’s remarks apply to buildings as well. What he describes as first burial corresponds, for example, to the moment when construction work is prematurely stopped, or when former tenants or users leave the place while the latter’s future remains insecure. After repeated brainstorming sessions and years of discussion, demolition can be seen as a second burial. In Kalkar, the first key moment was the cancellation of the project in 1991; the second, its resuscitation in 1996 as Kernwasser Wunderland. As with any other rite of passage, it is interesting to note that the transitory period from first to second burial is marked by concrete, physical signs. For example, when doors and windows are boarded up, or the building is placed behind a palisade, it is clearly separated from its surroundings, marked as having entered a liminal period during which its future status will be determined. A cartoon by Jupp Wolter, reproduced in Der Spiegel in October1981, ironically illustrates this issue. Two men are staring through a hole in a palisade on which it is mentioned: ‘This is the site of a new reactor ruin. Construction started 1978, projected demolition 1985’. At a later stage other signs can mark the building’s comeback and reintegration into its former environment, for example, a billboard on which the commissioned architect presents the transformations to be

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Fig. 5.1 ‘This is the site of a new reactor ruin. Construction started 1978, projected demolition 1985’. Cartoon by Jupp Wolter (by courtesy of Haus der Geschichte, Bonn).

realized. Here we may note the covert character of the period between the two burials, which Thompson previously assigned to the rubbish category. Yet the Kalkar case illustrates that this is not a necessary condition for the disposal of an undesired building, whether through transformation or elimination. If Hetherington’s approach to the disposal of objects sheds new light on the disposal of undesired buildings, some doubts, nonetheless, persist as to whether the term ‘burial’ is entirely appropriate. Firstly, if taken literally, it suggests that something equivalent to death preceded the first stage of disposal. What would this be in the case of architecture? Should the removal of the Kaiserbau, for instance, be seen as its death or as its (second) burial? Secondly, if the biography of a specific edifice comes to an end in its initial form, it does not necessarily imply that the building will disappear. In Kalkar, the edifice’s biography as a nuclear power plant undoubtedly and definitively came to an end, but the material object did not cease to exist. In such cases, notions of ‘resuscitation’ or ‘reincarnation’ would be more appropriate than ‘burial’. Finally, an overly exaggerated comparison would imply that after a first burial, the object remains within our reach until its value is determined, and that its materiality vanishes in the course of second burial. Yet when destruction is rapidly enforced and imposed, rather than

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lengthily deliberated and negotiated, such as in Sarajevo, the object can be affected materially long before its value has been definitely assessed. In brief, if taken too literally, the ‘burial’ metaphor is not valid for buildings. Yet, although terminology would perhaps need to be revised or specified with regard to architecture, the underlying thoughts are very enlightening: especially the idea that disposal occurs in two phases, and that the liminal period of assessment in between has a crucial importance. Generally, the so-called first burial could thus be seen as the moment when a building’s existence starts to be questioned. This is followed by a period of assessment whose duration is very variable, and that comes to end with the equivalent of second burial: the moment when the building’s fate is sealed. This provisional endpoint can be a removal, but also a reorientation, a new start. A Man of Action as a Successful Doorkeeper

Explanations for Van der Most’s success can be inferred from various texts compiled by Gay Hawkins and Stephen Muecke (2002b) in their edited collection, Culture and Waste: The Creation and Destruction of Value. In their introduction, the editors emphasized that, contrary to what is commonly assumed, the economic, commercial value of waste, on the one hand, and its moral, ethical, social appreciation, on the other, cannot be understood separately: ‘In the case of recycling, economics and ethical values depend on each other. … [V]alue is neither the province of the economy nor of culture, but is constantly transacted between the two in multiple sites and regimes’ (2002a: x–xi). These remarks converge with what was previously observed regarding the transitory period between first and second ‘burial’: in order to avoid controversies, the concrete, material fate of a building – which generally finds a translation in economic terms – must be in line with the dominant appreciation of its representative aspects (which constitute its cultural value). The perspective advocated by Hawkins and Muecke further implies that waste can on no account be considered as something without value; ‘The aestheticization of waste is an economic move, an attempt to invert value, to recuperate the negative’ (2002a: xi). Thompson already suggested this economic potential with his notion of ‘productive consumption’. Julian Stallabrass pushes this highlighting of the discarded even further in observing that, ‘In a world where concept and object are brought into perfect unison, the meaningless is the only area left for the exercise of conspicuous consumption’ (1996: 171). Whatever the precise magnitude attributed to rubbish as a subversive

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gold mine, it is this economic potential that Van der Most was very aware of. As long as things find themselves in Thompson’s rubbish category – that is, as long as their existence remains questioned and their further biography undetermined – their material and representative aspects might appear to lead separate lives. Generally, it is assumed that, after a thing has lost its function, what remains is a kind of material shell with an unclear – or even without any – significance; in other words, something material has lost its representative dimension: ‘Waste is materiality devoid of value, materiality in which we no longer find a meaning, or for which we no longer have a use’ (Halperin 2002: 4). The concrete colossus in the Rhine Valley, clearly, was such a thing: apparently immutable, with an indefinite aim and potential. Yet in other situations the opposite may also occur, namely when, in the rubbish category, material and representative aspects appear, for some time, as two separate entities, yet with the representative overshadowing the material. This may be the case, for instance, when a dilapidated edifice, as a memento, has a (socially) broadly based and firmly rooted sentimental value, yet finds itself in such a lamentable condition that its recuperation would necessitate disproportionately high costs. Pleadings for maintenance, then, bear no relation to its poor material state.6 In any case, as long as material and representative aspects are not in consonance, rubbish causes uncertainty and is, therefore, often kept hidden or invisible. According to Hetherington, disposal can be seen as ‘successful doorkeeping’ or ‘managing an ever-present potential absence such that that absence does not itself make an appearance as a visible agent’ (2004: 171). He adds that, when absence is unsuccessfully managed, and the supposedly absent unexpectedly reappears, this reveals an ‘unresolved question of value’ (ibid.: 170). In a chapter entitled ‘Down the Drain: Shit and the Politics of Disturbance’, Hawkins devotes herself to some of the most embarrassing cases of ‘unsuccessful doorkeeping’, where waste does not remain absent – not even seemingly: Encounters with the ugly face of what ends unsettle cultural boundaries, but these symbolic systems and their transcodings on the body are just one register of disturbance. These encounters can also trigger circuits of intensity that scramble stable domains of politics and authority; that disturb the intelligibility of social order. The hint of shit in a public space doesn’t just call the self into question, but technologies of governance, faith in infrastructure. (2002: 40, emphasis in original)

The empirical cases presented by Hawkins are disturbing to the senses; they provoke physical repulsion. Yet disturbance can also be of a more abstract kind, in that: ‘[W]aste also describes an uncertainty in the value

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of our own existence. It names the ever-present possibility of failure in life, the dread of which haunts all human striving’ (Halperin 2002: 4). Further, Hawkins distinguishes two types of disturbance in terms of where the absent reemerges from. The first is caused by waste that unexpectedly reappears at a later stage: ‘It comes back to haunt us, … it has that uncanny capacity to return’ (2002: 40).7 The second may be understood as more spatial, in that the unwanted has been displaced, yet despite this geographical distance, or despite being hidden behind closed doors, it is still ‘there’ (ibid.: 40–41). In both cases, thus, people tried – unsuccessfully – to discard something, in that they decided they ‘no longer want to be connected to it’ (Hawkins 2006: 75). Yet the distance created – whether temporally or spatially – could not be maintained and rubbish popped up again, at another time or another place. People are not infrequently aware of the relevance of these issues of visibility and presence; sometimes, they also try to exploit them to their own benefit. In particular, recuperated and revitalized rubbish will always retain something of its rubbish status, and it is precisely from this embodied biography that it can draw its force of attraction. John Frow has observed that ‘whatever has once been rubbish keeps a kind of memory of that state, an awareness of the possibility of relapse into it, such that the newly aestheticized object – the kitsch silk drawing or the gentrified house – is valued precisely because its value is insecure and is only precariously maintained within a market built upon the magical transmogrification of rubbish’ (2002: 35).8 In Kalkar, Van der Most faced a building that no one appreciated, and the remains of a technology that embodied such enormous paradoxes as to turn upset and divide an entire rural community. Yet he became a ‘successful doorkeeper’ because he was aware of the major relevance of rubbish as ‘the only area left for the exercise of conspicuous consumption’ (Stallabrass 1996: 171). In order to successfully exploit such potential, it is of vital importance to sensitively handle issues of visibility. Indeed, if disposal requires a form of ‘blindness’ (Hawkins 2006: 80), recuperation, on the contrary, necessitates bringing rubbish into the spotlight: When waste is framed as dead objects and relegated to its proper place in the dump or garbage truck it often fails to provoke. It poses no questions to us because it has been regulated and rendered passive and out of sight. … [F]or rubbish to be framed differently it needs first of all to be noticed, it has to become conspicuous. … We have to recognize discarded objects not as the passive and redundant context for our lives but as mobile, vital matter open to reconstitution. (ibid.: 75, 80, emphasis in original)

When Van der Most bought the ex-would-be power plant in Kalkar, he was not only conscious of its economic potential, he also knew how to

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approach his acquisition and develop it efficiently and lucratively, under no circumstances shrinking from its initially intended purpose. The entrepreneur was very impatient to start the realization of Kernwasser Wunderland. For him, the site represented an enormous surface area that he could never have acquired for such a price under ‘normal’ circumstances; it had high quality constructions and a readymade infrastructure such as supply and drainage, streets and lighting. As an outsider, all of the negative associations did not really mean anything to him. Often portrayed as a real ‘man of action’ (e.g., Voss 1995), his main concern was to open the doors of his leisure paradise as soon as possible. To sample the atmosphere of the prospective Kernwasser Wunderland, Van der Most, very early on, proudly organized something absolutely unparalleled: taboo-breaking guided tours into the bowels of his latest acquisition, the reactor chamber. The amusement park, a barely hatched idea, opened a few months later. Not in the least ignoring or hiding what the place had been, his approach was clearly one of confrontation. In doing so his actions concur with David Mick and Susan Fournier’s findings regarding psychological and behavioural responses to technology paradoxes. The two authors wrote that ambivalent feelings provoke anxiety and stress, which people try to overcome with various coping strategies. Mick and Fournier observed that ‘confrontative mechanisms (e.g., negotiation) lead to better adjustment than avoidance mechanisms (e.g., resignation)’ (1998: 125).

Fig. 5.2 The decorated cooling tower as climbing wall in Kernwasser Wunderland. Photo by Mélanie van der Hoorn.

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Koch, who was involved in the planning from the beginning, told me that the possibility of covering the walls with a kind of papier-mâché and transforming the former would-be nuclear power station into a Disneylike imaginary castle had been envisaged just for a second, but very soon rejected. The planning team preferred to leave the building as it was and focus its attention on the interior design. Certain walls were painted in a friendlier colour and the cooling tower – now an enormous climbing wall – was decorated with an alpine landscape, but the place still unmistakably looks like a nuclear power plant. The name Kernwasser Wunderland is consonant with the numerous contrasts between the enormous building blocks and the innumerable fairground attractions and other colourful additions. The logo consists of a simplified picture of the power plant with Kernie, best translated as ‘Nucli’, the local mascot. With his blue overalls and cap, he looks like a former employee of the power company, ‘knows everything and is very skilled’, according to Koch. Achim Harks from the public relations department adds that Kernie is cheerful, funny, a children’s friend always in a good mood. Harks summarizes their marketing strategy as intended openness about the place’s history, since, ‘You can’t disguise the fact that the physical building was a nuclear power plant’. The strategy includes numerous and playful references to nuclear power such as the name, the mascot, the cooling tower, or pump barrels transformed into oversized flowerpots. Approached in an ‘unprejudiced’ way, the ex-would-be nuclear power plant has become a tourist draw.

Conclusion It is difficult to gauge to what extent Van der Most, as an outsider, realized how heavily symbolically loaded the edifice he had acquired was. Likewise, it is difficult to estimate how much he understood that the reactions to the possibility of a power station had caused the disruption of an entire community. Yet Van der Most did realize that it would not be advisable or desirable (perhaps even impossible) to attempt to ‘kill’ the nuclear power plant’s material form, whether by removing or disguising it. The solidity of the material form – not only including the massive reinforced concrete building, but also the nuclear power plant’s technical equipment – is (ironically) illustrated by the fact that while tourists took ride after ride on Van der Most’s merry-go-rounds, the former operator of the would-be power plant had enormous difficulty disposing of unused but highly radioactive fuel rods, delivered in the 1980s in preparation for the nuclear power station coming into

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operation. Facing the immutable concrete blocks, Van der Most opted for relatively light transformations, or what could be seen as an ironic, playful or symbolic killing of the power plant. Newspaper articles, as well as witnesses, report that many initially regarded Van der Most’s plans as untrustworthy, and later praised him as a visionary (Claassen 1995). The ‘productive consumption’ Van der Most opted for – ‘the use of a product in a new process of production’, according to Thompson – was not obvious, because rubbish continues to be perceived by many as an endpoint, rather than as a transitory category. Hardly anyone, except perhaps Van der Most himself, could have imagined that the status of ‘ex-would-be nuclear power plant’ would be but one step in an edifice’s biography, taking it closer to becoming a successful amusement park. Once the nuclear power plant had been cancelled, the building had become, in the eyes of many, an obsolete piece of rubbish that one could only dispose of as soon as possible. As the nuclear power station had come to embody insurmountable paradoxes and conflicts, to do something with it while acknowledging it, but without architecturally transforming it into a nonnuclear power station, was something that people could not imagine. Van der Most, a ‘man of action’, did not reflect on all these issues, or on what should or could ethically be done. He purely supplied his team with diamond drills and turned scrap into gold as he had always done before. This action, indeed, unsettled some world views. The example of Kernwasser Wunderland suggests that in the realm of architecture, under certain circumstances, productive consumption can make a recuperator at least as prestigious as an eliminator. We commonly assume that ‘the conspicuous waste of goods always confers power and authority on their destroyer’ (Connor 1992: 75).9 The present case suggests that ‘successful doorkeeping’ by ‘productively consuming’ an architectural eyesore, can sometimes confer at least as much prestige as demolition. Van der Most has shown that ‘waste can revert’ and ‘turn out to provide energy and resource’, manifesting itself as a ‘potential source of revitalization’ (Moser 2002: 91). Yet he has also illustrated that, for so-called ‘doorkeeping’ to be successful, one needs to explicitly acknowledge that waste will (and must) always keep some of its previous, undetermined and ambivalent status, and that in this capacity, it simultaneously unfolds as ‘systemic menace and regenerator’ (ibid.: 91, 102).

Chapter 6

Consuming the ‘Platte’ in East Berlin The Revaluation of Former GDR Architecture

Evolving from radical eliminations towards less intensive material intervention, this chapter investigates edifices with a negative reputation, which, after revaluation, were cast in a better light. The outward appearance of these buildings remained unchanged and, at most, light transformations were realized inside. Yet this example shows that even a new image with almost unnoticeable material transformation is enough to arouse disturbance, notably from those with a special attachment to the edifice. In these cases, the intensity of reaction to change in each building is not proportional to the extent of material intervention. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, hundreds of thousands of former GDR high-rise buildings – so-called Plattenbauten – in East Berlin and, more generally, in East Germany are reported to be unoccupied.1 Erected within a few decennia to make the socialist dream literally and figuratively concrete, these flats embodied comfort, high standards and modernity during GDR times: to get one, many were willing to put their names on a waiting list for several years. After German reunification, the reputation of these particular high-rise flats changed drastically and they were increasingly regarded as ‘an expression of a spiteful left-wing Fordist instrumentalism … a spatial system determined by shortage and deficit management’ (Hain 2003: 80). People with enough income preferred to move to single family dwellings in the countryside, and smaller towns lost their raison d’être when the industrial complexes with which they were connected were closed. In Berlin, vacancy rates in non-renovated GDR flats vary between one-seventh and one-tenth (Geisel 2002: 30), and in several

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East German towns, they have become so problematic that certain buildings had to be torn down. The situation has not come that far (yet) in Berlin, nonetheless the existence of Plattenbauten is severely questioned. In the media, areas with many of the high-rises are currently associated with anonymity, criminality and right-wing radicalism (Geisel 2002; Steglich 1998; Zohlen 1999). Nicknames such as ‘rabbit hutch’, ‘shoebox’ or ‘locker for workers’ are very common (Rietdorf 1997a: 7). Despite all this, a series of articles appeared at the end of the 1990s, first in design and architecture magazines, later in the regular press as well, with titles such as: ‘Living in the Platte is Absolutely Trendy’ (Du Bois 2002); ‘New Life in the (C)Old Platte’ (Wewer 2001) or, as in the Bildzeitung on 8 June 2001, ‘Honi’s Platte is Hip’.2 Indeed, in the late 1990s many young designers, architects and artists decided to live and/or work in Plattenbauten or other former GDR architecture. Some of them also furnished their apartment with designs from the 1960s and 1970s; they were portrayed in glossy magazines. A famous German pop group, called Echt, used one of these apartments as a location for a video clip. Perhaps the most ironic is that multinational companies, most often associated with the epitome of capitalism, have recorded commercials in these celebrated embodiments of communism. What does the new popularity of former GDR architecture – Plattenbauten in particular – tell us about the social and cultural relevance of alternative attitudes towards contested architecture? The newcomers, who perceived the Plattenbauten differently to the predominantly negative public image, had no formal responsibility or influence in city planning matters: they were not policy makers, city planners, or investors. They could only witness urban developments and decisionmaking processes without being able to influence them directly. Nevertheless, by consuming the Plattenbauten and stimulating others to do the same, they were able to shed a new light on these buildings and to create new impressions. This relationship between consumption and cultural identification – self-construction and self-presentation in particular – has been discussed by various authors (Miller 1998a: 11). More specifically with regard to architecture, Caroline Humphrey has insisted that, ‘Consumption is central to the creation of culture, since it involves a process of objectification which enables material things and their discourses to become forms through which people have consciousness of themselves’ (2002: 176). Humphrey agrees with Daniel Miller that ‘the authentic culture of modern urban people may be created out of faked or recycled images’, but she adds that there must be certain conditions for this to happen. There must be ‘a resilience and energy

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given to image making itself’ as well as ‘the possibility of rather direct appropriation of material objects to the process of identification’ (ibid.: 200). In East Berlin, both of these conditions were met; the Plattenbauten case reveals how, although buildings are among the most difficult pieces of material culture to appropriate, when rejected as undesirable elements, they become perhaps more accessible than before. As an example of the effect of an alternative point of view to rejected architecture, the newcomers’ attitude towards the Plattenbauten, as well as what Humphrey would term their ‘energy given to image making’, form the central focus in this chapter. The newcomers’ innovative and detached approach was influenced by a complex intermingling of historic backgrounds, personal identifications and cultural affinities: most newcomers were West Berliners, West Germans or West Europeans in their twenties or thirties, working in the arts, architecture or design. In order to uncover how they altered and continue to alter the (image of the) Plattenbauten, several questions were posed: are the newcomers’ images related to the inside, the outside and/or the surroundings of the buildings? In what way do they consume the Plattenbauten? Are they totally indifferent to the history from which this architecture emerged? Is the appreciation of former GDR architecture just a (temporary) trend, or is it indicative of a changed perception of this architecture? Did the newcomers really appropriate the (images of the) Platte? Newcomers are not the only ones with a positive perception of the Plattenbauten: some of the initial tenants are still very attached to their domestic environment, which they would not like to be demolished. In the last few years, their individual experiences have tended to be described more often in daily newspapers (Finger 2003; Rosenkranz 2001). Nevertheless, they have not formed an organized group, actively fighting to ‘restore the good name of the Plattenbauten’, nor do the media present their perception as something new, that would contribute to a changed attitude towards these buildings. Rather, they embody some kind of continuity in a context of unprecedented social and political change. They are sociologically, politically and economically relevant by their number, but they do not explicitly partake in the forum about the future of the Plattenbauten. Their attitude is important in as far as it contrasts, and has caused friction, with the newcomers’ approaches.

Eyesores from Within Mary Douglas has written that, ‘To know why people do consume, we need to understand why they sometimes do not’ (1996: 107). Here we

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need to analyse a double refusal: the apparently dominant rejection of GDR architecture on the one hand, and the positive valuation of these buildings by a minority of people on the other – implying a refusal of the architecture appreciated by the majority. For most newcomers to the Plattenbauten (and those moving into GDR buildings in general), it was a coincidence that they moved into these buildings to live or work – they heard about the accommodation from friends or read an advertisement in the newspaper. They had no previous knowledge, no clear expectations or prejudices concerning the specific buildings into which they would soon move, and perhaps few criteria which their new home had to meet in any case. Erik Schmidt, for example, an artist who lives on the eleventh floor of a Plattenbau on the Platz der Vereinten Nationen, recalls that he had never heard of that address before: ‘It just gave “United Nations Square” as the address, and I didn’t know that location, what it was or what the neighbourhood was like. But the address and the description appealed to me. It stated “maisonette” or “five rooms” and it was cheap, I found it all fascinating’.3 Most people explained their decision to move in as an unbiased, positive valuation of the architectural object itself, without really considering the direct environment, the historic or symbolic meaning of the place or the potential neighbours. For these young people – many of them from West Berlin or West Germany – the rent seemed affordable, and the place was a very welcome alternative to the nonrenovated Altbau: apartments from the first half of the twentieth century, dark, with a shared toilet in the corridor, and a coal stove instead of central heating. Generalizations

If Plattenbauten are as luxurious as the newcomers assert, then why do they have such a negative reputation? First, their aesthetic aspects certainly do not work in their favour. Even in an edited volume meant to shed a more sensitive light on Hellersdorf, a residential district built in the periphery of East Berlin in the 1980s, Rolf Schneider describes the buildings, in his chapter, as ‘cold, massive, rejecting witnesses of an entirely different world, trumpeting their presence and stifling all memories of the sub-divisions of an old Berlin suburb’ (1999: 93). In an overview of the problems and potentials of various Plattenbauten districts in East Germany, Werner Rietdorf admits that many of them are relatively small and standardized in comparison with their Western counterparts, that many of them have construction faults such as leaking roofs or malfunctioning sanitary installations, and that there is a general

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lack of commercial and service infrastructure in these districts (1997b: 31). With the disappearance of the strong social structures which existed before German reunification, many of these areas have become socalled dormitory suburbs: people go to town to work, shop and enjoy culture, and they go to the countryside for recreation. Rietdorf also warns, however, against generalization and pleads for a differentiated approach to various types of buildings, erected in different places and different periods.4 The negative reputation of these areas is also largely influenced by Western reportage and an intrinsically Western perception. Actually, more than fifty per cent of the inhabitants in East Berlin live in prefabricated apartment blocks, and more than eighty per cent of them are reported to be satisfied (Geisel 2002: 29; Steglich 1998). Peripheral districts such as Hellersdorf or Marzahn, with many such high-rises, are characterized by order and tidiness. Axel Watzke, a student in Design Communication who organized a largescale artistic project in a Plattenbau in the summer of 2002, described the areas accordingly: ‘Hellersdorf is a very middle-class area, extremely well looked after, with front gardens like allotments. The cliché of ghetto really doesn’t apply there’. Unlike similar districts in the West, the population has always been relatively mixed, and certain blocks even represented the elite, because loyal citizens (productive workers, zealous civil servants, professors) had better a chance of obtaining an apartment from the state. According to Rietdorf, this ‘healthy social mix’ (1997b: 33) still persists nowadays, and is complemented by an increasing variation in terms of age structure. Gerwin Zohlen (1999: 138) has observed that stereotypical portrayals of the Plattenbauten often result from an abstract and distant viewpoint, as from a helicopter or looking down on a drawing table. Dominant negative images of architecture are often based on its outside appearance or its symbolic meaning, and seldom on an appreciation of its inner space. Evaluation of the inside of a building requires thorough investigation, and it cannot be so easily subjugated to generalizing statements or prejudices. Allen Carlson has described including interior spaces in analyses as a so-called ‘path of appreciation’: ‘in approaching, we experience a work’s existence, in closing and circling, we experience its outer form and its fit with its site, and, lastly, upon entering, we experience the fit between its outer and inner space and experientially realize its function’ (1994: 160). For an in-depth judgement of architecture, thus, it is necessary to enter the building and to get a feeling for how it functions.

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Cult and Cosy

Sharon Zukin has remarked that the rights of disposal over a certain place include the rights of disposal over its image, its symbolic dimension: ‘To ask “Whose city?” suggests more than a politics of occupation; it also asks who has a right to inhabit the dominant image of the city’ (1996: 43). The newcomers in the Plattenbauten have no official influence on city planning matters and no ‘right to inhabit the dominant image of the city’. The only means for them to contribute to a changed perception of the Plattenbauten is in entering them, and letting other people enter them as well: opening up the objects in themselves, leaving their outside appearance and symbolic connotations aside, and showing their potential. If this was not initially the intention of the new Plattenbauten users – they moved in for purely pragmatic and personal reasons – it was, however, the result of their actions. This is not to say that newcomers are the first ones to appreciate the inner space of the Plattenbauten, but their approach is innovative in that they also consciously open them up and purposely make the private realm public. Traditionally, despite – or perhaps precisely because of – the efforts of socialist states to penetrate into, and to achieve a publicity of the private sphere, inhabitants experienced and dealt with public and private spaces in remarkably different ways. The efforts that people put into the conception of their homes was much more than purely a question of taste; it was a means of identification through the appropriation of material culture and space.5 Certain newcomers were soon confronted with the special meaning that private space had acquired during several decades of the GDR. When Ulli Uphaus, a young landscape architect, moved into his apartment on the fifteenth floor of a Plattenbau in the Leipzigerstraße, he intended to organize an art exhibition on all floors of the 25-storey building. A renowned local artist was willing to produce new paintings for this occasion, which would be exhibited in each of the apartments at places chosen by the inhabitants themselves. Uphaus contacted all of his neighbours, presented them with a detailed concept for the project … and received no more than two reactions (both negative). The newcomers’ attitude towards their homes does more than diverge from that of the initial tenants in that the former have blurred the fundamental border between public and private, whereas the latter would tend to emphasize it. They also clearly have different conceptions and expectations of domestic environments. The newcomers appreciate their apartments, yet present them as temporary, utilitarian objects which can be exchanged for more suitable ones if needed or wanted. In magazines,

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Fig. 6.1 Erik Schmidt’s apartment: bare walls and minimalist furniture, stage for commercials. Photo by Mélanie van der Hoorn.

the images of their flats are not those of intimacy and individual biographies, i.e., their homes are not primarily presented as a place for privacy, refuge, security or self-identity, but mainly as cult objects, as models or as stages. ‘These homes are cool’, seems to be the message, ‘and so are the people living here’. Schmidt’s apartment, for instance, is characterized by bare walls, minimalist furniture and neutral colours, except for a few coloured accents such as a red chair or an orange lamp. When Schmidt visited the apartment for the first time, he knew at first sight that it could become ‘like a place in the architecture and design magazine Wallpaper’. Schmidt’s neighbours, on the other hand, came to live there in GDR times; their apartment is not only totally different in style, but also much more loaded with personal objects and meanings. It contains much more furniture – including some heavy, dark wooden cupboards – and is largely decorated with paintings, plants, figurines, carpets and paraphernalia: all kinds of objects that embody people’s occupation of, and personal attachment to, the place. The Higher, the Better

The new inhabitants consider the infrastructure largely superior to that of the Altbauten, but also praise the quality of the rooms in terms of light and space.6 Schmidt explained to me that he had completely different

Fig. 6.2 The view from Ulli Uphaus’ apartment: ‘The higher, the better’. Photos by Mélanie van der Hoorn.

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expectations of the Plattenbauten when he moved to Berlin, and that they turned out to be a surprisingly pleasant discovery: I didn’t like old Berlin, the city was closed off and nothing ever happened and the people were slow. When you visited friends there, you always sat in a dark basement or ground floor flat, and it was cold. We didn’t know the architecture of the Plattenbauten, they were locked up, so after the Wall fell they were the only new bit left to explore, so to speak. … And now you are high up, the sun shines, there is light there.

For Uphaus, the main motivation for moving into his flat was the height. He definitely wanted to live in a high-rise building – ‘the higher, the better’ – and this one turned up by coincidence. Another landscape architect, Frank Peter Thomas, who lives on the twentieth floor of another tower in the same street, explained to me that the proportions of the apartment – relatively long-drawn-out rooms with low ceilings – give him the impression of being in a bungalow, floating over the city somewhere around the twentieth floor. Ironically, what makes the Plattenbauten unattractive at first sight – their large size and uniformity – enhances the quality of their inner space in terms of light, and a spectacular view of the city. The newcomers thus found the best strategy to avoid eyesores: by experiencing them from the inside and enjoying what they can offer. In doing so the newcomers perhaps inadvertently adopted the same strategy as Roland Barthes advises in his essay on ‘The Eiffel Tower’: In order to negate the Eiffel Tower … you must … get up on it and, so to speak, identify yourself with it. Like man himself, who is the only one not to know his own glance, the Tower is the only blind point of the total optical system of which it is the centre and Paris the circumference. But in this movement which seems to limit it, the Tower acquires a new power: an object when we look at it, it becomes a lookout in its turn when we visit it, and now constitutes as an object, simultaneously extended and collected beneath it, that Paris which just now was looking at it. (1997 [1964]: 173)

Given the track record of communist meddling into the private sphere, flats for the initial tenants constituted a place of escape from, or protest against, the public realm. For the newcomers, on the contrary, the flats form a means to be immersed in the public realm: from inside the towers, they gain access, or another relationship, to the city. An Altbau apartment may be attractive for its high ceilings and wooden floors, but it is generally a relatively closed space, whereas high-rise buildings give the feeling of being in the midst of town. Thomas described this feeling in a comparison between two of his working places, the former in an Altbau, the latter in the so-called Haus des Lehrers (‘Teachers’ House’)7 on the Alexanderplatz: Before when we were in that flat, with coal heating, somewhere in a courtyard, you couldn’t see anything, it was simply a room in which you worked. But then at the Alexanderplatz, it was completely different, very urban. We had large windows, we were

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located far down, on the first floor, we were involved in the traffic. Nevertheless, we had a great view, because the house is on the corner and you can look down on the railway, and watch the high-speed trains come and go from the station. This is really big city life, tons of traffic on the street, accidents always happening, there was always something to see on the street. … We let ourselves be inspired by the atmosphere there, the prospect and the view of the street in the middle of the city, the urbanity of Berlin.

In sum, all this illustrates how much the dominant – here, negative – reputation of a building, or type of building, can be disconnected from a close and real appreciation of its inner space. When people are not influenced by prevailing attitudes, they are able to approach a building without the same prejudice, and experience the architecture for itself.

Consuming the Eyesores After their first contact with the Plattenbauten or other GDR architecture, new users realized that these buildings were not only suitable for personal use, but could be further consumed if they were transformed into something new, merchandized, and if they made their way in the mass media. As soon as Schmidt’s apartment was ready, he produced a video film, a series of postcards, and offered it as a location for rent to an advertising agency. His main motivation was the awareness that images of the apartment could attract a good price. The ice-cream brand Mövenpick was the first company to rent Schmidt’s apartment as a location for a commercial; the yield was enough for Schmidt to pay a few months’ rent (Lüdtke 2002: 62). Other commercials and publications soon followed.8 Echt, a German pop group for teenagers, made a video clip in which Schmidt’s apartment appears in its true state, very recognizable, including several views of the surroundings. The newcomers’ apparent detachment from the more intimate and personal aspects of home was a necessary condition to make images of the Plattenbauten suitable for the media. Commercials, video clips and magazines do not primarily aim at rewriting the history or ideological background of the Plattenbauten, nor do they subtly affect collective stereotypes by means of the personal experiences of old and new inhabitants. Rather, they present images of the architectural objects in themselves, their qualities and potentialities. Representations of people’s attachment to their homes as private, intimate spaces would just not sell.9 In order to open up the Plattenbauten and make people aware of their potentialities, they need to be freed of connotations to intimacy and individual experiences of home – people must be able to project their own ideals and wishes on them. This detachment is not only necessary

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to presenting the Plattenbauten in the mass media, but also to merchandizing. Before German reunification, most people had to be on a waiting list for years to obtain an apartment, but things changed drastically in the 1990s, and newcomers moved quickly and easily into Plattenbauten apartments from where initial tenants had left. History can explain why the people who already lived there did not necessarily appreciate their arrival. Uphaus, for example, had the following impression: Several people on this floor are a little eccentric; they’ve been living here for thirty years, forever. You notice sometimes that they feel: people come here from the West or young people, turn the music up loud and perhaps ignore the neighbours a bit. They feel rather like they have priority here because they’ve lived here so long and they had to apply to get a flat here. While for us it was so easy to find a place here.

The situation was even more striking in the apartment block were Schmidt lives: some of his neighbours were opposed to his initiative to rent his apartment as a location. They went to the rent tribunal and obtained a ban on further filming. Schmidt explained their resistance as a lack of economic awareness due to several decades under a communist regime, where profit-seeking was negatively valued. Yet along the line of Zukin’s remarks about who has a ‘right to inhabit the dominant image of the city’, the original inhabitants rather had the feeling that (the image of) their home was appropriated by people who did not have that right. Indeed, Rietdorf has emphasized that in GDR times, the state granted people a guarantee on their flat, which was thus like a social good, completely independent of their financial situation. Therefore, people’s attachment to rented flats was remarkably strong and durable – people identified with their flats as if they owned them. Inhabitants were even willing to renovate both private and communal spaces at their own expense (1997b: 35–36).10 This explains how the world of the initial inhabitants clashed bitterly with that of advertising managers from Hamburg who, inadvertently or advertently, occupied all the parking places with their Jaguars, and thought that money gave them the right to rule the place for one day. The conflict between the pragmatic, sometimes profit-seeking, attitude of the newcomers on the one hand, and the resistance of former GDR citizens against these developments on the other, can also be interpreted as an opposition between commoditization and singularization, as defined by Igor Kopytoff. Indeed, intensive coverage in the mass media and merchandizing make GDR architecture ‘exchangeable or for sale’ (1986: 69); this is a process of commoditization. When benefits could be made, the newcomers did not hesitate to merchandize the architecture, which then became, as it were, a product among others on

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the worldwide market. Schmidt was not the only one who realized that his apartment could become a source of income if rented to advertising agencies. Other inhabitants charged magazines for making photos, and GDR architecture was also introduced as a ‘marketing magnet’ into the club scene, as Gerriet Schultz, creative director of the WMF-Club explained.11 There was also a sudden revival of the aesthetics of Plattenbau facades: a Plattenbau card game was created and facade elements were used for the design of flyers and in the form of video projections. Kopytoff has written that, ‘The counterdrive to this potential onrush of commoditization is culture’ (ibid.: 73). Indeed, for those who resist commoditization, GDR architecture has not just functional characteristics, but essentially an important historic and symbolic value; it reminds them of a historical period in which their cultural identity is rooted. They have lived for several decades in a state where apartments were ‘publicly precluded from being commoditized’ (ibid.). Not only does it take time to get used to, and possibly accept, the changed perception of buildings as commodities, but even when the commodity status of architecture is recognized it does not necessarily stop the simultaneous processes of singularization, since ‘even things that unambiguously carry an exchange value – formally speaking, therefore, commodities – do absorb the other kind of worth, one that is nonmonetary and goes beyond exchange worth’ (ibid.: 83).

Eyesores and History The different relationship formed by newcomers and former GDR citizens to GDR architecture can be further illustrated by the case of the Teachers’ House. Upon arrival in the building, one of the first discoveries the incoming tenants made was the porter. Twenty-four hours a day, someone was sitting at the entrance to guard the place and manage the keys. When tenants wanted to go into their office, they had to sign in to get their key; when leaving the building, they had to check out. Most of them liked this system; they saw it as part of the highly functional and convenient infrastructure of this freshly discovered architecture. There was no risk of losing or forgetting one’s key, and it gave them a feeling of security. Thomas told me, however, that there were also a few tenants who had grown up in the GDR, who did not appreciate this system at all. It reminded them of the extreme and regular controls in GDR times, which imposed severe restrictions on individual freedom.12 These and other differences in perception raise the question of whether the attitude

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of newcomers towards GDR architecture is really entirely disconnected from its history. Furthermore, we may ask to what extent a positive valuation of generally undesired architecture such as the Plattenbauten can remain completely ahistoric. Curiosities

Most new users of GDR architecture told me that they were not really aware of the history out of which it had emerged when they moved in, but they soon developed a consciousness for the place in which they were living or working. Uphaus said that he got the feeling that the Teachers’ House was extremely ‘pregnant with history’. It was mainly the discovery of the architectural object from within which aroused the newcomers’ curiosity for the corresponding history. Rob Savelberg, a young historian, described his growing fascination for the ‘fantastic design’, the ‘typically GDR carpets and enormous built-in cupboards’, the goods lift that the porter showed them (which they repaired and put into use again), the spacious windows, the round doorknobs, and the rectangular decorations on the ceiling. Thomas added that all these features made him aware of the historical context in which they had been created: For me, the history of the building was not at first important, it was simply the place looks interesting because it still has a mosaic decoration and funny windows and is built of unusual materials, it is architecturally significant, but of course it was created because of history. Because there was a GDR, there is this mosaic, and because there was a GDR, there are these toned-down windows which the Palace of the Republic also has. … And so the history of the GDR slowly came to light.

If newcomers were unaware of the historic and symbolic meaning of the buildings into which they moved, the consciousness they subsequently developed contributed to a positive valuation of GDR architecture. Several said that, ‘We all thought it was cool to work in a GDR atmosphere’. New tenants accepted a direct confrontation with the building and its history; they did not deny it, but started an interaction with the traces from a recent past; Savelberg even mentioned that the new users of the Teachers’ House brought the building back to life: ‘It was GDR, it stank of musty carpets, musty cupboards, and musty telephone lines. Everything was musty. The first thing we did was to bring our synthesizers, our computers and all our materials inside, we tore out the carpet, cut off the curtains, opened the windows wide, and brought the building back to life. It had passed away’.

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Images From Within

Dieteke Van der Ree has taken the Potsdamerplatz in Berlin as her research subject for studying the perception of the built environment in the recollection of certain events. She uses the work of Pierre Nora to define two kinds of remembrance – ‘images from memory’ and ‘images from history’ (Van der Ree 1991: 6). She compares these two types of remembrance with two kinds of observation – ‘images at eye level’ and ‘images at a distance’ (ibid.: 4). If certain episodes are lacking in someone’s experience (if the person lived somewhere else at that time, or was simply not yet born), or if someone’s observations are influenced by a professional background (like an architect, planner or journalist), then the person will have, for the most part, so-called ‘images at a distance’ in mind, for example maps, cards or clichés. These images are often expressed in metaphors or in other symbolic terms. For instance, the general, negative perception of the Plattenbauten, as previously described, is based on images such as ‘rabbit hutch’, ‘shoebox’ or, ‘locker for workers’, and lacks an awareness of the specificity and diversity of the buildings as exposed, notably, by Rietdorf (1997b).13 On the other hand, when people have personally experienced an event, they have observed it ‘at eye level’; they remember it as images from memory (sometimes fragmented), and also describe it as such. The perception of the initial Plattenbauten tenants, for instance, is constituted of such images, related to the life they have lived there during several decades.14 These images are rich in personal experiences, but rarely objective or able to contextualize the buildings. Most newcomers refused the predominantly negative ‘images at a distance’, but could not fall back on ‘images at eye level’, because they had not experienced this architecture before German reunification. Their images are of a third kind, which could be called ‘images from within’. As described, incoming tenants firstly and primarily experienced the buildings from the perspective of inner space, which subsequently gave them access to the historical context out of which the architecture had emerged. Just as the generalizing, stereotyping ‘images at a distance’ lack an awareness of the specifics of the buildings in themselves, so the ‘images from within’ (as in magazines and commercials) tend to portray the buildings as disconnected from their (historical) context. The transition from ‘images at a distance’, via ‘images at eye level’, to ‘images from within’ follows Carlson’s ‘path of appreciation’: from a very distant perception of GDR architecture, first almost ‘flying over it’, approaching it, then coming closer and circling around it, entering it, and finally looking out from the inside.

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Risks of Singularization

The historic awareness that can arise from an experience of buildings ‘from within’ can also be directly in conflict with the sense of detachment previously described as an important factor in commoditization. Yet after two years of the newcomers having established their offices at the Teachers’ House, duality of both detachment and attachment characterized the situation. Many newcomers became increasingly aware of the architectural, historic and symbolic value of the building, especially when, in 2001, a developer expressed his wish to acquire the building. Savelberg, who had an office in the Teachers’ House at that time, used strip lights to build letters behind the windows of the ninth floor which, when illuminated at night, formed the words NOT FOR SALE as a clear protest against the plans of the developer. Savelberg enumerated once more all the special characteristics of the building: its fantastic design and furniture, its fascinating history, its exceptional location on the ‘only real and authentic centre of Berlin, the Alexanderplatz … the experimental garden of Europe’. After two years in the Teachers’ House, Savelberg’s message in a press release was: In the name of a supposed profit maximization and redevelopment a proven incubator will be destroyed. Second, the location Alexanderplatz 4 is worth more than the sale tag of twenty million German marks. Third, in Berlin already over nine per cent of offices are empty, i.e., hundreds of thousands of square metres of expensive space. Throughout the city there are English FOR SALE signs or simply SALE! signs posted everywhere. The sale to this investor is a sell out, and we, the society of tenants, are NOT FOR SALE. These investors do not dare and cannot buy us, buy us up or buy us out. The house and its inhabitants are unsaleable.

Savelberg’s project was very expressive but did not have any influence on city planning matters; users of the Teachers’ House were powerless to do anything about the sale.15 The project did not even receive as much attention in the media as Savelberg’s earlier projects did. Newcomers had moved in for the functional qualities of the architecture and the relatively low rent, but very quickly they had become fascinated by the uniqueness of the place and started to appropriate it as something very special, or even ‘uncommon, incomparable, unique, singular, and therefore not exchangeable for anything else’ (Kopytoff 1986: 69). Perhaps this could explain why NOT FOR SALE was not as efficient as previous projects organized by Savelberg in the Teachers’ House. When the developer expressed his intention to buy it, Savelberg and other tenants tried to present the edifice as a ‘noncommodity’, that is, ‘“priceless” in the full possible sense of the term, ranging from the uniquely valuable to the uniquely worthless’ (ibid.: 75).

