City squares, skateboarding, and art mueums

Two of the PPS's webpage on the best and worst parks (and squares) include amongst the worst examples Tate Modern (London) and the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art . The Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (abbreviated as MACBA), which is situated in the Plaça dels Àngels, in El Raval, Ciutat Vella, Barcelona, opened to the public on November 28 1995, in an area that back then was a run down working class neighbourhood. Likewise Tate Modern, when it opened in 2000, was to become the centrepiece to an urban redevelopment in a part of central London that had missed out on previous investment due to the timeline of Southwark's industrial and urban fabric, social and economic condition being by-passed by the West End and the City of London immediately across the River Thames. The construction and site of MACBA development had a very specific strategic purpose to transform this area of Barcelona, and is important to see this local strategy in relation to the wider transformation of the city that took place in the late 1980's as the city began preparing for the Summer Olympic Games of 1992.

According to Wikipedia the history of the museum begins in 1959:

In 1959, art critic Alexandre Cirici Pellicer formed a group of contemporary artists showing work in a series of 23 exhibitions with the hopes of beginning a collection for a new contemporary art museum in Barcelona. It was not until 1986 that the Barcelona City Council recommended the American architect Richard Meier & Partners (1987–1995) to design the museum.

Richard Meier's vision 'to situate the building amongst some of Barcelona’s oldest streets and buildings, in addition to revamping the public space of the Raval' has led to the building being described by the local media as "the pearl" set amongst an urban fabric with those rich and various textures revealing the patina of history.



The building's presence has the quality of a modernist spaceship that has landed in this city square, but unlike the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the design includes a transitional zone between the architecture and the public space but as part of the building rather than as part of the square. The square becomes the empty space that allows a view of the architecture, but also skate boarders.



During the night, while the museum is closed the square is available for the skateboarders of Barcelona, because it is empty space, and empty of other possible uses. The potential for other uses having been suppressed the skateboarders are going to take over the space and create a particular form of social fabric that has its own value.

Meanwhile the art public is encouraged to move from an outside space to the inside space where there is plenty of designed focus in the changing exhibitions of modern art.

Another square in Barcelona is in the Hall of Shame, the Placa Paisos Catalans.



The square was opened in its current form in 1983, built over the station rail yard, and architect Helio Piñon and Albert Vilaplana were awarded that year's FAD Prize by the Foment de les Arts i el Disseny. prizewinning schemes are not always the ones that prove successful over time, and this place is another favourite for Barcelona's skateboarders, Whilst the design scheme is visually impressive it is an impossible space for people to use and occupy in a sustained way.



This is a place for fleeting moments, meeting and then passing through as quickly as possible. Besides being popular with skateboarders, demonstrators have often gathered there, most infamously by ultra far-right groups during the 1990s and early 2000s.





Under the name The destruction of the Plaça dels Països Catalans an exhibition took place at the Col·legi d'Arquitectes de Catalunya in 2011 documenting the effects of urban decay in the area in stark contrast with the architects' original concept and intentions. This square is now the subject of an ongoing debate and critique, a classic example of a modernist visual programme excluding the potential for a human and social presence.



Not even a Lichtenstein can do much more than emphasize a sense of loneliness and abandonment.



Back to Tate Modern and the landscaping of the space facing the river and around the new developments, it seems that the principle at work is that the visual takes predominance. The schemes proposed for landscaping the spaces between the new building developments and the new Tate Modern extension are award winning, yes, but they also reinforce the pathway as a place for transit not settlement. Between the old power station and the river the wind often blows, vortices set up by the architecture itself and the temperature gradient between the water and the bankside. This is a reminder of nature and its power but these are not conditions where it is easy to create a place for people to use, except on hot and sunny summer days. The strategy in this case seems to be to pretend there is a public space with grass and silver birch trees, but even skateboarders cannot find a use for these often empty spaces.



There is a museum related space that works, not so much by design, but how people occupy the space.



The Place de Georges Pompidou slopes down from street level to the entrance ways of the Pompidou Centre, and just as in medieval times the space in front of Notre Dame de Paris was occupied by fairs and frolics, so the people who perform and those who spectate, sitting or standing, make a place for street theatre. No skateboarders!

City Squares: What is it that makes a city square work?

So, what is it that makes a city square work?

