De Dageraad residential complex

M. De Klerk and P. Kramer, De Dageraad residential complex, P.L. Takstraat, Amsterdam, 1918-1923. NAI/KLER 0767 collection

Mediterraneo

Δέν είμαι πράσινη, γαλάζια, κυανή;
περίκλειστη, μικρή, νεροταξίδευτη καλόπνευστη μέ αύρες;
όχι;
Ωραία ναυάγια, θησαυροί;

Δέν είμαι, εκεί μέσα,
τό Αγκριτζέντο εκεί μέσα καί η Κατάνη καί
η κοιλάδα των ναών καί
τό στεφάνι μέ τά ρόδα μέ τά κρίνα; - όχι;

Δέν είμαι τό άστρο-πόλεμος κι όταν νυχτώνει αγάπη
κι ύστερα πάλι αυγερινός η Αστάρτη, η Αστραδενή,
η Αφροδίτη-Αφρούλα; Πώς;
Πώς δέν;

Δέν είμαι επτά νότες, επτά παύσεις, επτά οξίες πού καί στήν Κίνα ακόμα
αν θά πάς, άλλες δέν έχει; - όχι;
Έχει;

Δέν είμαι η αίγια η κότσιηνη, ωριά θωριά κατάφυτη, η μαύρη γη κατάφυ-
τη, φούλια τριφύλλια κλωστικά καί χέννα η λάγια - βάψτε με! η θεριακή,
η αντίδοτη, βάψτε με καί στολίστε με! κι όλα τά αντίθεα ποτά χαλάλι της
νά πείτε θολώνει πού επιθύμησε στης δαγκωνιάς τό κέντρο, πράσινα όλα
πράσινα, ζεστό φιλί επιθύμησε καί σκουροζώνιν ρίφιν
 - όχι χαλάλι;
Όχι μού;

Δέν είμαι ο ρηχός βυθός, ο παφλασμός, eros, himeros, pothos, η γλώσσα
φλοίσβος γλώσσα τού νερού, υγρή φωνή, η προγονή του ωκεανού μέ τό
παλάτι μάρμαρο, μέ τό παλάτι ολόλευκο καί τά άλογα ζεμένα στόν θυμό
του κοσμοσείστη, εδώ σταθείτε, κατεβείτε οι ουρανοί, καθρεφτιστείτε,
στεριές οι δασωμένες, οι στεγνές, οροσειρές, οι λαξευτοί, διώροφοι από
τά Μύρα της Λυκίας οι τάφοι, περίτεχνοι φιλάρεσκοι οι τάφοι, μικρή Ασία,
εγγύς Ανατολή, τό χέρι μου νά ξεχαστεί ποτές μου αν σέ ξεχάσω...;
Νά ξεχαστεί;
Τό χέρι;

Δέν είμαι σπίτι καί κατάρτι καί κουπιά - χρυσό αρματωμένο κάτεργο -
όχι;
Δέν είμαι κάτεργο;
ωωωω!

Μέλπω Γρυπάρη, «Φάος∙Σελήνη∙Φέγγαρος » Μελάνι, 2012

Twelve Highrise Buildings

Twelve Highrise Buildings for "Het Gooi," Hendrik Th. Wijdeveld, 1957. NAI Collection.

Max Ernst with Kachina Dolls

Max Ernst with kachina dolls, spring 1942. Photo James Thrall Soby

(Max Ernst Archive, Paris)

Skyhooks

Skyhooks, 2012

Slide projection and ruler on the floor

Dimensions variable

In 1949, photographer Robert Sullivan, at R.M. Schindler's request, made some images when the Janson's house was still under construction. In one, Ellen Janson is standing alone on the deck against the skyline. "Skyhooks" was the nickname for her residence.

Special thanks to the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and especially to Melinda Gandara.