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Ironically, the pricelessness of the building is what probably attracted the developer. Further, tenants had obviously become attached to the building, but it was precisely their unbiased perspective, their detachment, which initially allowed them to approach it as an object in itself and gave their approach an exceptional strength. When they started to emphasize the singularity of the building, they began to argue on the same level as the people with ‘a right to inhabit the dominant image of the city’. In these discussions they were clearly lacking economic and political power and support. As Kopytoff emphasizes: ‘Behind the extraordinary vehement assertions of aesthetic values may stand conflicts of culture, class, and ethnic identity, and the struggle over the power of what one might label the “public institutions of singularization”. … Power often asserts itself symbolically precisely by insisting on its right to singularize an object, or a set or class of objects’ (ibid.: 81, 73). With the sale and consequent interior renovation of the building in 2001 and 2002, the newcomers clearly did not have, and could not acquire the ‘right to singularize’ the Teachers’ House. Ironically it was probably their earlier commoditization of the forgotten, hidden space through opening it to advertising that alerted developers to the building’s potential.

Culturally Gentrified Eyesores What did the newcomers’ perspectives on GDR architecture contribute to the debates? Did the new images which they created durably alter the predominantly negative perception of these buildings? Several newcomers told me that friends had eventually reacted very positively to their new home and could even imagine making the same choice. Thomas recalled: Our acquaintances at first took pity on us: ‘Oh, you have to live in a high-rise and it’s a Plattenbau. Do you really like it?’ We replied: ‘Yes, it’s great.’ They all had very funny reservations and prejudices about the house. People only know the Leipzigerstraße from driving through it fast. Then we had a party, and the effect was really impressive: everyone was delighted and felt that we had a very beautiful flat. That removed a bit of the shock. Everyone who had come to the party has said since: ‘It’s beautiful’, and many asserted that they would also like to live in such a house.

Respondents also indicated that there is a large interest in GDR architecture: Café Moskau, for instance, a catering establishment from the time of the GDR, has been converted into a hip and very wellattended discotheque. Similarly, in the summer of 2002, three students from the Art Academy in Weißensee organized an interdisciplinary

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project entitled Dostoprimetschatjelnosti (Russian for ‘objects or places of interest’) in an empty Plattenbau in Hellersdorf (Watzke, Lagé and Schuhmann 2003). Presentations, exhibitions and parties attracted hundreds of people. Whether the new users of GDR architecture can be defined as one specific group or not, and whether it is possible to speak about a trend or not, it is clear that this architecture, despite its generally negative reputation, received much attention in the media and gained a new popularity for a significant number of people.16 The arrival of newcomers, appropriating some of the Plattenbauten and other former GDR buildings, appreciating them in an unexpected way, and subsequently presenting them as trendy, attractive places – all these characteristics suggest similarities to a process of gentrification. Typically, the phenomenon gentrification involves ‘both a change in the social composition of an area and its residents, and a change in the nature of the housing stock (tenure, price, condition, etc.)’ (Hamnett 1991: 176). The concept of gentrification is interesting in the Plattenbauten case because it also emphasizes the differences between, as well as the influence and potential (notably due to differences in so-called ‘cultural capital’) of, the various groups involved. Nevertheless, the social changes that Hamnett mentions are generally presented as a shift from working- to middle-class residents (Smith and Williams 1986: 1). In addition, changes in the built infrastructure of a gentrifying district are not limited to the purely residential aspects but, as Neil Smith and Peter Williams have emphasized, ‘residential gentrification is integrally linked to the redevelopment of urban waterfronts for recreational and other functions, the decline of remaining inner-city manufacturing facilities, the rise of hotel and convention complexes and central-city office developments, as well as the emergence of modern “trendy” retail and restaurant districts’ (1986: 3). Even with various interpretations of what gentrification is, these few explanatory remarks make clear that the concept of gentrification does not apply to the case of the Plattenbauten as naturally as it may at first seem. On the one hand, the number of newcomers to the Plattenbauten is significant, and their presence contributed to the upgrading and transformation of certain GDR apartment blocks, which in turn contributed to an emerging interest in the qualities of these buildings.17 On the other hand, however, the differences between the original inhabitants and newcomers cannot be described in terms of class: first, because the Plattenbauten population is traditionally – and currently – very mixed, and second, because the most significant contrast between ‘old’ and ‘new’ inhabitants is, rather, between East and West. It must be added that the original inhabitants were not displaced by the newcomers; rather,

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Fig. 6.3 Project in an empty Plattenbau in Halle-Neustadt in 2003. Photo by Mélanie van der Hoorn.

they live side by side. Certain renovated apartments near the city centre have become owner-occupied property, but not to an extent that it would make the place inaccessible to the original tenants. Finally, it could be stated that some intrinsic qualities of GDR apartment blocks – too standardized, not luxurious enough, and not flexible enough to be transformed into more exclusive housing – make them unsuitable, in the long term, for further gentrification in terms of an inflation of real estate values. Not in the least influenced by a Western perception, most potential investors continue to associate Plattenbauten with low socioeconomic status. Although gentrification does not apply in terms of general understanding regarding social and economic changes, there is nevertheless a competition between people with divergent images of the Plattenbauten over ‘the right to inhabit the dominant image of the city’. This competitive negotiation directly concerning the reputation of specific buildings could be termed ‘cultural gentrification’. Jon Caulfield already suggested paying more attention to the cultural aspects of gentrification, since: ‘Often, culture is acknowledged as somehow or other part of the gentrification process, but its exact role – the role of the influence of philosophic or aesthetic values or of structures of feeling about everyday life – usually remains a black box’ (1989: 620). In this line of thought, what can be observed in Berlin is basically a process of cultural gentrification in the sense that newcomers, although they have

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not physically displaced the original tenants, tend to gentrify the latter’s experience(s) and image(s) of GDR architecture. Christian Lagé, one of the organizers of the Dostoprimetschatjelnosti project in Hellersdorf, told me that, to launch the project, they hung an enormous banner with their website: www.anschlaege.de (German for ‘attacks’) between their own and the adjacent Plattenbau. This action provoked many reactions from the neighbours, who wondered if the attacks were meant literally or figuratively. Users of the Teachers’ House even saw themselves as a new generation of teachers, as young professionals who could teach other people their discoveries. Finally, Thomas and his housemate, as a provocation, made a website entitled Robogon (no longer online), where they severely criticized historic architecture and ironically declared the Fernsehturm (the television mast built on the Alexanderplatz in GDR times) a guardian angel against flash ornaments and bad taste. These examples show that newcomers to GDR architecture have used and, in a sense, are appropriating GDR material culture and transforming its meaning. This corresponds to Caroline Mills’ interpretation of gentrification as ‘the victory over a hegemonic urban imagery by a new symbolism coupled to an emergent cultural manifesto’ (1993: 151). Original Plattenbauten inhabitants thus have to face more than the generally negative perception of their place of residence in the media, and the stigmatizing association with criminality, anonymity and right-wing radicalism. They also perceive how newcomers (West Berliners, West Germans, West Europeans) with a positive appreciation of Plattenbauten are appropriating traces of their recent history in which part of their identity is rooted. The meanings that newcomers attribute to GDR architecture are not only related to taste, but also to a new appreciation, or even a rewriting, of GDR history. The term Ostalgie (nostalgia for the East) has become very common to refer to a growing interest in, and appeal emanating from, GDR material culture, which can be illustrated by the revival of GDR design; the enormous success of the film Goodbye, Lenin; exhibitions such as Kunst in der DDR (‘Art in the GDR’) in the National Gallery in Berlin; the creation of a GDR Museum in a Plattenbau in Radebeul bei Dresden; the organization of numerous cultural projects in empty Plattenbauten; and the production of GDR souvenirs.18 Nonetheless, this so-called nostalgia for the East is generally one of relative superficiality, of commercialization and entertainment, often at odds with the complexity of feelings about the East among those who lived in it. Paul Betts (2000) has investigated memory and identification with East German material culture in an article called ‘Twilight of the Idols’. He writes that the memories attached to GDR material culture are of a fundamentally collective character and ‘have tended to reinforce,

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not undermine, East German solidarity’ (2000: 754). By contrast, the newcomers use East German images and symbols to emphasize a very individualistic way of living and a concept of home as a means of selfconstruction and self-presentation. For East Germans, ‘[T]he importance of housing, architecture, and city planning as the preferred sites of socialist cultural identity markedly shifted toward commodities and domestic spaces by the late 1950s’ (ibid.: 758). Post-1989 nostalgia has similarly primarily focused on the inside of the Plattenbauten (decoration styles, arrangement of furniture, unique objects). However, the fact that these objects matter so much for former GDR citizens in terms of cultural identification may explain why some of them resist the generation of images by the newcomers, for fear that the latter could appropriate their cultural roots. Finally, as Betts’s states: ‘Casting East German culture as fundamentally pre- or antimodern became a favorite West German parlor game after 1989’ (ibid.: 739). The perception offered by the newcomers is not entirely disconnected from this tendency: progressive, avant-garde young people come to live in the Plattenbauten, remove some of the old furniture and create minimalist interiors with modern design … and ‘bring the building back to life’, as Savelberg mentioned with regard to the Teachers’ House. Does this not suggest that the Plattenbauten in their original state were old fashioned and needed a trendy face-lift?

Conclusion Analysis of different perceptions of the Plattenbauten illustrates what can be the relevance of alternative attitudes towards rejected architecture. Newcomers approached the buildings from within; they experienced the inner architecture and functional qualities. This enabled them to go beyond stereotypes, which are usually based on a perception from the outside, and at a distance. The detached attitude that allowed such an unbiased exploration of the buildings was also a necessary condition for their presence in the mass media and their merchandizing. The strength of alternative images is best illustrated by the fact that politicians started to fear the arrival of newcomers in the Palace of the Republic, which was dismantled in 2006. Schultz told me that he and others, such as the Urban Catalysts, developed ideas for a temporary use of the Palace, at that time already scheduled for demolition. They proposed using the place in the meantime for performances, presentations and parties. The state, which owned the building, feared that a too positive revaluation would endanger the plans to eliminate the palace:

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‘Of course they are worried that when we go in there and are successful and open it up, that people will see: “Hey, it’s not really that bad”, and in three years everyone will say: “We don’t want to tear down the Palace”’. Experiencing GDR architecture from within also made new users aware of its history. The fascination and singularization to which this can give rise, can potentially reduce the previously displayed detachment, and relativize the strength of the positive images against their negative counterparts. This is intimately connected with what Kopytoff calls the power of the ‘public institutions of singularization’ (1986: 81). As was illustrated by the case of the Teachers’ House, the new tenants did not have a chance to succeed at this level of negotiation; in the end they were powerless to do anything about the sale. Strikingly, various positive attitudes towards rejected architecture can exist simultaneously, without ever intermingling. The newcomers’ relationship to the Plattenbauten differs from that of the initial tenants in more than one way: their respective conceptions of private and public space, their divergent home cultures, and their opinion about the saleability of homes. All this has much to do with their respective identification with the history out of which the Plattenbauten emerged. Finally, although the newcomers’ presence in the Plattenbauten has received much public attention in the media, and thus found a place in the collective imagination related to these buildings, the attitude of the new tenants was always very individualistic. Despite their interest in GDR history – which they seem to perceive, however, as something rather ‘peculiar’ – their main motivations were to discover the Plattenbauten by themselves, and to comment from their own point of view. They never primarily intended to stimulate a collective valuation of the Plattenbauten with which both the original and the new tenants would identify. Rather, they would use the material traces of this history to present themselves; in this sense, they unmistakably displayed a ‘narcissistic run for individuality’ which, according to Lees (1996), is characteristic for gentrifiers. In general, it is very difficult to foresee the impact of alternative attitudes towards rejected architecture, as it depends on a complex interaction between ‘images at a distance’, ‘at eye level’ and ‘from within’ – implying different observations, experiences, appreciations and attitudes towards the buildings. It also depends on whether the competing images are of the same kind or not, and whether those partaking in the debates have ‘the right to inhabit the dominant image of the city’ or not. This shows that, apart from demolition, transformation and acquisition, there are alternative, complex means of appropriating other people’s architecture.

Chapter 7

If Not Clearing, Then At Least Thinking Them Away The Significance of Unrealized Proposals and the Viennese Flaktürme

Value assessment of undesired buildings is a complex process that can spread over many years. The complexity is increased by the emergence of divergent alternatives to the original purpose intended for the building. The biographies of the six Viennese Flaktürme, previously mentioned in the introductory chapters, are illustrations of such as case. Their very existence might at first appear contradictory and raises the question: if the towers are as unwanted as many suggest, then why have they been left intact for almost sixty years? Built by the Nazis during the Second World War, most of the towers have remained unused since 1945. During this time, tens of projects for their alternative use have been proposed. While eventually never carried out (with the exception of one, which only marginally affected the aspect of the tower in question), the numerous proposals have nevertheless contributed significantly to a more conceptual confrontation with, and assessment of, their material form and representative value by introducing various innovative alternatives to postwar redundancy (such as elimination, elevation, covering, and so on), and clarifying the advantages and disadvantages of each. Compared to the cases discussed in Chapters 3 to 6, reactions to the Flaktürme were more conceptual; the presence of the Viennese eyesores has until now elicited two different social coping mechanisms: either a process of thinking them away, or the act of imagining transformations subsequently never realized. Whereas unrealized projects have always existed, and have always played an important role in architectural

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history, it was not until the late 1970s that they started to receive more attention (Colvin 1983; Ehlers and Hausknecht 1991; Höhns 1991b; Nooteboom 1985; Sky and Stone 1976). This new interest was related to innovations in historical studies which included so-called might-havebeen history, interpreting the significance and consequences of alternatives to the actual course of history (Demandt 1993; Ferguson 1997b; Hawthorn 1991; Tellenbach 1994). This chapter investigates what unrealized project proposals tell us about the assessment, and eventual rejection, of undesired edifices. It reviews alternative uses envisaged for the Viennese Flaktürme, analyses the different kinds of options (such as elimination, transformation, or preservation) that were developed, and draws parallels with the fate of Flaktürme in Berlin and Hamburg, where similar questions were asked, but not necessarily answered in the same way.

Six Scars in an Innocent Town In November 1942, when Austria was part of the Third Reich, Fritz Todt, Hitler’s Minister for Armaments and Munitions, ordered architect Friedrich Tamms to design for Vienna several Hochbunker (‘high-rise bunkers’) akin to the towers already existing in Berlin and Hamburg. Military strategists chose the most efficient triangle which would span an area of 20 km, but Hitler wanted to guarantee the protection of the city centre and make the war ‘psychologically present’, so the six Viennese Flaktürme were built in pairs (an artillery tower coupled to a radar tower) in a triangle around the city centre. The towers, some forty to fifty metres high, with walls standing several metres thick, were built in one year by the National Work Service, construction departments from the Wehrmacht, and in large part by Italian prisoners of war. In the summer of 1944, the towers were ready to be put to use; besides combat equipment, they contained offices and accommodation for commando troops and staff members, stores for ammunition and valuable cultural heritage, military hospitals, workshops for the arms industry, luxury bunkers for Nazi chiefs and shelters for the civilian population. They were equipped with independent water and electricity supply and air filters; they were designed to function as an autarky. Their military efficiency in terms of anti-aircraft defence was very disappointing – not even two per cent of all targets were hit – but they were also supposed to fulfil an essentially psychological purpose as Stimmungsarchitektur or ‘spirit architecture’ (Berger 1989; Freitag 1993; Kapfinger 1989).

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Big, Ugly Monsters on Representative Places

An analysis of Austrian daily newspaper articles reveals that the towers have, over the course of the last six decades, regularly been referred to with pejoratives. Many journalists have described them as monsters from an aesthetic point of view because of their excessive size and their rough, heavy and dark outward appearance: ‘a formless reinforced concrete block that casts its shadow over the last green spot in the grey row of houses’ (Pötzl 1990); ‘useless reinforced concrete monsters, Potemkinian giants’ (Loibl 1991); ‘the most senseless, useless and ugly loners of Viennese architectural history’ (Datler 1999). The Flaktürme are all the more an eyesore, because they are situated on busy public places (in parks, or along main roads), and all are visible from far away, except for two which are surrounded by houses. All are very present because of their size and material and the marked contrast with their surroundings. Their presence also opposes the image of Vienna as a wealthy, glorious capital city with its architectural jewels, exciting turn-of-the-century feel and its fairytale-like Sissi and Franz-Joseph stories – namely the image supported by the tourist industry and the Office for Listed Buildings – with one that is ‘[u]nembellished, raw, provocative – a thorn in the soft rose architecture flesh of the tourist metropolis’ (Freitag 1993). Of course, the presentation of the Flaktürme as absolute monsters is most of all rooted in the negative feelings attached to the period to which they refer, the Nazi-regime in Austria between 1938 and 1945. The towers were emptied after 1945 and traders stripped them of all the materials made of iron which could be sold at a high price because of the shortage after the war. Apart from this, everything was left intact, including inscriptions like, ‘Entry to the cabins only with the Führer’ or, ‘Only Wehrmacht in uniform’. In this sense, the towers were kept as unique documents of the Second World War, the power and madness of the Naziregime: ‘fire-spitting, apocalyptic war apparatus’ (Kapfinger 1989); ‘towers of bygone power, violence and fear’; ‘unwanted reminders of a dark period and history’ (Berger 1989); ‘monuments to the megalomania of a misanthropic regime’ (Freitag 1993). However, newspaper articles are not enough to make a building an eyesore: it is contemporary attitudes voiced by various institutions, groups and individuals, combined with a memory of the buildings’ original purpose, that leads to this perception. As will be shown, the towers’ negative reputation is founded in the purpose for which they were built: very much a product of their age, relatively inflexible in terms of their material construction, and constant reminders of a period of violence and destruction.

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Fig. 7.1 Flakturm in the Augarten. Photo by Mélanie van der Hoorn.

Envisaging a Future That Never Happened

Examining the possibility of eliminating the towers, as well as the reasons for which this was never carried out, consists of investigating potential and alternative biographies. Alexander Demandt proposed just this, in his book History That Never Happened. According to Demandt, insights into so-called might-have-been history might help ‘to understand crucial situations, to weigh up causal factors, to support value judgments, and to assess the different possibilities inherent in events’ (1993: 9). He writes that many historians remain rather reluctant towards might-have-been history. One reason is that our interest in history follows from the fact that it is all somehow ‘our’ history and touches directly upon our identity. ‘Our’ reality is presented as the result of a long chain of former realities, sustaining the idea that we were able to reach the point where we are now, because we repeatedly took the right decisions: A different history, however it might have taken place, would at any rate no longer be our history, the history whose products we are. … To some people, these consequences may appear downright blasphemous. … History itself, and the momentous things that we have accomplished, are due after all to the fact that the right side has always won, the right decisions have always been taken, the right people have always lived. (ibid.: 6–7, emphasis in original)

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Serious possibilities of might-have-been history are thus threatening and reassuring at the same time. Their potential to be(come) reality, on the one hand, shows that we might easily (have) take(n) different decisions. On the other hand, their interruption shows that we do or did take the ‘right’ decision. The same can be said about rejected buildings or ‘might-have-been architecture’: they open up perspectives on how the built environment could possibly (have) look(ed) like if certain conditions had been met. According to Demandt, any form of change is a competition between changing and preserving forces: ‘We can almost always imagine the force for change as having been insufficient to overcome the inertia of the existing situation, so that most things, at least, remained as they were’ (ibid.: 47). In the case of the Flaktürme it is, perhaps, a little tricky to imagine that their initial situation would have remained unchanged, because this would correspond to the continuation of the Nazi regime after 1945. Nevertheless, the question may be raised, how those who commissioned the towers had imagined their future after the end of the war. Apparently, their psychological function was supposed to be maintained; after the so-called ‘final triumph’, Hitler had planned to cover them with French marble, with the names of the fallen engraved in golden letters, and to transform the towers into monuments to the German victory (Berger 1989; Tabor 1991).1 Although this information has also been dismissed as rumour (Pieler 2002: 7), the fact that some imagine this could have been the destiny of the towers is not without relevance. Firstly, this threatening projection embodies the comfort that, in the end, as Demandt would write, ‘[T]he right side has won’, and that this specific might-have-been history did not, fortunately, happen. Secondly, imagining the artillery towers transformed into monuments to the Third Reich also recalls the specifically manipulative agency which the commissioners wanted the edifices to exert. Tim Benton, writing about the persisting effects of fascist buildings, remarked that it is a feature of these buildings ‘that their authors sought to fix very specific political meanings in the works, not only with symbols, inscriptions and iconography but in the form itself of the buildings, and that these inscribed meanings create resistance to a graceful assimilation in a developing culture once the sustaining ideology has been overturned’ (1999: 200). It is interesting to note that in a competition organized by the Austrian newspaper Neue Kronen Zeitung in 2003 as part of the exhibition Bunte graue Riesen (‘Colourful Grey Giants’) in the Vienna Museum, several entries still focused on the towers’ monumental potential. An architecture student called Paul Kweton, in particular, proposed to transform one of the towers into a church, and to leave the

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exterior almost unchanged, except for ‘decapitating’ it (by removing the top of the tower, from above the platform), and inscribing a facade-sized red cross on one of its sides. Thinking the Towers Away

The negative reputation of the Flaktürme seems to have led to a remarkable and purposeful lack of public discussion and documentation of their architecture, history and meaning until the late 1980s, that is, when the period from which they originate first started to be publicly reflected upon in Austria. Only in 1989 did Dietlind Erschen, an architect commissioned by the Minister for Economic Affairs to investigate possibilities for a future use of the towers, publish an official report on her research (Berger 1989). For many years, the towers did not even appear in city guides; photographers carefully chose a perspective where they would not appear; and postcards were retouched to eliminate them. This state of affairs can sometimes still stubbornly persist. As I was searching for postcards with retouched Flaktürme, the owner of a second-hand shop first said there was no Flakturm standing at the place I indicated. When I explained to him where the tower was located, but that it had been carefully eliminated from postcards, he said, ‘Well, they cannot be demolished, so we are compelled to remodel them!’ This was not an isolated reaction. Various informants told me similar stories in different words. A combination of attitudes from various institutions has contributed to a kind of passivity in dealing with the towers and an absence of real confrontation. Fridolin Schönwiese, author of the documentary film Luft-Räume: Ein Film über Flaktürme, die Stadt und den Krieg (1991), recalled that in the late 1980s the keyword ‘Flakturm’ was still nonexistent in the search system of the Austrian National Library. Another example is a plaque, probably installed by the second district organization, at the entrance of the Augarten, a park where two of the towers are standing. It not only indicates a wrong construction date, but also overlooks the complete history and meaning of the towers, indicating: ‘The anti-aircraft towers, that nowadays decisively determine the appearance of the park, were built in 1940’. Not even the Office for Listed Buildings seems to be interested in their potential historical, artistic or cultural meaning.2 Andreas Lehne, art historian, author of several books about historic architecture in Vienna and head of the Monument Registry Department, suggested that, ‘They are really edifices which persist, due to their monumentality; they cannot be destroyed, and therefore it makes no difference at all whether they are

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listed or not’.3 Finally, there is a striking lack of knowledge about the Flaktürme among supposed specialists (for example, historians), some of whom do not even know the exact number of towers or do not realize for what purposes they were built. This is notably evident in the statements of Renate Banik-Schweitzer, former employee at the Municipal Archives, coauthor of a historical atlas of Vienna and an alternative city guide. As incredible as it might sound, she only realized during my interview that the Flaktürme are hollow, i.e., that there are rooms existing inside: [RBS] I have seen floor plans of the Flaktürme; they are filled with concrete on the inside, aren’t they? They aren’t hollow, are they? [MH] Oh yes, there are definitely rooms in there … [RBS] As far as I remember from the floor plans, they are solid concrete things … [MH] There are several floors inside. Thousands of people could … [RBS] … stay in there? I thought that they were only a kind of broadcasting and transmission installation, on the one hand, and weapons that … But that it was a kind of a knight’s castle – I was not aware of that.

These examples indicate that the Flaktürme have been, for decades, largely rejected from the image of the city, not only in journalistic jargon, but by various institutions. Several respondents remarked that people in Vienna do not even see the towers anymore, because they do not want to see them. According to Gregor Eichinger, architect: ‘These towers are taboo. People don’t see them; people drive past them, and they do not exist, they are not noticed anymore’. The tendency to think the towers away is related to the perception of them as immortal and immutable edifices. While particularly strong in the immediate postwar decades, the same perception can still be traced in numerous contemporary newspaper articles. In a place where nearly nothing is left to chance with regard to city planning, the continued existence of such monoliths reveal a flaw in the power of several institutions who like to control the image of the city: ‘dark grey relics from the Second World War that cannot be removed from the townscape anymore’ (Reischl 1990); ‘a giant block behind the baroque ensemble of the former imperial stables, which can hardly be removed’ (Jaksch 1994); ‘the only indestructible piece of architecture in Vienna’ (Scheidl 1994); ‘a memorial that Vienna cannot get rid of’ (Linsinger 1999). The perception of the towers as immutable scars is partly rooted in an incident that supposedly took place in November 1946. When three wagons of ammunition, left in one of the towers, exploded by accident and caused negligible damage (whereas all windows of the surrounding houses were broken), people became convinced of the immortality of the towers, or at least of the impossibility of demolishing them without significantly damaging the surroundings (Freitag 1993; Tabor, Bernard

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and Feller 1994: 9).4 Even without such concrete antecedents the towers can evoke almost mythical, or supernatural, forces.5 Eichinger, for example, compared them to the Tepuis in Venezuela and sketched an apocalyptic picture: ‘The Flaktürme have very much in common with the Tepuis, the table mountains in Venezuela, where vegetation is prehistoric and where you could not even land with a helicopter, and there are unknown animals and plants, and giant waterfalls stream down, and there are wind- and thunderstorms going on permanently’. Nevertheless, belief in the towers’ strength alone is insufficient to explain why their elimination was, apparently, never seriously taken into consideration.

Eliminations: Elsewhere, But Not in Vienna Another method suggested by Demandt in the investigation of histories that never happened is by analogy; that is: ‘Whatever has occurred sometime, someplace, should ceteris paribus also be possible at another time, in another place, with other people’ (1993: 59). With regard to the Flaktürme, it is a little confusing to read that both in Berlin and Hamburg, several similar towers were dynamited despite severe technical difficulties and enormous costs (Sakkers 1998; Scheele 2001: 9; Tabor, Bernard and Feller 1994: 22).6 This throws serious doubts upon the frequent affirmation that none of the Viennese towers could have been eliminated. It would certainly not have been an easy task, but it was definitely not impossible. Vienna was occupied by the Allied Forces until 1955 and several authors write that in other cities, the latter were particularly keen to eliminate similar edifices, sometimes even despite protests from the local inhabitants (Knapp 1996: 15; Scheele 2001: 9). So what kept people from doing the same in Vienna? By 1945, for the second time in less than thirty years, Austria was among the losers of a world war. Both the country and the capital were divided into four zones and occupied for a further ten years by the Allied Forces. One of the main tasks for Austrian politicians was to create a viable political system and national symbols on which the imagination of the national community by its members could be based. In this context, it was very profitable for Austria’s perception by, and relations with, other countries to present itself as a poor, defenceless victim of the Third Reich instead of a co-perpetrator. Furthermore, this historical background sheds some light on certain cryptic formulations related to the ambiguous attitude of the Viennese population concerning eventual demolition of the Flaktürme. Jan Tabor, Erich Bernard and Barbara

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Feller write that in spite of all the intensive critiques against the towers, nobody really wants to see them go: ‘People do not like them – yet hardly anyone demands their demolition. People do not use them – yet do not want to do without them either. People do not appreciate them – yet any conversion is considered even worse’ (Tabor, Bernard and Feller 1994: 2). These contradictions become comprehensible in the context of the above mentioned construction of identity. The rejection of the Flaktürme was at its most extreme shortly after the war, and is still expressed nowadays by the elderly who experienced the early postwar period consciously. Schönwiese explained: ‘When you ask older people: “What is this?” they always answer: “A shameful blot – the Germans have left us with this” as well as: “The Germans are to blame for this, we have nothing to do with it, we can simply not get rid of them, because they cannot be dynamited, and therefore they are still standing here”’. Despite being openly rejected, we may assume that the towers were also indispensable. Apparently, their preservation could act as a confirmation for the discourse about their undesirability; they could be presented as irrefutable proofs of Austria’s ‘victim alibi’, in the sense of: look what the Germans did to Austria. In the end, the only conceivable demolition of the Viennese Flaktürme has turned out to be a virtual one, in the form of an installation by Antonio Riello. Invited to Vienna in 2005, the Italian artist reconstructed the six towers on a scale of one to twenty, out of a thousand kilos of sugar cubes, and exhibited them in the Kunsthalle Project Space. Visitors were invited to demolish the sugar towers and to take them home as souvenirs in a limited edition, numbered and signed by Riello (Kunsthalle Wien and Matt 2005). Finally, a deep-sea aquarium called Haus des Meeres (‘House of the Sea’) deserves special attention as the only activity accommodated in a Flakturm until well into the 1990s. Opened in 1958, it was absolutely ‘harmless’ for the nationalistic discourse of that epoch: it consisted of the housing of monsters (alligators, giant and poisonous snakes, piranhas, sharks, and so on) in the Flakturm-monster, thereby creating a gruesome attraction, very vividly described by Schönwiese: This prison, this tower and then those animals in there, behind concrete walls six metres thick. Then again this window against which the turtles are knocking all the time, always battering at it with their head. I find this very bizarre. … Actually the most awful things are happening in there. For visitors, there is a public feeding of live mice; they can watch how snakes devour guinea pigs. Somehow it is highly grotesque. In part it is really absurd, all these animals in there. There is no explanation for this state of things, but somehow, deep in the unconscious, it is a bit of an absurdity.

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Besides a recent, and not very conspicuous, glass extension of the House of the Sea, none of the towers have to date been altered. Nonetheless, a multitude of proposals were made throughout the years, whose analysis will complete our knowledge of changing attitudes towards the towers.

Interest in the Unrealized Various historians dealing with might-have-been history have raised questions of methodology and relevance. An estimation of the probability that alternatives to the actual course of history would actually have occurred appears to be particularly important in their investigations. Under which circumstances can might-have-been history – and in the present case: might-have-been architecture – be considered sufficiently realistic to have, eventually, happened? How to distinguish between mere fantasies without further relevance, and options that could just as well have replaced their ‘real’ counterparts? Niall Ferguson insisted on the necessity to ‘consider as plausible or probable only those alternatives which we can show on the basis of contemporary evidence that contemporaries actually considered’ (1997a: 86, emphasis in original). This partial answer still leaves us with the question of how to find out, then, which alternatives were considered by contemporaries. Still according to Ferguson, the main necessary condition is that these options were ‘committed to paper (or some other form of record) which has survived – and which has been identified as a valid source by historians’ (ibid.: 87).7 Unrealized architectural projects meet these conditions particularly well; this explains, perhaps, why Josef Ponten already described unrealized proposals as inherent to any significant development in architecture as early as 1925, even praising them as superior to real existing buildings.8 Ponten saw buildings as the embodiments of more abstract and deeply human tensions between the theoretical and idealistic realm on the one hand, and the possible and realistic on the other. He added that: ‘[S]ince this tension between will and ability generally exists in human life, architecture is an exalted symbol for the tension between what the mind wants and what reality allows’ (1987 [1925]: 12).9 In later works, which only started to appear half a century after Ponten’s theories, at least three factors come to the fore as important motivations for paying specific attention to buildings that were invented but never realized. The first is that unrealized projects have belonged to the reality of a historic era, on equal terms with buildings that were, subsequently, realized. Architects have imagined, drawn and detailed

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them; politicians, critics, potential investors and so on have taken them into consideration; they have provoked questions, debates, and perhaps led to alternatives. For Demandt, a main reason to investigate mighthave-been history is that all human history has once been human future. If we want to understand important moments in history from the actor’s point of view, then we need to reconstruct various possibilities for which he could have opted; this will shed light on the decision-making process as it was experienced and carried out at that time (1993: 11–12). Ferguson insists on the fact that ‘what actually happened was often not the outcome which the majority of informed contemporaries saw as the most likely: the counterfactual scenario was in that sense more “real” to decision-makers at the critical moment than the actual subsequent events’ (1997a: 88, emphasis in original). For some authors, it is important to distinguish between projects that were never realized although their creators would have liked to, and other projects – sometimes referred to as ‘utopian’ – that were never intended to be executed (Mußmann 1991; Collins 1976). Yet there are both practical and theoretical reasons to abandon a too strict distinction. Concretely, it can be difficult to find out how realistic a project was, or was meant to be, because we do not always know how it would have evolved if it had been detailed, nor which technical, financial or logistic difficulties the architect would have had to face. Moreover, projects that were once hardly possible can appear more realistic to us today with the development of new techniques. Also, it is difficult to find out to what extent an architect was simply not aware of potential difficulties or ignored them, or if he perhaps never thought about the project as a real building. From a more theoretical point of view, so-called utopian projects, on the one hand, and projects that were never realized although they were meant to be, on the other, are like two extremes on a sliding scale rather than two distinct categories: ‘Especially in architectural projects that were not realized – the unbuilt – there is often a range of utopian ideas, although this may often have been precisely the reason why these projects were not realized’ (Mußmann 1991: 15). Whether one wants to call projects merely ‘utopian’ or simply ‘unrealized’, they did, or do, belong to the reality of debates regarding the further development of specific buildings and in any case reveal what the latter evoke in people’s imagination. The second important motivation for investigating might-have-been architecture further annihilates the somewhat artificial distinction between utopian and unrealized. Indeed, part of the relevance of unrealized projects resides in the fact that they embody critique; both of the status quo by those who imagine alternatives, and of the proposals by those who reject them. Cees Nooteboom has introduced this notion of

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double critique as follows: ‘The strange thing about the unbuilt is that it says something about us in two ways. Firstly it shows what someone would have liked to build – the wish; secondly, it expresses equally sharply and precisely, what was not built; the refusal, the no’ (1985: 10). According to Olaf Mußmann, both unrealized and utopian projects seek to give shape to a better future; the major significant difference is that the former usually reckon with concrete conditions dictated by a specific context and visualize potential transformations in a near future, whereas the latter ignore the lack of flexibility of real contexts and are not necessarily developed within a given time frame (1991: 11). In the case of the Flaktürme, where all project proposals consist of transformations of existing edifices, it is even more evident that designers have sought to improve an existing situation; they criticize the actual state of the buildings and want to distance themselves from what the latter embody. Finally, Hartmut Frank (1991) insists that a major critical and dynamic potential of unrealized projects also lies in their influence on the development of architecture that was subsequently realized. Unrealized projects are very present in the minds of architects and have always significantly contributed to further innovations; their role has increased with the development of modern media and the facilitated access to publications. Thirdly – and this is intimately linked with the preceding motivations to investigate might-have-been-architecture for its ‘realistic’ as well as critical value – a chronological overview can act as a mirror, reflecting not only changed perceptions with regard to a specific building or site, but the broader social context as well. As regards the Viennese Flaktürme, the development of each proposal reflects an evolution in the attitude of the Viennese (Austrian) politicians and population towards the historic period they embody: ‘Chronologically placed next to each other, the projects for the Viennese Flaktürme not only reveal the Viennese’s ambivalent way of dealing with their own history, they also reflect changes in the social and artistic attitude related to the spirit of the times’ (Tabor, Bernard and Feller 1994: 3). A closer look at the projects will show that even in a situation where, concretely, nothing has happened in the sense of being actually realized, a lot can happen nonetheless in the form of changing attitudes and mentalities as they are visualized through these projects.

From Early Plastic Surgery to a Harry Potter Fun Park As early as 1946 the first project was proposed for one of the Flaktürme, setting the stage for a long series that continues until today. During

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almost six decades, various towers were singled out for proposals, sometimes alone, sometimes as an ensemble. The projects greatly differed in function, ranging from ideas as diverse as a casino, a swimming pool, a Holocaust museum or a hotel. In some projects, the towers were transformed beyond recognition; in others, only provided with minor additions. Nonetheless, all the proposals have one thing in common: none of them were realized. Their virtual character does not, however, make them irrelevant, quite the contrary. After the war, it soon became clear that the Flaktürme would stay in Vienna as immutable scars from one of the darkest periods in Austrian history. The dominant discourse at that time, dictated by the urgent need to define a relatively ‘clean’ image of Austria, presented the towers as absolute monsters built by the Germans against the will of the Austrians. The ‘national attitude’ ran thus: the best would be to eliminate them or – if not possible – at least to treat these scars with plastic surgery and make them literally invisible. In 1946, Karl Kupsky was the first architect who wanted to envelop one of the towers with new apartments and in so doing introduced the first generation of alteration designs. His design essentially consisted of providing the Flakturm with a covering (using the tower as a core). Several similar proposals soon followed, principally varying the proposed use: Erwin Böck with a hotel and exhibition hall in 1951, Kurt Vana with a hotel and multi-storey car park in 1953, and Oskar and Peter Bayer and Vinzenz Neuper with apartments in 1953 (Pieler 2002: 26, 30; Tabor, Bernard and Feller 1994).10 The idea to leave the Flaktürme untouched, but to use them as bases for huge sculptures, appeared in the 1960s with designs from Friedrich Kurrent and Johannes Spalt, working together as Arbeitsgruppe 4 (highrise apartments, 1958/1964) and from Hans Hollein (offices, 1960). The idea of covering the towers receded to the background; Horst Neu’s proposal, in 1979, to hang a construction on two sides in which to accommodate leisure activities, left the rest of the tower clearly recognizable (Pieler 2002: 22, 30, 34; Tabor, Bernard and Feller 1994). Newspaper articles justified the collapse of the projects with economic arguments (the proposals, they said, would be so laborious that alterations could hardly be profitable); with formalities concerning the ownership (the city of Vienna and the State have repeatedly given each other the towers back and forth); and often with the occurrence of protest movements from residents. The motivation behind these arguments is ideological. This ideological trend quite possibly conceals how no one was really interested in soiling their hands with the transformation of the towers. In any case, since the departure of the occupying forces from Austria in 1955, the memory of the Second World War had receded more

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Fig. 7.2 Project for a hotel and multi-storey car park in a Flakturm. Project and photo by Kurt Vana.

into the background, and the need to emphasize the distance to the Nazi regime was less acute. Discussing the historical meaning and the initial functions of the Flaktürme failed to occur until the early 1990s, after the Waldheim affair in 1986 and the ensuing public discussion about the role of Austrian officials, institutions and individuals during the Nazi regime.11 The Waldheim affair was a symptom for an insufficient – or even nonexistent – Vergangenheitsbewältigung;12 it gave rise to important polemics in Austria and abroad, and to the official recognition of Austria’s complicity in the coming about of the Nazi regime in Europe. Against the backdrop of this new discussion, artistic projects, reflecting upon the initial function and meaning of the towers, began to appear. Schönwiese, for example, initiated an investigation in the late 1980s, with the goal of making an experimental documentary film about one of the towers. He was surprised and indignant in his assertion that nothing had happened with them for fifty years, and that they were inaccessible and even ignored by official institutions like the National Library. With his film Luft-Räume, Schönwiese wanted to break down a taboo concerning the towers: Actually, there was a very concrete starting point: One comes to Vienna, wanders through the city, continues on further and sees this thing, and wonders: ‘What is this? Where does it come from? Why does it look like that?’Yet there are no answers, there is no literature,

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there is no documentation, everything is taboo, closed, inaccessible. … The only really useful thing is to make them transparent, to make them usable, to accept them just like they are, because by doing that, I oppose these mysteries, these myths.13

In 1991, the American artist Lawrence Weiner realized another project that, like Schönwiese’s film, also fell partly on deaf ears but nevertheless illustrates a new perception and presentation of the towers. He painted the following text in huge letters on one of the towers (both in English and German): ‘Smashed into pieces (in the still of the night)’.14 The most successful performance in these years was invented and realized in 1993 by Kurt Palm, a television programme maker. A twenty-minute documentary film showing the inside of one of the towers was projected at night on a huge screen on the edifice itself. At the same time a guitar player, floodlit, was standing on top of the tower and a list of six thousand people murdered during the Nazi regime in Vienna between 1938 and 1945 was read and projected on the screen: six thousand names, with the date and cause of death. Two thousand people witnessed this performance. Although these three art projects may appear as isolated initiatives in a nearly sixty-year-old history, they show an evolution in the attitude towards the towers. These projects would certainly not have been possible in the early postwar period. They make clear, once more, that the attitude towards architectural eyesores is variable and depends only partly on the historical period to which they refer, and mainly on the present social and cultural context. Far from being immutable symbols, buildings give rise to time-bound reactions, and are used as dynamic elements to express a message which corresponds to the demands of a specific period. The emerging tendency in the early 1990s to acknowledge the initial function and meaning of the towers was reflected in architectural proposals developed in the course of the following decade. One of the most recent ideas is for a museum of twentieth-century Austrian history, alternatively called ‘House of Tolerance’ or ‘House of History’. Similarly, among the almost fifty proposals selected by the Neue Kronen Zeitung to be shown in the exhibition Bunte graue Riesen in the Vienna Museum, about a quarter were explicitly concerned with granting the towers a function as memorials, for example as a Peace Torch, museum, or, as previously mentioned, as a church. In conjunction with the trend to emphasize the history of the towers, some recent proposals have taken the opposite approach, trivializing the original identity of the towers.15 Given the increasing number of proposals for attractions on, or in, the Flaktürme, it seems as if the towers are on the way to becoming ‘outdated monsters’ and losing the meaning they once held for the postwar generation. With the

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establishment of a viable, independent and democratic Austrian Republic, the ‘alibi’ function of the Flaktürme has lost its sense, and since the public discussions and confessions in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the presentation of Austria as a defenceless victim of the Third Reich has been completely refuted. Furthermore, the present architects, politicians, investors and property developers no longer belong to the generation who consciously experienced, and were possibly traumatized by, the Anschluß (Austria’s entry into the Third Reich) and its consequences: they therefore have a completely different association to this period in Vienna’s history. After the repression during the postwar years and the confrontations some forty years later, there seems to be a contemporary tendency to ‘normalize’ the discourse about the War, and present it in a less emotionally charged way. One could perhaps say: to repress the former repression. This does not mean, of course, that the description of the Flaktürme as monsters will disappear from one day to the next from all the newspaper articles. But it does mean that the towers are judged less on their historical and symbolic value and more pragmatically in how they can be used, or bring benefit. This has notably led to the establishment of an art depot from the Museum of Applied Arts, profiting from the excellent ‘natural’ air conditioning and perfect safety conditions (Noever, Müller and Embacher 2000), as well as the opening of a climbing wall on the tower in which the House of the Sea was already accommodated. Finally, a further expression of this trivialization is the list of ‘fun’ proposals, starting with a project for a swimming pool with café, restaurant and fitness centre (Dietlind Erschen, 1989), a panorama terrace with a funicular or transparent elevator (Andreas Brandolini with Gruppe Rastlos, 1989), or the combination of a climbing wall with a huge picture of dolphins painted on three walls, and a sushi bar on top of the tower (1995).16 Many of the proposals have been concerned with one tower in particular, probably because it is the most directly integrated in the city (along a main road, not in a park and not directly surrounded by other buildings). Besides the existing climbing wall and aquarium, expanded with a terrarium in the early twenty-first century, star architect Wilhelm Holzbauer planned a ‘World of Coffee’ (an interactive coffee museum and café) on top of the tower, accessible via a transparent elevator.17 The Chairman of the Sixth District Organization even proposed to build two additional floors on top of World of Coffee to make space for a casino, but this idea was not worked out; the complete project was rejected as not profitable enough. The towers evoked many similar ‘fun’ concepts to the Neue Kronen Zeitung readers, as reflected in more than half of the entries exhibited in the Vienna

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Museum competition, for example: sky diving (the winning entry), enormous advertising for Red Bull, or a Harry Potter fun park.