The website for the Project for Public Places has a page listing the World's Best and Worst Parks and that also includes a list of the best and worst City Squares or Plazas. Evaluating spaces and placemaking is what PPS is all about. The PPS website introduces the project thus:

PPS was founded in 1975 to expand on the work of William (Holly) Whyte, the author of The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Since then, we have completed projects in over 2500 communities in 40 countries and all 50 US states. Partnering with public and private organizations, federal, state and municipal agencies, business improvement districts, neighborhood associations and other civic groups, we improve communities by fostering successful public spaces. In its broadest application, Placemaking is a catalyst for building healthy, sustainable and economically viable cities of the future.

This list is nearly ten years old but it offers a good starting point for thinking about park and squares in the context of your project.



When evaluating the new public spaces in Liverpool 1 in 2008, the e-space lab project used the Capitoline Hill in Rome, designed by Michelangelo, as an examplar for the way an aesthetic programme of proportion, pattern and interval can shape an experience of space as harmonious and pleasurable.



This is perhaps an example of a public space, in itself capable of being experienced as a work of public art. This type of space will therefore appeal to a modernist sensibility except that it draws people in, it attracts people, whilst modernism tends to repel or exclude the human presence (see below).



Michelangelo humanizes a space whereas in the image of the perfect spaces of the imagined Renaissance Utopian City, human beings, messy, untidy, uncontrollable, possibly awkward and ugly and therefore excluded in order not to disturb the logical equilibrium of this perspectival space.

A Piazza for everything and everything in its Piazza as Marshall Mcluhan put it in  The Medium is the Massage.

Modernist spatial conceptions in many instances have a tendency to emphasize a pure spatial quality that works with the emptiness and fullness of spaces and prefers that they remain uncluttered by people and the activities they might get up to in the everyday formation of social fabric. For someone like Mies van der Rohe this is explainable if you connect his created spaces to the aspect of Romanticism that reveals a significant preference for nature over humanity, as in 'high mountains are a feeling, the hum of human cities torture'.

“I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that around me: and to me
High mountains are a feeling, but the hum
of human cities torture.” ― George Gordon Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

If we consider a classic Ludvig Mies van der Rohe piazza like the platform for the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin it is possible to see in this example a stage for architectural spectacle with the drama concentrated in the viewpoint of the individual and atomized observer.





Photos of this site trend to exclude documentation of the human presence. This editorial imperative flows from the way spaces in this architecture are to be taken primarily in visual terms. It is a framing thing, just as the photograph is a response to this implicit and pure spatial framing, unsullied by the incidents of everyday life, the platform and stage occupied by the main actor(s), the gallery's top deck!



But this photograph is more representative of the urban interactions going on in this part of Berlin. Urban fabric and social fabric! Traffic! No place to settle! It is a vast threshold. An outside for looking inside!



This is how people on the outside use the whole platform, using the transitional space between outside and inside that Tadao Ando often references in his embedding of the architectural in natural environment. This zone has a name in traditional Japanese architecture. Engawa (縁側) is a Japanese term that refers to the raised wooden platform that connects inside and outside in vernacular forms of building. Giving a type of zonal and spatial structure a name is significant, literally! For Mies van der Rohe such a zone would encourage a type of human occupation that would encourage actors to look out from the stage and miss out on appreciating the building in its setting as an artwork.



The gallery's top deck is a nightmare for showing artworks as they ending up cluttering the space which demands to be 'emptied'. However, if artists use the space then it is another matter.



For example Rudolf Stingel's installation in 2010.

Or, the work by Jenny Holzer, that integrates into the structure so well that it ramps up the phenomenon of spectacle to a degree where the philosophic message evaporates and is replaced by a sort of trance like absorption in "Art"with a capital "A"! Pure bourgeois ideology for my money, except, as William Blake writes 'Where any view of money exists art cannot be carried on but war only'! But Blake was thinking about art as being the whole business of humankind!





What about Vanessa Beecroft's performance work? It works with the ideology of the building perfectly. Chilling! Thirty degrees below flirtation! With resonances I dare not mention! We all need to get out more! Talking of getting out more, two more photographic references in relation to the Neue Nationalgalerie and its urban setting and then this post will move on. 

Empty spaces are good for architectural photography, riding your bike and skateboarding! See how skateboarding can be used an urban space evaluating activity in the next post.

art and public places - the visible and the invisible

This is the boulevard in front of Saarbrücken Palace, the seat of the state parliament in the city of Saarbrücken, the capital city of the German Federal state of Saarland.