Talk to the Hand

“By the end of the nineteenth century, the gestures of the Western bourgeoisie were irretrievably lost”: so writes Giorgio Agamben in his 1992 essay, “Notes on Gesture.”¹ The early years of the twentieth century were marked, the philosopher contends, by a frantic effort to reconstitute the vanished realm of meaningful movements: hence the exaggerated articulations of silent film and the mad leaps of modern dance. Certain “invisible powers”—the economic forces responsible for the simultaneous loosening and mechanization of the social sphere—had rendered daily life, for many, almost indecipherable. It’s a complaint that has echoed through the decades since, as subsequent generations have been characterized as increasingly shambling, ataxic, and slack, but also regimented, uniform, somehow less than human. The gestures of the (racial, national, or generational) other appear both random and programmed, meaningless and mechanical. Why, the gestural conservative wonders, do they keep doingthat thing with their hands, arms, shoulders, crotches?


In truth, a generalized sense that something is awry in the world of gesture is considerably older than Agamben allows. Classical authors already fretted at the unruly manner in which public speakers utilized various parts of the body. As well as regretting the tendency to alter the tone of voice in a theatrical fashion, Aristotle disparaged the use of gesture. For Cicero, too, theater was the model of physical expression that was most tempting for, and most emphatically to be avoided by, the untutored orator. Rather, a measured and dignified movement was all that was required or allowed. In the first century CE, however, the Spanish rhetorician Quintilian elaborated what he called a “universal language of the hands”: a gestural tongue, as it were, that spoke also through the head, face, eyebrows, and even the nostrils. With the discovery of a manuscript of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoriain 1416, the modern era of movement studies began.


In the treatises and manuals that appeared in the centuries to follow, there is a growing sense that instruction in the proper use of gesture answers some widespread failing in public life. For a start, gesture seems a sort of anti-Babel, supplying meanings that language cannot: in Giovanni Bonifacio’sArt of Signs (1616), the whole body is employed to counter this tendency of the spoken word toward opacity. In their “mute expressiveness,” the head, face, arms, hands, fingers, nails, chest, abdomen, genitals, knees, and feet have all got something to say. In his Chirologia (1644) and Chironomia(1648), John Bulwer calls gesture “the only speech which is natural to man; it may well be called the tongue and general language of human nature which, without teaching, men in all regions of the habitable world do at the first sight most easily understand.” Bulwer, who also contrived a finger-spelling alphabet that he called “the deaf and dumb man’s friend,” claimed that his gesture manual had another application, being “so ordered to serve for privy ciphers for any secret information”: in the latter instance, he apparently forgot for a moment his own assertion of the universal legibility of gesture. Crucially, his volumes also include illustrations of the gestures he describes.


In the eighteenth century, the interest in gesture took a chauvinist turn. English writers on oratory, in particular, seemed proud of their nation’s public speakers but acknowledged at the same time that a more bodily effusive presence might raise the standard of public debate. “Our preachers stand stock still in the pulpit,” wrote Joseph Addison, “and will not so much as move a finger to set off the best sermons in the world. We meet with the same speaking statues at our bars, and in all the public places of debate. Our words flow from us in a smooth, continued stream, without those strainings of the voice, motions of the body, and majesty of the hand, which are so much celebrated in the orators of Greece and Rome.”² At the start of the nineteenth century, Addison’s observation had hardened into a received wisdom: the British (more especially the English) were ineloquent in the gestural department.


* * *

In the introduction to his Chironomia (1806), the most ambitious and influential study of gesture published in this period, Gilbert Austin notes: “It is not the genius of the people of Great Britain to gesticulate; they are grave people. To saw the air perpetually is absurd.”³ (Austin was himself born in Dublin—he was a graduate of Trinity College and, as a Church of Ireland clergyman, a much admired preacher—but does not advert to any more daring or expansive gestures on the part of the Irish.) While the insular orator lacks the panache of his Continental coeval, he is not to be thought a mere dullard or plank: “Though in our temperate climate the people are less disposed to vivacity of manner, and are not easily excited; yet the cool, the solid and the cultivated understanding of the British speaker, under the direction of rational principles, is capable, as well in action as in composition, of all that is graceful and persuasive, and even of all the energetic and irresistible powers of delivery.”⁴

Gilbert Austin, Chironomia (1806), plate 9.