Conclusion Sixty years in the life of architectural ‘monsters’ reveal the Flaktürme as eyesores representing something undesirable in the official image of the city. This does not necessarily mean that they are completely unwanted: they have even been very useful in the expression of a certain message in the postwar construction of the Austrian nation state. In this case, keeping the Flaktürme intact was indispensable. The definition, presentation of, and attitude towards eyesores are clearly determined by the contemporary context at least as much as by the period in which they

Fig. 7.3 Flakturm as sculpture in romantic scenery. Design by Sascha Büchi.

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were built. Therefore, the attitude towards eyesores as well as ideas about how to eventually transform them, are variable – today’s monsters might be tomorrow’s jewels. Perhaps the latter does not completely apply to the Viennese Flaktürme, because of their rather repulsive outward appearance. They are massive, rough, dark and dominant, so they might remain ‘ugly’ for a majority of people; furthermore, to openly appreciate them would be very questionable given the circumstances surrounding their origination, but their character as eyesores is nevertheless currently attenuated compared to the postwar period. Although in the case of the Viennese towers none of the proposals for transformation, except for the terrarium extension of the House of the Sea, has been realized so far, this does not mean that things have remained unchanged since the end of the Second World War: quite the contrary. Unrealized projects show an interesting evolution in the attitude towards the towers and what they embody. All proposals show strong views on the towers, the status quo and the wishful future: how things should (not) be, how things could (have) be(en). Visualizations of how things could (have) be(en) raise questions regarding the reasons why this has not happened. They further illustrate real ways of thinking, and of imagining the towers. Proposed changes directly lead to a specific critique of the status quo: what people propose to change is usually what they dislike the most. As exposed, notably, by Mußmann (1991), unrealized projects do not have the same character as their realized counterparts but are intimately interwoven with them. Their virtual character, especially, can also be seen as strength. Whereas ‘something built would have lost its magic’ (Collins 1976: 1), the unrealized proposal does not constantly have to prove its aesthetic and utilitarian worth (Höhns 1991a: 17) and avoids becoming ‘as invisible as real buildings’, ‘the backdrop of our lives’ (Nooteboom 1985: 97). Being virtual grants a special aura and, possibly, a superior status. Perhaps in some instances, the more projects develop around them, and thus the more a building’s virtual life is intensified, the more difficult it might be to select one of them, to carry it out, and to prove its viability in concrete circumstances. In the end, one may wonder which edifices – real or virtual – are, or will be, considered eyesores: the present, or the (virtually) metamorphosed edifices? The Flaktürme have already been integrated, for example, as a kind of sculptures in romantic scenery on posters for the yearly open air film festival, or posters for various other activities in the Augarten. Finally, the Viennese might turn out to be surprisingly attached to ‘their’ towers.

Chapter 8

‘L’ like ‘Left to Its Own Devices’ The Progressive Dilapidation of the Kulturhaus in Zinnowitz

The many unrealized projects developed for the Viennese Flaktürme reflect changing perceptions and attitudes to undesired edifices. Doing nothing at all, and leaving such edifices to their own devices, is the last step that can be taken on the scale of physical intervention. The Kulturhaus (‘Cultural Centre’) in Zinnowitz, on the island of Usedom in north-east Germany, illustrates such a situation of non-intervention. Zinnowitz rapidly expanded as a seaside resort when, in the early 1950s, the Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (the GDR holiday organization) and the Wismut (a state-owned non-ferrous metal company) built and occupied new facilities in the town. The Kulturhaus was built between 1953 and 1957 by the holiday organization of the Wismut. It can be seen as a forerunner of the Bitterfelder Weg, a largescale East German cultural policy initiated in the late 1950s to narrow the gap between people and art. The Kulturhaus’ large theatre could accommodate about a thousand spectators, and played host to orchestras and dance companies of international fame, as well as to national television programmes. In the canteen, in the right wing of the Kulturhaus, both holidaymakers and employees were offered three meals a day, in three shifts of three hundred people. On the ground floor of the left wing there was a ballroom, and in the basement were a billiards room, a library and a playroom. In the late 1980s, after more than thirty years of activity, drastic renovations were made to the Kulturhaus. In 1989, the right wing was almost ready for use again: everything looked brand new and the

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Fig. 8.1 The Kulturhaus in the 1960s. Photo by unknown photographer (by courtesy of Historische Gesellschaft, Zinnowitz).

enormous kitchen had been entirely refurnished with up-to-date equipment. Yet, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent German reunification in 1990, the renovation work was abruptly interrupted: the Kulturhaus began to dilapidate. Nowadays, it is a site of devastation: all its windows are broken, plants are growing wildly around it, and inside the building nothing but the fixtures remain. On the main facade, the red letters ‘KULTURHAUS’, remnants of a glorious past, remind us of the building’s initial function. The letter ‘L’ now only hangs by a single hook and threatens to fall down at any moment. For Henrik Nitzsche, a local journalist who regularly reported on the condition of the Kulturhaus, this vacillating ‘L’ embodies the present state of the edifice.1 But how exactly should this statement be interpreted? How can it be that everyone in Zinnowitz seems to regret the present situation, yet the Kulturhaus fell prey to passivity? It often happens that the natural (or induced) decay of a building and its potential demolition lend it special attraction, if only because any visit to the building could be the last. Robert Harbison has described decay as a kind of ugliness that we experience as beauty, because of its transitory nature (1991: 122). The work of contemporary artists and photographers on this theme of ‘beautiful ugliness’ can also serve to confirm that buildings in a state of uncertainty can be attractive, and stir the imagination.2 Visualizing and emphasizing the decay of architecture,

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however, also challenges the premises underlying (Western) architecture – premises which have become so self-evident that many people take them for granted. As Edward Ford argues, ‘The idea that important buildings should be not only durable but also permanent is so integral with the Western idea of architecture as to escape notice, except by those critical of Western civilization as a whole’ (1997: 14).3 What determines the life span of a building? What determines if a building is rejected or, on the contrary, revalued? As Michael Thompson (1979: 9) emphasizes in Rubbish Theory, the power to create and destroy value is not granted to everyone. Not only does it challenge – in this case: architectural – notions of the durable and the ephemeral, it also challenges social (power) relations that are closely intertwined with the question of who has the right to assess the value of things. The notion of ‘ruin’ evokes buildings whose remains have survived for a surprisingly long time, as well as buildings that threaten to pass away prematurely. In the first sense, ‘ruin’ often refers to (art) historically significant edifices from a distant past – places that fascinate us and call up romantic feelings, such as the Acropolis in Athens. In the second sense, ‘ruins’ are dilapidated, marginalized buildings. Abandoning a piece of architecture to the work of Nature can accelerate its ageing and can, in the long run, lead to disposing of it or, at least, to distancing people from it. How do people experience dilapidated and marginalized ruins? When do people perceive this passive process of ‘letting go’ as a revolting waste? What differences are there in people’s perception and experience of significant and marginalized ruins, except for the fact that specialists do their best to stop the premature ageing of valued ruins?

Vanishing and Rediscovered Materiality In a special issue of the Journal of Material Culture, reporting the results of a conference on ‘Fleeting Objects’, Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld and Mark Peterson called attention to the ‘social and cultural dimensions of material ephemerality’, and more specifically ‘the social complexity of processes of material loss’ (2003: 243). In the course of the last fifteen years, the Kulturhaus in Zinnowitz has not only lost its raison d’être, but its material form has also been affected. Nitzsche and Christa Saager (former head of the Kulturhaus’ gastronomic department), for example, emphasized during their interviews that more and more trees are growing around the Kulturhaus: as Nature reclaims the site, it will soon disappear from sight. As Peter Jasiecki (former head of the local Wismut department, and now a hotel owner) remarked, ‘It is nothing

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more than an empty shell now’. Interestingly, these serious threats to the building’s durability do not render it materially irrelevant, quite the contrary. Colloredo-Mansfeld and Peterson argue that too many material culture studies are based on the assumption that objects are materially durable things with shifting sociocultural meanings. In chorus with other authors in the same issue of the Journal of Material Culture, they oppose this ‘fundamental assumption in material culture studies that cements cultural importance to physical permanence’ (2003: 243). One of the main ideas emerging from an analysis of ‘fleeting objects’ is: ‘Rather than undoing the materiality of social life in favor of spirituality … the using up of matter represents its own materiality, though not one dependent on permanence’ (Colloredo-Mansfeld 2003: 252). What remains of a building when its stones start to crumble and need replacing? Tim Edensor has described how: Ruination produces a defamiliarised landscape in which the formerly hidden emerges; the tricks that make a building a coherent ensemble are revealed, exposing the magic of construction. The internal organs, pipes, veins, wiring and tubes – the guts of a building – spill out, as informal and official asset-strippers remove key materials such as tiles and lead. … This coagulating debris emanates from the building itself and reveals how the sheer profusion and diversity of matter which is used to construct a building tends to be disguised by its form. (2005: 109–10)

In Zinnowitz, no longer distracted by the furniture and decoration of the Kulturhaus, by its users, or the dynamics of social life, did people start focusing more attention on fundamental choices underlying the design? Remarkably large and symmetric, with a prominent facade characterized by large steps, a colonnade, cornices and an attic, the building exemplifies a monumental tendency in the architectural designs of the former Eastern bloc in the 1950s. Yet despite these unaltered distinguishing features, in the last fifteen years the Kulturhaus also suffered significant losses, due to both natural processes and human intervention. From Visual to Multi-Sensory Experience

When an edifice is left to its own devices, long-repressed natural phenomena become visible again. Material decay, notably weathering, is no longer stopped or disguised by maintenance or repair. The transitory nature of architecture is experienced impartially. Many texts about ruins emphasize how decayed buildings reflect Man’s mortality, and describe how such buildings produce both an alarming and a reassuring effect on the observer. The existence of ruins embodies both the inescapable passage of time and resistance against time: despite their decay, the ruins

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Fig. 8.2 The Kulturhaus’ theatre in 2004. Photo by Mélanie van der Hoorn.

remain (Roth 1997: 2). Michael Roth refers, in his introduction to the catalogue Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed, to an unstable equilibrium between the ephemeral and the durable, as well as between natural phenomena and human intervention. When a building is constructed, society appropriates a piece of Nature by determining the purpose and meaning of the plot of land, and the materials to be used. Later, when official bodies distance themselves from the building because it is no longer needed or wanted, the artefact can be reabsorbed by Nature: ‘As things fall apart, out of their remains emerge new forms of growth. These are signs both of human decay and of reintegration into the natural world’ (ibid.). Ruins, however, can also be available to those interested in exploring them, interpreting them, or in giving them new meaning: in other words, there occurs both a natural and a sociocultural reconquest of buildings. Juhani Pallasmaa, in his article ‘An Architecture of the Seven Senses’, writes that in the modern Western world, the experience of architecture tends to be reduced to a merely visual and conceptual perception. However: ‘Every touching experience of architecture is multi-sensory; qualities of matter, space, and scale are measured equally by the eye, ear, nose, skin, tongue, skeleton and muscle’ (1994: 30). Strikingly, Pallasmaa repeatedly evokes sensory experiences related to empty buildings such as, for example, ‘the sound of water drops in the darkness of a ruin’, which spectacularly attest to the ‘extraordinary capacity of the

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ear to carve a volume into the void of darkness’ (ibid.). Further, he notes that one often has a vivid recollection of the odour of a space, and that abandoned houses in particular ‘always have the same hollow smell’ (ibid.: 32).4 He even suggests that these intense sensory experiences in abandoned buildings are called forth by the experience of visual emptiness (ibid.: 31). In Zinnowitz, due to the state of the Kulturhaus, a mainly visual perception of the building has shifted to a more diversified sensory experience. This is principally caused by two factors: Firstly, as most of the former ‘inhabitants’ have left and no more regular activities are taking place in the edifice, it has almost completely lost its function. Deprived of a clearly defined function (at least for the time being), more attention than before is paid to its very materiality. Secondly, the Kulturhaus is scarred: it has the overwhelming post-1989 changes inscribed ‘in its flesh’, and stands out as a picture of incompleteness. Nowadays, visiting the Kulturhaus has become a physical performance: to climb a fence (which has been facilitated by many previous visitors), find a way through overgrowth, and avoid shattered glass on the steps. Once inside the building, one still needs to watch one’s step, as the floor is strewn with debris and in certain places, such as the stage, it threatens to collapse. As all its openings have been broken, the building has become permeable to light, wind, dust, sounds from the outside, cold and warmth. Paint is peeling off the walls and shreds are hanging from the ceiling. Not only does a visit to the Kulturhaus represent a physical challenge, but its ruined state also stimulates the senses. Its ‘skin’ has been pierced and has acquired a new kind of three-dimensional texture; this has also given visual perception a more tactile dimension.5 Touching Away

In the case of the Kulturhaus, what is most interesting are Pallasmaa’s remarks about touch. Like several other authors (Rodaway 1994; Stewart 1999: 31), he writes that touch, in contrast to sight, allows for a more direct and intimate experience (Pallasmaa 1994: 34). He particularly emphasizes two aspects of tactile sensations: they are often associated with intense emotional states, and they create a connection with the past. The dilapidation of a specific building is always the result of changes in its broader context, which necessitates that those concerned with its fate adapt to these changes. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that adaptation is often accompanied by intensive emotional states – and, according to Pallasmaa, more palpable experiences.6

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It is remarkable that dilapidation is much more advanced inside rather than outside the Kulturhaus, and that, compared to other buildings in a similar state of disrepair, it is relatively free of graffiti. This suggests that physical harm to the building may not primarily have been aimed at conferring a message to the outside world, but, rather, it may have constituted personal confrontations with recent history. Indeed, the damaging of the Kulturhaus did not occur during the break-up of the GDR, unlike the demolition of the Berlin Wall, which was at the core of the events of 1989 and became synonymous with the Wende (i.e., the changes started off by the East German revolution and leading to German reunification). When people began their confrontation with the Kulturhaus in Zinnowitz, transition had already started; history had already turned away from the GDR. Those who had lived in the GDR for decades had to adapt to revolutionary changes and reshape their identities, in the context of shifting relationships and values in the new, capitalist and reunified Germany. The decaying of the Kulturhaus is unmistakably related to this period of transition. In the general chaos of the early post-1989 years, various groups of people visited the Kulturhaus – and some still do. While some people took objects from the building, others demolished them, and still others daubed graffiti on the walls, or simply visited the place. There most probably was much diversity among these visitors: opponents and adherents of the GDR; people from Zinnowitz and people from outside; people driven by curiosity, destructiveness or by profit seeking. The direct sensuous – especially tactile – confrontation with a prominent edifice, until that time at the core of sociocultural life in Zinnowitz, can be conceived of as the concretization of an abstract and confusing struggle with an alienating environment.7 Through this ‘interaction’ between the building and the people that were involved with it, abstract questions were, at least temporarily, given concrete contours. It is perhaps easier, and more tangible, to react directly to a building than an ideology or regime. Susan Stewart, in her ‘Prologue: From the Museum of Touch’, argues that: To experience the roughness or smoothness of an object, to examine its physical position or come to understand its relative temperature or moistness, we must move, turn, take time. Visual perception can immediately organize a field; tactile perception requires temporal comparison. We may say in fact that visual perception becomes a mode of touching when comparisons are made and the eye is ‘placed upon’ or ‘falls upon’ relations between phenomena. This temporal aspect of touching also implicitly bears a notion of … causality, of something having happened or made another thing to happen. (1999: 32)

Touch and ‘tactile vision’, in other words, have a particular ‘bridging’ or ‘comparative’ potential, allowing us to appropriate memories, come to terms with painful events and establish acceptable relations with the past

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in order to face the future. They allow us to get a grip on overwhelming changes that are difficult to grasp on the conceptual, emotional or intellectual levels.8 All those interviewed (even those who could feel personally responsible for the edifice’s dilapidated state) evoked the Kulturhaus as a very living place, where something was always going on, and where memorable performances and ceremonies took place: it was the sociocultural heart of the town. Yet when I questioned Jasiecki about the motives for destruction after 1989, he answered that: ‘At the time there was no interest in the GDR. There was something new, and many took great pleasure in it’. The contrast between the, apparently deeply engraved, positive remembrance of the Kulturhaus and widespread post1989 destruction can be interpreted in at least two ways. First, at the sight of accelerated changes, people may have wanted, as was the case with the Berlin Wall, to appropriate physical remnants of a rapidly vanishing contemporary history of which they had been part. Second, for fear of being excluded from such unprecedented changes, they may have wished to partake in the collective dismantlement of concrete embodiments of the GDR – or maybe even both at the same time. Following Edensor, ‘While ruins always constitute an allegorical embodiment of a past, while they perform a physical remembering of that which has vanished, they also gesture towards the present and the future as temporal frames which can be read as both dystopian and utopian’ (2005: 15). If attitudes to the demise of the Kulturhaus can be interpreted as signs of mourning and detachment from the GDR, what life did these rites of passage lead to? Identifying both the transitional nature of the Kulturhaus and the political context it embodied, as well as the prominent role of tactile experience, the question remains: given its current state, how do people envisage the Kulturhaus’ future?

Waiting for its Fate to be Sealed In a discussion of the history and architecture of the GDR’s Kulturhaüser, Ulrich Hartung describes a state of uncertainty, ambivalence and reservation toward hundreds of these prominent edifices that suddenly became anachronistic after the collapse of the former GDR. Through an architectural overview of one hundred and sixty of these cultural centres, he suggests that, nowadays, many buildings vegetate in a liminal, marginal state, waiting for a new purpose (1997: 7–8, 10). Simone Hain, in an extensive photographic and textual inventory of cultural centres in the former East Germany after 1989, wonders who could still be

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Fig. 8.3 The Kulturhaus’ prominent facade. Photo by Mélanie van der Hoorn.

interested in these superseded edifices for whom ‘the last curtain has fallen’ (1996: 53). In fact, the relevance of derelict buildings owes much to the meaning people project onto them retrospectively. Hain writes that people in the former GDR only became aware of the role cultural centres had played for forty years after they had been decommissioned – their function had become so self-evident that people did not notice them anymore (ibid.: 55). The renewed awareness of these buildings can be valued positively and negatively. For some, they continue to embody a manipulative and restrictive regime, and thus have a bad image. Other people, however, try by all means to preserve these old cultural centres, because, as Hain suggests, they simultaneously evoke ‘very personal memories, unrestrained joy and creative self-fulfilment’ (ibid.: 53).9 This ambiguity can be illustrated by the fact that, while the Zinnowitzer Kulturhaus fell into disrepair, it is a listed building. Like the vacillating ‘L’ on its facade, the Kulturhaus finds itself in an unclear, liminal condition between ‘not anymore’ (a sociocultural centre) and ‘not yet’ (anything else). Neither its value nor its future have yet been determined. (Lack of) Human Intervention

When describing the current condition of the Kulturhaus, many of the interviewees blamed two kinds of people for the current state of the edifice. On the one hand, there are those who, as in Saager’s recollection,

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‘have damaged everything, dragged out, pinched, stolen, torn out, plundered’. On the other, there are the people who failed to prevent this from occurring. The answer to the question of who is directly responsible for the damage done to the Kulturhaus is typically surrounded with confusion. When I asked Saager whom she suspected, she replied: ‘No one knows, not a soul. … They drove their cars up to the front, in the depths of the night, and tore out everything’. It is striking that whereas the respondents did not mention names with regard to the (active) destruction and the plundering of the Kulturhaus, they were much more precise in pointing out who, in their opinion, was actually (passively) responsible for its dilapidation. Mrs Frohreich, for example (a member of the Historische Gesellschaft or ‘Historical Society’) kept repeating that only one person could be held responsible, namely Ewald John, Zinnowitz’s mayor in the early nineties. Frohreich worked for the municipality at that time, and recalled that John encouraged people to throw away any reminder of the GDR.10 Saager’s views lend support to Mrs Frohreich’s opinion of who was responsible for the dilapidation of the Kulturhaus: Who could have prevented it? Only the municipality could have bothered, but they didn’t. They didn’t care. I must tell you, the mayor made a very revealing remark. We had a small museum, from the establishment of Zinnowitz to this day, or up till that time. It was all thrown away, because the mayor said: ‘That can all be thrown away, that belongs to the Communists, they won’t return’. Literally. Think about it! It still hurts me today, when I think about all that was thrown away then.

The situation in Zinnowitz shows that decay can be seen as a very unnatural phenomenon, accelerated by a lack of human intervention. As Thompson argues, ‘[T]he natural process of decline becomes a little less natural when we realize that the fact that buildings last for generations is dependent upon their receiving “reasonable maintenance”’ (1979: 37). This is also what Victor Buchli refers to, writing that ‘materiality is by no means a non-negotiable and unquestionable empirical reality [sic] it is a produced social one’ (2002: 15). In other words, while the Kulturhaus seems to have fallen prey to both human destructiveness and to natural decline, in reality, both are the result of human intervention, or the lack of it.11 A Touchy Subject

The fate of the Zinnowitzer Kulturhaus is a touchy subject. Compared to similar cases, it was remarkably difficult to find out what happened to it in the last fifteen years, or to uncover which alternative uses were envisaged for it. The municipal officials and property developers I had

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arranged to meet would pretend to have no time for appointments, they would refer me to other people, and they denied me access to relevant (and supposedly public) documents. For example, Volker Wienigk (Head of the Municipal Building Inspection Department) could be no more precise than simply saying that: ‘Many people gave it a try, had ideas, but it never came to anything. It was like this time after time. We, the municipality, also tried to urge certain projects, but it would necessitate such an enormous financial input that it would be unprofitable. Everything always fell through somehow. Then it just turned out like this, it was neglected’. Similarly, Peter Preuss, a hotel owner and property developer, asserted that he would be very pleased to help me, but that it would cost him half a day to sort out relevant documents. Visibly impatient, he summarized the situation in the following words: ‘The history of the Kulturhaus consists of a gigantic pile of papers and a wealth of thoughts and an awful lot that has nothing to do with the object, but with the people’. Naturally, all of them carefully avoided the comparison between Zinnowitz and Heringsdorf, the neighbouring seaside resort whose Kulturhaus has been entirely renovated and has been put into use again as a casino and reception hall. How could they have explained that what happened ‘there’ could not possibly happen ‘here’? Others were very willing to talk about the Kulturhaus, but they chiefly expressed great dissatisfaction at the building’s condition. Within less than twenty-four hours, members of the Historical Society managed to gain access to the archives of their museum, which had been stored away in a cellar for several months during renovation. Within that same time period, no less than five persons expressed their willingness to help me, by recalling their memories about the Kulturhaus, showing me documents related to the building, or scanning and lending me any material I might have needed. Apart from the interest such a local organization might have in possible free publicity, and besides these people’s undeniable helpfulness, the extraordinary cooperation I experienced shows how much the condition of the Kulturhaus touches, or even grieves, people in Zinnowitz. For example, Mrs Frohreich recalled the intervention of Margot Ebert, a famous German actress, who voiced her feelings about the condition of the Kulturhaus in a television report about Zinnowitz: She invited the camera to come a little closer, and then she held up a large picture: ‘Look, I made this picture of the Kulturhaus. For goodness’ sake, help!’ she said. ‘It must not be allowed to decay, this is what it looks like now, it must not be allowed to decay, I protest, I protest! Do you know what they want to make out of it?! A large car park! We won’t allow that, we won’t allow that!’ … We really appreciated it. I really appreciated it. I do not know how others felt about it, but I really, really appreciated it.

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In sum, the future of the Kulturhaus remains uncertain. The edifice finds itself in a liminal state, which causes friction and frustration among those concerned by its fate. This is reminiscent of what Kevin Hetherington (2004) describes as an object that has not yet been properly ‘buried’. Physical Presence and Representational Ambivalence

Hetherington writes that the disposal of objects often occurs in two phases, comparable to a first and a second burial (2004: 168–70). After their first burial, objects are set aside, but they are still physically present, waiting for their ‘soul’ to get a destination, i.e., they are waiting for their (representational) value to be determined. As long as this has not occurred, they cannot be properly buried a second time. Notwithstanding the fact that the term ‘burial’ is perhaps not entirely appropriate with regard to buildings (as was discussed in Chapter 5), the time period between the moment an architectural object’s existence is questioned (comparable to a first burial) and the moment its fate is sealed (comparable to a second burial), still has a unique character. A combination of physical presence and representational absence (or liminal ambivalence) characterizes the present state of the Kulturhaus. In Second Hand Cultures, Nicky Gregson and Louise Crewe describe how clothes that were cast off can be revalued in time. Their observations can be transposed to buildings. In Hetherington’s terms, they give various options for a second burial. First, people can try to retrieve and reemphasize the object’s historic meaning. This occurs through ‘recovery rituals whereby former meanings and traces of ownership are retrieved, recaptured and reimagined’ (Gregson and Crewe 2003: 144). This form of revaluation can either be based on thorough research and a well-founded historic reconstruction, or on an imaginary conceptualization of the period in question (‘imagined history making’) (ibid.: 146–47). The Kulturhaus could, for example, be restored to its original state, used as a museum, a theatre, a cinema and/or a restaurant. Such an approach can sometimes result in the building being no longer animated, but frozen in a real or fictive historic condition. Harbison goes as far as calling a building which was ‘renovated to death’, the real, lifeless ruin: ‘Rehabilitated, it had become a ruin, of a dispiriting sort, losing its history and its defining edge’ (1991: 110, emphasis in original).12 Second, people can try to erase all traces of history through ‘divestment rituals where the commodity problem is … that there is too much trace of previous ownership, traces that need to be expunged, removed’ (Gregson and Crewe 2003: 144). This option puts a building’s lively aura

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at risk. This is what might happen if, as an architecture student recently proposed, the Kulturhaus were to be transformed into a car park. Finally, a building can be used as a basis for something entirely new. Repaired, re-interpreted, perhaps completed by a contemporary extension, it gets a new spirit, as expressed by the term ‘re-enchantment’ (ibid.: 143). This might have happened if the Kulturhaus had been integrated into a multiplex, as a property developer imagined in the mid 1990s. Naturally, besides all these alternatives, an object – architectural or not – can also be disposed of for good, that is, demolished or blown up. Often, none of these options are self-evident, which can explain why it can take years before the knot is finally cut. Lack of Acceptance

The lasting liminal state of the Zinnowitzer Kulturhaus, perhaps embodied in the vacillating letter ‘L’, became synonymous with an inability to assess the edifice’s value. Hetherington writes that: ‘Only when all forms of value have been exhausted or translated and thereby stabilised will the object be permitted to undergo its second burial’ (2004: 169). To date, the Kulturhaus has not been ‘buried’ a second time: its existence has been questioned for many years, but its destiny has not yet been determined.13 The edifice’s physical presence, combined with its representational ambiguity, is experienced by more and more people as a thorn in the flesh. Even Jasiecki, who is very attached to the Kulturhaus, came to see it as a blot on the landscape, and suggested that it would perhaps be better to get rid of it completely: ‘Who will have sympathy for the Kulturhaus’ actual condition? Imagine: People leave the promenade and run into such a shameful blot’. One last parallel can be drawn between the burial of people and that of obsolete buildings. Bodily corruption is often surrounded by taboos and rituals, to prevent pollution or endangerment of the continuity of society. Within Christianity, for example, notions of corruption are even inextricably linked with notions of sainthood: ‘From a theological perspective, … bodily corruption is less a natural process than a moral one, for decay is the final physical result of a sinful (i.e., a ‘corrupt’) life. … If the absence of corruption correlates with and, by implication, signifies the presence of sainthood, conversely the presence of corruption bears witness to sainthood’s absence’ (Lincoln 1989: 125). As a potentially treacherous indicator of spiritual corruption, physiological corruption is thus seldom left overtly perceptible. Without necessarily attaching religious meaning to the condition of the Zinnowitzer Kulturhaus, it is noticeable that its progressive public decay is perceived

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as an undesirable phenomenon. From a cultural-historical perspective, Brigitte Desrochers, in an article entitled ‘Ruins Revisited: Modernist Conceptions of Heritage’, analyses how the Western perception of ruins drastically changed in the second half of the twentieth century. She writes that: ‘Two astonishingly destructive wars, the atomic gloom, a number of environmental disasters and growing problems of waste disposal all contributed to the waning of the romantic outlook on ruins’ (2000: 36). In the highly regulated Western world, especially in urban areas, situations in which nature regains (or tries to regain) the upper hand are relatively rare. This relates to the preservation of monuments at local and global levels, and to extensive regulation of the built environment. A building considered valueless in practical, cultural and (art) historical terms is generally disposed of rapidly, and only seldom is it abandoned to its fate. We may ask again why certain ruins, as exemplified by the Acropolis, are accepted, whereas others cause frustration. The ‘accepted’ type of ruin is usually treated as part of our cultural heritage. The unstable equilibrium between the ephemeral and the durable is no longer present, because official agencies have brought the process of decay to a standstill. Such ruins embody a bygone state of dereliction. With regard to the ‘revolting’ kind of ruin, no one can yet say who will get the upper hand: will the building be definitely reclaimed by Nature, or will people resuscitate and revitalize it? In this respect, Harbison differentiates between historic and contemporary (mainly industrial) ruins: ‘Ancient ruins vividly depict the passage of time, but it is now almost frozen. … Industrial ruins are most special in this: though large and powerful they feel extremely vulnerable. … Old ruins only look doomed … these plants and factories are’ (1991: 121, emphasis in original).14 To come to terms with its undetermined and deteriorating condition, more and more people have begun to envisage the elimination of the Kulturhaus as a preferable alternative to further public decay. This option, however, is not self-evident; it needs to ‘grow’ as the most acceptable alternative. In the revolutionary chaos of 1989, the edifice could have been sacrificed as a formerly cherished embodiment of the regime that was to be overthrown. Such a sacrifice would have been an expressive and symbolic means to distance oneself from the stain of the GDR. But the Kulturhaus outlived the GDR, and the appropriate moment for an impulsive elimination has passed. Nowadays, another justification would be needed in order to eliminate the edifice in a proper and acceptable (i.e., non-wasteful) way. With little hope of interested property developers with enough financial capacity to revitalize the edifice, the municipality is now waiting for the right

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moment to stage its elimination as a regrettable, but necessary and unavoidable, option. Wienigk told me that the only obstacle in the way of demolition is the Kulturhaus’ status as a listed building: Always accumulating projects, accumulating projects, accumulating projects; this will come to nothing. We have now reached the stage that in one or two years, we can show this to the Office for Listed Buildings: We have been working on this for five years now; time and again we have tried to build up something anyhow, but it never comes to anything. Stop telling us that it is protected as a listed building. It should be torn down because no one can make anything out of the object like it is, and it should be profitable somehow.

As was shown with regard to the Kaiserbau, Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss (1964 [1898]) distinguish between two kinds of sacrifice. The first aims to get rid of an impure status, and is accompanied by extensive exit rituals. With the Kulturhaus, this would have been the more revolutionary and impulsive option, relating to a process of distancing oneself from an unwanted regime. The second kind of sacrifice, preceded by a much longer preamble, aims at reaching a superior status. This could occur if the relevant people manage to stage the elimination of the Kulturhaus as being necessary, constructive, and beneficial to society – for example, if sacrifice allows for the building of something new in its place.

Conclusion The dilapidation of a building need not be a natural event; it can also result from (a lack of) human intervention. This explains why a ‘passive letting go’ of the condition of a building can cause deep frustration in people. However, people can rely on tactile experiences to reappropriate succumbing edifices considered to embody (part of) their identities. This use of tactility can turn into an iconoclastic gesture, although not necessarily. It can also take the form of an archaeological exploration, and this reappropriation can lead to a revaluation of rejected architecture, as was the case with the Plattenbauten in former East Berlin. In any event, as dilapidation is generally less natural than one may think, so the reappropriation of dilapidated edifices (whether symbolic or virtual) is always an act of resistance. In Zinnowitz, Wienigk assured me that the municipality would be giving ‘top priority’ to boarding up all openings of the Kulturhaus. One may wonder if, after all these years of non-intervention, this intention is motivated by the wish to protect the edifice or prevent accidents. In anticipation of its possible demolition, keeping people from entering the Kulturhaus can also be seen as an attempt to steer the building toward definitive disposal, by preventing visitors from reappropriating and revaluating it.15

Chapter 9

Exorcizing Remains Architectural Fragments as Intermediaries between History and Individual Experience

Discarding a piece of architecture need not bring its social life to an end. Smashed into pieces, recycled, transformed, the object can live on in fragmented form and act as an intermediary onto which people project memories, frustrations or experiences associated with the original architectural form. A striking example of this is the postwar biography of the National Socialist seaside resort Prora, on the island of Rügen in northern Germany. This building, almost five kilometres long, was not entirely destroyed, but its ‘active life’ came to an (temporary) end in 1991 after both the National Socialist initiators and the later communist occupants had left the building. Partly in ruins, partly abandoned to progressive dilapidation, only a very small part of the resort is today still in use for small-scale projects, while the whole is waiting for an overall concept to be developed and realized. In the media, Prora has often been vilified for its ugliness, its monstrosity and its uncanny aura: ‘a monstrous leisure complex’, ‘the monumental relic of dark days’ (Mikuteit 1994), ‘a foreign body’, ‘a gaping wound’, the ‘materialized antithesis of culture’ (Nickel and Spitza 1994), ‘megalomania in concrete’, a ‘repulsive memorial’ (Knöfel 2000). Nevertheless, each time Prora was transfered to new occupants, as in 1945 and 1991, the building was plundered and remains were taken away, stolen and recycled (Rostock and Zadniček 2001: 90, 101). This raises a number of questions: knowing Prora’s origin and recent history, as well as its actual reputation as a revolting architectural monster, could it not be expected that people would refuse to soil their hands with the remains? If not, what is it exactly that makes these

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Fig. 9.1 The National Socialist seaside resort in Prora. Photo by Mélanie van der Hoorn.

dubious remains simultaneously rejected and attractive? Have they been exorcized in the course of plundering? The most famous and best documented contemporary example of a recycled eyesore is probably the Berlin Wall. In terms of its own biography since 1989, one object stands out in particular: the so-called clip card, that consists of a little plastic holder with a Wall fragment inserted into a postcard. Some of these postcards are photographs of the Wall, usually of a similar colour as the integrated fragment, emphasizing a metonymic relationship. Others are authenticity certificates, stating that the piece of rock in the transparent plastic case is really an ‘original Berlin Wall brick’, ‘a piece of German history’. This peculiar object touches on similar issues to the Prora case: how can such a long-lasting undesired element in the built environment all of a sudden become an attractive souvenir for tourists, a talisman, a valuable object? How does it acquire a value similar to that of an antique, whereby not just the symbolic relevance but also its true authenticity seems to be of major importance?

Visualizing Dismemberment Soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989, people started gathering fragments of the once so detested object. In the following weeks, pickaxes were even offered for rent on the street to allow people to choose their own fragment and hack it away by

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themselves. The following year, after a few sections had been listed for preservation, and large segments of frontier Wall richly decorated with graffiti had been preserved by the East German export-firm Limex to be sold by auction all around the world, some resting fifty thousand tons of concrete, largely attacked by the so-called Mauerspechte or ‘wallpeckers’, were shattered by the Border Troops (commissioned by the Minister for Disarmament and Defence) and reused for the construction of roads (Hertle 1996: 278; Feversham and Schmidt 1999: 66). The fact that such a controversial object could become so fiercely desirable once it had been brought into fragmented form might at first be surprising, but is not an unprecedented phenomenon. More than two centuries ago, sculpted bricks of the French Bastille, fallen during the 1789 Revolution, were spread through the country by the revolutionary Pierre-François Palloy as three-dimensional testimonies to the end of the

Fig. 9.2 Clip card with a Berlin Wall fragment. Photo by Mélanie van der Hoorn.

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monarchy and the beginning of a new era (Lüsebrink and Reichardt 1997). For Linda Nochlin it was the first time that architectural fragments appeared ‘as a positive rather than a negative trope’. Indeed: The fragment, for the Revolution and its artists, rather than symbolizing nostalgia for the past, enacts the deliberate destruction of that past, or, at least, a pulverization of what were perceived to be its repressive traditions. Both outright vandalism and what one might think of as a recycling of the vandalized fragments of the past for allegorical purposes functioned as Revolutionary strategies. (1994: 8)

It seems that people confer on these fragments some inherent metonymic qualities, as if the parts could stand for the whole and the fate of the pieces would seal the fate of the complete building: dissecting the Bastille would irrevocably disrupt the monarchy. Of course, bricks do not possess such power in themselves – objects cannot act as primary agents; but they are used strategically to convey symbolic messages, thereby exerting secondary agency. Similarly, in Berlin, through public dismemberment and fragmentation, the Wall ‘was divested of its murderous aura and invested with magical properties’ (Ladd 1997: 8). The collective dismemberment ritual that sealed the end of the Wall’s dividing role was a unique opportunity for an immense number of people on both of its sides to leave their role of witness and become actively involved as co-performers in the destruction of the edifice and what it embodied. The main motives for gathering fragments of Berlin Wall were expressed in the following, or in similar, words: ‘I wanted a memento of something I had lived with my whole life. There was also a need to feel that I was somehow a part of dismantling the Wall, that I was involved in its end’ (Sussman 2000). Fragments were thus seen as relics in the double (historic and religious) sense of the word. In the first, historic sense, a relic is either a historic object or an object that belonged to a loved or worshipped person, and which is considered very valuable by its owner. We could also speak of reminders, mementos or souvenirs; indeed, these objects evoke memories, help us to remember a certain period, an event or a person.1 In the second, religious sense, the term ‘relic’ either refers to the mortal remains of a saint or to an object that has been in contact with Christ or a saint, in both cases worshipped by a community of believers. When a corpse is treated as a relic, it means that not only its political life, its (political) post-mortem handling, is important, but it is also attributed some intrinsic qualities: the power to bring luck, healing or purification. The same can be said about certain architectural remains: when a fragment gets the character of a (secular) relic, the object in itself – owning it, touching it – has a major relevance

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and the belief in the relic’s inherent qualities determines its further social life. In order to guarantee symbolic effectiveness, a layer of spray paint soon became an indispensable certificate of origin, emphasizing a pars pro toto relationship between fragments and the complete Berlin Wall from which they were issued. More important than how authentic the fragments allegedly were, the paint testified to their owners’ authentic participation in the collective dismemberment ritual. The assumed authenticity of the fragments was an important condition for the success of this ritual, but it did not really matter to what extent the pieces were really authentic – as long as people believed (or pretended to believe) that they were, and as long as people could easily recognize them as ‘true’ remains of the Wall. According to Katherine Verdery, in The Political Life of Dead Bodies, ‘[I]t is not a relic’s actual derivation from a specific body that makes it effective but people’s belief in that derivation’ (1999: 28). It is mainly in this reliquary form – small, fragmented and tangible – that the Wall could function as an intermediary between history and individual experience. Furthermore, the symbolic strength and significance of such collective rituals is due to the fact that every individual can freely interpret relics. As Verdery writes: ‘Remains are concrete, yet protean; they do not have a single meaning but are open to many different readings’ (ibid.).