In 1990 the artist Jochen Gerz began a project called 2146 Stones – Monument Against Racism, 1993. Over a 3 year period Gerz realized the work in a collective project with art students from the Hochschule für Bildende Kunst Saar (Saar College of Visual Art) in Saarbrücken. To quote Rudolf Freiling:

For this uncommissioned intervention in public space, research was done at the Jewish communities in Germany and then a list was drawn up of all the Jewish cemeteries that existed in the country before the Second World War and the Nazi regime's persecution of Jews. The names were engraved on the underside of pavement stones of the boulevard in front of Saarbrucken Palace – the seat of the state parliament. Over a period of several months, the original stones were exchanged at night until all 2,146 engraved stones were in place. When the measure was finally made public, the 'making visible' of an invisible installation in public space was discussed, including with the state government. This led to the decision to rename the square the 'Square of the Invisible Monument'. Jochen Gerz's work here was not only a temporal process, but also an interactive group process of forming.

Square of the Invisible Monument

This is an example of "placemaking" but based in the experience of a type of social knowledge, and of course the street sign, rather than a visible something or somethings.

Another work by Jochen Gerz was also completed in 1993 but began its life as a public art commission in October 1986. To quote from Malcolm Miles, University of Plymouth, Plymouth, in a paper called:
REMEMBERING THE UNREMEMBERABLE – THE HARBURG MONUMENT AGAINST FASCISM (JOCHEN AND ESTHER SHALEV GERZ, 2009):

A visitor to Harburg (a suburb of Hamburg) seeking the Mahnmal gegen Faschismus (Monument Against Fascism) by Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev Gerz will find no more than an informative plaque – a text explaining the project and nine small images of its realisation. The plaque is situated next to a shaft, into which the monument, a column faced with lead sheeting, was progressively sunk in eight stages during the six years of its realisation between 10th October 1986 and 10th November 1993. Above, there is an empty plaza. This is not so much an absence in place of a monument, but more an empty place as monument, corresponding to the lack of place which this history – the history of fascism – had in German post-war public discourse. The column itself is as buried in its shaft, and will remain there, to recall the burying, so to speak, of the history it sought to represent. Today, as members of the generation which participated in fascism have for the most part died, memories of that period are more admissible to public debate. Distance in time allows renewed attention, safely beyond the scope of living memory, reliant on the excavation of the few texts written of the time, or of the material contained – buried, as it were – in such archives as survive.

The Monument Against Fascism was commissioned by the municipality of Harburg-Hamburg after a lengthy debate and a public hearing at which the artists were selected. It is sited near the S-Bahn station and a shopping precinct, hence in a site with a high level of public use. Such an intervention, with its uncomfortable historical references, might have been expected to arouse controversy. It takes the form of a twelvemetre high, one-metre square column, weighing seven (metric) tons, faced in lead sheeting. As well as the column, there were two styluses made in steel with which members of the public were invited to sign the monument, as endorsement of its purpose.

 

The Invitation stated: “We invite the citizens of Harburg, and visitors to the town, to add their names here next to ours. In doing so we commit ourselves to remain vigilant. As more and more names cover this 12-metre tall lead column, it will gradually be lowered into the ground. One day it will have disappeared completely, and the site will be empty. In the end it is only we ourselves who can stand up against injustice.”

As an area was filled, the monument was lowered into its shaft to allow a clear space for further endorsement.

 

Malcolm Miles continues in a section called THE PASTS REFERENCED:

To be clear, this is not a memorial to the victims of fascism; it is a monument against fascism, located in the present (the mid 1980s onwards) and not in the past to which it relates. That past is seen through the window of the present, of the moment in which the monument appeared – arousing controversy beyond the artists’ expectation. If the monument’s implied meaning is that fascism should not return and that such a return is prevented by agency of the publics endorsing the monument, still vigilant, in a Europe of migrations and contested urban identities and rights to space, this proved more problematic than at first imagined. Yet in seeking vigilance against the return of fascism the monument is inevitably a reminder of that history which a generation of Germans worked so hard mentally to forget, and which was replaced by the post-war rebuilding of the city.

It seems more difficult to find appropriate signs, or to issue appropriate invitations, for present vigilance than to mark the histories of victims. The latter tends to generalising abstraction but the former requires an uncomfortable recognition that many ordinary Germans were complicit, even active in, the rise of fascism in the 1930s, and in anti-semitism.

Making a useful comparison between Gerz's approach to memorial and place as an artist instigating a process and a practice with an institutional or state sponsored memorialization

Comparing these works co-instigated by Gerz with the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (German: Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas) is an exercise in evaluating the meaning of a public art work through an analysis of how a monument is used, and how that it is the use of a space that in the end creates the placeness of a place and the meaning of that place.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (German: Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas)

Also known as the Holocaust Memorial (German: Holocaust-Mahnmal), this is a memorial in Berlin to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, designed by architect Peter Eisenman and engineer Buro Happold.