The full title of Austin’s book is Chironomia; or a Treatise on Rhetorical Delivery: Comprehending Many Precepts, Both Ancient and Modern, For the Proper Regulation of the Voice, the Countenance, and Gesture. Together With an Investigation of the Elements of Gesture, and a New Method for the Notation Thereof; Illustrated by Many Figures. It is in certain respects quite conventional, drawing upon classical sources to argue for a rational mean between expressiveness and restraint. As is usual by this time, Austin warns against the corrupting effects of bad theater—he exempts from censure the celebrated performances of David Garrick and Charles Kemble—and entreats his reader to maintain a degree of self-possession: “Where he is incapable of governing himself, he falls into undignified gesticulations, and into absurd distortions; and instead of inspiring others with his feelings, he will frequently become ridiculous, and be laughed at himself.”⁵ It is in the second half of the book’s title that the real novelty of Austin’s project is revealed. He is exercised, he says, by “the want of a copious and simple language” to represent the many gestures that the orator may deploy. The prospective public speaker “sees few models which are worthy of imitation.” Chironomiais meant to “represent every action of an orator throughout his speech, or of an actor throughout the whole drama, and to record them for posterity, and for repetition and practice, as well as common language is recorded.” To this end, its author has recruited a Lilliputian army of exemplary orators; page after page of tiny figures that embody, by their numerous and subtly distinguished movements, the gamut of human gesture.


The figures are well-dressed and mostly male: in some instances they appear in classical costume, but they are in general, one may assume, diminutive gentlemen of the early nineteenth century. They have been trained, so to speak, in the opening pages of the book—put through their paces inside a sphere that illustrates the various quarters in which their gestures may be made. This space is divided first into zenith, horizon, and nadir; a more detailed mapping of movements is indicated by dotted lines that surround the speaker like a web. The whole apparatus is an invisible presence in all the images that follow; it provides the notional geometric arena in which gestures are to be described (in both senses of the word). Within their imaginary bubbles, Austin’s tiny avatars are to be seen looking quizzical, aggrieved, eager, despairing, emboldened, dismissive, and emphatic. In eight instances, they raise an arm and splay a flat hand to ward off some notional assailant or unconscionable idea.⁶ Elsewhere, close-ups of sketched hands record the precise lineaments of waving, flourishing, sweeping, beckoning, repressing, advancing, springing, striving, recoiling, throwing, clinching, collecting, shaking, and pressing.


Given the precision of his spherical method, and the care with which each flourish of the hand or trajectory of the arm has been named and plotted, it comes as a surprise to find that Austin was less than sure of the efficacy of his book’s illustrations. He had intended, he tells the reader, a far more elaborate set of plates, but the initial drawings confirmed that the plan was ruinously expensive. Several times, Austin remarks upon the considerable labor and reflection to which his book has put him, as if aware that the move from illustrations of movement to annotated text—a necessary transition if the book is to be at all useful—is about to prove difficult for author and reader alike. A visual typology of gestures is all very well, but it does not exactly lend itself to easy marking-up of the orator’s text. Having drawn up the semaphore of possible gestures, Austin then needs to translate that language into a further set of ciphers that will sit legibly alongside the words to be spoken.


“It is necessary,” admits Austin at this point, “to give a short account of the difficulties which occurred in this system of notation of gesture, and of the manner in which they have been got over.” The problem, as he sees it, is that while the number of gestures is theoretically infinite, the range of symbols is, and must remain, limited. How then to render the stab of a finger, the attitude of an elbow, or the arc of a raised arm into a readable, and repeatable, code? The introduction of new names for the gestures in question, Austin concludes, is likely to prove “embarrassing” and “offensive”: he does not say whether the objections would be directed at the awkwardness of the lexicon or at an overly intimate attention to the outline of the body beneath the tailcoat and breeches. In any event, he decides instead on a system of symbolic letters: they will simply be easier to recall. In this last assertion, he was spectacularly mistaken.