Shared Experiences The National Socialist seaside resort Prora, built between 1937 and 1939, was meant to host twenty thousand people at any given time and allow German workers cheap holidays in shifts of ten days. The mad dimensions of the 4.5-kilometre-long six-storey building with ten thousand double rooms can still be experienced nowadays; almost an hour is needed to walk along its complete length. At the end of the war, as construction had been interrupted, seven blocks out of eight and part of the main square were structurally complete. The site was taken over by the Red Army, and parts of it were used as accommodation for refugees. From 1950, the East German Kasernierte Volkspolizei (‘People’s Police’) transformed Prora into a barracks and declared it a no-go area. Its successor, the Nationale Volksarmee or NVA (‘People’s Army’), stayed in Prora from 1956 to 1989 and opened a holiday resort for NVA officers in the most southern block, the so-called Walter Ulbrichtheim (‘Walter Ulbricht House’). Houses for employees were put into use and became what is still Prora village. After the fall of the Iron

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Curtain, the West German Army was stationed there, while the former Walter Ulbricht House functioned as a hotel until 1991. Finally, in 1992, after all these occupants had left, Prora opened its gates to a larger public again (Rostock and Zadnicˇek 2001: 90–98, Lichtnau 2000: 30–40). Several small-scale projects were initiated: a youth and a family hostel, a skating hall, a theatre, workshops, museums, art galleries, secondhand shops and a disco. Nothing was done to revitalize the building, however. Today, if five of the original holiday blocks are still in a relatively good state, most of them are empty and their future is uncertain. Most tenants left the edifice after a change of ownership in the summer of 2006.2 In a book detailing the history of the Prora edifice, Jürgen Rostock describes how, after 1945, Russian occupants forced the German population to help them with dismantling the building: doors, windows and radiators were taken off, then turbines, heating systems, wood and rails. Afterwards, the site was released for the gathering of construction material and plundering; people even came from the mainland to pick up tiles or mortar. Plates and bedclothes designed especially for Prora, blankets, bathing trunks and deck chairs were also taken away (Rostock and Zadnicˇek 2001: 90). Kurt Ott, farmer in nearby Lubkow, has lived near Prora for over seventy years. He remembers the postwar period very clearly, as he was recruited by the Russians to dismantle part of the building. Ott’s perspective shows how the report of personal experiences with regard to these fragments can be a means to concretize a more large-scale history. Talking about these objects brings him to position himself in relation to what happened, to justify certain things and condemn others. He recalls how they had to remove the radiators and place objects in one-poundheavy boxes that were shipped off to the USSR, but he insists upon the fact that not only the Russians, but also the English took advantage of this dismantling. However, Ott’s priority when talking was not (only) to show that the occupying forces were sharing fairly, but (also) to prove that everybody was actually doing the same, as a kind of justification for the plundering by the Germans; ‘It was not only the Germans who plundered these trifles, it was also plundered on a large scale’. Refugees also benefited from the Prora plunders, and many inhabitants in Prora’s neighbourhood came to gather remains: ‘Well, everyone from hereabouts helped themselves. … Many went there and picked up pieces of linen, because plenty was lying around’. Ott’s account further clarifies who, in his opinion, had the power during this period of plunder, and who benefited most from the situation. A local translator, for example, with good contacts amongst the Russians, built a complete new house out of Prora material. Nevertheless, it is of note that Ott’s comments are

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also relatively free from value judgements: things would have been lost anyway, so it was good if someone could use them.3 Ott’s account illustrates that, whether a building is partly preserved or not, its dismantlement and the spreading of its remains attract a large number of people; and the consequential scenes of plundering and reuse in this case seem to play a very significant role in coming to terms with the history the building embodies. Prora’s remains occupied an intermediate role in the translation of a large-scale development, abstract themes (such as National Socialist history) and fields of tension (such as occupation by the Russians) on the one hand, and individual experiences on the other. In 1945, although the people involved in the dismantlement of Prora had various nationalities, backgrounds, professions and interests, all of them were able to participate in the transition and share the remains. It was important to start with a clean slate and strip the building of most physical references to its National Socialist origin, but it was even more important that this experience would be a collective one. In other words, the success of what can be termed as an ‘exorcism’ was dependent on its public character. In 1991, when the communist occupants left, fragments of Prora were again recycled, divided and recontextualized. On this occasion, however, things did not go precisely the same way, and accounts of both show that people experienced these two similar events in a very different way. In fact, when new occupants take over everything left by their predecessors, and stop others from becoming involved, then the distribution of remains is less of an exercise in purification, less of an exorcism, and, instead, a very touchy subject capable of evoking deep resentment.

Eloquent Remains Dismemberment is often associated with forgetfulness, as mentioned notably by Victor Buchli and Gavin Lucas (2001c) in their Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past: ‘[M]aterial culture shoulders the larger responsibility of our personal and collective memory. The corollary of this, of course, is that the decay or destruction of these objects brings forgetfulness’ (2001b: 80). Nevertheless, the authors also recognize that ‘the relation between remembrance and forgetfulness is not a linear process but a struggle, a tension – in every memorial, something has been left out or forgotten, in every removal, something is left behind, remembered’ (ibid.).

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Perhaps the Berlin Wall in itself was almost completely eliminated, but its remains were not. Large, painted and thus more valuable Wall segments soon appeared to have a high political potential and were displayed as trophies, monuments or (state) presents at symbolically significant places all over the world, such as the garden of the Vatican or the CIA headquarters in Washington DC. For many people and institutions, the acquisition, gift or display of a segment of Berlin Wall was a means to participate, at least symbolically, in its dismantlement and that of the political order it had come to symbolize. It was a way to exchange, at least apparently, the role of witness for that of co-performer – witnessed by a range of potential clients, business partners, electors or even by an international community.4 Segments of the Wall acquired a metaphoric, more than a metonymic value: they were used as signifiers, referring to a range of signifieds (diplomatic relationships or business partnerships, for example) that were sometimes directly, sometimes very indirectly, connected to the Wall’s initial function and meaning. A few large segments have remained at their initial location in Berlin as references to the vanished Wall – a metonymic relationship further emphasized by the irrevocable and deep scars left by the wallpeckers. Apart from a possible counteraction of forgetfulness by consciously displaying architectural remains as a form of monument, the Wall case also shows that both the dismantlement of a construction and the consequent collective memory of that event are sometimes tightly interwoven when the broken remains themselves, deeply affected by numerous scars, embodying even their own elimination, continue to function as constant reminders of a vanished past. Marita Sturken has written about this subject with regard to the bodies of surviving veterans. Her remarks can easily be translated into ‘architectural casualties’: ‘These veterans’ bodies – dressed in fatigues, scarred and disabled, contaminated by toxins – refuse to let historical narratives of completion stand. Memories of the war have been deeply encoded in them, marked literally and figuratively in their flesh … The wound gives evidence of the act of injuring’ (1991: 132–33). In Prora, scarred remains are also very present. Indeed, at the end of the 1940s, the occupants at the time tried to blow it up, with limited success: the most southern block was eliminated but two northern blocks were ‘only’ severely damaged; the rest remained intact. In the north, ruins in various phases of decline are still visible nowadays. It proved difficult to find reliable information about these demolitions, and especially reasons why the other five blocks were not blown up at that time.5 Still very visible despite the dense vegetation, the ruins in the north constantly raise questions: what happened? Who did it? Why was

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the work not finished? Questioned by tourists and pushed by the constant presence of these three-dimensional reminders, people in and around Prora continue to try to make sense of what happened in the early postwar years. Mr Kaufmann for example, a former NVA officer and guide at Museum Prora, is adamant that when the Russians first arrived in 1945, they wanted to destroy everything that belonged to the Nazis. All resting munitions, he says, were brought together and lit, but the ‘Wotan concrete’, out of which Prora was constructed, appeared to be indestructible and several people lost their life in these attempts. According to Kaufmann, the failure to demolish the building mainly demonstrates Prora’s unprecedented solidity, or even endless persistence: It was decided to let Nature take its course with that building. After all, plants grow even on runways at airports after a few years, but here in Prora Nature doesn’t stand a chance. … Yummy yummy yummy! … When a demolition expert sees this Wotan concrete, his heart starts beating wildly, and he says: ‘Take care of it without my help, this is hopeless!’

Kaufmann took a certain pleasure in describing Prora as an unbeaten colossus – perhaps these exciting stories confer on the area a certain uniqueness or even identity. Furthermore, it may be seen as an illustration of the ambivalence of evil as noted by David Parkin: ‘The essential contestability of notions of evil and the many perspectives on human maleficence and suffering point metaphysically in two main directions: imperfection and over-perfection, between which mankind tries to strike a balance’ (1985: 13). The simultaneous attribution of imperfection and over-perfection to the seaside resort – and to other architectural eyesores as well – translates combined feelings of admiration and repulsion towards an architectural object which is publicly considered to be rejected but can be, simultaneously and unofficially, considered to have a certain appeal. Ott approaches the matter of destruction from a different perspective, although he also remembers very clearly that accidents happened out of ignorance. Nevertheless, this, he says, was not the main motive to stop elimination: Ott clearly recalls a meeting with students from Potsdam, probably in the late 1940s, which took place in Prora in the presence of Wilhelm Pieck, first president of the GDR. He himself had to lend a helping hand at this meeting and witnessed a discussion that, in his opinion, would have far-reaching consequences for the future of Prora: And then these students said: ‘Comrade Pieck, why does this have to be torn down, after all the Trans-Siberian Express, which the Czar built, still exists in Russia under the Communists’. And then Mr Pieck went back home and nothing else was torn down, instead it was rebuilt. How easily things can change. Pieck was really quite a forgiving president, he must have really thought about it.

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This quote shows the wider implications evoked by the fate of the local building. Indeed, Ott touches upon themes that reach further than the pure demolition of certain blocks: a comparison with the remains of another totalitarian regime, the relation between Pieck and ‘the people’, as well as his own opinion about Pieck. In this explanation of Prora’s further destiny, Ott uses his personal experience as a starting point to place Prora in a broader, (inter)national framework. If five of the original holiday blocks are still in a relatively good state, the remains of destroyed blocks, however, present a permanent threat to the rest of the building in the possibility of total demolition. The ruins in the north display successive stages of decline, as if indicating what the future has in store for the other five blocks: there are parts where paint is peeling off and windows are broken, blocks where most of the walls have been removed, skeletons without anything else, accumulations of large bricks and fragments with steel pins, and finally parts that have already been covered with earth. Although the building was listed for preservation in 1994, this gives no guarantee of complete maintenance (Ilyes 1998: 307). Actually, the threat to the still existing parts is twofold: both progressive dilapidation and active destruction are possible destinies. The fear of the former is expressed in a constant watching of the state of the building, as expressed for example by Ursel Steinberg, a former teacher and municipal representative living in Prora since 1966: ‘Look at how the trees are already growing on the roofs. It’s getting more expensive for the investors, it continues to crumble and it’s still being wrecked. People take away the ornamental shrubbery, beautiful slates, the terraces …’. In short, a certain personal attachment to Prora appears in various stories about the ruins: a kind of admiration for a building that, steady as a rock, survived turbulent times and radical breaks; the occasion to evoke a sensible president who, apparently, stood close to the people; a sentiment of becoming accustomed over many years to a familiar environment. After more than seventy years, Prora is a part of the identity of this area. Talking about a possible elimination of the complete complex, Mrs Ott, Kurt Ott’s wife, simply says: ‘Actually, Prora doesn’t bother us, we would really miss it if it were to go. It belongs here’. Ironically, its scarred ruins embody Prora’s very imperfection. The ruins’ raison d’être is, perhaps, the fear of what some see as Prora’s overperfection; it is oversized, with an almost stubborn steadfastness which, literally and figuratively, places it ‘beyond the limits’. On a more abstract level, the prominent presence of scarred ruins in Prora can be considered a kind of ‘safety valve’ putting the monumental, permanent

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and impressive character of the building into perspective, and thereby removing some of its potentially threatening aura. The affected remains embody human agency, while showing that it is possible to ‘revolt’ against the building’s own presence and agency. These remains point to the limits of Prora’s strength and durability and emphasize its ephemeral quality.

The Desire to Possess As soon as the Berlin Wall was fragmented, it became highly desirable. In the introduction to this chapter, amazement was voiced on seeing fragments sold in the form of clip cards. Perhaps this astonishment is partly due to not initially regarding the Wall as a commodity. However, Igor Kopytoff’s concept of commodity, i.e., ‘a thing that has use value and that can be exchanged in a discrete transaction for a counterpart’ (1986: 68), clarifies this specific case. In general, it is unusual for the ‘symbolic inventory of a society’ (ibid.: 73) to be commoditized. Especially just after the fall, we still perhaps thought of the Wall as something ‘uncommon, incomparable, unique, singular’ (ibid.: 69), or at least as a so-called terminal commodity, ‘in which further exchange is precluded by fiat’ (ibid.: 75). Nevertheless, the Wall had at least once been subject to commoditization, evidenced by the recorded production costs for each segment. Whether it could still be called a commodity at the time of its fall or not, it became subject to a process of commoditization as soon as pieces of it started to be sold.6 The chaos following the fall of the Wall allowed many to appropriate segments – some people, who directly recognized a gap in the market, built up sufficient supplies for the next decades. A similar transitory period occurred in Prora after 1945 and gave many people the opportunity to take part in its dismantlement. In 1991, however, the situation was very different: objects from Prora were inaccessible to people who had lived or worked next to, or in the building, for many years. Not only did the new occupants keep the site under their control, but – after appropriating the most valuable objects – they also burnt down or threw away most of what was left. In the early twenty-first century, a minuscule percentage of the objects from the GDR period were put up for sale every weekend in a nearby secondhand shop. A further few were displayed in the NVA Museum (one of the three Prora museums) – reducing any personal experience of these showcased remains to a purely visual one. Most objects from the GDR period, however, did not survive the spring clean of 1991. Recalling these events

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still provokes deep indignation. Steinberg, for example, deplores what happened and crystallizes her regrets in the unforgettable image of pianos that were simply thrown from the fifth floor into big containers. Kurt Ott’s brother, who was working in Prora at that time, had to burn masses of things for many days: First of all came them from over there, the West Germans, and they pocketed the best things: linens, carpets, everything – the finest, the newest. All the rest was burnt. … Mountains of it, for days on end things were burnt, brand-new things, mountains of ashes. They were like madmen, grabbing and dismantling things and for days they just burnt stuff. … And with so much poverty in Germany! They could at least have given it to the many poor people. … My brother could only shake his head and said: ‘You’ll never believe what we are burning up there! Such a shame!’

The brothers Ott are overwhelmed with incomprehension in the face of so much waste, as well as the inequality between those who appropriated the nicest things and those who did not get anything. Those active in the plunder of 1991 are clearly identified as ‘them from over there, the West Germans’. Not only is there an undeniable incomprehension between East and West, but former residents and workers have also been, in this context – and contrary to the situation in 1945 – relegated by the West German newcomers to the status of powerless witnesses, condemned to watch other people carrying out massive destructions. The enormous frustration provoked by insensitive disposal and what, for many, was a massive waste, can be further explained by the fact that East German material culture played a very important role in the expression of an East German identity after German reunification. Paul Betts writes that ex-GDR consumer objects ‘have emerged as new historical markers of socialist experience and identity. … Where GDR goods once served as a source of perennial dissatisfaction and embarrassment, they later became emblems of pride and nostalgia’ (2000: 734, 741). Betts’ comments are a good reminder that ideas about the (un)desirability of specific material culture are subject to change, particularly in periods of political or cultural transition. Objects that first embodied dissatisfaction may suddenly embody a valuable and reassuring stability in times of change and uncertainty. Even in relation to the Berlin Wall, Polly Feversham and Leo Schmidt have suggested a concept of emotional comfort and quote Auguste Comte: ‘[O]ur intellectual equilibrium is largely and primarily derived from the fact that material objects with which we come into contact every day do not change, or only do so to a slight degree, and offer us a picture of permanence and constancy’ (Comte, in Feversham and Schmidt 1999: 124).

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Possessing in Order to Take Possession It was mentioned before that many people wanted to acquire a fragment of the Berlin Wall as a historic relic – a memento, or souvenir. The Wall became a historic relic, not from the perspective of public museums but mainly in the private sphere, with fragments of it displayed on home mantelpieces. Two aspects typically characterize the privatization of this well-known public symbol: first, ‘[T]he events it witnessed can be viewed vicariously from a position of safety and distance’, and second, ‘[T]heir importance lies in the fact that we can interact with the past by both personalizing and actually handling them’ (Feversham and Schmidt 1999: 128). In other words, the new, private context in which the fragments are brought takes away their threatening aura and offers the possibility of a tactile, individual experience. Thus the exorcism of the Berlin Wall – and possibly other architectural eyesores as well – not only occurred through its collective dismemberment and appropriation, but most importantly through the tactile and individual experience that the possession of fragments made possible. When people own the remains individually, the latter can come to ‘serve as repositories of private histories and sentimental reflections’ (Betts 2000: 753). In Prora, this phenomenon finds a perfect illustration in Mrs Ott’s comments about her Prora tea towels (complete with initials of the National Socialist Deutsche Arbeitsfront, or ‘Labour Front’) inherited from her mother-inlaw. Indeed, what Prora’s remains evoke to some, does not necessarily have political connotations – while the same remains are, for others, inherently political. Talking about the tea towels, Mrs Ott first mentions their excellent quality – something unequalled nowadays. It brings her to describe Prora in the same terms: ‘See, nowadays everything is worn out, these little cloths they use as towels. That was so fine! It’s lovely, isn’t it? This quality! All of Prora consists of the same quality. All of the other houses will fall down before Prora does’. When her grandchildren started to study and she wished them good luck, Mrs Ott wanted to give them one of these towels. Her grandson took one, but her granddaughter refused, as she feared that other people in the student residence would perhaps not have such an apolitical view on the three DAF initials. When a three-dimensional object cannot be owned physically, then stories, anecdotes and reflections about the remains can be a means to take possession of it and of the history it embodies in a more symbolic way; this was also illustrated by the various accounts about Prora’s ruins. What makes architectural remains particularly attractive and suitable intermediaries between large-scale history and individual experience is the fact they are, in Susan Stewart’s terms, ‘souvenirs of death’, that is,

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Fig. 9.3 Works of art by Klaus Böllhoff: Prora Putzen, Proradies, Oproration, Prorarität (‘Prorarity’). Photos by Mélanie van der Hoorn.

‘They mark the horrible transformation of meaning into materiality more than they mark, as other souvenirs do, the transformation of materiality into meaning’ (1984: 140). It could be added that this peculiar character is the core relevance of architectural remains, as their possessors are left completely free to transform the remaining materiality into a completely new meaning.7 In that sense, some of the most interesting Prora objects were to be found in Klaus Böllhoff’s atelier, an artist who came to Prora at the end of 2000 together with Rosa Russo, a photographer, and stayed until 2004, when the former resort started to change hands. At the entrance of his workshop, named Proradies, Böllhoff had displayed a whole collection of works of art based on Prora. Böllhoff is not just a normal painter; he is also a word painter. The starting point for his work about Prora is always a word, distilled from a personal experience in, or with, the place. He explains that the name of his workshop, Proradies, is not just the two German words ‘Prora’ and ‘Paradies’ blended together, suggesting that Prora is a paradise. To him, it gets its full significance when pronounced in English as ‘Prora dies’ (in two words): Prora needs to die, to be a paradise. Here we may recognize a combination of the repulsion and admiration mentioned before. Böllhoff’s works of art hardly need any explanation to get a

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deeper significance; they are in themselves carriers of deeper meanings, perhaps because they are, actually, words in a three-dimensional form and most of them are made of Prora material such as old curtains or floorcloths. Other examples are: Proramus (‘We, the People from Prora’), Prora et Labora, Proradox, Proraletarier aller Länder (‘Proraletarians From All Countries’), Insproration, Prorakel (‘Proracle’) or Proradiator. Böllhoff’s work does not just consist of the capricious lines of thought of a highly imaginative artist; it is a well-considered reflection on and interaction with the site, that he is sharing with a large public. When Böllhoff and Russo arrived, they organized a cleaning day, Prora Putzen, for which they invited a whole range of people: friends, neighbours, politicians, journalists. A large Prora Putzen wall segment, displayed near the entrance, remained from this cleaning campaign. Wondering what he would give people as a thanks for their help on that day, Böllhoff decided to give them a small fragment of Prora with Prora Putzen as a signature – an interestingly symbolic echo and physical resemblance to the dispersal of the Wall fragments. One room, however, as Russo explained to me, remained very problematic in Proradies. She and Böllhoff later baptised it Konti, because it was, in their opinion, contaminated: it had been a medical room during NVA-times and stank terribly. Russo is not the only one to report about a weird ‘Prora smell’, which is, apparently, part of the Prora experience. In a newspaper article about the former youth hostel, located in the same block as the Walter Ulbricht House, one can read the following description of a ‘total Prora experience’: It stinks of FDGB, the coffee tastes of it. Nevertheless, or perhaps precisely because of it, the hotel can be recommended. Ordinary citizens can complain here about the hideous things which ten years ago decorated their own bedroom: eggshell-coloured wardrobes, art prints on press board. That’s the Prora principle: your feelings rush delightfully from enthusiasm to shudder as much as on the roller coaster. (Rehlein and Härtel 1999, author’s translation)

Unfortunately, the article does not mention how the FDGB or Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (the GDR holiday organization) smells. Perhaps it is the smell of Wofasept, another name given to the ‘Prorasmell’ on a website about GDR-related themes (Wulf 1998). One can read about a typical GDR product for personal hygiene and – with a slightly different chemical formula – about an all-purpose cleaner with exactly the same name! The smell of Wofasept is described as a stale, suffocating vapour. This was not the opinion of the producers in Wolfen, as we can read in the advertisement from 1951 shown on the website: it shows a fictive woman, who is the pride of the factory where she works

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because she proves that it is not just a man’s thing to find better and new production methods. Nevertheless, despite her ‘almost masculine’ decisive force, she manages to keep her feminine appeal thanks to Wofasept, the nice, new antiseptic. Shortly: ‘Wofasept-spezial leaves you feeling fresh, clean and germ-free. The modern woman should always have it at home’. Whether it was the smell of Wofasept or not that contaminated Böllhoff’s workshop, if Russo is to be believed, it was extremely difficult to get rid of it, necessitating the employment of almost magical skills. She recalls how she and Böllhoff met a man on the occasion of a later Prora Putzen: a professional cleaning person, but also in a mystical sense, since, ‘He also cleans symbolically’. He spent hours in the contaminated room – where other people could not stand for more than a few minutes – scratched the floor and the walls, took samples, mixed them with other liquids, and finally managed to get rid of the smell. The whole description sounds like a secular exorcism. With the bottles he had used, Böllhoff made his work Prorasept. Russo concludes, ‘And when they are reopened, the Prora spirit will come out’. Böllhoff chose to live and work in and with Prora – he opted for a direct confrontation and fight with the colossus. His objects are interesting because they are the direct offspring of an individual experience – a combination of fascination and sober mindedness, interest and humour, straightforwardness and subtlety – out of which the artist has created something new that he is sharing with others. His objects are made of Prora remains and some of them, even literally, embody something that happened in and to Prora, for example, Prora Putzen and Prorasept. With or in these objects, Böllhoff – or his officiator, the ‘symbolic cleaner’ – really faces the colossus and articulates (his) life in and with Prora. The example of Prorasept shows how many different levels of experience can be associated with such an object: the direct reference to a famous GDR product, Wofasept, and the range of cultural meanings connected to it, as expressed in the advertisement; the olfactory experience, that probably all people who ever lived or worked there will remember as an essential element in the Prora experience; the purification ritual carried out in Böllhoff’s workshop and the fear of an eventual comeback if anybody dared to open the bottles.

Conclusion Beyond the relevance of destruction in itself, this chapter draws attention to the relationship between architectural remains and the whole object

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they used to constitute. After a building has been dismantled, its pieces can continue to embody its history – at the same time, individuals can, and do, transform and reinterpret the fragments. As such, the pieces of dismembered constructions (their circulation and recycling) constitute relevant intermediaries between large-scale history and personal experience. The example of Prora suggests that, in order to remove the stain of reputation that rests on a building, it is necessary to reduce the architectural structure to a smaller scale, to bring it within the reach of many people. When an edifice cannot be appropriated physically, storytelling constitutes a powerful means to keep, or get, a grip on it. Yet a physical confrontation with the remains also has a crucial importance, as confirmed, notably, by the deep frustration expressed by people when deprived of such experience. An edifice’s fragmentation enables it to move from the public into the private sphere, and grants people an individual and tactile experience of the former eyesore. An edifice can not only be fragmented, but also miniaturized, as illustrated by the sculpted Bastille bricks described by Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink and Rolf Reichardt (1997), or integrated into something entirely new, as in the work of Klaus Böllhoff. In the anecdotes told about its remains, Prora does not at all appear as the embodiment of perverted dictatorships or a military megalomania. It is important to recall here that the National Socialists never put Prora to use: except for its construction, there was no National Socialist history in Prora. During the GDR period, people in Prora belonged to a certain elite; these people will thus also not recall Prora as something negative (Ilyes 1998: 304). Nevertheless, essentially ‘non-Proraners’ started to invent myths about Prora and to refer to it in increasingly negative terms – something that can partly be explained by its forty years of history as a no-go area and the following mystery and ignorance surrounding the site. Whatever kind of uncanny aura has been attributed to Prora as a mysterious, negative or haunted place, the biography of its remains embodies quite a different significance. There is no occurrence of the exorcism of Prora’s remains here: the leftovers have never been evil in themselves, and people in Prora who handle, own and talk about them, do not express repulsion or disgust towards them. At most, other people, mainly outsiders, attribute to the objects an evil character for what they represent in their opinion. Thus it is more correct to say that in the biography of these remains, which includes their appropriation, circulation and integration into another context, the original site of Prora is dissociated from the evil that people have afterwards attributed to it: remains are not exorcized; they are exorcizing.

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To conclude, just as with disposal, there can be two raisons d’être to the so-called afterlife of a sacrificed architectural eyesore. First, attempts can be made to clear the edifice of its impure status, a process previously referred to as ‘secular exorcism’. Second, efforts can be made to grant the edifice superior status. This elevation will be discussed in the next chapter, and consists of rehabilitating the memory of eyesores, either by reconstituting or replacing the former edifice, or by referring to it in a more positive light.

Chapter 10

In Fond Memory of a Rejected Edifice Reaffirming Agency by Rehabilitating Vanished Eyesores

In the previous chapter the afterlife of eyesores was analysed through tracing the relevance of fragmentary remains of rejected buildings. It was shown that extremely undesired architecture can become attractive once it is fragmented, or once fragments from it are made available. The transition from a complete and undesired to a dismembered and desired edifice might seem to represent primarily a radical break with the previous biography of the edifice. In this transition, however, the persistence of a continuous (though altered and challenged) material form appeared to be of crucial importance. Especially in times of sociopolitical upheaval, the fate of architectural remains forms a tangible concretization of more abstract questions. When a material remainder exists, people can keep a grip – literally and figuratively – on their variable surroundings. Even in a situation of war such as in Sarajevo, where many edifices seemed to signify that after the siege life would never be the same, dealing with the built environment – notably by attempting to rescue certain pieces, or testifying to what happened – appeared to be relevant to many people’s experiences of survival. Architectural remains, however much damaged or fragmented, allow people to bridge the gap between different periods in time on the one hand, and between history and individual experience on the other. In the case of Prora in the 1990s, much frustration arose when local inhabitants were denied access to the resort’s remains. Indignation can also arise when people feel excluded by deviations from the initial purpose of a building – as with the original inhabitants of the Plattenbauten in former East Berlin, for instance. In these two cases,

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feelings of frustration were perhaps assuaged because the building in itself was not (completely) cleared away, but there are other situations in which edifices that were (almost) completely eliminated or transformed continue to haunt a place many years after their removal or transformation. While some people previously wanted to dispose of the buildings, others, at a later stage, attempt to rehabilitate their memory and, in so doing, show the former eyesores in a better light. These ‘rehabilitators’, in other words, reconsider the former rejection: they question the previous questioning of the buildings’ existence, as well as the fate of their material form. Such rehabilitations form the subject of the present chapter. Ways to rehabilitate the memory of formerly undesired buildings are as manifold as ways to reject the edifices. They manifest themselves in reconstructions, memorials, references, replacement buildings, photographs, maps, works of art, books (Arean, Vaquero and Casariego 1995; Den Hollander 1985; Hobhouse 1971; Hoffmann 1997), computer simulations, and so on. The focus in this chapter is on rehabilitations visible in public space, that have a three-dimensional, material form: reconstitutions, such as that of the former Parisiana Nightclub in Budapest; replacements, with the eventual integration of fragments from the former edifice, such as in the New Synagogue in Dresden or the new Church of the Holy Mary in Budapest; and references to discarded edifices, such as the Hungarian National Theatre in Budapest.1 Rehabilitations could be perceived as an attempt at continuing a rejected building’s existence by restoring a material form reminiscent of the vanished edifice. It will be shown, however, that rehabilitated edifices consist of new material forms, in a new sociocultural context, with new purposes – and that the apparent continuity with former eyesores is often illusory. Robert Bevan already noted, in this regard, that: ‘Rebuilding can be as symbolic as the destruction that necessitates it. … What were once unintentional monuments – the places of worship, libraries and fountains of everyday life – by their rebuilding can become new, intentional monuments to the events that caused their destruction’ (2006: 176).2 Furthermore, rehabilitations are not always solutions that pacify feelings and attitudes towards controversial eyesores; rather, as with the case of the New Hungarian National Theatre, they can be as controversial as the biography of the buildings to which they refer. Two questions thus form the starting point for investigation: what brings people to treat buildings as (human) deceased, and put so much energy into rehabilitating the memory of former eyesores many years after their ‘death’? Which fields of tension do such rehabilitations embody?

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Lamented Martyrs Ways of dealing with (regrettably) vanished buildings can present remarkable parallels with people’s attitudes towards human deceased: this is strikingly illustrated by the memorial for the Church of the Holy Mary in Budapest, whose shape has clearly been derived from that of a headstone. Located in a prominent place on a significant avenue, the large cross, adorned with a floral wreath, catches the eye from far away. Next to it on the same pedestal, a commemorative plate indicates: ‘Here used to stand the Church of the Holy Mary. It was torn down by Mátyás Rákosi in 1951’.3 Mention of the edifice’s birth date, or the addition ‘at the age of twenty’ would have completed the similitude with a tomb. Finally, a large fragment of concrete at the foot of the cross conveys the impression that the mortal remains have been brought to rest there.4 Neil Harris, who used the human life cycle as a model to investigate the life and death of buildings, has suggested that, ‘Great buildings are generally assumed to have been murdered; the idea of their dying a natural death seems unacceptable’ (1999: 166). This also applies to the Church of the Holy Mary, designed by Iván Kotsis and inaugurated in 1931. It was dedicated to the tenacity of the Catholic Church and to the victims of the Republic of Councils of 1919 (Sinkó 1992: 84) – a short-

Fig. 10.1 Monument to the Church of the Holy Mary. Photo by Mélanie van der Hoorn.

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lived communist dictatorial regime with far-reaching consequences under which the parish of the Holy Mary had been created. Those who commissioned it intended to ‘raise a church to proclaim and serve, under the prevailing conditions of truncation and material decay, the ideal of an integrated Greater Hungary, the historical Regnum Marianum’ (Prakfalvi 2003: 47). No more than twenty years later, in 1951, the edifice was blown up to give way to a parade ground with a gigantic statue of Stalin, while some of the stones were used as building material for an enormous grandstand (Móra 2001: 101). In an article about the raising and demolition of monuments, Katalin Sinkó wrote that, ‘[T]he appearance of the Stalin statue … meant the symbolic destruction of Hungary’s former identity’, while ‘the image of Stalin’s heel resting above the spot formerly occupied by the church’s altar is vividly impressed on the minds of the Budapest public’ (1992: 84). Ironically, the statue was removed a few years later during the Revolution of 1956 against Russian domination (Åman 1992). At the end of the 1990s, the parish of the Holy Mary commissioned Attila Illés-Kreutzer to design a new church in a different district, and the memorial was erected on the site where the old church used to stand. Between the moment when a building’s existence starts to be questioned and the moment when its fate is finally sealed, several things are supposed to occur: the building’s value has to be assessed, a physical treatment (preservation, abandonment, transformation, elimination) has to be determined in accordance, and acceptance for this fate needs to be achieved. Sometimes, buildings can remain for many years in a situation in which their assessment has not been concluded, or where decisions have not been taken with regard to the fate of their material form. The protracted length of the procedure often arouses indignation. This is the situation in which the Kulturhaus in Zinnowitz finds itself: its existence is undoubtedly questioned, but its value has not been determined, and its fate not yet sealed. On the other hand, a building’s material fate may be sealed, despite the fact that the necessary consensus of opinion was not achieved – as when disposal continues to be perceived by many as unnecessary wastage. Such situation can, again, provoke deep frustration, because the physical treatment that the edifice receives is discordant with the (emotional, symbolic, historic) value that it represents for a significant number of people – as with the recent renovation of the Oslobod¯enje carcass in Sarajevo. In line with Kevin Hetherington’s notion of ‘unsuccessful doorkeeping’, when the disposal of a building has been unsatisfactorily concluded (i.e., without the necessary acceptance by a significant number of people), the issue of the building’s fate at a later stage some-

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times ‘unexpectedly returns or attains a presence and shocks us into a recognition of its significance’ (2004: 170). These remarks lead Hetherington to consider ‘improperly buried’ objects as ‘ghosts’ or ‘revenants’ – literally, ‘those who return’ – whereby, ‘The representational figure of unfinished or unmanaged disposal is the ghost and its agency is expressed in the idea of haunting’ (ibid., emphasis in original).5 The confrontation with so-called ghosts arouses feelings of guilt, because they embody ‘an unacknowledged debt’ that we ‘owe for the failure to dispose of something in the proper manner’ (ibid.). Guilt, however, is not the only possible reaction towards ghosts: they can also frighten (Rév 1995: 26), challenge or even enrage. This especially holds true for architecture because, as far as buildings are concerned, they do not reappear by themselves, but need to be rediscovered in order to be purposefully rehabilitated.6 As a consequence, those who rehabilitate socalled architectural ghosts by definition blame those who disposed of the buildings in the first place. Attitudes towards former architectural eyesores whose disposal has been unsatisfactorily concluded frequently show striking similarity with attitudes towards martyrs. This suggests, once again, a parallel between discarded buildings and human deceased, more specifically persons (generally saints) who suffered a cruel and undeserved death. Martyred edifices, typically, fell prey to their executioners while bystanders did not, or could not, do anything but witness. István Rév has analysed people’s preoccupation with the afterlife of symbolically relevant human corpses, which strikingly comes to the fore during, or after, periods of revolutionary upheaval. In these circumstances, celebrating martyrs is not only crucial because it elevates the latter to a superior status, but with them also those who dare to point out the executioners: ‘[T]he torturer is forced to appear in the foreground, together with the scapegoats, so that the naming and sentencing give dispensation to the silent majority. Trying and sentencing them is a retroactive act, not just of justice but of resistance. Those daring to name the sins could not be sinners themselves’ (1995: 32). In the monument to the Church of the Holy Mary, the suggestion that the dynamited edifice should be seen as a martyr is emphasized by the use of symbols with Christian connotations. The cross to commemorate the old church, notably draws a parallel between the edifice and Christ as the ultimate martyr. Feelings of guilt, as well as the idea that ‘those daring to name the sins could not be sinners themselves’, also gain a particular dimension against this background. The big sinner is explicitly named: Mátyás Rákosi, who advocated, among other things,

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‘limitations on religious freedom, on the freedom of worship, the banning of religious movements, societies and organizations’ (Tomka 1991: 59). These restrictions were particularly virulent in the early 1950s, and specifically directed against the Catholic Church as ‘the only institution bold enough to defy totalitarian authority’ (ibid.: 60). A tragic death and a sacrificed existence grant a martyr a superior status. Therefore, although the death of a martyr is presented as particularly cruel, undeserved and revolting, it is nonetheless not meant to be overcome, because that would correspond to the loss of status as martyr: There is no life after death – at least not for the martyrs on this earth. Death makes the martyr, and his death rewrites, reinterprets, his whole life. … His life freezes at the moment of his death, and one cannot warm up his body and give a new worldly life and then a new death to him. A martyr who survives the death that made a martyr of him is an antimartyr, a poor mortal figure. (Rév 1995: 35)

Similarly, through the memorial for the Church of the Holy Mary, although the old edifice’s elimination continues to be strongly contested (or better: is contested again), this contesting is not an attempt to reverse the memorial and reinstate the Church. Moreover, the parish has continued to exist, and has taken up residence in a new church in another district. The memorial is, therefore, less of a confirmation of the church’s status at the time of its elimination, than its elevation to the status of martyr under new circumstances. Dario Gamboni already remarked with regard to works of art that people either destroy them completely in an attempt to eradicate their memory entirely or damage them without complete elimination (1997: 19). When wounds are left visible they can testify to the fate that was inflicted on the object. Similarly, edifices can be entirely reconstituted in order to efface the void that was left after their removal, or they can be partially left in an altered or damaged state, to testify to what has happened. Had the Church of the Holy Mary been reconstructed, this would have erased what happened to it and, by so doing, rewritten its biography: the building would perhaps, in Rév’s words, have gained ‘a new worldly life’, but it would simultaneously, and most of all, have lost its special status as a martyr.

Mythologized Anti-Martyrs Despite the fact that an altered material form would testify to the rejection of a building in its initial shape and that it would, as such, constitute a necessary condition for its elevation to the status of martyr,

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reconstitutions – whether complete or partial – frequently occur. ‘Reconstitution’ as a collective term refers to a multitude of operations that aim at restoring an edifice’s initial appearance by effacing the traces of previous damage or alteration. If the building in question was removed or very seriously damaged, reconstitution can consist of a complete or partial reconstruction, either with (supposedly) authentic or with new material, or a combination of both. In other cases, reconstitution can also consist of making previous transformations undone, for example by uncovering initial walls that were hidden by new additions. Recently, famous examples of reconstitutions were given by the reconstruction of the Mostar Bridge and the Frauenkirche (‘Church of Our Lady’) in Dresden.7 Less obvious, perhaps, is the reconstitution of buildings that were not destroyed but transformed, such as the former Parisiana Nightclub in Budapest. Throughout the twentieth century it underwent such radical metamorphoses that, from the 1960s onwards, one could rightly wonder whether the initial building still existed or not. Designed by the progressive architect Béla Lajta in 1908, in a period characterized by architectural eclecticism, it had a very simple and therefore conspicuous facade. It ‘demonstrated the power of new monumentality and of new architectural design in that very genre i.e. the theatre and music-hall, in which the public least expected it’ (Dávid 1991: 14). Having suffered serious financial problems, the institution changed ownership and the building was transformed into a theatre by László Vágó in 1921.8 It was renamed Lujza Blaha Theatre and the interior adaptations required by the change of use were realized in NeoEmpire style. Vágó further ‘broke the provoking emptiness of Lajta’s facade with an inscription and a hood above the entrance’ (ibid.), setting the stage for a series of increasingly fundamental face-lifts. A more radical transformation of the former Parisiana’s outside appearance occurred in 1952, when two series of large square windows were cut in the facade to provide light for the offices behind. The marble cover was replaced with plaster; concrete pillars and ceramic decorations were added; and it was renamed Jókai Theatre. Ten years later, in 1962, the facade was altered beyond recognition when the angels on top of it were removed and it was covered with a steel-andglass curtain wall. In the late 1980s, art historian Ferenc Dávid and the two architects Tamás König and Péter Wagner envisaged reconstituting the initial facade on the basis of original photos and drawings. Their proposal, together with a more large-scale interior adaptation to the needs of the time, was commissioned by the Municipality of Budapest. Nowadays,

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except for a small detail on the roof and the initial ‘Parisiana’ letters on top of the facade that were changed into a more timeless ‘Színház’ (theatre), the building can hardly be distinguished from its initial shape as registered on early photos. In the foreword to an exhibition catalogue about the reconstitution of Lajta’s design, András Hadik (1991) placed the ‘martyrdom’ of the former Parisiana Nightclub among many other mourned edifices that passed away ‘too early’ and expressed the hope that this rehabilitation would herald a new era. Art historian Endre Morvay (1999) described the new theatre as, ‘A Phoenix Risen From the Dust’. Whether or not such reconstitution is, or should be, appreciated, a few things can be said with regard to what it embodies. From a material point of view, it corresponds to the creation of an image of completeness by making previous alterations supposedly undone. More abstractly, Rév has described a process of ‘time compression’ as a ‘tool of historical healing’ consisting of ‘bringing the past closer to the present’ (1995: 32).9 The sense of these abstract notions becomes very clear at the sight of a sequence of photographs of the facade of the former Parisiana: the time between its creation in the early twentieth century and its reconstitution in the 1990s has literally been put into brackets. Predilection for a (frequently idealized) more distant past is relatively common in times of radical change, like in Hungary in the early post-1989 years. Symbols of the past, namely, ‘attain particular effectiveness during periods of intensive social change when communities have to drop their heaviest cultural anchors in order to resist the currents of transformation’ (Cohen 1985: 102). András Török, author and lecturer in Urban History and former Deputy State Secretary for the Arts, explained that in the 1980s a new attachment to ‘the value of old things’ had already arisen in Hungary.10 According to Richard Esbenshade it is characteristic of EastCentral European countries to ‘show a varying but undeniable mix of

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Fig. 10.2 Former Parisiana Nightclub in 1908, 1921, 1952, 1962 and 1990: putting time into brackets. First three photos by unknown photographer (second and third by courtesy of Hungarian Architecture Museum, Budapest); last two photos by Gábor Barka.

rehabilitated traditions and historical figures and the repression of problematic wartime and postwar memories’ (1995: 80). Rév draws similar conclusions with regard to Hungary in particular, and adds that, ‘According to post-Communist revisionism, Communism in Hungary was the tragic result of a conspiracy organized from abroad; it was the work of outsiders in the service of foreign powers, and as such, was no part of Hungarian history’ (1995: 33). Against this background, it may not appear very surprising that in the 1990s the former Parisiana was brought back to its appearance of 1908. Although reconstitution may act as a supposedly comforting confirmation of a historically remote and deeply rooted identity, it also effaces all traces of disposal, alteration or damage that the edifice went through and which could testify to its eventual martyrdom. In sum, by granting edifices a ‘new worldly life’, reconstitution creates antimartyrs. Besides, as exemplified by the Parisiana Nightclub with its new interior behind a supposedly ‘authentic’ facade, reconstitution is often based on an illusory (and simplified) image of a building which is actually long gone, and which used to embody much more than what this image reflects. Finally, reconstitution is based on the questionable assumption that, first, it forms the mirror image of deconstitution – as if the process of disposal, alteration or damage could simply be ‘rewound’ like a film tape – and that, second, the restoration of material form enables the continuation of representational aspects. Seen from this perspective, reconstitution suffices to annul regrettable alterations and to reestablish the wholeness of the edifice as well as the significance it embodies. Yet such a procedure ignores the contested legitimacy which is so central to the significance of many acts of disposal. In Bevan’s words, ‘There is a faith that rebuilding can achieve a new certainty even if the destruction itself has already demonstrated the fragility of such comforts’ (2006: 184).