Wikipedia describes it as consisting of;

a 19,000 square metres (4.7 acres) site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs or "stelae", arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. The stelae are 2.38 m (7 ft 10 in) long, 0.95 m (3 ft 1 in) wide and vary in height from 0.2 to 4.8 m (8 in to 15 ft 9 in). 

According to Eisenman's project text, the stelae are designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason. 

A 2005 copy of the Foundation for the Memorial's official English tourist pamphlet, however, states that the design represents a radical approach to the traditional concept of a memorial, partly because Eisenman did not use any symbolism. However, observers have noted the memorial's resemblance to a cemetery.

Jewish tombstones at New Jewish Cemetery in Brody, Ukraine

Just as in Gerz's projects there has been controversy in aspects of the project that are both visible and invisible. The aesthetic qualities of the memorial are shaped by the politics and history in a way quite opposite to what one would expect. German journalist Lea Rosh was the driving force behind the memorial. In 1989, she founded a group to support its construction and to collect donations. Later, in the context of her vision for the memorial, she was elected "most embarrassing Berliner of the year" (peinlichste Berlinerin) by the readers of Berlin city magazine Tip in 2003.

With growing support, the Bundestag passed a resolution in favour of the project. When the seat of government was moved from Bonn to Berlin in 1999, an extensive "Holocaust memorial" was planned as part of the vast development of new official buildings in the district of Berlin-Mitte. So, in the end the German state is the instigator not the artist, so one would expect that the project and its ramifications would have been thought through extensively regarding the practical, political, ethical and public relations considerations. However, the disconnection of power from practice often results in very interesting and unintended consequences.

The design was to be the result of a competition with an announcement made in Germany's major newspapers in April 1994. Twelve artists were specifically invited to submit a design and given 50,000 DM (€ 25,000) to do so. The only rules and guidelines given were that building the project could only cost up to 15 million DM (€ 7.5 million). The winning proposal was to be selected by a jury consisting of representatives from the fields of art, architecture, urban design, history, politics and administration.

In all 528 proposals were submitted. The jury met on January 15, 1995 to pick the best submission. All but 13 submissions were eliminated from the race in several rounds of looking through all works. As had already been arranged, the jury met again on March 15. 11 submissions were restored to the race as requested by several jurors, after they had had a chance to review the eliminated works in the months in between the meetings. Two works were then recommended by the jury to the foundation to be checked as to whether they could be completed within the price range given. One was designed by a group around the architect Simon Ungers from Hamburg; it consisted of 85x85 m square of steel girders on top of concrete blocks located on the corners. The names of several extermination camps would be perforated into the girders, so that these would be projected onto objects or people in the area by sunlight. The other winner was a design by Christine Jackob-Marks.

Her concept consisted of 100x100 m large concrete plate, 7 meters thick. It would be tilted, rising up to 11 meters and walkable on special paths. The names of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust would be engraved into the concrete, with spaces left empty for those victims whose names remain unknown. Large pieces of debris from Massada, a mountaintop-fortress in Israel, whose Jewish inhabitants killed themselves to avoid being captured or killed by the Roman soldiers rushing in, would be spread over the concrete plate.

These plans would eventually be vetoed by Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

Peter Eisenman and the artist Richard Serra collaborated on a plan that emerged as the winner of the next competition in November 1997. Richard Serra, however, quit the design team soon after, citing personal and professional reasons. On June 25, 1999, a large majority of the Bundestag decided in favor of Eisenman's plan, modified by attaching a museum, or "place of information," designed by Berlin-based exhibition designer Dagmar von Wilcken.

Building began on April 1, 2003, but according to Wikipedia:

On October 14, 2003, the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger published a few articles presenting as a scandal the fact that the Degussa company was involved in the construction of the memorial producing the anti-graffiti substance Protectosil used to cover the stelae, because the company had been involved in various ways in the National-Socialist persecution of the Jews. A subsidiary company of Degussa, Degesch, had even produced the Zyklon B gas used to poison people in the gas chambers. At first these articles did not receive much attention, until the board of trustees managing the construction discussed this situation on October 23 and, after turbulent and controversial discussions, decided to stop construction immediately until a decision was made. Primarily it was representatives of the Jewish community who had called for an end to Degussa's involvement, while the politicians on the board, including Wolfgang Thierse, did not want to stop construction and incur further expense. They also said it would be impossible to exclude all German companies involved in the Nazi crimes, because — as Thierse put it — "the past intrudes into our society". Lea Rosh, who also advocated excluding Degussa, replied that "Zyklon B is obviously the limit." In the discussions that followed, several facts emerged. For one, it transpired that it was not by coincidence that the involvement of Degussa had been publicized in Switzerland, because another company that had bid to produce the anti-graffiti substance was located there. Further, the foundation managing the construction, as well as Lea Rosh, had known about Degussa's involvement for at least a year but had not done anything to stop it. Rosh then claimed she had not known about the connections between Degussa and Degesch. It also transpired that another Degussa subsidiary, Woerman Bauchemie GmbH, had already poured the foundation for the stelae. A problem with excluding Degussa from the project was that many of the stelae had already been covered with Degussa's product. These would have to be destroyed if another company were to be used instead. The resulting cost would be about €2.34 million. In the course of the discussions about what to do, which lasted until November 13, most of the Jewish organizations including the Central Council of Jews in Germany spoke out against working with Degussa, while the architect Peter Eisenman, for one, supported it. On November 13, the decision was made to continue working with the company, and was subsequently heavily criticized. Henryk M. Broder said that "the Jews don't need this memorial, and they are not prepared to declare a pig sty kosher." 

The project was finished on December 15, 2004. It was inaugurated on May 10, 2005, sixty years after the end of World War II, and opened to the public two days later. It is located one block south of the Brandenburg Gate, in the Friedrichstadt neighborhood. The cost of construction was approximately €25 million.



So, on inauguration the meaning of the memorial was already being shaped by controversies relating to material matters that are not visually evident, in this instance the coating of the stelae. Perhaps because Eisenman and Happold's design positively rejects symbolism through abstraction, the project immediately invites various kinds of cultural, political, aesthetic and ideological projections to occur.



Under this monument, below ground, "buried", is the "Place of Information", holding the names of all known Jewish Holocaust victims, obtained from the Israeli museum Yad Vashem. 

Vergangenheitsbewältigung is a composite German word that describes processes of dealing with the past (Vergangenheit = past; Bewältigung = coming to terms with, mastering, wrestling into submission), which is perhaps best rendered in English as "struggle to come to terms with the past". It is a key term in the study of post-1945 German literature and culture. Perhaps because of the memorial's resemblance to a cemetery Eisenman's abstraction quickly becomes symbolic of burial, and therefore a burial of the past ahead of its submission. Burying the the unresolved is hiding the past, but hiding leads to seeking and finding.



The informal name of this memorial, the "Holocaust-Mahnmal" is significant. It does not translate easily: "Holocaust Cenotaph" would be one sense, but the noun Mahnmal, which is distinct from the term Denkmal (typically used to translate "memorial") carries the sense of "admonition," "urging," "appeal," or "warning" rather than "remembrance" as such. The work is formally known as das Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas (English translation, "The Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe"). Some controversy attaches to it precisely because of this formal name and its exclusive emphasis on Jewish victims. As Eisenman acknowledged at the opening ceremony, "It is clear that we won't have solved all the problems — architecture is not a panacea for evil — nor will we have satisfied all those present today, but this cannot have been our intention." But as shown in the photo above the memorial has been transformed in its meaning by its use. Photographing the memorial obviously results in photographic images (look at around 952,000 results when you google Holocaust Memorial Berlin), but photography does not merely represent realities, photography substitutes itself for realities. The memorial is situated in photographic space.

One of the recent controversies occurred in January 2013, and taken up in the media (outrage at the Daily Mail etc) after the blog Totem and Taboo posted a collection of profile pictures from the gay dating app Grindr, and taken at the memorial for the obvious reason that it provides a brilliant photographic "background".



One of the images used on the Wikipedia page for the memorial suggests the potential for play, a game of hide and seek, running through a maze of spaces, and evoking the innocence of childhood! Or the presence of evil stalking the vulnerable. Here's Johnny! Weird!

The legacy for Lea Rosh seems to include some controversy as well as official recognition for her selbsttherapeutisches Lebenswerk' (lit. 'self-therapeutic life's work'). The debates and soul searching continue, which is by many accounts, to the good. Meanwhile the memorial as a permanent structure remains a hostage to fortune, history and the use that people make of it. Is it possible, can you imagine, that sometime in the future, this site will be re-developed? Will this work survive? Be loved and cherished? Or are we stuck with it along with the retrospective monuments erected after the unification of Germany in 1871 whereby the ruling class manifested their historical and ideological views? The Hermannsdenkmal and Völkerschlachtdenkmal for example.