The actual workings of Austin’s system of annotation are horrifically complex, so much so that the editors of the 1966 edition of his book sincerely doubt that any prospective public speaker could marshal the necessary information and acquire the proper skills to follow it. Each movement of the hand is denoted by four letters: they mark in turn the position of the hand, the elevation of the arm, the transverse situation of the arm, and the motion or force of the gesture. Thus, phfd means prone horizontal forward descending; seqn signals supine elevated oblique noting. Often, the last letter is omitted, but a further three letters then added for the left hand: phq—pdb, then, according to a complex table to which the orator would first have to refer (having already appraised himself of the names of the various movements depicted in the illustrations), means prone horizontal oblique—prone downwards backwards. At this point, things become more complex: a capital letter at the start of a sentence fixes the position of the head and the direction of the gaze; another set of symbols, below the line of spoken text, instructs the orator where to place his feet; a marginal mark suggests the force, rapidity, or interruption of the voice. To attempt to follow one of Austin’s annotated extracts from canonical texts—Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard,” Edward Young’s “Night Thoughts,” a speech of Brutus’s from Julius Caesar—is to become, inevitably, a clumsily articulated automaton, a mechanized monster of crippling self-consciousness. The gesticulating figures, with their elegantly executed actions, are overacting energetically to hide the degree of confusion and exhaustion that awaits any reader rash enough to put the system to the test.


Despite its rigors, however, Chironomia was remarkably influential among later authors of Victorian gesture manuals. It is the model for several volumes published in the United States in subsequent decades. Dr. Jonathan Barber went so far as to construct a bamboo replica of Austin’s sphere, which he used to teach students at Harvard and recommended in his 1831Practical Treatise on Gesture. The average American orator, it seems, presented the opposite problem to his British counterpart. As A. M. Bacon avers in his Manual of Gesture of 1875, the native public speaker is grievously in need of the prince’s counsel to the players in Act III, Scene ii ofHamlet: “In the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.”⁷ Drawing explicitly on Austin’s system, Bacon merely simplifies it somewhat and updates the attire of his illustrative figures, so that they appear less flamboyantly dressed, sober-suited, and stately. (Also, sporting a modish variety of facial hair.)


From A. M. Bacon, Manual of Gesture (1875). Like Austin, Bacon uses an imaginary sphere to map the speaker’s gestures.

Introducing Chironomia in 1966, Mary Margaret Robb and Lester Thonssen comment that, in discovering a method for recording the gestures of great orators, Austin “anticipated the electronic wizardry of tape and disc.” Oddly, the editors do not mention cinema, which is surely the closest analogue to the illustrations in Chironomia. Like the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge, the frozen gestures of 1806 almost demand to be set in motion, to be stitched together in a flicker-book approximation of the cinematographic technology to come. As with cinema, the paradox at the heart of Austin’s system is that in order to describe (never mind begin to prescribe) bodily movement, one has first to decompose it into its constituent parts. The mobile orator actually has to become one of Addison’s “speaking statues” before being allowed to breathe, move, and live once more. In this sense, Chironomia is but the first step in a vast project undertaken by the arts and sciences in the nineteenth century: the isolation of the instant so that physical expression may be pictured, comprehended, and archived before it passes away. It is the ambition, for example, of Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals(1872), with its photographic register of grinning and gurning faces. It is the impulse behind Jean-Martin Charcot’s record of the unruly but typical gestures of the hysteric. The photographs taken at the Salpêtrière clinic are now better known than the tabulated drawings produced by Charcot’s colleague Paul Richer, whose “complete and regular form of the great hysterical attack,” rendered in eighty-six disheveled female figures, resembles nothing so much as Austin’s anatomizing of the rhetorical gestures of the erudite gentleman. The orator, like the hysteric, is the anxious object of an abstracting gaze, made to perform his every natural affect and impulse according to a predetermined plot. At times, you can almost imagine that he revolts against this inhuman regimen, that he is madly signaling for assistance, or raises his arm at a random and rebellious angle, letting it drift along a dotted line of his own choosing, through the air’s uncharted ways.


1. 1 Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture,” in Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1993), p. 135. 

2. 2 Joseph Addison, The Spectator, no. 407, 17 June 1712. 

3. 3 Gilbert Austin, Chironomia: or a Treatise on Rhetorical Delivery, ed. Mary Margaret Robb and Lester Thonssen (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1966), p. 134. Austin, it seems, may not have read Bulwer’s Chironomia, but arrived at the same title by reference to sundry classical sources. 