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According to Adrian Forty and Wolfgang Sonne, rather than being dependent on each other, material and representational aspects actually seem to counterbalance each other. Forty, in his introduction to The Art of Forgetting, has questioned the common (Western) assumption that ‘memories, formed in the mind, can be transferred to solid material objects, which can come to stand for memories and, by virtue of their durability, either prolong or preserve them indefinitely beyond their purely mental existence’ (1999: 2). If these premises can be challenged – and Forty explicitly and convincingly does – then material decay and destruction no longer necessarily imply forgetting, and (re)constitution and preservation are no guarantee for memory. Forty even states that iconoclasm, ‘rather than shortening memory, … is just as likely, whether intentionally or not, to prolong it’ (ibid.: 12). With several concrete examples, he also shows that reconstructions, inversely, rather than acting as repositories for memory, are just as likely to induce forgetting. Nevertheless, Forty and Sonne agree that the creation and destruction of material forms have something to do with processes of remembering and forgetting. In an article about ‘The City and the Act of Remembering’, Sonne describes material and representational aspects on a larger, urban development scale and suggests that they actually alternate with each other: ‘[T]he relationship between the form and the myth of the city cannot be defined in general terms. Rather, they both have varying influences at different times: In times of considerable social change, the form of the city generates permanence, in times of large-scale material destruction it is the city myths which preserve continuity’ (1995: 92). On a smaller scale, if an edifice has been unsatisfactorily disposed of (eliminated, or transformed beyond recognition), people may want to reaffirm the agency of which they were deprived when the edifice was liquidated. If the object does not exist anymore, this reclaimed agency can only become manifest in a merely representational act: in a substituting gesture, people tend to mythologize the former eyesore. Reconstitution, thus, rather than restoring a previously existing material form, actually consists of creating something new. The monuments to which this gives rise are generally more related to the present than to the past, as Gert Mattenklott affirms from the onset in an article on memorials: Monuments are forms of the afterlife. From the moment of their creation they begin a life of their own in the minds of those who wished them into an existence; although certainly also functioning to some extent as the sign of a past person or event, they are primarily a variable for the relationship of a respective present to a certain history. (1993: 27)

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At first instance, perhaps, the reconstitution of the Parisiana seems to have brought Lajta’s work back to life. Yet as a ‘variable for the relationship of a respective present to a certain history’ in the truest sense of the term, it is, rather, a re-creation with a different identity under changed circumstances.

Founding Relics Apart from being reconstituted, the memory of a rejected edifice can also be rehabilitated by integrating its remains into a replacement building with the same function. Through a metonymic relationship, fragments represent the former eyesore in its entirety, and create a kind of genealogical lineage between the initial and the new building. For example, in Dresden, where in the late 1990s the reconstruction of the Church of Our Lady had begun to take shape, replacement was deliberately preferred to reconstitution for the rehabilitation of the vanished synagogue. The Jewish place of worship designed by Gottfried Semper in 1840 was burnt down during the Kristallnacht on 9–10 November 1938 – an event that marked the beginning of a systematic persecution of the Jews and decimation of a large and dynamic religious minority. Remains of the synagogue were cleared away, stones were used as pavement, and costs were passed on to the Jewish Community. It was not before the mid 1990s that the latter, with newcomers from the CIS, started to grow and reach a significant number again. The architects Wandel Hoefer Lorch + Hirsch were commissioned by a society of local, national and international supporters to design the New Synagogue which was inaugurated on 9 November 2001, exactly, to the day, sixty-three years after the Semper Synagogue had been burnt down, and on exactly the same site. The ground plan of the former edifice is marked by a small line on the floor in front of the new one, a few stones that were recovered have been integrated in one of the walls, and most importantly, the only recognizable and highly symbolic element that survived the massacre, the Star of David, adorns the entrance door in full splendour (Förderkreis bei der Jüdischen Gemeinde 2002; Helfricht 2001; Laudel et al. 2003; Mehlhorn 1999; Rauterberg 2001). Lutz Werner, volunteer for the Jewish Community, explained that there were many reasons for not envisaging a reconstruction. The erection of a new Semper Synagogue would run the serious risk of being perceived as a negation of the Holocaust. All of a sudden, the edifice would stand there again, as if nothing had ever happened. This would be

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a process of ‘time compression’ as described before with regard to the former Parisiana Nightclub, but in a context where this would hardly be acceptable. In a brochure about its new place of worship, the Freundeskreis der Synagoge Dresden (‘Circle of Friends of the Synagogue’) describes its motivations for replacement by a new building as follows: The reconstruction of unbroken continuity would be more than questionable with regard to the synagogue. The historical gap is too big, the ‘synagogue’ commission in itself too ambivalent. Rather, the New Synagogue in Dresden lies in an area of tension between stability and fragility, between durable and provisional states, between massiveness of the outside shell and fragile tissue inside. There, where there are no remains of the former congregation, it puts a check once and for all on the yearning for a return to ‘normality’. (Laudel et al. 2003)

Also, apart from the very pragmatic consideration that Semper’s plans were anyway not available anymore, Werner remarked that the old synagogue had been desecrated by the fire. Most of all, however, he insisted that the initiators explicitly wanted to look forward. The present Jewish Community consists to a very large extent of newcomers from the CIS who have no relation at all to the synagogue eliminated more than sixty years ago. Also, the new edifice had to meet the expectations of a very progressive community: the synagogue was equipped with a state-of-the-art sound system, ingeniously hidden behind the walls; its spatial design abolishes the former separation between men and women; and it is combined with a cultural centre, very open to the outside world. A similar perspective of looking to the present and future led the commissioners of the new Church of the Holy Mary in Budapest to build it in another district, where it was felt the Church was more needed: the closest church neighbour was six kilometres away. But there are many more parallels to be drawn between various replacements of edifices that were previously rejected,11 notably the fact that it is common to integrate a fragment of the old building into the new one.12 In Budapest, György Hajnal, parish priest, and András Vedres, a volunteer who assisted him during our meeting, were very proud to show me the remains of the old Church of the Holy Mary integrated into the new church and its garden design. Hajnal recalled that he was fifteen years old when he witnessed the old church being demolished. At the last Holy Mass, everybody was crying. Worshippers formed a chain around the building, but Russian soldiers fired a few shots and the people went away. The church was dynamited early in the morning; it was a military action, during which the spectators were forbidden to speak, or the soldiers would shoot at the stones as a warning signal. The young Hajnal saw how Russians and Hungarians together loaded the

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remains on trucks, and he followed them to the periphery of the city to see where they would bury the stones three metres underground. Afterwards, he came back every year to check if the remains had not been removed. When Cardinal László Paskai decided, in 1989, that a new church would be erected, it was Hajnal who found the appropriate place and went to live there in a small hut to supervise construction. He also proposed to excavate some remains of the old church and have them integrated into the new edifice. The elements chosen were part of the dome construction; Hajnal considered them most essential from a symbolic point of view because they supported a significant part of the edifice. They were displayed in the new churchyard with a cross and a headstone indicating ‘1931–1951’. Two smaller elements were integrated into the church: one in front of a large triptych and another under the tabernacle. A small plate indicates that, ‘This capital adorned the altar of the Church of the Holy Mary that was destroyed on behalf of Mátyás Rákosi’. The integration of fragments of deceased buildings into their replacements recalls the age-old veneration of relics ‘in which not only does the part stand for the whole but in the case of bodily relics, the inanimate for the animate, the dead for the living’ (Goody 1997: 75). Relics not only embody a continuity between that which is no longer and the present, but they also exert a form of agency in the sense that a superior force is seen to emanate from them – a force that can either repel or attract (ibid.: 83). When relics originate from a martyr, this is seen to increase their power – and thus also the power of those who possess, touch or worship them. The equivalent of relics in architectural terms can be found in the notion of ‘spolia’, meaning ‘any piece of building material reused in a new context, regardless of whether it is visible or hidden, reworked or in its original state, and regardless of whether it is employed for reasons of practicality or signification’ (Raff 1995: 65). In the present case we are mainly concerned with the socalled ‘ostensive use of spolia’ (ibid.: 66). The fragments’ supposed authenticity is essential in order to guarantee their beneficial effects. Through a metonymic relationship, they perpetuate the existence of the edifice from which they were issued. Most of all, they confer upon the new building the superiority that the old one acquired through its martyrdom. They increase the power of those who own them (ibid.) and can even elevate those who identify with them to a superior status as well (ibid.: 67). Finally, the integration of spolia is a means to grant a new edifice a specific identity when it is considered not to have one: ‘[I]n a place with no history of its own and, unfortunately, with no identity to speak of, a memorial was to be created to the home which

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had been destroyed: with the help of the old, a new identity was to be created. In a case like this we could speak of a secular “architectural relic”’ (ibid.: 71). These remarks concur with the impression, at least with regard to the New Synagogue in Dresden and the Church of the Holy Mary in Budapest, that the rehabilitation of the former edifices – emphasizing their martyrdom and thereby elevating them to a superior status – as well as the integration of fragments into the new edifice, are part of a larger process, namely the construction of the new edifice’s ‘foundation myth’. The notion of myth is used here in an anthropological sense: not in a pejorative sense that condemns certain narratives as untrue or untrustworthy, but rather as ‘a symbolic text which presents a story which in turn transmits values, norms, and patterns essential and fundamental for a given culture’ (Mach 1993: 58). In Hajnal’s narrative, for example, it does not matter whether his version of facts is entirely ‘true’ or not, because ‘what does matter is the symbolic story conveyed by the narrative’ (ibid.: 61). There is a central, heroic figure: the young Hajnal, who has defied the danger represented by the Russian occupation forces and the dictatorial regime at the time. Hajnal is willing to give up many things for the good cause of preserving and continuing the parish’s existence, as illustrated by the image of him moving into the small hut for supervising construction of the new church. His yearly visits to the site where the remains have been buried confirm the durability of the parish, the authenticity of the fragments and the continuity between the old and the new church. It is a story of heroic courage, perseverance and survival. Hajnal’s narrative resembles in many ways the story of the salvation of the Star of David in Dresden, which is told in almost every publication related to the New Synagogue. The central figure is Alfred Neugebauer, a young fireman who was very indignant about the arson in the Semper Synagogue and the explicit ban on extinguishing the fire. Very brave, he ‘exposed himself to great risks to save Semper’s unique Star of David from destruction’ (Helfricht 2001: 55, author’s translation).13 In both narratives, it is noticeable that, ‘Myth confers “rightness” on a course of action by extending to it the sanctity which enshrouds tradition and lore’ (Cohen 1985: 99). The integration of spolia into a replacement edifice, as well as the mythical narratives accompanying it, are perhaps the best illustration of how and why former eyesores are sometimes rehabilitated many years after their elimination. Previously, the legitimacy of a specific building’s existence has been so fundamentally questioned that the edifice was removed. Years later, it is precisely the remains of this rejected eyesore – imbued with, and emanating a superior status – that

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grant the new edifice a very significant basis for legitimizing its origin and its existence.14

Old and New Controversies The apparent harmony suggested by the myths related to the integration of spolia contrasts with the controversy that continues to surround other references to former eyesores. In Budapest, the former Hungarian National Theatre, which used to stand on Blaha Lujza Tér (‘Lujza Blaha Square’) and was blown up by the Neo-Stalinist regime in 1965, perfectly illustrates the fact that eliminated edifices do not necessarily fall into oblivion. Despite similarities with the previous examples – its recent replacement by a contemporary edifice, the creation of references to the old building – its biography still continues to cause dissatisfaction. The history of the Hungarian National Theatre is very complex, since in the course of time the institution has always been both a source of national pride, and one of constant conflict over its location and design (Kosztolanyi 1998; Simon 1997: 41). The building that hosted the theatre from 1908 to 1963 was erected in 1875 as Népszínház (‘People’s Theatre’) and was considered ‘only a temporary home, as it was commonly held at the time that Hungarian culture and world literature deserved something bigger, better and more grandiose’ (Móra 2001: 72). This temporality eventually came to an end in the 1960s, ostensibly because the government at the time claimed the place for the construction of a new subway station – but several alternative explanations circulate as well. Despite its initial temporality, the edifice had become a very representative place and its demolition was perceived as ‘one of the outpourings of anti-bourgeois revolutionary fervour which occurred whenever the power pendulum swung back from an enlightened to a totalitarian phase’ (Mezo˝s and Wagenaar 2000: 11). The event is still vividly imprinted in the minds of many inhabitants of Budapest, and the National Theatre has remained a touchy subject ever since. It was not before March 2002, after several architecture competitions, changes of location and scandals related to its realization (Koltai 2002), that a new Hungarian National Theatre was finally inaugurated on a completely different spot from its predecessor. A plaster cast of the facade, submerged in the pond in front of it, refers to the old theatre on Lujza Blaha Square. On the square itself, the facade of the EMKE office building, virtually facing the old theatre, duplicates

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Fig. 10.3 New Hungarian National Theatre, with plaster cast of the facade of the old theatre. Photo by Mélanie van der Hoorn.

a black-and-white photograph of the historic edifice reproduced in negative. As such, the biography of the National Theatre does not significantly diverge from the examples analysed before. The old edifice has been replaced by a new one, and although no authentic remains were integrated, commissioners of the new building have nonetheless acknowledged its famous predecessor by symbolically referring to it. Further, Hilda Gobbi, a famous Hungarian actress who was very indignant about the demolition and ready to fight on the barricades for the preservation of the old theatre, acted as a heroic figure. She came to embody the mourning of, and the attachment to, the old theatre. In the 1970s, she started to raise funds for the construction of a new one, but the aura of accumulated failure which surrounded the National Theatre also spread to Gobbi’s initiative: while thousands of investors who had acquired so-called brick coupons were still awaiting construction to begin, it was rumoured that the money had been unlawfully used for other purposes, and some people started to claim their money back (Koltai 2002: 152). The example of the National Theatre illustrates once again that the creation and destruction of buildings are intimately interwoven with processes of memory and forgetting, but in very complex ways. The two memorials (on the facade of the EMKE office building, and in the pond

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in front of the new theatre) cannot determine if, and how, the old theatre is to be remembered. Neither monuments nor buildings alone are able to generate meaning; they rather need to be invested with a specific significance by those who (are supposed to) feel concerned by them. Sandy Isenstadt, in an article entitled ‘The Interpretative Imperative: Architecture and the Perfectibility of Memory’, has observed that architecture ‘serves memory not because it contains memories, but because it insists that we remember’ (1997: 62). Architectural forms are both materially and symbolically persistent, but this does not mean ‘that any one particular meaning survives across time, but that a work of architecture retains its ability to prompt interpretation for generations beyond its creation’ (ibid.: 58). The role of architecture in triggering processes of memory and forgetting, thus, is more like that of a ‘blinking cursor. Like the dial tone, it demonstrates that systems are operational but waiting, waiting for meaning that will justify the effort to make the system in the first place’ (ibid.: 62). Similarly, the new National Theatre and the references to the old one trigger reactions, but not necessarily the ones that the commissioners would have expected. This is, perhaps, what Mattenklott referred to as ‘the meaning of monuments beyond the politics of memory with their labored and often so self-righteous moral pathos: that they appeal to a here, even though they have lost all hope of being able to define a now as well’ (1993: 35, emphasis in original). Neither the inauguration of the New Theatre nor the references to the old one have brought the narratives about the latter’s demolition to a standstill. In various testimonies, the state of the building at the time of its elimination proves to be of fundamental importance in determining whether the act was legitimate or not. Only ‘hard’ material arguments – as opposed to more symbolic ones – are considered convincing by those who questioned the theatre’s demolition. This rests on the (false) assumption that buildings can either die a natural, or a premature and imposed death; the former is generally perceived as inevitable, whereas the latter’s legitimacy is contested. As futile as this might seem, several decades after its demolition differences of opinion about whether or not the edifice’s walls were cracked are essential to its eventual rehabilitation. If the building was in an irreproachable state, then its ‘senseless’ elimination was an act of cruelty which could grant it a superior status as martyr. Following Endre Prakfalvi, curator at the Hungarian Architecture Museum who investigated the construction of the second underground line in Budapest in the 1960s, the theatre purely and simply had to make way for a new underground station; its demolition was not meant as a symbolic gesture.15 Nevertheless, Prakfalvi’s colleague Pál Ritoók

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specifies that there is evidence in non-architectural sources such as radio and television that ‘although there were some evident technical reasons, the erasure of the National Theatre was undoubtedly perceived as a symbolic act’. According to Imre Móra, author of Budapest: Then and Now, elimination was motivated by political reasons, because ‘the National Theater, despite its communist director and strict Party surveillance, managed to maintain some independent Magyar spirit and remained a “temple” of Hungarian speech and culture’ (2001: 73). Elimination already aroused frustration in the 1960s, but remembrance was perhaps stimulated by a specific post-1989 context, in which many Hungarians reemphasized their attachment to the past. There is certain continuity in the stories told about the fate of the old theatre and the creation of the New Theatre, perceived as two developments that were imposed on the Hungarians by an autocratic regime. For Török, ‘[T]he National Theatre has been under a curse for several decades’. In the course of the 1980s, the World Association of Hungarians together with the Association of Hungarian Actors and the Architects’ Association projected the construction of a National Theatre that would ‘reflect the cultural aspirations of all Hungarians whatever nationality they possess, affording their art a spiritual homeland’ (Kosztolanyi 1998). The actual realization seems to be very remote from these ideals and has been severely criticized. Török deplored the edifice’s ‘run-of-the-mill eclecticism’ which was ‘already morally outdated on the drawing board’. Tamás Mezo˝s, professor at Budapest Technical University, affirmed that: ‘Most architects hate the building, although no one wrote it down, but architecturally speaking it is really problematic. The acoustics are bad, and there are forty to seventy seats without a view’. Rév (2002), in the online advertisement for an exhibition on contemporary theatres in Galeria Centralis, even wrote that the New Theatre is ‘a reminder of where impudent autocracy, community-degrading ignorance and sheer tastelessness may lead. What can be seen reminds us of what does not exist’. Tamás Koltai, theatre critic, wonders what the plaster cast of the old facade – a ‘ridiculous basin’ – is supposed to mean and adds that: ‘It transforms the old theatre into a legend, a symbol which has nothing to do with the theatre itself ’. Gavin Lucas has affirmed that ‘rubbish needs to be linked to a temporality of desire which is never present to its object but always future or past’ (2002: 16). In this line of thought, rehabilitations can be seen to infuse former eyesores with new desirability and tear them into the spotlights again (or, to borrow Isenstadt’s terms, to transform them into ‘blinking cursors’). This is what happened to the old theatre – and

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continues to influence the perception of the new one. A kind of vicious circle can be observed here: as long as the remembrance of the old theatre continues to work as a ‘blinking cursor’, as long as the vanished edifice continues to be lauded and lamented as a beloved and irreplaceable martyr, its replacement stands no chance of being accepted. The other way round, as long as dissatisfaction dominates in the appreciation of the new one, this only nourishes further nostalgia towards its predecessor. But perhaps the Hungarian National Theatre is the ultimate example of an indispensable eyesore: an edifice that has always been contested, whatever form it had, but whose fate was essential in order to allow these narratives. We should not forget that the edifice on Lujza Blaha Square was initially considered ‘a temporary home’ because ‘Hungarian culture and world literature deserved something bigger, better and more grandiose’ (Móra 2001: 72). If the old edifice had been reconstructed, it would have lost its status as martyr; if the new one were to be considered a good replacement, then ditto.

Conclusion Perhaps controversies similar to the ones surrounding the Hungarian National Theatre persisted in the previous cases as well, but they tended to be overshadowed by the material intervention (reconstitution or replacement). Indeed, reconstitutions seem to heal wounds by creating an impression of completeness. The image of an edifice that was unsatisfactorily disposed of is replaced by its image when it was still untouched. Rehabilitation of the memory of the former eyesore, in this first case, occurs by denying that the building’s existence was questioned. Replacements, on the other hand, heal wounds by taking much care of the ‘scar tissue’. The elimination of the former building is not undone, but rather acknowledged and exploited. Rehabilitation, here, consists of elevating the edifice that was unsatisfactorily disposed of to a superior status and integrating its remains as a basis for the new one’s identity. Certain rehabilitations, however, do not seem to ‘work’, since many people still feel alienated from them, and divergent narratives persist. The former eyesore continues to haunt its surrounding. Mattenklott has introduced monuments as ‘gestures by which a society bestows nobility, signs of hierarchization and the attribution of value’ (1993: 29). Understood like this, references to the former building are close to reconstitutions and replacements, all of them consisting of singling out certain former eyesores that ‘deserve’ to be rehabilitated. In the case of

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the Hungarian National Theatre, however, it was not ‘society’ but a handful of commissioners who created the references to the old theatre as well as the new edifice (which, by its nature and history, automatically refers to its predecessor as well). What is important in the rehabilitation of former eyesores is that people attempt to regain some agency over an environment from which they feel they have been alienated. This seems to have failed in the realization of the new Hungarian National Theatre, which can be seen to have literally replaced its predecessor in that it has become the new eyesore.

Chapter 11

Eyesores Are Indispensable Concluding Remarks

Wherever there are people, there are undesired buildings. As Mary Douglas has noted, in her discussions on taste, ‘The discourse about dislike and ugliness is more revealing than the discourse about aesthetic beauty’ (1996: 50). The aim of this book is precisely to delve into such discourses of dislike and ugliness, and to provide keys for how to approach the fate and significance of so-called architectural eyesores. At the beginning of the third millennium, in which many world-wide developments have been determined by the terrorist attacks against the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in New York, investigating the fate and significance of supposedly undesired material forms confronts us with much larger issues. The examples chosen are as divergent as the Kaiserbau in Troisdorf and the Parisiana Nightclub in Budapest: edifices which seem to have nothing in common, except for the fact that their existence has been publicly questioned and, in most cases, their material form affected. As diverse as these cases might seem to be, a number of parallels have emerged in the preceding chapters, which would also help to approach further examples elsewhere. Chapters 3 to 8 focused on six situations in which rejected buildings can possibly find themselves: six situations with various stakes and implications, but also six cases with returning elements, such as the gradual nature of rejection, as well as the need to combine material efficiency with acceptance. Chapter 9 and 10 accentuated the agency of buildings, an agency which is shown to extend even after their disuse or demolition. In the introduction to An Archaeology of Socialism, Victor Buchli has remarked that: ‘Of all the material cultures produced by societies, architecture is probably the most durable, long-lasting and easily

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retrievable. Architecture is also the material cultural matrix which most other artefacts of material culture are associated with or related to’ (1999: 1). This partly explains why questioning a building’s existence – unexpectedly emphasizing the ephemeral nature of something supposedly durable – has such relevance, and contributes to what David Crowley calls ‘peaks of dramatic transformation or troughs of controversy’ (2002: 202). Undesired buildings, understood as material culture, can undergo various destinies: they can be eliminated, transformed, or only challenged. Depending on the question of whether other people involved approve the rejection of a so-called eyesore or not, the situation gains various meanings. When people agree with each other that a building has to be eliminated, for example, demolition can be given the character of a collective, secular sacrifice, as in the case of Troisdorf’s Kaiserbau. When various groups of people disagree about the building’s fate, and all have power and influence in the matter – because of their profession or political position, or simply because of their number – then this can give rise to long-lasting discussions in which they confront their images together. Both in Troisdorf and in Kalkar, it took many years until the various groups (owners, investors, politicians, and so on) could agree. Also, it may be that some of the people who feel concerned about the fate of the building do not have enough official power to be able to influence such matters. In this situation, the only possible means to counteract the dominant perception and decision making is by arguing on another level, as was shown with regard to the Plattenbauten in Berlin in terms of ‘images at a distance’, ‘images at eye level’ and ‘images from within’. Buildings can embody the claims, hopes or frustrations of entire groups of people. Changes to a building can visualize power relationships, radical breaks and fields of tension. Yet most individuals are not in a position to alter entire buildings, and are thus often condemned to merely witness large-scale changes. The situation is different regarding the remains of buildings: they allow further concretization of abstract themes and large-scale phenomena as well as further individualization through personal handling. As exemplified by the Berlin Wall and the seaside resort in Prora, even when remains originate from the same edifice, they can eventually be handled and interpreted differently by various people. Circulation and the passage of remains from one owner to another is charged with meaning; stories told about these objects are means of giving sense to a more complex history, whereby the objects function as valuable intermediaries.

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Negative Value, Zero Value, No Value In any place and at any moment in time, certain buildings are considered desirable, while others are rejected as an undesirable nuisance. The former are carefully renovated, proudly presented on postcards or in guided tours, indicated on maps and traffic signs, described in art and architecture books. The latter are either left to their own devices, ignored, deliberately altered, or, in the most extreme cases, only exist in the form of drawings because they did not see the light of day. Nonetheless, the valuation of buildings – especially their disqualification – cannot be reduced to a simple dichotomy. Rather, buildings that are not cherished can find themselves in all kinds of statuses, and are divergently valued. In particular, it is possible to distinguish negatively valued buildings from buildings of zero value, and still others with no (determined) value. This could be represented in the form of a sliding scale, ranging from the most undesired and most intensely rejected edifices (such as the power plant in Kalkar in the eyes of its innumerable opponents), to the most appreciated and cherished edifices (such as any famous monument that people even come to see from overseas). Both extremes of this continuum are well known to the public: the former because it is a hotbed of public discussion, the latter because of its alleged popularity. Between these extremes, however, we may imagine a kind of grey zone, with numerous buildings that are not particularly conspicuous. They are more or less appreciated and, in some cases, people would not really mind if they were removed, but it is also not considered ‘worth’ it to put them on a black demolition list. These buildings, it could be said, do not really ‘matter’: they remain unnoticed, and seem to not merit further attention. They are the buildings of zero, or little (positive or negative) value. Their apparently insignificant state is to be distinguished from that of so-called eyesores at the negatively valued extreme of the continuum: architectural eyesores have a value, but are perceived as disturbing, or even harmful; they should eventually be transformed or removed. Buildings mean different things to different people, at different moments; certain buildings, therefore, find themselves at different places on the supposed continuum simultaneously. This was very obvious, again, in Kalkar, where some saw the power plant as an apocalyptic monster, while for others it embodied all their hope in a better future. Admiration and repulsion were shown to exist side by side as in the love-hate relationships with the Flaktürme or the seaside resort in Prora. Divergent attitudes were also at the core of a situation of major conflict such as in Sarajevo, or in the differences sketched between an

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appreciation from the outside or inside, such as in Prora, or with regard to the Plattenbauten in Berlin. Depending on the relative power of both expression and influence, some opinions become more vocalized than others, and some demands have more chance of being carried out. The intentions of the besiegers of Sarajevo are an obvious example of this, but also the easily commercialized conceptions of the newcomers in the Plattenbauten, smoothly adopted by the mass media. Furthermore, buildings can easily move, or even ‘jump’ from one position to another on the sliding scale. Today’s architectural highlights might be tomorrow’s eyesores and vice versa. Buildings can be rediscovered and rehabilitated many years after their rejection, or they can suddenly become significant for some people, when others start questioning their existence. Journalists from Oslobod¯enje recalled that their headquarters did not have any particular significance until it came under incessant fire from the besiegers of the city. Then, progressively, it became an almost indispensable landmark, a concrete embodiment of survival. In Zinnowitz, it was only after 1989 that people became fully aware of the role the Kulturhaus had played until that time. Finally, buildings can also, temporarily, have no (determined) value; this is especially the case when their existence has started to be questioned, but their fate is not yet sealed.

Rejection in Three Stages The rejection of buildings generally occurs in three stages. First, an edifice’s existence starts to be questioned; then its value is assessed, a material treatment envisaged in accordance, and acceptance of sorts eventually achieved; and finally, its fate is sealed by carrying out what was previously decided. An edifice’s existence starts to be questioned, for instance, when it is decommissioned (like in Troisdorf and Kalkar), or when political shifts go hand in hand with a changed perception of certain architectural objects, as with the Flaktürme after 1945, or the edifices whose biographies were influenced by the fall of the Berlin Wall (in Prora, Zinnowitz and Berlin). Inversely, political changes can also correspond with the rehabilitation of certain buildings, such as the Parisiana Nightclub being reconstituted in a context of revaluation of prewar history. In certain cases, like in Sarajevo, the first questioning of a building’s existence can coincide with material damage. Nonetheless, even when the edifice’s initial shape is altered at such an early stage of the rejection process, as yet, its material form still remains recognizably present.

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The period between the point when an edifice’s existence starts to be questioned, and the moment when its fate is finally decided, can be characterized as undetermined, ambiguous and transitory. During this time, the building’s value has to be assessed, its destiny determined and, perhaps most of all, acceptance of the rejection has to be achieved, i.e., a consensus of opinion reached between the (various groups of) people concerned. Each one of these steps can be an arduous process, which explains the frequently long duration of this period: almost thirty years, for example, between the official bankruptcy of the Kaiserbau’s contractor, and the building’s elimination. In Zinnowitz, more than fifteen years after the initial plundering of the building, partial dismantlement and subsequent abandonment to dilapidation, its fate still remains uncertain. Slowly, even people that were very attached to the edifice, start to conceive of its eventual removal as a preferable alternative to extensive decay. In Vienna, where it could possibly be forever until the Flaktürme would show any symptom of old age, no one seems to know, six decades after the end of the Second World War, what can be done with the towers. In this period of liminality in which a building’s destiny remains uncertain, storytelling serves a useful purpose in enabling people to reclaim a material environment from which they might otherwise experience alienation – especially when buildings are made inaccessible (as in Prora and Vienna), or in a situation of major conflict such as in Sarajevo. The construction of buildings is to lesser or greater degree controversial. Likewise, the rejection of a building is also susceptible to controversy. The degree of acceptance of a building’s fate has nothing, and everything, to do with the degree of intensity of physical intervention by those who question its existence. Nothing, in the sense that a complete elimination (that of the Kaiserbau, for instance) can be perfectly well accepted, whereas many people feel revolted and indignant at the sight of the Kulturhaus in Zinnowitz, which seems to have been deliberately ignored. At the same time, acceptance has everything to do with physical intervention, in the sense that the material fate inflicted upon a building should not contradict the prevailing perception and appreciation of the building. The example of the Plattenbauten in Berlin has shown that even a mere change of image – though, perhaps, well-intended and positive – is not necessarily favourably received. David Riches (1986) has observed that violent acts always have instrumental and expressive purposes. This corresponds to what Edward Schieffelin meant when he wrote that in the course of performance something always needs to be accomplished: not only the (expressive)

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performance in itself, staging ‘realities vivid enough to beguile, amuse or terrify’ (1998: 194), but also ‘the accomplishment of the work it was meant to do’ (ibid.: 198), that is, the instrumental purpose. Given that a building always has a utilitarian as well as a representative character, the rejection of a building always oscillates between pragmatic clearance and pure iconoclasm. People who want to dispose of a building need to decide on an appropriate physical intervention allowing them not to be disturbed by the eyesore anymore (instrumental purpose) and, at the same time, present, and make other people accept, this intervention as the most preferable or profitable (expressive purpose). When any of these purposes fails to be served, rejection can be said to have been carried out unsatisfactorily. Contested transformations or removals, where consensus failed to be reached, can continue to play a significant role even many years later, and sometimes trigger off rehabilitations.

Indispensable Eyesores In the character of intensive public debates related to the preservation, elimination or transformation of specific buildings, architecture distinguishes itself from other (artistic) forms of expression such as painting, sculpture, music or literature. First, edifices always have a utilitarian function, which contributes to determine their fate. Some people may reject an object as ugly, but it can still be of crucial importance to the people living around or working in it. Similarly, the ease or difficulty to reorient a building to another function may prevent or hasten its disposal. Second, edifices are three-dimensional, public objects that cannot be hidden. Books can remain unread, musical scores unexecuted, and paintings or sculptures unnoticed and stored, but buildings can, at most, remain unrealized – once they exist, their existence is difficult to deny. Even when they are completely fenced off, they still remain visible; and, as illustrated by the Viennese Flaktürme and the resort in Prora when it was a no-go area, people frequently try to penetrate into them by means of their imagination. Similarly, even when they are airbrushed out of city skylines, as in the case of the Viennese towers, their physical presence, when in the neighbourhood, is impossible to deny. The cases in the previous chapters illustrate that undesirability is no synonym for irrelevance, quite the contrary. Eyesores, despite being rejected, or perhaps precisely because of it, are indispensable. Dario Gamboni (1997) and David Freedberg (1989) have presented the qualification and disqualification of works of art as two sides of the

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same coin. Similarly, architectural highlights exist merely by the grace of eyesores. According to Gamboni and others (Rosefeldt and Steinle 1996b), the notion of tabula rasa exemplifies the possible simultaneity of constructiveness and destructiveness: buildings must disappear, so that new ones can emerge. Interestingly, it could also be seen the other way round: sometimes new buildings must appear so that old ones can be removed. In Troisdorf, as was shown, many years had to pass until the removal of the Kaiserbau could be accepted as regrettable but necessary. The promise that an industrial estate would soon be built on the plot certainly contributed to this acceptance. This was still more obvious in Kalkar where, despite the fact that the carcass of the power plant was sold for a fraction of what it had initially cost, the realization of Kernwasser Wunderland was crucial for local inhabitants in coming to terms with the site’s controversial history. If an appropriate project was proposed as an alternative to the Kulturhaus in Zinnowitz, this might similarly convince people to accept its removal, now that the building itself has fallen into such serious disrepair. The fate of specific architectural eyesores can often be seen as the concrete embodiment of much more abstract tensions. Eyesores, in this sense, play a crucial role in allowing people to keep (or get) a grip on certain questions that would otherwise remain very distant. The example of the Viennese Flaktürme illustrated that even virtual transformations, in the form of unbuilt projects, reflect intense and evolving confrontation and coping mechanisms with dark periods in history. Even when an edifice has been (partly) removed, such as the Berlin Wall, or the seaside resort in Prora, remains can continue to act as tangible intermediaries between (macro) history and individual experience. In Sarajevo, buildings were at the core of the conflict opposing Bosnian Muslims, Croats and Serbs. The case of the Oslobod¯enje headquarters illustrates how the fate of specific edifices cannot be understood from a purely semiotic perspective as that of targeted signifiers referring to undesirable signifieds. Rather, the damage done to an edifice by some, and the significance ascribed to these acts by others, embody the competition of various groups for the authority over the building’s agency. If an edifice is altered by certain people, it automatically also affects other people’s relation to the building; it somehow reduces their freedom towards the object (Van Beek 1996: 18). Nonetheless, even when people do not have the means to influence the fate of a material object, they can still influence its significance. In this respect, the example of the Oslobod¯enje headquarters demonstrates the fundamental role of witnesses in granting the acts of the destroyers a meaning. Actually, it was

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not merely the object in itself that was at stake in this case – it did not have an exceptional value before, and furthermore did not suddenly acquire one – but rather, essentially, the possibility to determine its agency. This case, then, illustrates how symbolic and political meanings and struggles are transplanted onto the biography of the material fate of buildings. Since buildings are not inconspicuous objects, and generally involve a range of different users with different appreciations and attitudes, as well as a range of decision makers, the capacity to determine their fate is intimately related with power relationships. It requires power to alter or even erase edifices, but these acts also put power at risk since acceptance of these acts can be withheld; on the other hand, destruction or recuperation can also spectacularly increase one’s power. In Troisdorf, not just the initiator but perhaps most of all the ‘master of detonation’ was regarded with great admiration. In Kalkar, the recuperator of the exwould-be power plant acquired a status akin to that of a hero, and showed that resuscitation, as a source of power, is at least as significant as destruction. Since processes of recuperation and disposal are often intimately interwoven with the personal biography of those who carry them out, there are supposedly many more parallels to be drawn between the successful recuperation or disposal of objects, on the one hand, and notions of power, self-fulfilment or fame, on the other. Great recuperators, or heroes of disposal, could be at the core of such investigations. Initial impetus to such reflections will be given in the second part of the present chapter, illustrated by a first visit to the so-called ‘EcoCathedral’ in Mildam (northern Netherlands), a project conceived on the basis of used construction material, on the initiative of artist and philosopher Louis Le Roy (Boukema and McIntyre 2002). Other striking examples of large scale recuperation would include Justo Gallego Martínez’s cathedral in Mejorada del Campo (near Madrid). In Den Helder (northern Netherlands), artist Rudi van de Wint has transformed a discarded plot of dune land into an impressive ‘regenerative’ statue park for which he received two hundred thousand Euros from the Dutch Ministry of Culture in 1998. Some of the very emotional aspects of disposal and recuperation could be laid bare thanks to participant observation in the vicinity of these persons. This method would also reveal the diversity of reactions towards these processes, as well as their less appreciated aspects. Justo Gallego Martínez’ project, for instance, was frequently mocked. Furthermore, there are not only heroes but also ‘scoundrels’ of recuperation and disposal, accused of scandalous wastage or pollution. They could also be submitted to similar questions.

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Finally, the indispensability of architectural eyesores is reflected in that, even many years after their removal or transformation, rejected buildings can continue to play an important role. A tactile experience of their remains, which already accompanies a process of decay such as in Zinnowitz, is an essential intermediate between large-scale, abstract political or sociocultural issues, on the one hand, and various individual experiences of these issues on the other. When people are kept from appropriating fragments, such as in Prora in the early 1990s or in Budapest when the National Theatre was dynamited, this can arouse deep frustration. The appropriation of fragmentary remains is an effective means to come to terms with the connotations of a dark period in history, but also to start revaluating a rejected edifice and the period to which it belonged. Integrated into replacement buildings, fragments can be used as reminders in order to rehabilitate the memory of vanished edifices, as well as reliquary foundations for the new edifice’s identity in the making. As mentioned with regard to the Kaiserbau, the first step to elevating an edifice to the superior status of a martyr is to ‘kill’ it. Another primary condition is to preserve traces of its martyrdom in the form of (incomplete) relics. On the contrary, reconstitution, as an attempt to erase all traces of former rejections, excludes any possibility of former eyesores being elevated to such a superior status.

The Fate of Undesired Buildings Affects Us People feel concerned by the fate of undesired buildings. No matter whether buildings can be entered, no matter whether people have the means to concretely influence their material fate, no matter, even, whether buildings have already been removed; they continue to provoke reactions. Indignation, especially, and the controversies to which it gives rise, are often related to a number of clearly defined and recurrent issues. The contested legitimacy of rejection is often rooted in a perception of wastage. When attitudes towards a building are so diverse that some people want to dispose of it while others consider it valuable – that is, when questions of value have remained unresolved – the former risk being reproached with accusations of wastage by the latter. This was illustrated by the reactions of people in Prora (combined with indignation about the fact that they had no access to the remains) and in Zinnowitz. It was avoided in Troisdorf and Kalkar: two examples, respectively, of a successful (i.e., not contested) elimination and transformation.

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The issue of acceptance of rejection is often related to concepts of durability. People on the whole expect buildings to be relatively durable, which explains why ‘[g]reat buildings are generally assumed to have been murdered’ (Harris 1999: 166). According to Michael Thompson (1979), this assumption is founded in the idea that decay does not occur naturally, but is always the consequence of a lack of maintenance. Notions of expected (or expectable) durability, as well as induced decay as opposed to natural decomposition, came to the fore with regard to the progressive decay of the Kulturhaus in Zinnowitz. Similar frustrations were voiced by some inhabitants in Prora, at the sight of dilapidated parts of the seaside resort. Related to this, is the observation that only ‘hard’ material evidence, such as cracks in the walls, seem to be acceptable justification for a building’s removal: this was illustrated by the various explanations for the disposal of the Hungarian National Theatre. Further, many controversies in the rejection of an edifice are related to the fact that buildings are not mere signifiers, but rather concrete embodiments of complex biographies with a three-dimensional, material shape, in a very concrete context. If edifices could be seen as mere signifiers, then their alteration or elimination could be seen as a fusion of signifier and signified in the eyes of their transformers or destroyers, who would seek to attain the signified via the signifier. This theoretical approach might be very useful with regard to the destruction of art, as exposed by Freedberg (1989: 406), but the case of architecture is more complex. Material interventions to buildings do not simply attain what the buildings supposedly represent as symbols. Such a view would obscure the fact that objects themselves also exert a certain (secondary) agency, and that the people concerned by such alterations are also not entirely passive. Rather, the fate and significance of undesired edifices are actively negotiated in a process involving both human agency and the agency of the edifices themselves. Gosewijn Van Beek (1996) has explained the essence of acts of destruction from such perspective, insisting not so much on a relationship of signifier and signified, but rather on a conflict and competition between different (groups of) people over the agency of objects. At stake are the relations between the object and all people concerned by its fate. If some people purposefully destroy or alter a building, this will not attain some kind of supposed signified – and destroyers know this – but it will definitely affect the relationship that other people have to the building and, as Van Beek has emphasized, rob them of some of their freedom and agency with regard to the building in question. Involuntarily, witnesses to the acts of destroyers too will have to revise their relationship towards the building. Destruction in

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Sarajevo has illustrated this, as well as how people witnessing such acts attempt to regain some of their control over the agency of affected buildings. Similarly, reconstitution is also not completely ‘innocent’, as in the case of the Oslobod¯enje headquarters. Starting from the assumption that alteration or elimination can simply be reversed, such intervention annihilates the agency of buildings in their altered (or even absent) state as well as the agency of people who contributed to make rejection controversial (and thus rehabilitation as well). Finally, a sense for how much the fate of undesired architecture affects all kinds of people is reflected in notions of creating scapegoats or heroes. For instance, there is a striking and widespread taboo on trying to understand performers’ motives. It was shown by Joseba Zulaika (1996) and Freedberg (1989) that delving into the motivations of terrorists and destroyers of art is similarly taboo, as if such investigation would necessitate an identification with some obscure force, which could then possibly contaminate the analyst as well (or which is present in the analyst as well, but that he or she would prefer to deny). Regarding the destruction of buildings, this reluctance has often resulted in – or even been disguised as – a condemnation of the performers, as exemplified by Louis Réau (1994 [1958]) and Alexander Demandt (1997). Generally, indignation about the fate of certain buildings (and the consequences for one’s relationship towards this object) has often been reflected in a polarization, such as in many testimonies of destruction in Sarajevo. An alternative example can be observed in the search for a responsible person for the Zinnowitzer Kulturhaus’ dilapidated state, or in the classification of hero associated with persons who rescue some remains, such as in Dresden or Budapest.

Epilogue

Taboos on the Multi-Sensory Materiality of Buildings and Their Agency

If the present investigation has enabled us to draw parallels between examples that were, at first sight, rather divergent, it has also revealed, however, a number of stubborn presuppositions affecting, in a wider sense, perceptions and analyses of material culture. These issues can be more clearly identified by reviewing the questions that have been raised in the course of the analysis.

Buildings Don’t ‘Do’ Questions related to the Kaiserbau and the Oslobod¯enje headquarters expressed a need to explain how people could possibly have such a strong emotional interest in the fate of an edifice, and what made them so upset, affected or combative. In other words, how could ‘a simple thing’ possibly create such a stir? Amazement, again, inspired the chapters on the ex-would-be power plant in Kalkar and the Plattenbauten in Berlin. How could such eyesores come to be perceived as potentially attractive? Which part was played by the edifices themselves and which by their ‘recuperators’? Or, as formulated by Gay Hawkins, ‘What triggers a reframing of rubbish, and what inhibits this?’ (2006: 80). If apparently incompatible perceptions of one and the same building formed key issues in these two chapters, a seeming antithesis between people’s (expressed) thoughts and their (perceivable) actions, on the other hand, was at the core of the analysis of the Flaktürme and the Kulturhaus in Zinnowitz. In other words, there seemed to be a serious

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discrepancy between ‘is’ and ‘should’ viewpoints. Why would people act in such contradiction with the ideas, wishes and representations they voiced? Also, a certain unease over the durability or ephemerality of the material informed these chapters. Some of these questions reappeared with regard to the ‘afterlife’ of edifices in the last two chapters. Why would people make such a fuss over things that were vanishing? How could architectural remains possibly cause such commotion? In retrospect, however, it would just be as legitimate to reply: why would they not, after all? Why would what things ‘do’ require further explanation at all? Because in our common perception, we do not expect things to ‘do’ anything at all, because (sensory) vitality is still not a qualification we generally attribute to things, to ‘dead’ material. Many related questions throughout the analysis revolved around the very nature of ‘things’, whether architectural or otherwise: around their materiality, their (lack of) agency, and the recognition (or mainly denial) of sensory facets that had long been quieted down – aspects, namely, that were not purely visual but related to the whole palette of senses, not the least to touch. Finally, although the notion that things have a ‘biography’ is something that has long been recognized, the end of such a biography – the eventual disposal of things – has long been ignored – and so have issues of recuperation. It is only in the third millennium that more authors have started to devote themselves to this shortcoming (Edensor 2005; Hawkins 2006; Hawkins and Muecke 2002b; Neville and Villeneuve 2002; Scanlan 2005). In order to shed more light on processes of disposal and recuperation as well as the significance of material objects which (threaten to) disappear, it is necessary to develop ideas on the differences between definitive and provisional disposal, such as introduced by Gavin Lucas (2002). Does definitive disposal exist? Do items necessarily take on another form in the course of disposal? How do things that cannot really be disposed of, such as nuclear waste, affect our notions of waste and disposal? What are the necessary conditions that enable an object to be recuperated? To conclude, a few directions for further research will be proposed, that could lead to new insights into what could be termed, more generally, an anthropology of recuperation and disposal. These reflections, centred round the agency of things, their multi-sensory facets as well as their transformation in the course of disposal or recycling, will be illustrated by empirical observations made on the site of Louis Le Roy’s Eco-Cathedral.1

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Louis Le Roy’s Eco-Cathedral as a Laboratory Louis Le Roy’s Eco-Cathedral is located a few kilometres outside the northern Dutch town of Heerenveen, on a plot that he acquired in 1982. He agreed with municipal institutions that they would donate him their superfluous, mostly used, building material – mainly bricks and tiles, which since that time have amounted to some three thousand ten-ton loads. Day after day, his work has consisted of patiently sorting out these rough stones according to size and colour, experimenting with various stacking techniques so as to reassemble them in a stable form, first as foundations, later as walls and towers. Several aspects make Le Roy’s oeuvre particularly interesting as an opportunity to experience the multisensory facets of discarded material in the course of recycling. First of all, Le Roy has become a unique ‘expert in materiality’. He has always refused to use cement and tools, and has engaged in an unmediated exchange between Man and Material. Every single brick has gone through his hands; he has experienced its weight, surface, shape, structure, and has invented simple utensils such as small rollers to move or lift larger pieces. In this way, Le Roy has never lost ‘sight’ of the proportions (in terms of effort and time) that the material imposed on him. Sometimes it would take him a whole day to move a few bricks across his terrain. Not only has the Eco-Cathedral been erected without any external technical resources, but during the first twenty years, it was also exclusively and purposefully the work of just one man – as a kind of experiment to see (and show) how much material one man alone could handle. In previous chapters, it was mentioned that individuals can experience feelings of frustration or powerlessness when faced with the dimensions of three-dimensional edifices and with the power relations that keep them from altering large pieces of architecture and influencing their fate. This was discussed as one of the reasons why fragments of buildings could play such an important role: unlike entire edifices, they allow a direct – tactile – confrontation, and people concerned are no longer held at a distance by other, more influential ones with unrestrained access to the buildings. However, this tactile and ‘intimate’ contact is only one aspect of what can be observed in the ‘face to face’ interaction between Le Roy and his stones. Le Roy also lets the material dictate to him, to a large extent, what can be built – that is, he reacts to the material he gets, instead of imposing a preconceived design on the stones.2 He is very sceptical about design and designers; he constantly emphasizes that Man not only influences things, but that things also ‘make’ Man. Apart from his own ‘raw’ human working power, Le Roy only allows – and even ‘invites’ – Nature to intervene. Once he has piled

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bricks on top of each other, he keeps his hands off reassembled stones for several years, and lets plants start to grow in between them, acting like ecological cement. Some of the material disappears from direct sight, but it never vanishes completely, since it contributes to the transformation of the place in itself, and forms hills in various sizes and heights, which are subsequently used as foundations for new constructions. After the example of historic cathedrals, the construction of the Eco-Cathedral is planned to last at least until the year 3000. According to Le Roy, it should have reached a height of two hundred metres by then. In this lapse of time, keeping one’s hands off construction at repeated intervals is a necessary condition to let Time unfold and the agency of Material become perceptible. Besides the artist’s very direct contact with material and materiality, the second important aspect of Le Roy’s work is that it questions common assumptions of what is defined as rubbish to be disposed of. Remaining construction material considered worthless – firms would even be charged considerable amounts to dispose of it – constitutes an indispensable ingredient for Le Roy’s oeuvre. He is able to ‘breathe new life’ into dead material, or perhaps simply create the conditions for this material to ‘recover’ by itself. Here again, something that could be termed the agency of things comes to the fore. An influential factor is that the material Le Roy receives has been stripped of all, or most, of its

Fig. E.1 Le Roy’s Eco-Cathedral: abandoning oneself to ‘thing-ly’ agency. Photo by Mélanie van der Hoorn.

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cultural markers. This means that any previous hierarchy between stones considered more or less ‘noble’ depending on the edifice to which they belonged has disappeared. Parts of gravestones, which would normally be considered as sanctified, and thus ‘elevated’ above more profane material, can lie side by side with the most average paving stone. Yet at the ‘gateway’, even Le Roy’s Eco-Cathedral cannot remain entirely isolated from its surrounding social system. Strikingly, definitions of rubbish have evolved over time, and what was considered worthless some thirty years ago is no longer without value nowadays. Meanwhile, a true competition has started between Le Roy and local recycling firms interested in the same used material for the production of granules for the construction of roads. Also, with an increased awareness of environmental consequences, every kind of material must be checked for polluting substances before being released – another factor that makes it increasingly difficult for Le Roy to get the requested components for his cathedral. Finally – and this is one of the most difficult aspects to grasp – Le Roy’s Eco-Cathedral is a work in progress in the broadest sense of the term. None of its parts is finished, it will and can never be finished, and the so-called final product is, actually, entirely irrelevant, and perhaps even nonexistent as an imaginary or virtual thing. In addition to the previous facets mentioned, this allows an unusual experience of material and materiality in the course of continuous transformation, an experience that goes much deeper than the usual, more superficial and mainly visual perceptions of built material – yet an experience that also requires another approach. And this is one more way in which the EcoCathedral sets its own rules.

The Agency of Things From a (social) scientific viewpoint, the idea that ‘things’ have agency continues to provoke a kind of malaise. Kevin Hetherington, when criticizing the ‘exclusive privilege given to the subjective and the human’, explains that in common perceptions, ‘It is assumed that place is about agency, and that agency is invariably defined as human agency’ (1997: 183–84). During the present research on undesired buildings, readers repeatedly warned not to ‘breathe too much life into buildings’ or ‘over-accentuate aspects of their aura’, since one should not lose sight of the fact that edifices would always remain ‘inanimate structures’. Naturally, things do not have their own free will and, of course, that which emanates from things always originates in some form of human

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intervention, yet things can also affect us in ways that are not so easy to retrace in explicit and common causal effects, but require a wider perspective on the very concept of agency (Gell 1998; Latour 2005; Van Beek 1996; Verrips 1994). Jojada Verrips (1994) has already discussed such issues with regard to modern technological devices. As reflected in the title of his text, ‘The Thing Didn’t “Do” What I Wanted: Some Notes on Modern Forms of Animism in Western Societies’, anthropologists are very reluctant to recognize that people in Western societies often talk to, or about, computers or machines as having their own free will. According to Verrips, anthropologists’ tendency to stubbornly ignore this is rooted in the traditional distinction, which has long been emphasized within this discipline, between respectively Western and non-Western, ‘civilized’ and ‘wild’, ‘rational’ and ‘mystical’ thought. Yet Verrips illustrates that, contrary to what these dichotomies suggest, animistic and anthropomorphic notions and representations also abound in Western societies. This also holds true for people’s relations to architecture. From what people say about buildings it can be gathered that, whether or not the built environment has any direct effect on their (human) behaviour, wellbeing or even worldview, at least people often do ascribe a form of agency or humanlike traits to edifices, and perceive the latter as having some influence of their own. This became clear, for instance, in the analysis of stories told about quarantined buildings, and of the coping mechanisms (concretized in monuments and mementoes) deployed to deal with buildings that had ‘passed away’. Still similarly to the electronic devices to which Verrips draws attention, the tendency to face edifices in a kind of ‘subject–subject’ relation seems to be all the more common when buildings are considered to have dysfunctions, or suspected to have a negative aura: As long as they perform their tasks properly, the tendency to perceive and experience them as animate is slight. This changes, however, when they suddenly stop working or start making chaos. For then people feel powerless and begin to think in a magicalmythical way, to anthropomorphize and subsequently to communicate with the obstinate pieces of material culture as if they were human beings whom one could compel by speech or even physical violence to behave differently (ibid.: 47).3

In a more recent work, Bruno Latour has devoted a chapter to the agency of things as an important premise of Actor-Network-Theory. In different phrasings, Latour deplores the tenacity of similar divides to those discussed by Verrips, and writes that in social scientific approaches, things, generally, ‘might exist in the domain of “material” “causal” relations, but not in the “reflexive” “symbolic” domain of social relations’. He pleads for a wider perspective on the notion of agency and

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suggests that ‘any thing that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference is an actor – or, if it has no figuration yet, an actant’ (2005: 71, emphasis in original). Latour does not propose a new kind of fetishistic approach; he remains aware that things are not able to intentionally and purposefully cause any radical changes. Yet he wants to broaden common viewpoints and allow a larger variety of notions than solely those of animate, intentional human beings on the one hand, and inanimate, material things on the other. In his own words: ‘[T]here might exist many metaphysical shades between full causality and sheer inexistence. In addition to “determining” and serving as a “backdrop for human action”, things might authorize, allow, afford, encourage, permit, suggest, influence, block, render possible, forbid, and so on’ (ibid.: 72). To put it simply, refusing a so-called ‘thing-ly’ determinism does not force one to exclude an extreme diversity of other ‘thing-ly’ influences. Still according to Latour, in order to grant the agency of things the place it deserves, we need to develop an ‘eye’ for occasions where this very agency, which is not always perceptible, can be experienced; that is, ‘[S]pecific tricks have to be invented to make them talk, that is, to offer descriptions of themselves, to produce scripts of what they are making others – humans or non-humans – do’ (ibid.: 79, emphasis in original). Among the appropriate circumstances that Latour suggests are ‘the study of innovations and controversies’, ‘the irruption into the normal course of action of strange, exotic, archaic, or mysterious implements’, as well as ‘accidents, breakdowns, and strikes’. Additionally, he proposes ‘archives, documents, memoirs, museum collections, etc.’ as means to experience the agency of objects that are no longer present, and – should all this fail or be insufficient – he encourages social scientists to pay more attention to fiction and works of art (ibid.: 80–82). Latour further writes that construction sites, where ‘visitors have their feet deep in the mud’, are excellent places to ‘witness the connections between humans and non-humans’ (2005: 88). It could be added that ‘de-construction’ sites also perfectly lend themselves to this end, that is, the agency of things can be experienced at places where rubbish is disposed of, and eventually hidden or embellished (deserts, car dumps, rubbish dumps, ruins). There, attentive and receptive visitors can investigate the role, appreciation and potential transformation of all kinds of carcasses and fragments, as well as associations that they bring to mind: notions of mortality (whether natural or not) in the face of decay; notions of mystery in the face of objects recalling other times; notions of beauty as reflected by the work of artists on such themes; notions of scapegoats or heroes regarding those who are in charge of preserving or disposing. Such observations, in turn, can contribute to

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revising, differentiating or extrapolating theories on the value of outdated, ignored or rejected objects as well as the eventual end of their biography. Le Roy’s Eco-Cathedral, a permanent construction and deconstruction site, thus, seems to be an ideal place to appreciate the agency of things. There is no artificial distinction between people and things, but a convergence of material remains, human intervention in reaction to the available material, and natural transformation processes. As reflected in the title of a publication about Le Roy’s work, Nature Culture Fusion (Boukema and McIntyre 2002), various elements are inextricably bound up with each other in a large, creative, dynamic process. Still, it remains a difficult task to grasp precisely what the agency of things consists of. Le Roy lifts a corner of the veil when he insists on the differences between his ‘dynamic’ Eco-Cathedral and ‘static’ laid-out gardens: ‘[T]he designer begins with a plan that is fixed beforehand (in draft drawings). Plants and trees are allocated a set place. Possibilities of growth are only present in terms of length and density’. Such a domineering attitude towards things and their mutual relationships continues to necessitate constant and meticulous supervision (2002: 34). Most of all, a static approach considerably narrows one’s view, and blinds one against much more complex processes, too often superficially perceived as chaotic, which the straitjacket of design cannot possibly tame: Through this enormous activity that we think we have no choice but to engage in, the activity that is actually present, concealed behind the relation between all the natural elements in combination, is totally disrupted. Every natural element is part of a process and although the outward appearance of the world of plants, for instance, looks very static to us, this does not tally with the work that is actually carried on by plants. (ibid.: 34–35)

Similarly, edifices may look, from the outside, very static and inanimate. Yet radical transformations such as those described in the present research, show that much more is going on between people and things, and between things mutually, than we commonly allow ourselves to see. Latour’s invitation to physically enter the mud, however, necessitates the visitor’s willingness to immerse himself in an unmediated experience of ‘things’, and an unimpeded openness to other sensory perceptions than the purely visual.

Multi-Sensory Experiences of Materiality Various sensory experiences generate various types of knowledge, which in turn can find an expression in various media. A tactile

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experience might be more difficult to put into words than visual perception, yet tactility is indispensable in order to grasp the full nature of things – also edifices: ‘One may observe the building of a brick wall and believe that he or she understands its making, but his or her knowledge would prove deficient when that person picks up the brick and trowel. Head knowledge must find verification in the hands’ (Decker 1994: 209). This plea for a direct, manual involvement with facets of material and materiality which are more than merely visual might be seen as something rather unusual and ‘disturbing’ in a generally distant and supposedly detached (social) scientific investigation. Yet what is it, in particular, that characterizes tactile experiences, compared to those allowed by other senses? Following Hetherington, touch is not simply another means of perceiving similar things, but an entirely different way of generating knowledge than by visual perception. Very important in this respect is the proximity that touch requires, compared to the distance often preserved by sight: ‘Proximal knowledge is performative rather than representational. Its nonrepresentational quality is also context-specific, fragmentary, and often mundane. This contrasts with distal knowledge, which generally implies a broad, detached understanding based on knowledge at a distance or on a concern for the big picture (2003: 1934). This distinction in terms of proximity is also very familiar to Le Roy, who is involved in a long-lasting, unmediated dialogue and interaction with the bricks and tiles out of which he has erected his Eco-Cathedral. He believes that most people have a very limited view of material reality, one which does not reach beyond purely outward appearances. Time is one of the prerequisites for another, more satisfying perception; ‘If people want to understand what it’s all about, then they must look ten times a year at various moments, and if they persevere for some twenty years in doing so, they will somehow start to grasp what is going on’.4 Pursuing his comparison between touch and sight, Hetherington further remarks that touch is ‘inherently dialogical in character’ (2003: 1936). Where sight can grant observers an overview and form the basis for – more or less dominantly – imposing representations on the object, touch, on the contrary, implies a more balanced exchange and calls for a more modest attitude of the exploring subject, whereby ‘the “me” disappears and all that is left is the object’ (ibid.: 1939). This is an interesting link to issues previously discussed, since it invites us, once again, to reconsider the notion of ‘thing-ly’ agency (ibid.: 1938), and to surrender to a tactile experience in which place forms ‘an encounter rather than a representation’ (ibid.: 1939).

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Finally, a crucial notion with regard to touch is that of confirmation: ‘We touch something to confirm it: that it is there, that it feels like this, that we are here to experience it, that our eyes do not deceive us’ (ibid.: 1941). This can perhaps explain why multi-sensory experiences, and touch in particular, play such an important role when edifices are cleared away, or threaten to be. Thus, taking leave of someone or something is hardly conceivable without any form of tactile experience. This clearly came to the fore in how people handled the fragmentary remains of vanished buildings – either dispersing them as so many eloquent testimonies of the joyful and definitive disposal of an unwanted edifice and what it embodied, or cherishing them as valuable relics of the ‘deceased’. Also, one could hardly explain why so many people would like to attend the demolition of an edifice which in itself takes no more than a few seconds, without taking into consideration its overwhelming impact on all senses. In sum, whether processes of disposal are rapid and radical or, on the contrary, slow and hesitant, senses other than the purely visual always play a prominent role. Roy Decker’s analysis of tactility in the appreciation of architecture partly elucidates its specific role in leave-taking. In particular he writes that vision is to imagination what touch is to pain. Touch, by its direct, intimate, unmediated character, allows a one-to-one confrontation between the touching subject and the touched object. In the case of pain, which is inherently tactile, this contact can even be perceived as a kind of melting together between the two, and a simultaneous separation from their surrounding: ‘In pain the subject loses exterior comparison. … Two separate worlds are created, the self interior in pain, and the other exterior world of objects’ (1994: 212). Vision, on the contrary, presupposes a certain distance between subject and object, and imagination allows one to reach out for external objects. Therefore imagination can be deployed to overcome pain: ‘In pain there are no external objects … To lose touch with the outer world of objects is traumatic and damaging. Imagination accordingly provides the other boundary condition of experience. Unlike pain, imagination exists only through its objects’ (ibid.: 211–12). Alternating tactile and visual experiences, thus, consists of moving back and forth between, on the one hand, that which specifically relates to or ‘touches’ oneself, and on the other, a broader surrounding. In sum, ‘To mentally adjust from a sensation of touch to imagining work is to move from self to other’ (ibid.: 213).

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Recuperation and Definitive Disposal ‘Getting rid of things is one of our most quotidian experiences of loss’ (Hawkins and Muecke 2002a: xiii). In the course of this process, there is generally an opportunity to decide whether disposal should be definitive, or if recuperation should be envisaged. Touch, again, plays a crucial role in influencing one or other alternative. Hetherington very aptly remarked that: ‘While the eye consumes, the hand produces’ (2003: 1936). This can be interpreted in a variety of ways, but here it is interesting to note that it constitutes a direct link between the relevance of multi-sensory experiences, and issues of recuperation and disposal. Indeed, as Decker noted, ‘Hands are the most difficult to deceive, and eyes are the easiest’ (1994: 209). If the appreciation of architecture were based on purely tactile experiences, there would perhaps not be such a number and variety of undesired buildings nor so many accompanying reasons to reject them. Similarly, Le Roy’s Eco-Cathedral is the living proof that an unmediated, tactile experience of material can encourage, or ease its recuperation. This has partly to do with the place, and partly with the people one can come across there. Latour has already emphasized that ‘when you are guided to any construction site you are experiencing the troubling and exhilarating feeling that things could be different, or at least that they could still fail – a feeling never so deep when faced with the final product, no matter how beautiful or impressive it may be’ (2005: 89, emphasis in original). As already suggested before, construction and deconstruction sites are, perhaps, one and the same thing. Deconstruction sites are often privileged places for the resuscitation of things and, perhaps even more than construction sites, they benefit from an exceptional status with boundless opportunities. When things are supposed to have lost their value, many people tend to leave them to their own devices – and that gives other people the opportunity to approach them creatively. These very people, according to Le Roy, have better chances to breathe new life into existing things, and to create something new, if they are not professionally involved in the matter: ‘Only people like this are in a position to give free rein to chance. The expert can’t do that any more, because he’s already learned how things ought to be done. Everything that is inept, wayward, intuitive, instinctive and emotional – that is the expertise of the non-expert (2002: 94).

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Conclusion To sum up, thus, the three main issues addressed in this epilogue seem to have much more in common than only their susceptibility to (socialscientific) taboos. When things – in this case edifices – are relegated to the margins and possibly start to decay, various sensory experiences can all of a sudden manifest themselves much more explicitly than before. More than anybody else, Tim Edensor has very expressively depicted the multi-faceted experience of buildings that (threaten to) fall into dilapidation: The agency of decaying and otherwise transformed matter means that it might creak when walked upon or crumble to the touch, might give off fragments which attach themselves to the body. The facility of unpolished objects and matter to impress the body with their changing qualities under conditions of decay and deterioration, with their hardness, dampness, slipperiness, roughness and coldness, is the evocation of a materiality which has been liberated. In ruins, freed from the necessity to disguise its nature in the service of commodification, or escaped from the realms to which it was consigned, no longer swept up or polished away, the materiality of matter returns. (2005: 122)5

In the course of this materiality unfolding beyond the purely visual, it is the agency of things that becomes more directly perceptible. Despite, or perhaps precisely because of, their unclear, ambiguous, undetermined status, things in the rubbish category exert a specific kind of inescapable agency (Hawkins 2006: 85). This agency urges us more or less pressingly to determine the further destiny of the things in question, which often presupposes partly smoothing out these very things’ character – either materially or representatively. Yet whether the final issue is recuperation or disposal, this necessary ‘blindness’ will never enable complete eradication, since former rubbish will always, in one form or another, stubbornly remain present: ‘To throw things away is to subordinate objects to human action, it is to construct a world in which we think we have dominion. This doesn’t just deny the persistent force of objects as material presence, it also denies the ways in which we stay enmeshed with rubbishy things whether we like it or not’ (ibid.: 80). In order to grasp something of the agency of things, therefore, we must not only set out for places – such as (de)construction sites – where we have better chances to unrestrictedly experience it, but we must also be willing to almost literally plunge into such places, and have the intellectual modesty to unresistingly ‘abandon’ ourselves to the multisensory ways in which this ‘thing-ly’ agency might find an expression.

Notes

Chapter 1 – Dragons, Tunnels, Gold and Russians: Narrative Introductions into the Bowels of ‘Corrupt’ Architecture 1 The German term Flak refers to anti-aircraft defence. Taken literally, a Flakturm (plural Flaktürme) would thus be a tower for anti-aircraft defence. In reality, only every second tower was built to host anti-aircraft guns, and each of these artillery towers was coupled to a radar tower. For referring to any tower without differentiation, the terms Hochbunker (‘high-rise bunker’) or Gefechtsturm (‘turret’) would thus be more appropriate. Yet, since in vernacular they are all, commonly, called Flaktürme, this term will be retained in the rest of the text. 2 Since 1995, the Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna, has accommodated an art depot in one of the towers and opened it to the public. From May to November, once a week, visitors are granted access to two of the floors. Another tower hosts the Haus des Meeres (‘House of the Sea’), a deep-sea aquarium and terrarium; yet its inner architecture has been so radically changed to fit this new function that from the inside its initial character is hardly recognizable. The third tower is part of a barracks and thus a no-go area. The other three are empty and inaccessible. The history, current state and possible future of the towers are discussed in detail in Chapter 7. 3 Klaus Steiner, in an interview on 8 April 1999. 4 Fridolin Schönwiese, in an interview on 29 March 1999. 5 It is told that an underground line, connecting two neighbouring seaside resorts, was constructed under the edifice in Prora. Further, seven basements, meanwhile inundated, as well as a submarine pen, should still exist. Tunnels, flood basements and secret laboratories are also presumed under the IG Farben Haus in Frankfurt am Main. The building initially hosted a large company that actively collaborated with the National Socialist regime. After the Second World War, the U.S. Army confiscated it, and it was repeatedly cut off from the rest of town for indefinite periods of time (Loewy 2001: 4; Kirkpatrick 1999: 117–18). 6 Thomas Wolff, in an interview on 3 May 2002. 7 Fridolin Schönwiese, in an interview on 29 March 1999.

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8 More recently, a similarly spectacular story was told with regard to another Flakturm in Berlin Zoo (Knöfel and Schulz 2007). Tellingly, it made the front page of Der Spiegel as ‘Der Goldschatz aus dem Bunker’ (‘The Golden Treasure from the Bunker’). 9 The presence of thousands of pigeons in one of the Viennese towers has become inextricably bound up with the psychosomatic kind of perversity ascribed to the edifice. In a report of a visit to the tower, Dietmar Arnold (2006) describes an apocalyptic microclimate, in which degenerated creatures, apparently unable to find their way out anymore, brood in the rotten remains of their ancestors. Shortly before maintenance works started at the beginning of 2007, the fear of infectious diseases that the animals, as potential vectors, could spread once liberated formed a main cause for concern in the local press. 10 Specifically, IG Farben was closely involved in the establishment of Auschwitz–Birkenau, and the production of Zyklon B (Loewy 2001: 9).

Chapter 2 – Between Pragmatic Clearance and Pure Iconoclasm: Theoretical Perspectives on the Life and Death of Undesired Buildings 1 Dario Gamboni already noted, with regard to the rejection of works of art and monuments, that ‘openly conflictual situations involving physical or verbal attacks and resistances are especially interesting because they force antagonists to make explicit and justify their objections’ (1997: 313). 2 For a general discussion of anthropological perspectives on architecture, see Buchli 1999, 2002; Lawrence and Low 1990; Melhuish 1996. For an overview of anthropological perspectives on domestic space (the domain on which a majority of anthropological investigations into architecture have been focused), see Humphrey 1988; Lawrence-Zúñiga and Birdwell-Pheasant 1999; Miller 2001. 3 In an article entitled ‘An Anthropological View of Architecture’, Peter Blundell Jones is unique in evoking the issue of undesired architecture, which he presents as a phenomenon typical of ‘modern Western societies, where most buildings are inherited, the construction of new ones handed over to specialists, and the act of building constrained by endless rules and regulations, not to mention economic forces’, so that ‘the relationship between architecture and society is far less direct’ (1996: 25). Perhaps it is true that, depending on a number of economic, legal, political or technological factors, people can be more or less directly involved in giving shape to their built environment and that: ‘Lacking complicity with designers, people may create their own kind of independent and sometimes haphazard complicity with buildings’ (ibid.). Yet Blundell Jones confusingly suggests a difference between dwelling, and more public building types. He writes that the latter ‘have always necessarily been shared projects requiring some kind of consensus and cooperation, representing society and its values more generally’ (ibid.). I have, however, encountered several examples of heavily contested public buildings which contradict these observations, and Blundell Jones himself directly nuances his own statements as well, stating that,

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increasingly, ‘Public buildings become regarded as at best neutral containers, at worst symbols of an oppressive and anonymous authority’ (ibid.) Nevertheless, he concludes with another puzzling statement, asserting that, ‘When the complicity between building and users is so far reduced, the political potential of architecture is neither noticed nor understood’ (ibid.). On the contrary, I would be inclined to say that when people start to reject certain buildings as alienating elements, the situation starts to be profoundly political in the largest sense of the term. 4 Architecture’s potential for controversies includes what Martin Warnke (1984) has described as its ‘political factor’, and which he traces back to three aspects in particular. First, the built environment represents a rather considerable economic factor, which simply cannot remain unnoticed politically. Further, city walls, bunkers, watchtowers and so on have always literally and figuratively secured the power of political leaders, seeking to resist and intimidate their opponents. Finally, and naturally following from the foregoing, edifices embody power relationships, whether in their (overawing) size, in references to famous predecessors, or in otherwise symbolically eloquent ornaments (1984: 12–14). In other texts, Warnke emphasizes that the controversial character of numerous edifices is rooted in their relationship to other buildings. Having previously introduced the notion of ‘over-construction’ (‘Überbau’), as opposed to ‘construction’ (‘Bau’), Warnke (1996) opts for the twin concepts ‘Bau und Gegenbau’ (‘Construction and Counter Construction’). He suggests that the development of architecture has, generally, less been inspired by a need for harmony than by the wish to surpass – and, indirectly, deny or repudiate – existing edifices (ibid.: 11). In early architectural history, competition between commissioners was mainly quantitative: they would play each other off in increasingly large edifices. Later, specifically in the course of the twentieth century, as architectural style became increasingly informed by worldviews in addition to taste and aesthetics, competition between commissioners got a more qualitative character (ibid.: 12). More and more frequently, architectural design would be deployed politically, in order to attack ‘counter edifices’ ideologically (ibid.: 18). Many other authors have racked their brains over an exact definition of architecture’s political potential. More recently Robert Bevan, in his work The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War, experienced how difficult it is to pin the latter down in words: [T]here is nothing intrinsically political about the style of a city’s buildings … That is not to say that the design and production of architecture is free from ideological content; quite the opposite, it is saturated with it. But this content is not inherent in form but arises when those forms are placed in a societal and historical context. It is the ever-changing meanings brought to brick and stone, rather than some inbuilt quality of the materials or the way in which they are assembled, that need to be emphasized. Fundamentally it is the reasons for their presence and behind the desire to obliterate them that matter. Buildings are not political but are politicized by why and how they are built, regarded and destroyed (2006: 12, emphasis in original).

5 In the light of political developments in Ajaria in the early twenty-first century and the resignation of president Abashidze in May 2004 in particular, it is difficult to say in which condition the kindergarten finds itself nowadays, but this does not alter the value of Pelkmans’ (more abstract) analysis for the present investigation.

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6 Winfried Nerdinger is exemplary of such a semiotic approach, stating that, ‘It belongs to the duties of an art historian to let buildings speak, so that they tell their story and help us understand historical connections. … Every society and authority inscribes its name in the buildings and city maps that it brings about or plans’ (2004: 8–9). 7 Simon Coleman and Peter Collins have made similar observations with regard to sacred buildings: Churches, temples, synagogues and mosques can house spaces of secret resistance as much as of official discourse; here issues of visibility, perspective and the intersection of the temporal with the spatial come to the fore. A purely semiotic approach consequently misses much of the shifting ideological, political and social significances of the spatial environment. Spaces, sacred or otherwise, should not be seen as fixed social forms: they are contested, modified and reconstituted in the official and unofficial realms of culture. (1996: 14)

8 In the entire book, all quotes originally in German or French have been translated by the author. 9 Warnke (1973) was already very conscious of this deeply controversial character of iconoclastic gestures. He emphasized that those who have damaged or destroyed their opponents’ artefacts in an attempt to overrule them would condemn such methods straightaway if their own property were threatened. Warnke also recognizes that scientists are not immune to such value judgements, and that pseudo-objective distinctions between supposedly embellishing and senseless destructions often prevent detached and insightful analyses of these issues (ibid.: 10–11). 10 Demandt’s analysis pertains to a humanistic tradition, as distinct from a sociological one in which a work of art is perceived as ‘a moment in a process involving the collaboration of more than one actor, working through certain social institutions, and following historically observable trends’, and the value of a work of art is seen to derive ‘not solely from aesthetic qualities intrinsic to the work, but from external conditions as well’ (Zolberg 1990: 9). See also Becker 1982 as well as Chapter 3 on the removal of the Kaiserbau for a more detailed discussion of these issues. 11 Réau already sensed that he was dealing with a touchy subject when he explained the lack of publications on this theme by the difficult, afflicting and hazardous character of such an investigation (1994 [1958]: 3). 12 David Riches, in his introduction to The Anthropology of Violence, has noted that: ‘Childhood experiences, personality traits and other factors “internal to the individual”, which possibly predispose particular manners of behaving, will be less prominent in the explanations offered by anthropologists. Behind the anthropologists’ perspective is the assumption that social acts are designed to make an impact on the wider social environment, and that a measure of shared understanding between an act’s perpetrator and its recipients and witnesses is a precondition of the act’s intended effect being produced. Social values importantly underpin this shared understanding’ (1986: 15). 13 Cohen has insisted that the perception and presentation of vandalism as motiveless is not disconnected from people’s condemnation of it: ‘[O]n the one hand, acts which are seen to have a motive, to “make sense”, might be less subject

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to the violent reactions usually directed to acts perceived as motiveless. But on the other hand, motives can be approved or disapproved of and if the vandalism is associated (correctly or not) with an ideology one disapproves of, then the reaction will be more punitive’ (1973: 40–41). Demandt, despite condemning vandalism altogether, also recognizes that its traces, when appropriated by witnesses, can come to be recognized and get a value as historic testimonies, whose elimination would then also be an act of vandalism, since, ‘Removing the traces of acts of violence is violence against violence; it could be termed anti-vandalism, which, though justified, nonetheless interferes with the essence of memory’ (1997: 64). Nevertheless, here again Demandt cannot omit a judgement and states that in any case, the artist always deserves more respect than the destroyer (ibid.: 66). Also in very recent works, certain authors are not backward in admitting that their (scientific) investigation would be inconceivable without a more personal (subjective) commitment, even if they are very aware, like Nerdinger (2004: 9), that this might easily cause annoyance. Personal concern has also unmistakably informed Bevan, when he discusses, in the last part of his book, the legitimacy and appropriateness, authenticity or superficiality, of issues of ‘Rebuilding and Commemoration’. In a chapter on ‘Protection and Prosecution’, he urges national and international institutions to not only take a clearer position and severely condemn the illegitimate destruction of architecture, but also suit the action to the word and call offenders to account for their deeds. His pleading is imbued with indignation when he writes that: ‘The outcome of the ICTY trials and the deterrent effect of severe sentences for those found guilty of crimes on the basis of the destruction of a community’s built heritage are vital if a climate is to be created where the unacceptability of such actions is understood. It is important to hope but it is hard to be optimistic’ (2006: 211–12). According to Gamboni, attacks against works of art have the potential, like all kinds of crises and dysfunctions, to shed light on the so-called ‘normal’ attitudes and modes of communication from which they tend to be distinguished. More specifically, they can ‘help us better to realize and understand the plurality of functions … that works of art – or objects defined as works of art by certain people under given circumstances – go on fulfilling, the plurality of corresponding attitudes, the relations that exist and the conflicts that arise between them’ (1997: 11). In his analysis of the post-1989 removal of Lenin statues, Mark Lewis already remarked that calls for preservation are always related to the awareness that an object can potentially be modified. This presupposes that people realize that a monument is ‘always more and less than the figure which it ostensibly represents’ (1991: 3, emphasis in original). This calls to mind Riches’ distinction between the instrumental and expressive purposes of violent acts. For more about this two-sided relationship, see also Barthes 1997 [1964]. Demandt (1993) has explored this subject on a more abstract level in a book about ‘might-have-been-history’, which can be applied to ‘might-have-beenarchitecture’. Every realized project, actually, implies the rejection of various

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unbuilt projects. The latter are at the centre of Chapter 7, about unbuilt projects for the Viennese Flaktürme. Having emphasized the complexity of architectural objects and of their eventual destruction, the prefix ‘icono’ is perhaps not appropriate in the present case and should be replaced by a notion encompassing the material as well as the representative aspects of buildings. I am grateful to Mathijs Pelkmans from whom I have borrowed the terms ‘concrete embodiments of corruption’, which he introduced in a session with the same title at the Fifteenth Anniversary Conference on Corruption, at the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research on 12–13 December 2002. For a discussion of various dimensions of the notion of corruption as applied to architecture, see Chapter 1. Similarly, Colloredo-Mansfeld observes that, ‘Orchestrated moments of destruction, cycles of appearance and vanishing, and other losses recur across time and societies and scales of human action in ways that present thinking about ephemeral objects has yet to touch’ (2003: 247–48). Harris observed that: ‘[B]uilding modernization, like extensive hospitalization periods, can produce a sense of rebirth and renewed energy. Turning to the private sectors we find that after being closed for reconstruction, stores, theatres, and office buildings often have grand openings, ribbon cuttings, and special programs, although they do not normally produce a new cornerstone’ (1999: 128).

Chapter 3 – 13 May 2001, 8.01 A.M. – 1 Building, 20,000 People and 450 Kilograms of Explosives: The Elimination of the Kaiserbau in Troisdorf as a Secular Sacrifice 1 In all cases described in the following chapters, complete elimination has been, at some point, envisaged, whether as a real, concrete option, or in the imagination. One of the most striking examples is, perhaps, Antonio Riello’s miniature reconstruction of the Viennese Flaktürme out of sugar cubes, and their subsequent collapse, as presented in Chapter 7. See also Nerdinger (2004: 139), for an illustration of the virtual explosion of the Haus der Kunst (‘Art House’) in Munich, an edifice commissioned by the National Socialist regime. 2 With regard to architecture, representatives of a merely humanistic tradition as described by Zolberg would, notably, consider that: Not all building is usually thought of as architecture. We use the word ‘architecture’ most readily when speaking of building that is not casual or routine but planned, thought about, and designed by people educated as architects. That education includes much instruction in how buildings are to be designed, how their construction is organized, where they should be located, and much else. (Sparshott 1994: 4)

3 All quotes by Heinz-Bernward Gerhardus, Alex We Hillgemann, Francis Hall, Heike Glomb, Klaus Schlich and Roman Hümbs are taken from interviews held on 9–10 July 2002, 9–11 November 2002 and 17 May 2003.

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4 Aesthetic qualities should not be seen as explanatory in themselves, as something inherent to the edifice that ineluctably determines its fate, but formal aspects, proportions, and the choice of materials should not be dismissed as entirely insignificant and irrelevant. They determine that buildings do not all start their biography with absolutely ‘equal’ chances, and supporters of removal frequently invoke them among other justifications. 5 One attempt was made to improve the building’s image, in 1999: H.A. Schult, an artist from Cologne, realized a project in the Kaiserbau entitled Hotel Europa, which aroused great interest in various media in Germany and even abroad. It consisted of providing the Kaiserbau with some virtual guests by hanging over one hundred huge portraits of famous people in front of each of the hotel rooms on the west side. It brought the building into the spotlight for several months, but economic benefits failed to appear and the second part of the project, on the east side, was never realized. It is evident that the project had nothing to do with the specific meaning of the building, apart from its initial function as a hotel – which it never fulfilled. The portraits could just as well have been hung on the facade of any other empty hotel. Certain people in Troisdorf told me that the project had been initiated by people ‘from outside’ who wanted to create a distinct profile for themselves and organized an expensive party for ‘high society’ to celebrate the opening. Klaus Schlich, a young man who had spent much time in the Kaiserbau, was particularly indignant when Schult’s project was realized – it gave him the feeling that the Kaiserbau had been taken from him and his friends: ‘It was our Kaiserbau, and now they come along and impose this frippery.’ 6 Testimonies of the removal of other buildings elsewhere confirm this impression of an overwhelming total sensory experience. See, for example, Knapp 1996. 7 Hubert and Mauss have written, with regard to the sacrificer or priest, that: ‘More familiar with the world of the gods, in which he is partly involved through a previous consecration, he can approach it more closely and with less fear than the layman, who is perhaps sullied by unknown blemishes’ (1964 [1898]: 22–23). 8 David Gross introduces the notion of ‘premature waste, that is, the discarding of things when they are only about halfway through their natural life spans, or in some instances, even less than halfway’ (2002: 33, emphasis in original). 9 In order to make a building’s elimination significant, its high value can either be positive or negative – as long as it does not have a neutral value and find itself in a kind of ‘grey zone’ of routinely unnoticed edifices.

Chapter 4 – Witnessing Urbicide: Contested Destruction in Sarajevo 1

In Riedlmayer’s investigation, a total of 397 sites, located in 19 municipalities, were surveyed: 277 mosques and 55 other Muslim sites, 63 Roman Catholic sites and 2 national libraries and archives. The term ‘heavily damaged’ applies to a building which ‘has suffered significant structural damage to its main elements; typically, this would be used to describe a building that has been completely burnt out, often with its roof entirely or substantially collapsed, or extensive blast damage, or a combination of damage to several parts of the structure’ (2002: 8).