4. 4 Ibid., p. xi.

5. 5 Ibid., p. 138. 

6. 6 This venerable gesture, which we may assume was a staple of nineteenth-century stage melodrama, was preserved and perfected in silent film, then abandoned with the advent of cinematic sound, and relegated to the practical repertoire of the traffic cop. It was only in the televised performances of the girl groups of the 1960s that it found its proper emotional valence again. In particular, the Supremes’ 1965 entreaty to “Stop! In the Name of Love” would have meant nothing without this gesture. Nowadays, it has only an ungracious and anomic significance, as the (somewhat dated) title of this essay confirms.

7. 7 A. M. Bacon, Manual of Gesture (Chicago: S. C. Griggs, 1875).

Cabinet, Issue 26 Magic Summer 2007

Text By Brian Dillon

Source:http://www.cabinetmagazine.org

The Golden Age

The 15-hour working week predicted by Keynes may soon be within our grasp – but are we ready for freedom from toil?

Text by John Quiggin, Aeon Magazine, 27 September.

Source: www.aeonmagazine.com

The Orator

The Orator, 2012

40 x 30 cm

Mixed media

Inkjet print on fine art paper

665: The Least of All Possible Evils

If, as a friend recently suggested, we ought to construct a monument to our present political culture as an homage to the principle of the “lesser evil,” it should be made in the form of the digits 6-6-5 built of concrete blocks, and installed like the Hollywood sign on hillsides or other high points overlooking city centers. This number, one less than the number of the beast—that of the devil and of total evil—might capture the essence of our humanitarian present, obsessed as it is with the calculations and calibrations that seek to moderate, ever so slightly, the evils that it has largely caused.

The principle of the lesser evil is often presented as a dilemma between two or more bad choices in situations where available options are—or seem to be—limited. The choice made justifies harmful actions that would otherwise be unacceptable, since it allegedly averts even greater suffering. Sometimes the principle is presented as the optimal result of a general field of calculations that seeks to compare, measure, and evaluate different bad consequences in relation to necessary acts, and then to minimize those bad consequences. Both aspects of the principle are understood as taking place within a closed system in which those posing the dilemma, the options available for choice, the factors to be calculated, and the very parameters of calculation are unchallenged. Each calculation is undertaken anew, as if the previous accumulation of events has not taken place, and the future implications are out of bounds.

Those who seek to justify necessary evils as “lesser” ones, especially when searching for a rationale to explain recent wars and military expeditions, like to appeal to the work of the fourth-century North African philosopher-theologian St. Augustine. Augustine’s rejection of the principle of Manichaeism—a world strictly divided into good and evil—meant that he no longer saw evil as the perfect mirror image of the good; rather, in platonic terms, he saw evil as a measure of the absence of good. Since evil, unlike good, is not perfect and absolute, it is forever measured and calibrated on a differential scale of greater and lesser. Augustine taught that it is not permissible to practice lesser evils, because to do so violates the Pauline principle “do no evil that good may come.” But—and here lies its appeal—lesser evils might be tolerated when they are deemed necessary and unavoidable, or when perpetrating an evil results in the reduction of the overall amount of evil in the world.

More recently, Pope Benedict XVI has appealed to the lesser evil principle in a decree permitting the use of condoms in places with high rates of HIV. Similar to this logic of contraception, some in the Vatican thought that implicit support for the government of Silvio Berlusconi, albeit plagued by sin, ridicule, and corruption, might be considered as the lesser evil in protecting Christian values. In cases such as these, the economy of the lesser evil is always cited as a justification for breaching rigid rules and entrenched dogma; indeed, it is very often used by those in power as the primary justification for the very notion of “exception.”