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A building is ‘almost destroyed’ when ‘several principal parts of the building, such as perimeter walls, are missing or severely compromised; the building appears to be beyond repair and would require complete reconstruction, but still has some identifiable elements standing’ (ibid.). Finally, ‘completely destroyed’ means that it ‘has been razed and has no potentially salvageable elements left standing above ground’ (ibid.). An earlier version of the present chapter (Van der Hoorn 2004) has been published in the book Stadt und Trauma/City and Trauma: Annäherungen – Konzepte – Analysen, edited by Bettina Fraisl and Monika Stromberger (2004b). In this work, various authors have reflected on the relationships between the notions of city and trauma – or, alternatively, ‘city of trauma’ and ‘trauma of the city’ (Khan and Muñoz-Rojas 2004: 63) – and/or provided an analysis of traumatic experiences in New York, Hiroshima, Berlin, Pforzheim, Manchester, Kuta or Riga. How to distinguish traumas in an urban context from other traumas? How do traumas influence the experience of urban space and, perhaps, result in a changed cultural infrastructure? (Fraisl and Stromberger 2004a: 17). Does an urban context reinforce, or rather compensate for traumatic experiences? (ibid.: 14) Robert Bevan has devoted his entire book The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War to the damaging and destruction of edifices in a context of war. From the outset, although he explicitly focuses on the fate of architecture, he underlines that the latter is inextricably bound up with that of human beings: ‘The link between erasing any physical reminder of a people and its collective memory and the killing of the people themselves is ineluctable. The continuing fragility of civilized society and decency is echoed in the fragility of its monuments’ (2006: 8). Bevan joins Slavenka Drakuli´c in thinking that an explanation for the extreme emotions provoked by the deliberate destruction of buildings must be sought in the general tendency to ascribe permanence to architecture (ibid.: 12). He does not extensively work out this issue, and his work does not stand out by the depth or innovation of theoretical discussions, but his main merit is to have meticulously described and cross-referenced an impressive quantity and diversity of cases worldwide and all through the twentieth century – cases ranging from the explosion of the Mostar Bridge by Croatian riflemen in 1993 to the devastating arson in the National and University Library in Sarajevo by Serbian occupants a few months earlier; the destruction and clearance of Armenian cultural heritage in Turkey in the 1960s; terrorist attacks by the IRA in the 1920s and 1960s; the elimination of Palestinian dwelling houses by Israeli troops in the last four decades; and so on. Actually, buildings are never inherently and indisputably eyesores in themselves. Therefore, the term ‘sore in the eye of …’, or ‘thorn in the flesh of …’ might be in general more appropriate than ‘eyesore’, since it implies relativity and invites us to specify in whose eyes an edifice is unwanted. Ivica Proli´c has described that even the sensory experience of the city had become entirely different: the perception of hot and cold, the absence of light, and the unusual silence, regularly interrupted by explosions (1993: 73). Vije´cnica, built as a City Hall in 1896, had been used as the National and University Library since 1945 when, on 25 August 1992, it was ‘bombarded and

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set ablaze by a tightly targeted barrage of incendiary shells, fired from multiple Bosnian Serb Army (VRS) positions on the heights overlooking the old town’ (Riedlmayer 2002: 19). Only the outside walls remained, and less than ten per cent of an exceptional collection of 1.5 million books and unique centuries-old manuscripts. The building and the collection, used by local inhabitants from all ethnic backgrounds and scientists from all horizons, had an important symbolic value. As part of the historic business centre, Vije´cnica was ‘at the margins of West-Mediterranean, Central-European and Oriental cultural movements … a “Battlefield” of their conflicts, interweaving and reconciliation’ (Dz˘irlo 1993: 48). All quotes by Enes Kujundz˘i´c, D ¯ enana Buturovi´c, Midhat Cesovi´c, Mehmed Halilovi´c and Mevlida Serdarevi´c are taken from interviews on 11–16 August 2003. Also at home, people spent a lot of time repairing and cleaning, in order to keep some impression of normality. Ivica Proli´c, for example, describes how her neighbour patiently stopped the gaps and cleared his apartment after every attack (1993: 75). David Freedberg also mentions ‘the desire to gain attention and publicity’ (1989: 423) as a main motivation for iconoclastic gestures. Naturally, citizens themselves were also targets during the siege, but in the present analysis, they primarily appear as witnesses of the destruction to which buildings have fallen prey. Outside the scope of David Riches’ three-part perspective on violent acts – including one or more victim(s), performer(s) and witness(es) (1986: 4–7) – the use of the term ‘performer’ and its precedence over that of ‘perpetrator’ perhaps requires some additional justification. The term calls to mind Edward Schieffelin’s view of performance as something inherently interactive, risky and unpredictable – all qualifications which equally apply to the questioning of an edifice’s existence and its possible alteration. Compared to the term ‘perpetrator’, which often suggests a form of guilt and reprehensibility, ‘performer’ seems more neutral. It could be argued that the term ‘perpetrator’ is to ‘performer’ as the term ‘victim’ to ‘target’. In the following, we will therefore retain the term ‘performer(s)’ to designate those who question an edifice’s existence and possibly carry out its alteration. In the course of cross-examination, Riedlmayer produced evidence that Milos˘evi´c’s perspective did not correspond with reality: Typically, when you have acts of retribution taking place, they tend to be spontaneous acts. … Generally, the kind of tit for tat thing also tends to be sporadic. It depends on circumstances and opportunity. So the one thing that speaks against it is the systematic and uniform nature of the destruction that I saw and documented. The second one is the fact that much of this destruction occurred not in the heat of conflict, but at times when the areas in question were under control of the Bosnian Serb authorities, which suggests, along with other factors that I mentioned, such as the use of explosives and the amount of organisation involved, … that this was not merely a matter of mob anger but of some sort of directed policy. And lastly, if you had a real tit for tat relationship, one could expect the same pattern and degree of destruction on all sides. And as I’ve explained, this is clearly not the case (ICTY 2003: 23882–83).

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13 Bevan concurs with Coward when he confidently refuses, from the very beginning of his work, to see the destruction of architecture as ‘collateral damage’ and draws attention, instead, to ‘the active and often systematic destruction of particular building types or architectural traditions’, which ‘are attacked not because they are in the path of a military objective: to their destroyers they are the objective’ (2006: 8, emphasis in original). Yet although Bevan sticks to this perspective in the rest of his work, he does not theoretically discuss the issue as elaborately as Coward. According to the two other perspectives identified by Coward, destruction is understood as directed essentially against cultural heritage, or as ‘signs of Balkanization’ (2004: 164). The first interpretation rightfully relates destruction to ‘ethnonationalism that has at its heart the destruction of the conditions of possibility of pluralism, key among which is the evidence of coexistence provided by the built environment of Bosnia’ (ibid.: 162). Yet Coward rejects this view as too partial, because ‘the destruction of the urban environment is more widespread than these symbolic buildings. Indeed, it encompasses buildings that have no distinctive cultural value, or are of indistinct cultural provenance’ (ibid.: 163). The other interpretation is too semiotic, according to Coward: it sees rubble as a signifier, referring to a signified (the fragmentation of the Balkan), and completely passes over the relevance of the very acts of deliberate destruction (ibid.: 164). 14 Regarding the question of whether or not urbicide and genocide should be seen as two interrelated facets of one and the same phenomenon, Coward and Bevan clearly disagree with each other. Bevan’s whole investigation starts from the idea that the fate of buildings is one element – or even symptom – of the fate of human societies, and that the latter can even be ‘read’ from the former in that ‘where a group is under physical attack, the destiny of its representative architecture is an excellent indicator of whether genocidal intent is present or incipient’ (2006: 27). Pursuing this perspective, and despite the fact that Bevan’s book focuses on the fate of buildings rather than people (ibid.: 23), its whole structure is derived from various possible fates of human societies: I begin with an examination of the fate of buildings as part of genocide and ethnic cleansing and go on to examine the targeting of buildings in campaigns of terror and conquest, in the structures erected and demolished to keep peoples apart or force them together, and those levelled at the hands of revolutionary new orders that want to build Utopia on the ruins of the past (ibid.: 21).

It is mainly Bevan’s rather semiotic point of departure that makes his approach more limited than that of Coward. This viewpoint clearly comes to the fore when he writes that ‘architecture takes on a totemic quality: a mosque, for example, is not simply a mosque; it represents to its enemies the presence of a community marked for erasure’ (ibid.: 8), as well as when he delimits the scope of his book as the ‘violent destruction of buildings for other than pragmatic reasons’ (ibid.: 11). Yet, in any destruction, there is always a part of pragmatism combined with a part of symbolism. 15 The intention with this comparison is not to limit the view on the Bosnian Serb Army by simply equating the besiegers with terrorists. Rather, the main idea to be retained from Zulaika and Douglass’ text is that of a transgression of norms by the performers, making them taboo in the eyes of those relating their actions.

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Indeed, although no one can precisely determine the presumed life expectancy of buildings, their three-dimensional materiality is generally perceived as something durable – or, as concisely worded by Drakuli´c, at least as something ‘to outlive us’ (1996: 97). Questioning an edifice’s existence, thus, is like evoking its premature death, and is therefore often surrounded by taboos. (Even when a building is considered ugly and senseless, like in Troisdorf, its elimination requires careful justification.) Trying to understand those who are questioning an edifice’s existence and possibly altering it, then, would require identifying oneself with these ‘performers’, and thus to break a taboo oneself. This can partially explain a reluctance to analyse the performers’ motives – a reluctance which can not only be observed in the Sarajevo case, but also, for instance, in Zinnowitz, as will be discussed in Chapter 8. 16 Mark Wigley has structured an article on ‘Terrorising Architecture’ around the idea that ‘terrorism is not simply the violation of space. More precisely, it is the possibility of such a violation, since it is usually threatened rather than enacted’ (1995: 42). 17 Straus depicted the destroyers as follows: Their souls, uncivilized and brutal, self-conscious about their birth outside the ‘civilized’ world, have remained undeveloped, sluggish with an ignorance of which they are not even conscious. Strong and brave while acting as a mob, they destroy everything before them, unaware that once their rage has been satisfied, they will have to go back to their ‘eternal roots’, their huts, ravines, mountains and lairs. Emerging from the dregs of society, they attain for a fleeting moment the pinnacle of their glory. (1994: 40)

About the Nature–Culture opposition and, specifically, the perception of war as ‘a phenomenon belonging more to nature than to society’, see also Zulaika 1988: 34. 18 The towns of ‘urbicide doers’, according to Kurto, are nothing else than ‘ideal prototypes of urban villages’, showing that, ‘Obviously they have not understood the meaning and the task of a town known throughout its history’ (1993: 32). From a more neutral, analytical viewpoint, Chaslin observed that the war in former Yugoslavia was ‘driven by an unstoppable hatred of the city’. Basically, the conflict opposed the city – as ‘a concentration of authority’, ‘a place of historic awareness’, ‘main site of cultural and religious interbreeding’ and ‘site of modern industry’ (1997: 44) – to traditional settings striving at any cost for the preservation of some centuries-old customs and social structures. 19 There are remarkable parallels between Zulaika and Douglass’ explanations for ignoring the motivations of terrorists (1996: 179) and Freedberg’s observations with regard to iconoclasts: ‘We might be corrupted, as the curators and others note, if we hear (too much) talk about iconoclasm. Beneath this concern lies the strong fear that to reveal such things in others might somehow expose and legitimate that which lies deep within ourselves’ (1989: 423). 20 Riedlmayer reports about ‘the destruction and razing of 5 mosques in the town of Bijeljina; of 2 mosques in the town of Janja (in Bijeljina municipality); of 12 mosques and 4 turbes in Banja Luka; and of 3 mosques in the city of Brcko’ (2002: 12). See also Mustafi´c 1993.

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21 Similarly, Mustafi´c has denounced ‘the attempt to wipe out former living together of all the four peoples on this territory without sparing even the symbols of their own cultural-historical identity’ (1993: 26). 22 Invited by the ICTY to depict the situation encountered in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Riedlmayer recalled that: ‘The destroyed buildings in many cases had been not only burnt or blown up but the ruins had been bulldozed and the rubble removed from the site. One could tell that the building had been there often only by looking carefully for traces of foundations, and in a few cases even the foundations had been excavated’ (ICTY 2003: 23793). 23 Straus evoked the same question from a more economic point of view: ‘There are so many ruins in town, so many burnt down blocks of flats that will remain unusable for a long time. Therefore we will need to investigate whether it is more profitable to complete the destruction or to reconstruct these edifices’ (1994: 173–74). 24 Excerpts that simultaneously express indignation and confidence include: ‘Their castles will remain destroyed, and this city will rise like a phoenix from its ashes, because it is more than merely a city; it is also the spirit of its inhabitants!’ (Straus 1994: 114). ‘These difficult and pregnant, complex and contradictory moments which this town is now going through are in fact cathartic processes; in this process of self-purification, the light comes, as in Cabalistic or Buddhistic mysteries, from inside, from the deepest interiors of the urban being of Sarajevo’ (Špilja 1993: 23).

Chapter 5 – From Nuclear Waste to a Temple of Consumerism: The Recuperation and Neutralization of the Ex-would-be Nuclear Power Plant in Kalkar 1 See Chapter 10 for further discussion of buildings as ‘martyrs’. 2 All quotes by Harald Koch, Klaus Bender, Karl-Ludwig Van Dornick, Willibald Kunisch and Achim Harks are taken from interviews held on 17 January 2004, 12 July 2004 and 27–28 July 2004. 3 Tom Vanderbilt, in an extensive analysis of the architecture of nuclear power stations built in the United States during the Cold War, has noted that these buildings are ‘the highest expression of the modernist dictum “form follows function”’, but that ‘any single building by Mies van der Rohe has occasioned more architectural consideration than all these structures combined’ (2002: 17). 4 This seems to be one of the explanations for the dilapidated state of the Kulturhaus in Zinnowitz, described in Chapter 8. 5 Gentrification will be amply discussed in Chapter 6, about the new popularity of GDR high-rise buildings in Berlin. 6 This might become the case in Zinnowitz, if the Kulturhaus described in Chapter 8 were to fall further into disrepair while simultaneously gaining in importance and recognition as a last, nostalgia-fed remnant of GDR times. 7 The concept of the uncanny has often been defined as a notion of unexpected presence, ‘a once-buried spring bursting forth unexpectedly, … a disquieting

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return’ (Vidler 1992: 25–26). It will be discussed in much greater detail in Chapter 10 on the rehabilitation of former eyesores. In The Architectural Uncanny, Anthony Vidler adds that in the realm of architecture one could not say that a building is uncanny in itself, but rather that it is experienced as such in people’s minds. In other words, ‘there is no such thing as an uncanny architecture, but simply architecture that, from time to time and for different purposes, is invested with uncanny qualities’ (ibid.: 12). Interestingly, it is often precisely those buildings whose doors and windows are boarded up that people consider haunted and uncanny. If we are to believe Hetherington, these buildings have not been ‘properly buried’ yet. Michael Mayerfeld Bell has also written about this theme under the daring title Ghosts of Place. He describes the ghosts as ‘spirits we cannot see but whose presence we nevertheless experience’: Ghosts of the living and dead alike, of both individual and collective spirits, of both other selves and our own selves, haunt the places of our lives. … I use the term here in the broader sense of a felt presence … that possesses and gives a sense of social aliveness to a place. … The ghosts of place may seem uncanny at times, but they are nevertheless a familiar and often homey part of our lives. … [They] are not only ghosts of the past; they can as well be of the present, and even the future. (1997: 813, 815–16, emphasis in original)

8 Hawkins formulated similar ideas in different words: ‘For if the thing is always a kind of remainder, so too is waste, hence the potential of waste to remind us of the liminality between useful and useless, object and thing’ (2006: 75). 9 Similarly, Thompson writes that ‘one sure indication of status … is how many objects people are able to discard’ (1979: 2).

Chapter 6 – Consuming the ‘Platte’ in East Berlin: The Revaluation of Former GDR Architecture 1 According to Sieglinde Geisel, the German term Plattenbau – plural Plattenbauten, often abbreviated to Platte – is a West German invention that obscures the positive reputation of these buildings in former East Berlin. She quotes the mayor of Hellersdorf, who remembered that, ‘We called them totalcomfort accommodation, because we were fascinated that warm water came out of the tap’ (2002: 30). I will nevertheless continue to use the term Plattenbau, because it was used by the people I spoke with, the newcomers in these prefabricated apartment blocks who are the subject of this chapter. Besides that, literally, the term refers to nothing else than a type of building, characterized by a specific construction method using prefabricated plates. 2 Honi is short for Erich Honecker. 3 All quotes by Erik Schmidt, Axel Watzke, Ulli Uphaus, Frank Peter Thomas, Gerriet Schultz, Rob Savelberg and Christian Lagé are taken from interviews held on the 5–8 July 2001 and 4–9 May 2003. 4 In Berlin, a significant number of prefabricated apartment blocks were built in or near the city centre. These apartments allow easy access to the rich and complex infrastructure of the inner districts and a different lifestyle from that in the

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dormitory suburbs. Newcomers have all chosen centrally located buildings; they would probably not make the move to a peripheral district. In addition, although all Plattenbauten look very similar at first sight and were supposed to embody egalitarian housing, there are nevertheless some significant differences in standards: where most centrally located high-rises are well equipped, and some of them have even been renovated, certain eighteen-storey buildings in Marzahn do not possess an elevator. About the relation between, on the one hand, public space, exterior design and standardization and, on the other, private space, interiors and personal arrangements in domestic space in the former Eastern Bloc, see also Dörhöfer 1994: 201; Crowley 2002: 187; Gerasimova 2002: 210; Drazin 2001. It is important to bear in mind, however, that flats in which entire families were living are now occupied by two new inhabitants at the most. The Teachers’ House, a very prominent building on the Alexanderplatz, was designed by GDR star architect Hermann Henselmann and used for the education of teachers. It remained empty for many years after German reunification, until it was put into use again by a number of artists, architects and designers in the late 1990s. With the title ‘Platte putzen’ (‘Cleaning Platte’), Max presented four newcomers in the Plattenbauten together with images of their interior (Esser 2001). Home followed with ‘Neues Leben in der (k)alten Platte’ (‘New Life in the (C)Old Platte’): interviews with four inhabitants, illustrated by glossy pictures of their trendy homes (Wewer 2001). Der Spiegel published an in-depth report entitled ‘Dufte urban’ (‘Great Urban’) (Koelbl 2001), and the new impulse even reached the other side of the Atlantic with a one-page coverage in The New York Times, stating, ‘In Chic New Berlin, Ugly is Way Cool’ (Roth 2002). In the same and following period, Coca-Cola, Volkswagen and Vodafone used Schmidt’s apartment or other Plattenbauten as locations for commercials. In Marzahn and Hellersdorf, many efforts were made – supported by big investments – to renovate Plattenbauten and differentiate them from each other by means of individual balconies, works of art on the roof, plants, and coloured or decorated facades. Although this corresponds, for many people, to a positive image of the Plattenbauten, it has never received – and will never receive – the same attention as the apartments of the newcomers. Additionally, the Plattenbauten are very recent in terms of architectural history, and many current inhabitants were the very first ones to move into their flats – they were, so to say, ‘pioneers’, and this creates a special kind of attachment to the place, as well as between fellow inhabitants (Kil 1999). See also Humphrey 2002: 185–87. The WMF-Club, founded and initially accommodated in the Württembergischen Metallwaren Fabrik (a former metalwork) has led a nomadic existence since the early 1990s. The search for empty, affordable space soon led its initiators into GDR architecture, such as the very striking, shell-shaped, concrete building surnamed Ahornblatt (‘Maple Leaf’), that was used in GDR times as a canteen, or Café Moskau, one of the catering establishments representing the other Eastern bloc states. The WMF-Club also got hold of the entire interior of the Palace of the Republic. Nonetheless, Schultz also explained to me that especially

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the elderly from the former GDR were not necessarily happy with these developments. He recalled the comments of the caretaker in the building of the Council of State, where Schultz and others presented projects for the Palace of the Republic: He said to me: he would prefer to tear the thing down before some obscure artist got up to pranks with the GDR architecture. Better to go down with honour than end up a ruin of GDR architecture that someone plays with. There are many former GDR inhabitants who mourn the passing of the old state, who fulfilled positions of importance, and don’t like what we are doing.

12 Another example in the Teachers’ House was the telephone exchange, an enormous installation from GDR times. Savelberg, who had an office in the Teachers’ House, told me that one person was responsible for making the connections. On this occasion, he was also tapping the phone calls, as he had always done before 1989. Most incoming tenants found it funny; Savelberg said it gave him the feeling of living in a kind of museum or fairyland. This was of course not the same perception as those had who actually lived in the GDR. Similarly, Schultz told me that, although the regular customers of the WMF were, from the beginning, from both East and West Germany, not all of them appreciated the introduction of GDR aesthetics in the interior design. Some East Germans complained that, ‘I don’t want to go to a club and be surrounded by the shit I grew up with’. 13 Since ‘images at a distance’ generally represent the perception of professionals, they do not always have to be negatively biased: in another context, politicians could have an interest in preserving certain buildings, or investors could see a gap in the market. 14 My emphasis has mainly been on positive valuations by initial tenants, but high vacancy rates in non-renovated flats show that negative ‘images at eye level’ can also exist and lead hundreds of thousands of people to move out. 15 After the Teachers’ House had been sold, some tenants started privileging their individual interests in the search for a new office, and what had by that time become like a community soon fell apart. Here we see a shift from ‘images from within’ to ‘images at a distance’, and a very pragmatic search for other, affordable offices. Others, who absolutely wanted to stay on the Alexanderplatz, moved into the Haus des Reisens (‘House of Travel’), another GDR building with a contemporary interior; and still others rented a floor in the main building of the communist newspaper Neues Deutschland. 16 In a sociological study for Humboldt University about the revaluation of Plattenbauten, Kwadwo Awuku and others (2001: 17–18) asked if the new popularity of Plattenbauten should be interpreted as a trend, or if it consisted of a series of individual interests that did not form a collective movement. The scope of their research was too small to draw definitive conclusions, but the authors had the feeling that the growing popularity was not as striking as the coverage in the media would suggest. The friends and acquaintances of incoming tenants reacted positively to their new apartment but did not imitate them – a necessary condition for the development of a trend. 17 For example, several apartment blocks on the Platz der Vereinten Nationen (where the artist Erik Schmidt lives) were extensively renovated in 1995 and

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1996 and subsequently became listed buildings (Perler 1998). Attempts at upgrading the housing stock in Hellersdorf were also made. In general, since 1990, many property developers have asked themselves how to develop this enormous quantity of GDR housing. 18 Besides Dostoprimetschatjelnosti in Hellersdorf, for example, an empty Plattenbau in Halle-Neustadt was transformed into a hotel for several weeks in September 2003, attracting hundreds of visitors every day. In the same period, thirty artists were participating in a project in Hoyerswerda entitled Superumbau: Die verkunstete Platte, documenting, analysing and challenging the changing meanings of Plattenbauten in various cities (Baumeister 2003).

Chapter 7 – If Not Clearing, Then At Least Thinking Them Away: The Significance of Unrealized Proposals and the Viennese Flaktürme 1 According to Elmar Widmann (1998), this is confirmed by a number of documents showing that in Hamburg and Berlin as well, it was planned to transform the towers into memorials and to make them more attractive aesthetically after the war, either decorating them or covering them with natural stone. 2 Following the Austrian law for the protection of listed buildings, an edifice can be listed if it has a historical, artistic or cultural meaning, and if there is public interest in the preservation of this meaning. At least until the late 1990s, public buildings owned by the state, the Church, cities, municipalities or Bundesländer (federal states) were automatically listed until evidence to the contrary was provided by the Office for Listed Buildings. At this date, four Flaktürme were owned by the Austrian state, and two by the municipality (ownership has changed back and forth), but none of them were listed. 3 All quotes by Fridolin Schönwiese, Andreas Lehne, Renate Banik-Schweitzer and Gregor Eichinger are taken from interviews held between 29 March and 3 May 1999. 4 Apparently, Russian military forces also tried – unsuccessfully – to dynamite one of the Viennese towers in the early postwar years (Mattl 2001: 76; Sakkers 1998: 96). 5 The mysterious aura surrounding the towers was already illustrated by the narratives presented in the first chapter. See also Chapter 9 concerning the case of the National Socialist seaside resort in Prora, where some have expressed similar fascination for the edifice and where interesting parallels could be noted between, on the one hand, physical incompleteness and imperfection, and on the other, strength and durability. 6 Gottfried Knapp elaborately describes the laborious demolition of a Flakturm in Berlin: the first fifty thousand kilos of explosives only occasioned clouds of dust and after several weeks under fire, the edifice only had limited damage. Nonetheless, the British military did not give up and managed to blow up the walls with an additional bursting charge of thirty tons. Subsequently, one hundred

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thirty workers needed two years and seven hundred additional explosive charges to clear away the rubble (1996: 15). The question of ‘survival’ seems to be very pressing, at least, with regard to projects that were designed before the computer age. Alison Sky and Michelle Stone were very sorry to discover, during their investigation into unrealized projects throughout the history of the United States, that a significant number of drawings had been accidentally or purposefully destroyed (1976: vii). Ponten exulted: ‘Architecture that remained unrealized: this is generally the most beautiful architecture! It is to the realized as the ideal is to reality’ (1987 [1925]: 13). Howard Colvin shared Ponten’s perspective when he later introduced his work Unbuilt Oxford by emphasizing architecture as ‘a compromise between the visionary and the practicable’ (1983: vii). Mattl similarly presents the projects for the Flaktürme in various periods, with the same four covering proposals as representatives of the first period, but I do not always agree with his interpretations. For example, when he writes that, ‘Evidently, right after 1945, the towers were not seen as representative, but as mere utilitarian buildings’ (2001: 79), I think the opposite is true. I share this point of view with Tabor, Bernard and Feller (1994: 23), when they remark that it was only from the late 1980s onwards that designers tried to use the towers more pragmatically for what they are worth, trying to reduce the required interventions, and focusing less on (aesthetic improvements to) their outside appearance. Kurt Waldheim was elected as a Bundespräsident (President of the Republic) in 1986 with 53.9 per cent of the votes, in spite of his most objectionable behaviour during the Second World War, which was completely ignored in his official biography up until that time, but put forward by the socialists during the election campaign (Milza 1995: 298–302). The term Vergangenheitsbewältigung does not translate in English. It describes a process of coming to terms with the past, i.e., no longer repressing but accepting, analysing and discussing it, and learning from it. The result of Schönwiese’s work was a twenty-four minute experimental film, which was projected twice a day during one week in the Apollo Cinema, next to one of the towers. Although Schönwiese had gathered lots of information and developed a critical point of view on the official attitude towards the towers, the film did not really provide the spectator with additional information. It was mainly a rhythmical succession of images, supported by experimental music. Too cryptic, unfortunately, it did not really score a success. Shortly after the realization of Weiner’s project, on 30 August 1991, the Arbeiters Zeitung commented, in an article entitled ‘Zerschmettert’, that, ‘They remain enigmatic, the words on the obscure edifice’. Apparently, it gave rise to a diversity of opinions, as appears in the comparison with a later comment: ‘The Flakturm in the Esterházy Park which, thanks to the poetic and yet very figurative inscription … was likewise elevated to the rank of antiwar memorial as well as work of art of international importance’ (Karl 1996). George Mosse has analysed similar processes of trivialization with regard to the memory of the First World War in the postwar years. In particular, he has

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described how ‘battlefield pilgrimages faced battlefield tourism’ (1990: 152) as increasingly ‘the former sites of a murderous war had become tourist attractions’ (ibid.: 154). Especially, ‘With the passage of time the sacred was ever more difficult to protect from the encroachment of the trivial’ (ibid.: 155). 16 The proposal for a sushi bar and climbing wall, completed by an enormous mural representing dolphins, never made it until the stage of a first draft on the architect’s table. The rough concept as voiced by local politicians and investors was described in Die Presse on 7 July 1995, in an article entitled ‘Garage unter, Delphin auf dem Flakturm’. 17 For concrete references to the project by Wilhelm Holzbauer, see Pieler 2002: 30. The idea to have the catering part realized in the form of a World of Coffee was described in the Wirtschaftsblatt, on 24 Oktober 1998, in an article entitled ‘World of Coffee auf dem Flakturm soll jährlich 275.000 Besucher anziehen’.

Chapter 8 – ‘L’ like ‘Left to Its Own Devices’: The Progressive Dilapidation of the Kulturhaus in Zinnowitz 1 All quotes by Henrik Nitzsche, Christa Saager, Peter Jasiecki, Mrs Frohreich, Volker Wienigk and Peter Preuss are taken from interviews held on 6–9 July 2004. 2 For example, in 1975 Paul Virilio (1994 [1975]) tried to get to grips with the mysterious attraction emanating from bunkers built along the French Atlantic Coast. In the same period, Gordon Matta-Clark drew attention to the potential beauty of buildings about to be demolished and underlined the unstable equilibrium through which the beauty of transition can come to the fore (Yau 1997: 10). In his project Splitting, from 1974, he cut a dwelling house in two pieces. In Office Baroque (1977), he removed pieces from the walls and floors of an office building, as if an enormous iron had melted through it. Conical Intersect (1975) looked as if a wrecking ball would have quietly gone through a house, without damaging the rest of the building (Lee 2000). For other works of art dealing with the ephemerality of architecture, see Charney 1991; Corrin 1999. For an extensive overview of waste integrated into works of art or museum collections, see also Hauser 2002. Similarly, so-called ‘urban explorers’ – also calling themselves ‘urban adventurers,’ ‘geocachers’ or ‘infiltrators’ – are very sensitive to what they describe as the power of expression of modern ruins. They regularly visit abandoned, sometimes also unfinished, buildings or inaccessible pieces of buildings, such as tunnels or drains. Many of them present photos from their explorations and exchange information about newly discovered locations on the internet. See, for example: Action Squad 2004; Groundspeak 2004; Kazil 2002; Ninjalicious 2004; O’Boyle 2002; Savatier and Raynaud 2001; Urban Exploration London 2004. See also Edensor (2005: 21–35) on ‘The Contemporary Uses of Industrial Ruins’ as well as on ruins as ‘Art Space’ (ibid.: 33–35) and their representation in films (ibid.: 35–42). 3 This can explain why Matta-Clark’s projects were seen by many, including himself, as anti-architectural or ‘anarchitectural’ (Noever 1997: 5). Similarly, Tyree Guyton, at the end of the 1980s, produced stylized accumulations of old

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toys, car tyres, shoes and rusty ironmongery. With his sensational Heidelberg Project, he wanted to denounce the neglect of a row of houses in Detroit. Indignant critics mercilessly rejected the project as scandalous (Beardsley 1999). For another example, see the discussion of the smell of Wofasept as related to the memory of FDGB holidays in Chapter 9. Pallasmaa notes: ‘[T]he eye also touches; the gaze implies an unconscious bodily mimetic identification. Perhaps, we should think of touch as the unconscious of vision. Our gaze strokes distant surfaces, contours and edges, and the unconscious tactile sensation determines the agreeableness or unpleasantness of the experience’ (1994: 34). About touch as the very essence of any sensory experience, see also Verrips 2002: 39. The importance of a tactile experience of architectural remains for coping with monumental changes has already been illustrated in Chapter 3 by the crowd that rushed at the smoking ruins of the Kaiserbau in search of debris. It will further be discussed with regard to the widespread circulation of fragments of Berlin Wall, and by the immense frustration and indignation voiced in Prora, where people were deprived of this experience. More specifically, Pallasmaa writes that: ‘In emotional states, sense stimuli seem to shift from the more refined senses towards the more archaic, from vision down to touch and smell. A culture that seeks to control its citizens is likely to value the opposite direction of interface; away from the intimate identification towards the publicly distant detachment. A society of surveillance is necessarily a society of a voyeurist eye’ (1994: 34). This could confirm that, after years of the GDR regime, where democratic freedom was limited, a tactile confrontation with the Kulturhaus became an appropriate means with which to come to terms with the history it embodied. Jay Winter has analysed the crucial importance of tactile experiences in commemorations at war memorials. He describes touch as an indispensable medium in rituals of separation, from past life with the deceased to a new life without them (1995: 115). Hartung (1997: 11) has noted similar ambivalence and indecision. Indignant reactions from former GDR citizens faced with the disposal of GDR material culture were already evoked in Chapter 6 about the Plattenbauten in Berlin, and will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 9 about Prora. Exceptionally well aware of the fact that decay is the result of human (lack of) intervention, Hitler’s architect Albert Speer caused a stir in the 1930s, with his so-called ‘theory of ruin value’. He believed that a careful choice of materials and a well-balanced structure would be a means to control a building’s decay beforehand, and to guarantee the never-fading monumental aura of the representative edifices of the Third Reich. He illustrated his ideas with muchtalked-of sketches of the (virtual) ruins of the Zeppelin Tribune in Nuremberg. Reportedly, Hitler reacted enthusiastically and saw Speer’s ideas as a means to extend his control over the built environment and perpetuate the effect of the ‘word in stone’. Other people in Hitler’s entourage were deeply shocked that Speer could imagine the symbolic markers of the so-called ‘Thousand-Year Reich’ in a state of decay (Schönberger 1987). These opposed reactions correspond to the two common but divergent perceptions of ruins as glorious

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remnants of a distant past on the one hand, or as dilapidated, marginalized buildings on the other. 12 This corresponds to the idea expressed by John Ruskin as early as 1849, that restoration, ‘means the most total destruction which a building can suffer: a destruction out of which no remnants can be gathered: a destruction accompanied with false description of the thing destroyed’ (1907 [1849]: 353). Stewart has noted that conservation is often accompanied by a loss of tactile sensation: As public museums and forms of collective memory supersede devotion and private manipulation, the contagious magic of touch is replaced by the sympathetic magic of visual representation. … Those works of art that we cannot touch are repositories of touch and care – the touch and care of their makers and conservators. Our engagement through looking is a ritualized practice of restraint and attention. (1999: 30)

13 Hain expresses the essence of this ambivalent period, pointing to the relevance of making photographic inventories of cultural centres in the former GDR. She writes that Michael Schroedter, photographer, ‘not only guards the phenomena from the “discredit and contempt to which they have fallen prey”, but also from the kind of preserving tradition that lies hidden behind the “appreciation as heritage”’ (1996: 54). 14 The terms used by Harbison are confusing. When do buildings stop being contemporary and start being historic? As the value of more distant historic periods as well as their architectural representatives have generally already been assessed, ‘accepted’ ruins often tend to be historic and vice versa, but this is not per se the case. 15 In the same line of thought, the German state initially refused to release the Palace of the Republic in Berlin for cultural initiatives until its demolition, because people would start to appreciate the building and contest its disposal.

Chapter 9 – Exorcizing Remains: Architectural Fragments as Intermediaries between History and Individual Experience 1 The notion of fragments as bridges to the past also lies at the core of the work of archaeologists. Traditionally, they mainly concentrated on the distant past but since the 1960s they have started to pay attention to the recent past and present as well. Victor Buchli and Gavin Lucas (2001c) have devoted a book to the relevance of such Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past. They write that: ‘[T]he traditional operation of “archaeological uncovering” serves a different purpose in the recent past, one that is more immediate, socially relevant, and as a consequence tense and often painful’ (2001a: 15). 2 The Federal Republic of Germany experienced significant difficulty in finding an investor with enough financial capacity and decided in the mid 1990s to subdivide the property. Ruins in the north were auctioned to an anonymous trading partnership from Lichtenstein in 2004, whereas the most ‘popular’, central part, which housed most cultural initiatives, was sold to Inselbogen, a company in formation, in 2006. Property development is said to focus on sports and leisure facilities for the youth (Rostock and Zadnicˇek 2006).

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3 All quotes by Kurt Ott, Mr Kaufmann, Ursel Steinberg, Mrs Ott, Rosa Russo and Klaus Böllhoff are taken from interviews held on 2–5 May 2002. 4 Segments with their actual locations are listed on several websites: see for example, Burkhardt 2004; Plunkett 1999. For example, Berlin’s mayor Eberhard Diepgen gave a section to the former Lenin wharfs in Gdansk, Poland, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of Solidarno´sc´ in 2000 (Meyer 2001: 117). German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel gave another piece to the School of Advanced International Studies in Washington in the name of the German Senate, ‘in tribute to the success of the German-American partnership and as a symbol of the peaceful end of the Cold War’ (Neuringer Klubes 1997). Not only political actors, also multinationals acquired fragments of the Wall. The global technology company Daimler-Benz gave a section to Microsoft’s chairman Bill Gates as a first milestone in a ‘long-term strategic partnership’ (Microsoft 2000). Finally, in the Main Street Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, shrine of capitalism, some segments serve as an anchor for a row of urinals in the men’s bathroom, thus ironically criticizing the decades of socialist rule in Eastern Europe (Rauch 1999). 5 Several accidents happened when the building was dismantled under the orders of the Soviets, probably between 1945 and 1947. It is probably for this reason why the German authorities, in 1948–49, decided to blow up the northern blocks, instead of tearing them down. However, the quality of the reinforced concrete made it difficult to accomplish this task completely. Strikingly, the attempted destruction of three blocks is often attributed to the Soviets, although the German authorities in all likelihood actually commissioned it (Lichtnau 2000: 32; Rostock and Zadnicˇek 2001: 91). 6 One segment of the so-called Grenzmauer 75 – erected in 1975 – code UL 12.11, 360 cm high, 120 cm large, 12–22 cm thick, initially had a monetary value of exactly 359 East German marks (Meyer 2001). As early as half way through November 1989, the American multimillionaire Barry Stuppler had offered the GDR fifty million dollars for the complete Wall (Thomsen 2001). A few months later, on the occasion of a big auction in Monaco, the firm Lelé Berlin Wall sold eighty-one segments for an average price of twenty thousand German marks (ten thousand Euros). Volker Pawlowski, the inventor of the clip card, has sold tens of thousands of small pieces for a few Euros each, every year since 1990. Finally, tons of hinterland Wall without murals but displaying a ‘top quality mixture of concrete and bitumen’ were reduced to rubble and recycled in road-building programmes for an ‘attractive price of DM 23 per ton of granules’ (Feversham and Schmidt 1999: 70). 7 For a comparison, see Saunders 2000, for an analysis of so-called ‘Trench Art’, created by soldiers, prisoners of war and civilians during and after World War I, using war-time materials.

Chapter 10 – In Fond Memory of a Rejected Edifice: Reaffirming Agency by Rehabilitating Former Eyesores 1 Riaz Partha Khan and Olivia Muñoz-Rojas (2004) have made a similar, threefold comparison in their chapter ‘The City of Traumas, the Trauma of Cities: Modes

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of Preservation and Commemoration in Berlin, Hiroshima, and New York’. They distinguish three forms of commemoration – reconstruction (Brandenburger Gate, Berlin), preservation of ruins (A-Bomb Dome, Hiroshima) and replacement (World Trade Center, New York City) – and explain how these are rooted in nineteenth-century conceptions of architecture and the city. Bevan’s remarks further remind of the Oslobod¯enje headquarters: a rather inconspicuous edifice which acquired a very special importance for its users once it had been seriously damaged and, in this form, embodied the struggle for survival of the institution it hosted. Mátyás Rákosi was the chairman of the Communist Party and head of the Hungarian Government at that time. Gottfried Knapp (1996: 23) mentions a similar memorial in Berlin, whose existence could, unfortunately, not be verified. The remains of the Jerusalemkirche (‘Jerusalem Church’), which was seriously damaged during the Second World War, were dynamited in 1961, when newspaper tycoon Axel Springer wanted to erect his new headquarters. According to Knapp, Springer, supposedly remorseful, commissioned that after his death the foundations of the church would be excavated and presented as a memorial. Dario Gamboni already used the term ‘revenants’ to refer to communist monuments that were ‘replaced not by brand-new monuments but by the same ones they had repressed, where these had been stored, and where not, by reconstructions or substitutes’ (1997: 61–62). If the notion of revenants is not infrequently evoked in relation to architecture (Marcus 1999; Vidler 1992), it is Brian Ladd, however, who comes the closest to Hetherington’s perspective when he writes that: ‘A book about buildings and places … might be seen as history with the people left out. But the haunts of Berlin’s famous ghosts have provoked, and continue to provoke, impassioned and sometimes thoughtful discussion’ (1997: 2). István Rév has described similar ‘reactivations’ more generally with regard to dates, events and people in communist and post-communist history making: ‘From being taboo historical events and actors sank into the realm of nonexistence, transformed into nonevents, nonproblems, nonpersons. In light of the subsequent developments, it is clear that they were only put aside … and were then reactivated in a different guise, in a different persona, in the context of a different, inorganically re-created narrative’ (1995: 25, emphasis in original). Adrian Forty mentions the Church of Our Lady in Dresden along with the Church of Christ the Saviour in Moscow as two examples of ‘countericonoclasm’ showing that ‘the filling of a void, whose emptiness had exercised diverse collective memories, ends by excluding all but a single dominant one’ (1999: 10). Attachment to the ruins of the Church of Our Lady, destroyed in an air raid in 1945, came to signify resistance against the GDR in the 1980s. The reconstruction of the edifice, initiated in the 1990s, ‘was clearly an attempt to erase the memory of the GDR, but at the same time it deprived the city of its best memorial to the other cataclysmic event of the century’ (ibid.) The Church of Christ the Saviour in Moscow was blown up in the 1930s to give way to the Palace of the Soviets. As the latter was not built, the site was used for an openair swimming pool until the church’s reconstruction was started in the early

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11

12

13

Notes

1990s. See also Gamboni 1997: 62 and Bevan 2006: 184–86. About the Mostar Bridge, see for example Willeke 2003. Edwin Heathcote suggests that the change of use was mainly dictated by the short-lived Republic of Councils at the time, which did not accept such decadent institution (1997: 148). Marita Sturken has written that many war memorials aim at such a ‘closure of history’ (1991: 133) – an abstract notion imaged as a healing wound, a wound that will leave nothing but an almost imperceptible scar. She notes that the ‘discourse of healing’ with regard to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, for example, is an attempt at reestablishing completeness by closing many wounds (ibid.: 123). Yet survivors, who have the results of the war definitely inscribed in their flesh, pose problems to this so-called ‘closure of history’ because the latter necessitates physical wholeness in order to be in any way credible. Ironically, she adds, history ‘operates more efficiently when survivors are no longer alive’ (ibid.: 132). All quotes by András Török, Lutz Werner, György Hajnal, András Vedres, Endre Prakfalvi, Pál Ritoók, Tamás Mezo˝s and Tamás Koltai are taken from interviews held on 24–29 August 2003 and 5 November 2004. The biographies of the Versöhnungskirche (‘Church of Reconciliation’) and Kapelle der Versöhnung (‘Chapel of Reconciliation’) in Berlin present many parallels with those of the two synagogues in Dresden. The Church of Reconciliation was designed by Gotthilf Ludwig Möckel and inaugurated in 1894. After the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, enclosed between the front and back Wall, it became inaccessible. The religious community nevertheless did not cease to exist, and even erected a new (temporary) community centre with a worship room just opposite the Wall. This could not, however, prevent the church from being dynamited in January 1985, only a couple of years before the fall of the Wall. In 2001, it was replaced by the Chapel of Reconciliation, designed by the architects Reitermann and Sassenroth on the foundations of its predecessor. As in Dresden, funding was raised through various fundraising techniques: people could acquire an original stone from the old church, or a penny with the effigy of the new chapel. The clocks and altar, which had been recuperated prior to the old church’s demolition, were integrated into the new edifice. See Just and Fischer 1998. In the New Synagogue in Dresden, the Church of the Holy Mary in Budapest and the Chapel of Reconciliation in Berlin, the integrated elements are relatively small in size. There are also other examples existing, such as Coventry Cathedral, England, and the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche (‘Emperor William Memorial Church’) in Berlin, where entire structures have been preserved next to the new building in order to permanently visualize the fate of the old one. Neugebauer first hid the Star of David at the fire station, in a chest of sand under an enormous pile of paper. When he was drafted into the army, he risked his life by packing it into a blanket and transporting it by bike to the house of his fatherand mother-in-law, where he hid it in the attic until the end of the war. After the war, he handed it over to the Jewish Community, who put in on the roof of its temporary worship room. In 1988 – fifty years after the elimination of the Semper Synagogue – the star was gilded, and a few years later it became the logo

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of the Förderverein Bau der Synagoge (‘Fund for the Construction of the Synagogue’) (Förderkreis bei der Jüdischen Gemeinde 2002; Mehlhorn 1999). 14 Attempts at legitimizing a new order of things are not unfamiliar to reconstitutions either, but in a different sense, notably because notions of continuity and authenticity are differently interpreted and valued. See, for example Sturken 1991: 137, as well as Rév, who suggested that processes of ‘time compression’ could be purposefully used ‘in the new political legitimation by forming the basis of a continuity myth’ (1995: 32). 15 Another version of the ‘underground-argument’ is that excavation for the construction of the underground was not carried out carefully enough, so that the theatre was damaged beyond repair (Prinz 2001).

Epilogue – Taboos on the Multi-Sensory Materiality of Buildings and Their Agency 1 The description of Le Roy’s Eco-Cathedral is largely based on a visit to the site on 11 April 2007, together with Johan van der Zee (one of the two collaborators currently pursuing the construction of the Eco-Cathedral); an interview with Louis Le Roy at his place of residence; as well as an interview with Peter Wouda, member of Stichting Tijd (‘Time Foundation’) in charge of continuing Le Roy’s oeuvre. 2 The description of Le Roy’s work is formulated in the present tense, although he is no longer able to pursue construction himself. Born in 1924, he worked at the Eco-Cathedral until well into his seventies, when an accident forced him to refrain from further physical efforts. At the present time, Siebe Homminga and Johan van der Zee, two collaborators whom he initiated into the art for several years, continue his work at a slower pace. 3 On the idea that things are more explicitly experienced as animate when they do not ‘do’ what is expected from them, see also Hawkins 2006: 74. 4 Louis Le Roy, in an interview on 11 April 2007. On the importance of the temporal factor, see also Decker 1994: 203. 5 See also Edensor 2005: 27. Earlier, Julian Stallabrass formulated similar ideas in different wordings: ‘In becoming rubbish the object, … gains a doleful truthfulness, as though confessing: it becomes a reminder that commodities, despite all their tricks, are just stuff; little combinations of plastics or metal or paper. The stripping away of branding and its attendant emotive attachments reveals the matter of the object behind the veneer imposed by a manufactured desire’ (1996: 175).

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Index

A acceptance (of a building’s fate), 34–37, 53–55, 57, 61, 74, 110, 174, 191, 194–97, 233n14. lack of, 150–152, 173–76, 189 power relationships and, 198 See also burial (proper); doorkeeping; life expectancy access, 8, 17, 81, 101, 107, 112, 204, 214n2 virtual, 4–7, 9 See also closed buildings advertisement, 82, 102, 167–68, 188 advertising, 108–10, 114, 136 aesthetic (aspects), 84–85, 99, 103, 191, 216n4, 217n10, 220n4 Flaktürme and, 122, 137, 229n1, 230n10 Kaiserbau and, 42, 45 nuclear power plants and, 85 Plattenbauten and, 102, 110, 228n12 seaside resort and, 153 aestheticization (of waste), 93, 95 afterlife Berlin Wall and its, 154–57, 160, 165 Church of the Holy Mary and its, 173–76, 182–85 of eyesores, 31, 36–38, 170–90, 203 National Theatre and its, 185–90 Parisiana Nightclub and its, 177–81 seaside resort and its, 158–70 Synagogue and its, 181–82, 184–85

See also fragments; martyrs; reconstruction; references; rehabilitation; remains; replacement agency of art, 13–15, 72. See also images (‘power of’) of buildings and things, 12–15, 18, 23, 27, 29–30, 46, 70–73, 85–86, 94, 124, 156, 162–63, 175, 183, 197–98, 200–1, 207–8, 210, 213 of destroyed buildings and objects, 72–73, 162–63, 183–84, 197–98, 200–1, 213 and the Eco-Cathedral, 205, 209 human, 7, 12, 14, 30, 70–71, 74, 77, 84, 141–42, 146–47, 152, 163, 180, 190, 197–98, 200–1, 204, 206–9, 213, 232n11 taboos related to ‘thing-ly’, 206–7 agents (primary and secondary), 14–16, 156 See also patients (primary and secondary) agreement (on a building’s fate). See acceptance alteration, 15–16, 19, 23–25, 35–36, 46, 58, 61, 64, 200, 222n11. See also transformation and agency, 18, 74, 197–98, 200–1 and conflict, 60 and power, 192, 198, 204 traces of, 176–80

256

Indispensable Eyesores

See also Kernwasser Wunderland; Parisiana Nightclub; unalterable (features) alternative images, 100–2, 104–5, 108, 112, 114–15, 117–19, 149–50 purposes, 26, 35–36, 39, 80, 86–87, 89, 120, 129–30, 149–50. See also Flaktürme ambivalence of disposal, 27, 30, 57, 149 of assessment, 35, 86, 88, 96, 131, 145, 149, 161, 232n9, 233n13. See also assessment (of value); lovehate (relationship) of waste, 98, 149 Amerlinck, Mari-Jose, 13 anatomy (of buildings), 3–6, 9 anthropomorphization, 3, 13, 33–34, 172, 175, 207 appearance (outward). See aesthetic (aspects) appreciation, 12, 31, 41, 60, 64, 84–85, 93, 103, 108, 119, 193–95, 211–12, 233n13, 233n15. See also assessment (of value); value ‘path of’, 103, 112. See also Carlson, Allen appropriation, 13, 24, 28, 43, 75, 101, 104, 109, 113, 115, 117–19, 142, 144–45, 152, 163–65, 169, 199, 218n14 Arbeitsgruppe 4, 132 archaeology, 152, 233n1. See also Buchli, Victor; Lucas, Gavin anthropology (and architecture), 12–13, 16–17, 20, 31, 215nn2–3 architects. See Arbeitsgruppe 4; Bayer, Oskar and Peter; Böck, Erwin; Erschen, Dietlind; Gruppe Rastlos; Henselmann, Hermann; Hollein, Hans; Holzbauer, Wilhelm; IllésKreutzer, Attila; König, Tamás; Kotsis, Iván; Kupsky, Karl; Lajta, Béla; Möckel, Gotthilf; Neu, Horst; Neuper, Vinzenz; Speer, Albert; Tamms, Friedrich; Vágó, László;

Vana, Kurt; Wagner, Péter; Wandel Hoefer Lorch + Hirsch art (works of), 5, 7, 13–14, 21–22, 24–30, 41, 53, 72, 176, 196, 200–1, 208, 215n1, 217n10, 218n14, 218n16, 231n2, 233n12, 234n7 Art House, 219n1 artists, 100–2; 198, 227n7, 229n18. See also Böllhoff, Klaus; Brandolini, Andreas; Charney, Melvin; Guyton, Tyree; Hilgemann, Alex; Le Roy, Louis; Martínez, Justo; MattaClark, Gordon; Palm, Kurt; Riello, Antonio; Savelberg, Rob; Schönwiese, Fridolin; Schult, Hans-Jürgen (H.A.); Van de Wint, Rudi; Watzke, Axel; Weiner, Lawrence assessment (of value), 10, 15–16, 30–35, 55, 60, 64–65, 84–85, 91–93, 103, 120, 149, 174, 194–95. See also value power and, 140 attachment, 60, 64–65, 99, 101, 105, 108–9, 113–14, 137, 150, 162, 186, 195, 227n10, 235n7, 237n5. See also detachment audience, 9, 24, 28, 40, 45, 50, 57, 119. See also media Awuku, Kwadwo, 228n16 B Barry, Ellen 62 Barthes, Roland, 107, 218n19 Bastille, 155–56, 169 Bayer, Oskar and Peter, 132 Becker, Howard, 41, 217n10 Benton, Tim, 124 Berlin, 221n2, 235n5 Alexanderplatz. See House of Travel; Teachers’ House; television mast Potsdamerplatz, 112 Wall, 16, 56, 154–57, 160, 163–65, 192, 197, 232n6, 234n4, 234n6, 235n1, 236n11 fall of the, 16, 36, 56, 99, 139, 144–45, 154, 194, 236n11

Index

See also Café Moskau; Chapel of Reconciliation; Flaktürme; House of Travel; Palace of the Republic; Plattenbauten; Teachers’ House Bernard, Erich, 126–28, 130, 132, 230n10 Betts, Paul, 117–18, 164–65 Bevan, Robert, 59, 172, 179, 216n4, 218n15, 221n3, 223nn13–14, 235n2, 236n7 bias, 21–24, 36, 41, 65, 184, 201, 210, 217n9, 217n13, 218nn14–15. See also taboos (in scientific investigations) biography of buildings, 26, 33–34, 36–37, 83, 92, 98, 120, 123, 153–54, 169, 171–72, 176, 185–86, 194, 198, 200, 220n4, 236n11 of things, 31, 94–95, 203, 209 Blundell Jones, Peter, 215n3 Böck, Erwin, 132 Böllhoff, Klaus, 166–69 Bogdanovi´c, Bogdan, 69–70 Boukema, Esther, 198, 209 Brandolini, Andreas; 135 Buchli, Victor, 16–19, 27, 30–32, 147, 159, 191–92, 215n2, 233n1 Budapest, 37, 201. See also National Theatre, Parisiana Nightclub, Church of the Holy Mary burial, 33, 45, 56, 91–93, 149–50 proper, 34, 149–50, 175, 226n7. See also acceptance (of a building’s fate); doorkeeping; ghosts C Café Moskau, 114, 227n11 canonization, 57. See also sainthood Carlson, Allen, 15, 103, 112 Caulfield, Jon, 116 Chapel of Reconciliation, 38, 236nn11–12 Charney, Melvin, 231n2 Chaslin, François, 67, 75, 224n18 Church of Christ the Saviour, 235n7

257

Church of the Holy Mary, 38, 172–76, 182–84, 236n12 Church of Our Lady, 178, 181, 235n7 Church of Reconciliation. See Chapel of Reconciliation circulation of fragments, 169, 192, 232n6 of stories, 2–4, 184–85 clip card, 154–55, 163, 234n6 closed (buildings), 1, 3–10, 133–34, 163, 171, 195, 199, 207, 214n2, 231n2, 236n11. See also Flaktürme; IG Farben Haus; seaside resort Cohen, Anthony, 178, 184 Cohen, Stanley, 22–23, 217n13 Coleman, Simon, 13, 217n7 Collins, George, 130, 137 Collins, Peter. See Coleman, Simon Colloredo-Mansfeld, Rudi, 31–32, 219n23. See also Peterson, Mark Colvin, Howard, 121, 230n9 commoditization, 109–10, 113–14, 163 communism, 8, 107, 109, 161, 173, 179, 188, 235n3, 235nn5–6 communist (architecture). See GDR architecture completeness, 38, 178, 189, 236n9. See also incompleteness conflict, 15, 19, 23, 29, 34–35, 55, 58–61, 66, 69, 72, 74, 77, 88, 98, 109, 113–14, 185, 193, 195, 197, 200, 215n1, 218n16, 222n6, 222n12, 224n18 Connor, Steven, 39, 98 consumption, 17, 50, 54, 89–90, 100–1, 108, 212 ‘conspicuous’, 93, 95 ‘productive’, 90, 93, 98 contest, 15, 31, 56, 81, 100, 176, 189, 196, 215n3, 217n7, 233n15 contested (legitimacy), 23–25, 27, 41, 54, 60, 74, 77, 179, 187, 199 continuity 19, 33, 37, 53, 64, 83, 101, 150, 172, 180, 182–84, 237n14 corrupt (buildings), 2–3, 6–10, 31, 50, 56, 57, 81, 219n22

258

Indispensable Eyesores

corruption (bodily), 2, 150 Coventry Cathedral, 236n12 Coward, Martin, 67–68, 74, 223nn13–14 Crewe, Louise, See Gregson, Nicky crime novels, 1, 5–6 Crowley, David, 192, 227n5 Ćurić, Borislav, 64 D damage, 15, 22, 26, 35, 37, 39, 55, 58–61, 64, 66–67, 69, 71–75, 78, 126, 147, 160, 171, 176–80, 194, 197, 217n9, 220n1, 223n13, 229n6, 235n2, 235n4, 237n15 DAS-SABIH, 58, 61 Dávid, Ferenc, 177 death 1, 20, 31, 34, 40, 53, 59, 65, 92, 134, 149, 165, 172–73, 175–76, 187, 224n15 debris, 5, 49, 56, 141, 143, 232n6 decay, 2, 6, 139, 141–42, 144, 147–48, 150–51, 159, 174, 180, 195, 199–200, 208, 213, 232n11 Decker, Roy, 210–12, 237n4 definitions (of undesired buildings), 11, 12, 36, 60–61, 136–37 definitive (disposal), 32–33, 58, 152, 203, 211–12 Demandt, Alexander, 22, 24, 41, 59, 121, 123–24, 127, 130, 201, 217n10, 218n14, 218n20 demolition, 13, 20–21, 28, 35, 40, 43, 45–46, 49–57, 83, 91, 98, 118–19, 125–28, 139, 144, 150, 152, 160–62, 182–83, 185–88, 191–93, 211, 223n14, 229n6, 231n2, 233n15, 236n11 Den Helder, 198 Desrochers, Brigitte, 151 destruction of art, 21–22, 25–26, 29–30, 46, 53, 72, 200–1 of buildings 15, 18, 21–24, 27–31, 34, 37, 39, 45–47, 50, 52–55, 58–61, 65–78, 92, 122, 125–26, 144–45, 147, 153, 156, 159, 161–62, 164, 168, 172, 174,

176–77, 179–86, 197, 200–1, 216n4, 217n9, 218nn14–15, 219n21, 219n23, 221n1, 221n3, 222n10, 222n12, 223nn13–14, 224n17, 224n20, 225nn22–24, 233n12, 234n5, 235n7 and power, 39, 98, 140, 198 of value, 12, 20, 32, 82, 93, 140 detached (perspective). See bias detachment, 101–2, 108, 113–14, 118–19, 145. See also attachment detonation, 27–28, 46–49, 51–57 ‘master of’, 50–51, 54, 81, 90, 198 dilapidation, 15, 18, 36, 94, 139–40, 143–45, 147, 152–53, 162, 195, 200–1, 213, 225n4, 233n11 disease, 2, 3, 6, 10, 34, 215n9 dismantlement, 2, 60, 118, 145, 156, 158–60, 163–64, 169, 195, 234n5 dismemberment, 156–57, 159, 165, 169, 171 disrepair, 84, 144, 146, 197, 225n6 Dizdarević, Zlatko, 76. See also Rondeau, Gérard domestic space, 101, 104, 118, 215n2, 227n5 dominant image, 60, 93, 100, 102–3, 108, 112, 114, 192, 235n7 ‘right to inhabit the dominant image of the city’, 104, 109, 114, 116, 119 ‘doorkeeping’, 93–95, 98, 174. See also acceptance (of a building’s fate); burial (proper) Dörhöfer, Kerstin, 227n5 Douglas, Mary, 31, 44, 101, 191 Douglass, William, 68–69, 223n15, 224n19 Drakulić, Slavenka, 59, 64, 221n3, 224n15 Dresden, 201. See also Church of Our Lady; Synagogue durability, 1, 6, 15, 19, 23, 31–32, 35, 57, 74, 81–84, 89–90, 140–42, 151, 163, 180, 182, 191–92, 200, 203, 224n15, 229n5. See also

Index

ephemerality; immortality; life expectancy; life span Džirlo, Amra, 222n6 E Eco-Cathedral, 198, 203–6, 209–10, 212, 237nn1–2 Edensor, Tim, 45–46, 141, 145, 203, 213, 231n2, 237n5 elimination, 5, 8, 10, 12, 15, 20, 24–26, 29, 35–37, 39–41, 45–47, 50–58, 61, 69, 80–81, 89–90, 92, 99, 118, 120–21, 123, 125, 127, 132, 151–52, 160–62, 172, 174, 176, 180, 182, 184–85, 187–89, 192, 195–96, 199, 200–1, 218n14, 219n1, 220n9, 221n3, 224n15, 236n13 ‘eliminator’, 81, 90, 98 See also removal Emperor William Memorial Church, 236n12 empty (buildings), 8–9, 16–17, 19, 43, 60, 141–42, 158, 214n2 ephemerality, 1, 11, 19, 31–33, 52, 57, 140, 142, 151, 163, 192, 203, 219n23, 231n2. See also durability; life expectancy; life span; mortality Erschen, Dietlind, 125, 135 Esbenshade, Richard, 178–79 exchange value. See commoditization expressive (potential), 24–26, 28, 35, 49, 68–69, 77, 195–96, 218n18. See also instrumental (purposes) F Feller, Barbara. See Bernard, Erich Ferguson, Niall, 121, 129–30 Fernsehturm. See television mast Feversham, Polly, 155, 164–65, 234n6 Flaktürme Berlin, 5, 7, 215n8, 229n1, 229n6 Hamburg, 127, 229n1 Vienna, 1–3, 5–6, 8, 10, 12, 19, 36, 120–29, 131–37, 193–97, 202, 214nn1–2, 215n9, 219n1, 229n2, 230n10, 230nn13–14, 231nn16–17

259

Förderkreis bei der Jüdischen Gemeinde, 181, 237n13 Ford, Edward, 140 forgetting, 37–38, 159–60, 180, 186–87 Forty, Adrian, 180, 235n7 Fournier, Susan 96 fragments, 13, 15, 37–38, 53, 56, 153–59, 163, 165, 167, 169, 171–73, 181–84, 199, 204, 211, 232n6, 233n1, 234n4, 234n6 Fraisl, Bettina, 221n2 Frankfurt am Main. See IG Farben Haus Frauenkirche. See Church of Our Lady Freedberg, David, 28–29, 31, 46, 72, 196, 200–1, 222n9, 224n19 Frow, John, 95 frustration, 36, 149, 151–52, 164, 169, 171–72, 174, 188, 199–200, 204, 232n6 G Gamboni, Dario, 16, 25–27, 29, 31, 72, 176, 196–97, 215n1, 218n16, 235n5, 235n7 GDR architecture, 101–2, 109–11, 116, 228nn11–12. See also Café Moskau; House of Travel; Kulturhaus; Palace of the Republic; Plattenbauten; Teachers’ House material culture, 117, 147, 164, 232n10 Geisel, Sieglinde, 99, 100, 103, 226n1 Gell, Alfred, 12–15, 17, 27, 30, 46, 72, 207 gentrification, 90, 95, 115–17, 119 ghosts, 175, 226n7, 235n5 Girard, René, 43 Gobbi, Hilda, 186 Goody, Jack, 183 graffiti, 43, 56, 144, 155 Gregson, Nicky, 31, 149–50 Gross, David, 220n8 Gruppe Rastlos, 135 Guyton, Tyree, 231n3

260

Indispensable Eyesores

H Hain, Simone, 99, 145–46, 233n13 Halle-Neustadt, 229n18 Halperin, David, 94–95 Hamburg. See Flaktürme Hamnett, Chris, 115 Harbison, Robert, 139, 149, 151, 233n14 Harris, Neil, 2–3, 20, 33–34, 53, 56, 173, 200, 219n24 Hartung, Ulrich, 145, 232n9 Haus der Kunst. See Art House Haus des Lehrers. See Teachers’ House Haus des Meeres. See House of the Sea Haus des Reisens, See House of Travel Hawkins, Gay, 53, 94–95, 202, 213, 226n8, 237n3. See also Muecke, Stephen Heathcote, Edwin, 236 Helfricht, Jürgen, 181, 184 Henselmann, Hermann, 227n7 Hetherington, Kevin, 32–34, 91–92, 94, 149–50, 174–75, 206, 210–12, 226n7, 235n5 Hillgemann, Alex, 43–45, 48, 51, 56 Höhns, Ulrich, 121, 137 Hollein, Hans, 132 Holzbauer, Wilhelm, 135, 231n17 House of the Sea, 128–29, 135–37, 214n2 House of Travel, 228n15 Hubert, Henri, 50–52, 54–55, 152, 220n7 human intervention. See agency (human) traits. See anthropomorphization humanistic (versus sociological) approach, 41, 217n10, 219n2 Humphrey, Caroline, 16–18, 27, 30, 100–1, 215n2, 227n10 I ‘iconoclash’, 30, 45, 52, 219n21 iconoclasm, 18, 25–29, 46, 72, 152, 180, 196, 217n9, 222n9, 224n19, 235n7

ICTY, 59, 66–67, 71, 75, 218n15, 222n12, 225n22 identification, 52, 100–1, 104, 109, 117–18 IG Farben Haus, 6–7, 214n5, 215n10 Illés-Kreutzer, Attila, 174 Ilyes, Petra, 162, 169 ‘image breaking’. See iconoclasm images, 20, 40, 45, 52, 59, 75, 77, 99–101, 103–5, 108–9, 112, 114, 116–19, 122, 126, 136, 146, 178–79, 189, 192, 195, 220n5, 227nn8–9, 228nn13–15 ‘power of’, 28, 72 imagination, 2, 4–5, 7, 9, 15, 20, 35–36, 80, 87, 119–20, 124, 129–30, 137, 149, 196, 211, 219n1 immortality, 126 immutable. See unalterable (features) improper (burial). See ghosts impure (status), 50, 52, 55, 152, 170. See also purification; superior (status) inaccessible (buildings). See closed (buildings) incompleteness 143, 199 229n5. See also completeness indignation, 24, 34, 55, 73, 75, 146–47, 164, 171, 174, 184, 186, 195, 199, 201, 218n15, 220n5, 225n24, 232n6, 232n10 indispensable (eyesores), 10, 12, 128, 136, 189, 194, 196, 199 Institute for Oriental Studies, 67, 73 instrumental (purposes), 24, 68, 74, 77, 195–96, 218n18. See also expressive (potential) intervention (human). See agency (human) International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. See ICTY Isenstadt, Sandy, 187–88 J Jackson, Michael, 7 Jamaković, Said, 61, 75 Jarman, Neil, 70–71

Index

Jencks, Charles, 40 Jerusalem Church, 235n4 Jerusalemkirche. See Jerusalem Church K Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche. See Emperor William Memorial Church Kaiserbau, 35, 40–57, 60, 81, 84, 89–90, 92, 152, 192, 195, 197, 199, 202, 220n5, 232n6 Kalkar. See Kernwasser Wunderland; nuclear (power plant) Kapelle der Versöhnung. See Chapel of Reconciliation Kapferer, Jean-Noël, 7–8 Karahasan, Dževad, 74–75 Kernwasser Wunderland, 81, 91, 96–98, 197 KGB headquarters, 8–9 Khan, Riaz, 221n2, 234n1 Kirkpatrick, Charles, 6–7, 214n5 Knapp, Gottfried, 27–29, 40, 127, 220n6, 229n6, 235n4 Köhler, Jochen, 28 Koltai, Tamás, 185–86, 188 König, Tamás, 177 Kopytoff, Igor 109–10, 113–14, 119, 163 Kosztolanyi, Gusztav, 185, 188 Kotsis, Iván, 173 Kramer, Bernd, 16, 20 Kulturhaus, 36, 138–52, 174, 194–95, 197, 200–2, 225n4, 225n6, 232n7 Kupsky, Karl, 132 Kurrent, Friedrich. See Arbeitsgruppe 4 Kurto, Nedžad, 66, 72, 224n18 L Ladd, Brian, 2, 156, 235n5 Lajta, Béla, 177 Las Vegas, 39, 234n4 Latour, Bruno, 30, 45, 207–9, 212 Laudel, Heidrun, 181–82 Lawrence-Zúñiga, Denise, 13, 16, 215n2 Le Roy, Louis, 198, 204–6, 209–10, 212, 237nn1–2

261

Le Vine, Victor, 65 Lees, Loretta, 119 legends, 1–3, 5. See also myths; narratives; rumours legitimacy. See contested (legitimacy) Lewis, Mark, 16, 218n17 Lichtnau, Bernfried, 158, 234n5 life expectancy, 11, 25, 200, 224n15. See also life span life span, 32–33, 64, 82, 84, 86, 140, 220n8. See also life expectancy liminality, 5, 62, 64, 77–78, 91, 93, 145–46, 149–50, 195, 226n8 Lincoln, Bruce, 150 listed (buildings), 146, 152, 155, 162, 228n17, 229n2 Loewy, Hanno, 7, 214n5, 215n10 love-hate (relationship), 5, 10, 161, 166, 193 Lucas, Gavin, 31–32, 36–37, 159, 188, 203, 233n1 Lüsebrink, Hans-Jürgen, 156, 169 M Mach, Zdzisław, 184 marginal (state), 1, 3, 8, 10, 43–44, 56, 140, 145, 213, 233n11 Martínez, Justo, 198 martyrdom, 57, 81, 175–76, 178–79, 183–84, 187, 189, 199 ‘master of detonation’. See detonation Matta-Clark, Gordon, 231nn2–3 Mattenklott, Gert, 180, 187, 189 Mattl, Siegfried, 229n4, 230n10 Mauss, Marcel. See Hubert, Henri Mayerfeld Bell, Michael, 226n7 McIntyre, Philippe. See Boukema, Esther media, 16, 39, 75, 81, 100–1, 108–9, 113, 115, 117–19, 131, 153, 194, 209, 220n5, 228n16 Mehlhorn, Achim, 181, 237n13 Mejorada del Campo. See Martínez, Justo memory, 5, 20, 22, 37, 40, 56, 112, 117, 159–60, 172, 176, 180–81, 186–87, 218n14, 221n3, 235n7

262

Indispensable Eyesores

merchandizing, 108–9, 118 Meyer, Bernd, 234n4, 234n6 Mezo˝s, Tamás, 185, 188 Mick, David. See Fournier, Susan might-have-been architecture, 130–31, 218n20 might-have-been history, 121, 123–24, 129–30, 218n20 Mildam. See Eco-Cathedral Miller, Daniel, 54, 100–1, 215n2 Mills, Caroline, 117 Milošević, Slobodan, 66–67, 222n12 Möckel, Gotthilf, 236n11 Móra, Imre, 174, 185, 188–89 mortality, 33, 40, 59, 141, 176, 208 Moscow, 18. See also Church of Christ the Saviour Moser, Walter, 32, 98 Mosse, George, 230n15 Mostar Bridge, 59, 64, 67, 177, 221n3, 236n7 mourning, 34, 55, 145, 178, 186 Mrozek, Bodo, 5, 7 Muecke, Stephen, 31, 93, 203, 212 Munich. See Art House Muñoz-Rojas, Olivia. See Khan, Riaz Museum of Applied Arts, 135, 214n2 Mußmann, Olaf, 130–31, 137 Mustafić, Sevdalija, 66, 224n20, 225n21 myths, 2–8, 10, 134, 169, 180, 184–85, 237n14. See also legends; narratives; rumours narratives, 1, 3–4, 7, 71, 81, 160, 184, 187, 189, 229n5, 235n6. See also legends; myths; rumours N National Museum of Bosnia-Herzegovina, 63 Socialist (architecture), 89–90. See also Art House; Flaktürme; seaside resort Theatre, 38, 172, 185–90, 199–200, 237n15 and University Library, 60, 62–63, 67, 73, 75, 221n3

nature, 28, 71, 84, 140, 142, 151, 161, 204, 224n17 Nerdinger, Winfried, 217n6, 218n15, 219n1 Neu, Horst, 132 Neuper, Vinzenz. See Bayer, Oskar and Peter Neville, Brian, 31, 203 Noble, David, 87 Nochlin, Linda, 156 Noever, Peter, 135, 231n3 no-go area. See closed (buildings) Nooteboom, Cees, 121, 130–31, 137 nuclear (power plant), 35–36, 80–89, 92, 95, 97–98, 193, 197–98, 202 O Oslobo denje headquarters, 35, 60–61, 64–65, 75–79, 174, 194, 197, 201–2, 235n2 P Palace of the Republic, 2, 233n15 Pallasmaa, Juhani, 142–43, 232n5, 232n7 Palm, Kurt, 6, 134 Parent, Claude, 85 Parisiana Nightclub, 37–38, 172, 177–79, 181–82, 191, 194 Parkin, David, 161 patients (primary and secondary), 14–16, 27 See also agents (primary and secondary) Pelkmans, Mathijs, 16–17, 19, 30–31, 216n5, 219n22 performance, 13, 45, 49–52, 54, 57, 145, 195–96, 210, 222n11 performers, 21–22, 24, 31, 49–50, 65–73, 77–78, 156, 160, 201, 222n11, 223n15 Peterson, Mark, 140–41 phased (disposal), 33, 55, 88–93, 149, 194–96 physical (properties of buildings), 3, 6, 8–10, 12–13, 18, 20, 25, 27–28, 35, 38, 49, 58, 68, 84, 91, 141,

Index

143–45, 149–50, 165, 169, 174, 195–96, 209, 221n3, 229n5, 236n9 Pieler, Erich, 124, 132, 231n17 Pirnat-Spahić, Nina, 78 Plattenbauten, 36, 99–112, 114–19, 152, 171–72, 192, 194–95, 202, 226n1, 226n4, 227nn5–6, 227nn8–10, 228nn16–17, 229n18 polarizations, 71–72, 78, 201 Ponten, Josef, 129, 230nn8–9 Povrzanović Frykman, Maja, 64 power, 7, 14, 19, 39–40, 44, 51, 58, 78, 98, 113–14, 119, 126, 140, 158, 183, 185, 192, 194, 198, 204, 216n4 of images, 28, 72 practical (value). See utilitarian (value) pragmatic (motives), 27, 29, 104, 109, 135, 223n14, 228n15, 230n10 Prakfalvi, Endre, 174 private (sphere), 104, 107–9, 119, 165, 169, 227n5 Prolić, Ivica, 221n5, 222n8 Prora. See seaside resort public character of buildings, 8, 11, 13–14, 16, 25–26, 46, 83, 86, 104, 107, 119, 122, 150–51, 156, 159, 165, 169, 172, 196, 215–16, 227n5. See also private (sphere); threedimensional (character of buildings); visibility discussion, 15, 35–36, 100, 119, 125, 133, 135, 161, 191, 193, 196, 215–16n3 See also audience publicity, 23, 83, 104, 108, 148, 222n9 purification, 39–40, 50, 55, 90, 156, 168. See also impure (status); superior (status) Q quarantined (buildings). See closed (buildings) questioned (existences), 15, 93–94, 149–50, 174, 184–85, 189, 194–95

263

R Radebeul bei Dresden, 117 Raff, Thomas, 183–84 Réau, Louis, 21–22, 24, 41, 201, 217n11 reconstitution, 37–38, 170, 172, 176–81, 189, 194, 199, 201, 237n14 reconstruction, 64, 149, 172, 176–77, 180–82, 189, 219n24, 221n1, 225n23, 235n1, 235n5, 235n7 recuperation, 26, 33, 35–36, 83, 93–95, 198, 203, 212–13, 236n11. See also recycling ‘recuperator’, 81, 90, 98, 198 recycling, 31, 33, 153–54, 156, 159, 169, 204, 206, 234n6. See also recuperation references, 25, 27, 38, 40, 55, 97, 159–60, 168, 172, 185, 187, 189–90, 216n4 Regnum Marianum Templom. See Church of the Holy Mary rehabilitation, 37, 56, 81, 149, 170, 172, 175, 181, 184–85, 187–90, 194, 199, 201 Reichardt, Rolf. See Lüsebrink, HansJürgen Reitermann, Rudolf, 236n11 relics, 56, 156–7, 165, 183–84, 199, 211 remains, 15, 37, 49, 56, 66, 75, 94–95, 140–42, 153–54, 156–60, 162–63, 165–66, 168–69, 171, 173, 181–86, 189, 192, 197, 199, 201, 205, 209, 211, 232n6, 235n4 remembering, 38, 64, 112, 145, 156, 159, 180, 187 removal, 12, 19–20, 27, 32–33, 35–36, 46, 51, 66, 73–75, 78, 84, 159, 172, 176–77, 184, 195–97, 200, 218n14, 220n4, 220n6, 225n22. See also elimination replacement, 25, 37–38, 172, 181–84, 189, 235n1, 235n5, 236n11 reunification (German). See Berlin Wall (fall of the) Rév, István, 175–76, 178–79, 188, 235n6, 237n14

264

Indispensable Eyesores

revaluation, 118, 149–50, 152, 199, 228n16 revenants. See ghosts revolution, 16, 25–26, 50, 55, 144, 151–52, 155–56, 175, 223n14 Riches, David, 24–25, 31, 54, 65–66, 68–70, 74, 195, 217n12, 218n18, 222n11 Riedlmayer, András, 59, 66–67, 69, 71, 74, 220n1, 222n6, 222n12, 224n20, 225n22 Riello, Antonio, 128, 219n1 Rietdorf, Werner, 100, 102–3, 109, 112 rituals, 20, 33, 39, 50, 62, 149–50, 152, 156–57, 168, 232n8 Rondeau, Gérard, 60,77–78 Rosefeldt, Julian, 27, 29, 40, 197 Rostock, Jürgen, 4, 8, 153, 158, 233n2, 234n5 Roth, Michael, 142. See also Salas, Charles rubbish, 31–32, 53, 82–83, 88–95, 98, 188, 205–6, 208, 213, 237n5. See also waste ruins, 28, 45, 75, 77–78, 140–43, 145, 149, 151, 162–63, 213, 231n2, 232n11, 233n14, 235n1 rumours, 2–4, 6–8, 124, 186. See also legends; myths; narratives Ruskin, John, 233n12 S sacrifice, 50–52, 54–55, 57, 81, 90, 151–52, 170, 176, 192, 220n7 sainthood, 150, 156, 175. See also canonization Sakkers, Hans, 127, 229n4 Salas, Charles, 59 Sarajevo. See Institute for Oriental Studies; National Museum of Bosnia-Herzegovina; National and University Library; Oslobo denje headquarters Sassenroth, Peter. See Reitermann, Rudolf Savelberg, Rob, 111, 113, 228n12 scapegoat, 7, 43, 175, 201, 208

scars, 62, 64, 70, 75, 126, 132, 143, 160, 162, 189, 236n9 Schieffelin, Edward, 49–50, 52, 195–96, 222n11 Schmidt, Bettina, 24 Schmidt, Leo. See Feversham, Polly Schneider, Rolf, 102 Schönberger, Angela, 232n11 Schönwiese, Fridolin, 3–4, 125, 128, 133–34 Schröder, Ingo. See Schmidt, Bettina Schult, Hans-Jürgen (H.A.), 52–53, 220n5 seaside resort, 4–5, 8, 153–54, 157–71, 192–97, 199–200, 214n5, 229n5, 232n6, 233n2, 234n5 semiotic (approaches), 46–47, 68, 197, 217nn6–7, 223nn13–14 sensory (experience), 27–28, 45, 47, 52, 142–43, 203, 209, 211–13, 220n6, 221n5, 232n6 sickness. See disease Sieglar, 51, 57 signifier (and signified), 8, 18, 25–27, 29, 46, 160, 197, 200, 223n13 singularization, 109–10, 113–14, 119, 163 Sinkó, Katalin, 173–74 Sky, Alison, 121, 230n7 smell, 143, 167–68, 232n7 Smith, Neil, 115 Snyder, Corinna, 8–9 sociological (versus humanistic) approach. See humanistic (versus sociological) approach Sonne, Wolfgang, 180 Sontag, Susan, 3 soul, 3, 13, 34, 91, 149 souvenirs, 56, 117, 128, 154, 156, 165–66 Spalt, Johannes. See Arbeitsgruppe 4 Sparshott, Francis, 219n2 Speer, Albert, 232n11 Špilja, Sabahudin, 62, 225n24 spolia, 183–85 Stallabrass, Julian, 93, 95, 237n5 statues, 16, 20, 174, 218n17

Index

Steinle, Piero. See Rosefeldt, Julian stereotypes, 43, 68, 70, 103, 112, 118 Stewart, Pamela, 69 Stewart, Susan, 143–44, 165–66, 233n12 Stone, Michelle. See Sky, Alison storytelling, 4–5, 7–10, 169, 195 Strathern, Andrew. See Stewart, Pamela Straus, Ivan, 60, 64, 67, 71, 75, 224n17, 225nn23–24 Stromberger, Monika. See Fraisl, Bettina Sturken, Marita, 74, 160, 236n9, 237n14 subterranean. See underground superior (status), 50, 52, 55, 137, 152, 170, 175–76, 183–85, 187, 189, 199. See also impure (status); purification Synagogue, 38, 172, 181–82, 184–85, 236nn11–13 T taboos on closed buildings, 3–4, 6, 96, 126, 133–34 on mortality, 150, 224n15 on multi-sensory materiality and ‘thing-ly’ agency, 202–3, 206–7, 210, 213 on understanding performers’ motives, 68–69, 72, 77, 201, 223n15, 224n19. Tabor, Jan, 124. See also Bernard, Erich tabula rasa, 29–30, 197 tactility, 37, 49, 143–45, 152, 165, 169, 199, 204, 210–12, 232nn5–8, 233n12. See also touch Tamms, Friedrich, 121 targets, 65, 67–68, 70, 72–73, 222nn10–11 taste, 84–85, 104, 117, 191 Teachers’ House, 107–8, 113, 227n7, 228n15 television mast, 117 terrorism, 65, 68, 191, 201, 221n3, 223n15, 224n16, 224n19

265

Thompson, Michael, 31–32, 82–85, 88–94, 98, 140, 147, 200, 226n9 three-dimensional (character of buildings), 8–9, 11–13, 15, 26, 46, 57, 64, 68, 70, 78, 81, 83, 143, 155, 161, 165, 172, 196, 200, 204, 224n15 Tomka, Miklós, 175–76 touch, 142–4, 156, 183, 203, 210–12, 232nn5–8, 233n12. See also tactility transformation, 24, 26, 32, 34, 55, 57, 68, 80, 90, 99, 131, 137, 166, 177–78, 188, 197, 206, 209, 213. See also alteration ‘transient’ (objects), 32, 82–83, 89 trauma, 59, 221n2 Troisdorf. See Kaiserbau tunnels. See underground Turner, Victor, 62 U ugliness, 43, 139, 191, 196, 224n15 unalterable (features), 85, 126, 141 unbiased (valuation). See detachment unbuilt (projects), 15, 36, 130–31, 197, 218n20 uncanny, 95, 225n7. See also ghosts underground, 5, 6, 9, 214n5, 231n2 urban explorers, 231n2 urbicide, 67–69, 223n14, 224n18 use (value). See utilitarian (value) utilitarian (value), 17, 26, 29, 69, 135, 137, 163, 196 V Vágó, László, 177 value (of buildings), 77, 82–84, 89–91, 93, 96, 110, 114, 146, 151, 154, 160, 193–94, 206, 212, 220n9, 232n11, 234n6. See also assessment (of value); commoditization; singularization; Thompson, Michael value-free (analyses). See bias Van Beek, Gosewijn, 46, 72, 197, 200, 207

266

Indispensable Eyesores

Van de Wint, Rudi, 198 Van der Ree, Dieteke, 112 Vana, Kurt, 132 vandalism, 21–24, 41, 72, 156, 217n13, 218n14 Vanderbilt, Tom, 225n3 Verdery, Katherine, 16, 20, 33–34, 157 Verrips, Jojada, 207, 232n6 Versöhnungskirche. See Church of Reconciliation victims, 24, 50, 54, 65, 69, 222n11 Vidler, Anthony, 225n7, 235n5 Vienna. See Flaktürme; House of the Sea; Museum of Applied Arts Vijećnica. See National and University Library Villeneuve, Johanne. See Neville, Brian Vilnius. See KGB headquarters violence, 24–26, 31, 54, 64–65, 67–71, 74, 77–78, 195, 217nn12–13, 218n14, 218n18 Virilio, Paul, 231n2 visibility, 25, 32, 70, 78, 82–83, 86, 94–95, 137, 141, 176, 196, 217n7 W Wagenaar, Cor. See Mezo˝s, Tamás Wagner, Péter. See König, Tamás

Wandel Hoefer Lorch + Hirsch, 181 Ward, Colin, 21–22, 24 Warnke, Martin, 216n4, 217n9 waste, 28, 32, 36, 39, 93–95, 98, 151, 164, 226n8, 231n2. See also rubbish ‘premature’, 89, 140, 187, 220n8, 224n15 Weiner, Lawrence, 134, 230n14 Wende. See Berlin Wall (fall of the) Widmann, Elmar, 229n1 Wigley, Mark, 224n16 Williams, Peter. See Smith, Neil Williams, Rosalind, 5, 9 Winter, Jay, 232n8 witnesses, 19, 24, 31, 35, 49–50, 52, 61, 65, 68–73, 77–78, 156, 160, 200–1, 217n12, 218n14, 222n10 WMF-Club, 227n11, 228n12 Z Zadniček, Franz. See Rostock, Jürgen Zinnowitz. See Kulturhaus Zohlen, Gerwin, 100, 103 Zolberg, Vera, 41, 217n10, 219n2 Zukin, Sharon, 104, 109 Zulaika, Joseba, 61, 71, 201, 224n17. See also Douglass, William