In fact, Augustine’s discourse of the lesser evil was developed at a time when the church had started to participate in the political government of its subjects and had acquired considerable financial and military power. Through the ages, the Christian church saw its task as keeping human evil to a minimum. It pastorally ruled over a vast and complex intrapersonal economy of merits and faults—of sin, vice, and virtue—operating according to specific rules of circulation and transfer, with procedures, analyses, calculations, and tactics that allowed the exercise of a specific interplay between conflicting goods and degrees of evil. In his lectures on the origins of governmentality, Michel Foucault argued that, on the basis of this “economical theology,” the modern, secular form of governmental power has itself taken on the form of an economy.¹

The theological origins of the lesser evil argument cast a long shadow over the present. In fact, the idiom has become so deeply ingrained, and is invoked in such a staggeringly diverse set of contexts—from individual situational ethics and international relations, to attempts to govern the economics of violence in the context of the “War on Terror” and the efforts of human rights and humanitarian activists to maneuver through the paradoxes of aid—that it seems to have altogether replaced the position previously reserved for the term “good.” Moreover, the very evocation of the “good” seems to invoke everywhere the utopian tragedies of modernity, in which evil seemed to lurk in a horrible Manichaeistic inversion. If no hope is offered in the future, all that remains is to insure ourselves against the risks that it poses, moderate and lessen the collateral effects of necessary acts, and tend to those who have suffered as a result.

In relation to the War on Terror, the terms of the lesser evil were most clearly and prominently articulated by Michael Ignatieff, former human rights scholar and leader of Canada’s Liberal Party. In his book The Lesser Evil, Ignatieff suggested that in “balancing liberty against security,” liberal states should establish mechanisms to regulate the breach of some human rights and legal norms, and allow their security services to engage in forms of extrajuridical violence—which he saw as lesser evils—in order to fend off or minimize potential greater evils, such as terror attacks on civilians in Western states.²

If governments need to violate rights in a terrorist emergency, it should be done, he thought, only as an exception and according to a process of adversarial scrutiny. “Exceptions,” Ignatieff states, “do not destroy the rule but save it, provided that they are temporary, publicly justified, and deployed as a last resort.”³

Film still from Sylvain George’s documentary on North African and Middle Eastern refugees’ attempt to reach the U.K.. Here, one of the characters shows his obliterated fingertips—a strategy to evade identification through fingerprinting. May they rest in revolt (Figures of wars I), 2011. Copyright: Independencia.

The lesser evil emerges here as a pragmatic compromise, a “tolerated sin” that functions as the very justification for the notion of exception. State violence in this model is a necro-economy in which various types of destructive measures are weighed in a utilitarian fashion, not only in relation to the damage they produce, but to the harm they purportedly prevent and even in relation to the more brutal measures they help restrain. In this logic, the problem of contemporary state violence resembles an all-too-human version of the previously mentioned mathematical minimum problem of the divine order, one tasked with determining the smallest level of violence necessary to avert the greatest harm. For the architects of contemporary war, this balance is trapped between two poles: keeping violence at a level low enough to limit civilian suffering, yet high enough to bring a decisive end to a given war.⁴

More recent works by legal scholars and legal advisers to states and militaries sought to extend the inherent elasticity of the system of legal exception proposed by Ignatieff into ways of rewriting the laws of armed conflict themselves.⁵Lesser evil arguments are now used to defend anything from targeted assassinations and mercy killings, to house demolitions, deportation, and torture,⁶ to the use of (sometimes) non-lethal chemical weapons, the use of human shields, and even “the intentional targeting of some civilians if it could save more innocent lives than they cost.”⁷ In a macabre moment, it was even suggested that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki might be tolerated under the principle of the lesser evil. Faced with a humanitarian A-bomb, one might wonder what, in fact, might qualify as a greater evil. Perhaps it is time for the differential accounting of the lesser evil to replace the mechanical bureaucracy of the “banality of evil” as the idiom to describe the most extreme manifestations of violence. Indeed, it is through this use of the lesser evil that self-proclaimed democratic societies can maintain regimes of occupation and neocolonization.

Text from Eyal Weizman’s most recent book The Least of All Possible Evils 

1 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977–1978, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Graham Burchell, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 164–73, 183.

2 Michael Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

3 Ibid., xiv.

4 These refer respectively to jus in belloand jus ad bellum.

5 A former Israeli military lawyer Gabriella Blum opines that if international humanitarian law “is designed to minimize humanitarian suffering within the constraints of war, then it is not at all clear why measures intended to further minimize suffering … a choice for the lesser evil – cannot serve as a justification,” she says effortlessly, “for suspending the law in the name of the law.” Gabriella Blum, “The Laws of War and the ‛Lesser Evil,’” (35 YJIL 1, 2010), 3.

6 Relying on what is essentially a proportionality analysis, the Israeli Commission of Inquiry into the Methods of Investigation of the General Security Service Regarding Hostile Terrorist Activity, otherwise known as the Landau Commission, of 1987 reaches the conclusion that the prohibition on torture is not absolute, but is rather based, in its own words, upon the logic of “the lesser evil.” Thus, “the harm done by violating a provision of the law during an interrogation must be weighed against the harm to the life or person of others which could occur sooner or LATER” [upper-case in the original]. US Department of Justice attorney John Yoo similarly referred to a balance of interests when authorizing forms of torture during the Bush Administration. Itamar Mann and Omer Shatz, “The Necessity Procedure: Laws of Torture in Israel and Beyond, 1987–2009,” Legalleft, 2011, see →.

7 Ibid., 3.

The Other Modernism

These days, when architecture is supposed to be either pleasant or slick, it can be startling to remember that for a brief, brilliant moment, the reigning style, particularly for civic buildings, was something called Brutalism. It’s worth considering what we’ve gained and lost since that moment, especially with the passing away, reported at the end of June, of Gerhard Kallmann, one of the authors of Boston City Hall (1968), which represented perhaps the apex of that style in the United States. 

When we think of modern architecture, two modes come to mind. The first is the sleek, planar, glass-and-steel style established by Mies Van Der Rohe and his interpreters at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and elsewhere, epitomized by Mies’s Seagram Building (1958). The second is heavy, sculptural steel-reinforced concrete, with much of its artistry in the treatment of the cast concrete surface, most closely associated with the late work of Le Corbusier. The architectural term brutalism is said to have its origins in Corbusier’s use of the phrase béton brut, or “raw concrete,” thebrut connoting not brutality or brutishness (although critics would play up that association) but the decision to leave the concrete’s surface rough and unfinished, and often impressed with the wood grain, joints, and other irregularities of the boards with which it was cast. The concept of “the New Brutalism” was brought into being by the critic Reyner Banham’s 1966 book of that name, which highlighted the work of postwar British architects Alison and Peter Smithson.

In public housing projects and more corporate work, like the Economist’s London headquarters, the Smithsons developed their concrete modernism in a particular way. The finishes and details had a rawness and roughness that spoke not only to postwar austerity but also to a new ideal of social and political transparency in a society that was rebuilding itself. The detailing was deliberately modest, but the big picture look of Brutalist architecture was unashamedly the opposite: it was monumental and aspirational, expressive and expansive (and to its critics, bombastic, relentless, and insensitive to the scale of human activity). The Smithsons took it as a given that public housing should have the visual impact of a Gothic cathedral, and part of their invention, and struggle, was finding a set of forms and geometries that, without explicitly borrowing from the great historical styles, would be their equals in expressing the spirit of the age. (Their American contemporary in this search was Paul Rudolph, who as dean of the Yale School of Architecture in the 1960s turned much of New Haven into a landscape of moody cement, and who also designed government buildings for Boston.)  Perhaps the Smithsons’ greatest project, unbuilt, was a proposal to replace the bombed-out Coventry Cathedral with a single, massive, crushingly heavy concrete roof. Like a giant wing, it would have appeared to soar over the ruins, both sheltering them and, poignantly, brutally, leaving them behind. 

Gerhard Kallmann’s competition-winning design for Boston City Hall, developed in collaboration with Michael McKinnell, embodied a similar idea of heaviness poised above lightness. The building is a brooding, fortress-like mass of concrete resting on fins and columns rendered in concrete and brick. The brick was also used for a stepped podium and vast plaza that physically isolated the monumental building from its surroundings but materially connected it to the federal and colonial architecture nearby. From some angles, the building looks like a cement spaceship perched on more firmly terrestrial landing pads. From others, it looks like a ruin almost Roman in its complexity, with a thousand cutouts and panels and skylights and landings and lines that speak both to its designers’ anxious virtuosity and their desire to produce something timeless. There is something deeply moving about seeing the words “Boston City Hall” incised over the uncompromisingly modern entry in lettering that would not be out of place on Trajan’s Column. 

In the fifty years since its conception, the design has remained divisive. It was part of an urban renewal project that committed the familiar crime of destroying a piece of historic urban fabric and replacing it with a windswept plaza. And even its fans (myself included) must concede that it is not an easy building. It’s not always easy to look at or to find your way around, and from the perspective of a contemporary sensibility that favors Cupertino-inspired ease of interface and simplicity of form in all arts and artifacts, it’s not easy to see why any building, especially a public building, should be so hard. Boston Mayor Thomas Menino put forward a short-lived proposal in 2006 to move the city government out of the building. A New York Timesarticle about the proposal included this quote from a citizen standing in line at the parking clerk’s window: “It’s prime real estate. Just nuke this and sell it. It’s such a waste of space.”

Nukes are to the point. In the popular conversation about architecture and design,modernism has been oddly domesticated by the term midcentury. As with the proliferation of the surname Eames as a catchall for retro-futuristic connoisseurship,midcentury reduces form-follows-function to form-follows-fun: it connotes the sophisticated yet familiar good taste you see in shelter magazines, all those chairs that are timelessly good to sit in yet somehow, in their charismatic profiles, make life seem smart and great. “Atomic-age” and “Jet-age” have become swingin’ signals for ring-a-ding-ding consumer goods made in swoopy and sexy plastic and chrome. And yet there is another side to this story, one in which the Smithsons are a kind of Yin to the Eames’ Yang, an eternally rainy Britain to their perpetually sunny California. 

That other side is the cold war, in which atoms and jets had a different role and connotation. Think of the Mad Men episode in which Don Draper travels to California for a presentation by military contractors; recoiling from the high-tech apocalypse they describe, he retreats to a milieu of sybaritic lotus-eaters in an Eamesian house of steel and glass. There’s much to debate about that particular hall of mirrors, about one popular culture’s incarnation of another—but something about the juxtaposition of high stakes and high design rings true. While the Eames’ (who developed much of their bent-plywood technology for military contractors during World War II) supplied a stylish refuge from the era’s tensions and terrors, the Brutalists deliberately attempted a more ambivalent response to their moment. 

The Smithsons, along with Reyner Banham, described their New Brutalism as “an ethic, not an aesthetic,” and that ethic can be said to have had two essential premises. The first was that tough and complex times called for tough and complex architecture. The ruins of World War II (and intimations of a World War III) inspired architecture so massive as to be nuclear-proof but also so special and soaring in form that it might transcend a fear-struck moment. The awfulness of the era called for awesomeness in its buildings. (“It will outlast,” New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable wrote of Boston City Hall in 1969, “the last hurrah.”) The second premise was that buildings built by governments, from city halls to public housing, answered to a higher calling than those created by private development, which needed only to be efficient and entertaining. What exactly that calling was and is, and whether structures like Boston City Hall answered it, is a matter of perpetual debate—and that debate, and the notion that architecture can and must summon it, is thrilling. 

It’s the same thrill and admiration one feels for the town council of Goshen, New York. In 1967 the Council built a Paul Rudolph design for its county government center, which in its intricately turbulent upwards-and-outward form, like a massive concrete coral reef, is quite similar to Boston City Hall. Today civic leaders in Goshen want to replace Rudolph’s building, now weather-beaten and unfashionable, with a gingerbread colonial pastiche. That replacement may be a much easier building, but it won’t be a better one. 

So it’s worth asking about those Brutalist architects and the public servants who were their primary patrons: What did they know, and aspire to, that we don’t? The last word, for now, goes to Kallmann, who on the fiftieth anniversary of Boston City Hall told the Globe: “It had to be awesome, not just pleasant and slick. [It should] remind you of ancient memories, history. It’s not a department store. It’s not an office building. Come on.”

Text by Thomas de Monchaux

Source: http://nplusonemag.com/