The Romans used to write in wax-coated tables. Referred as ‘palimpsest’ (Greek παλιν (palin): "again" + ψαω (psao): "I scrape”) these tables where written, scraped, cleaned and used again. As a result of this technique, some Palimpsests contain the traces of hundreds of texts written in them.
Cities are palimpsests of memories, collecting the records of innumerable lives and events built over time. Like poems where each word carries multiple meanings, cities contain the complex history of events past: victory, invasion, imperialist domination, communist regime, rise of an empire, decadence, evangelization, bombing…the fragility of civilization is written, scraped and re-written in their walls, monuments, structures… and through this density, meaning is captured.
“Each particular manifestation on a building is just one moment in a long history of possible forms it might take”.Phelan,Peggy Building the life drive:architecture and repetition on Herzog & DeMeuron: Natural History,1999
Wars, battles, redevelopment, natural disasters, act as the voluntary or involuntarily ‘erasers‘ of the palimpsest. Bombings, for example, can flatten entire areas of a particular city or create regular patterns of destruction where only a keen eye can read and recognize the signs, marks, and traces left behind.
Walking on the streets of London, in a residential neighborhood, I noticed that once every so often a new house was inserted into the traditional urban pattern of old row houses; this seemed quite natural until I realized that the insertions occurred rhythmically and precisely every ten houses. I started wondering why and discovered, with some discomfort, that these new houses are scabs, new tissue that had healed over the wounds inflicted by an aerial bombing attack during the Second World War.
‘War levels the cities in much more than the physical sense; it reduces its multilayered complexity of meaning to one-layered tableaux…’.Wood, Lebbeus. Architecture & War. Princeton Architectural Press, 1993.
Beyond the limits of its intricate physical reality, the city fragments become reference points, symbols that define the identity of the place and give it its character but also, and most importantly, create a symbolic link with the inhabitants, the citizens of the place. It is this symbolic connection what evokes a feeling of belonging, of ownership, of understanding that corresponds to our vision of what is real and as such represents the city itself.
Winston Churchill must have felt and understood this connection during the Second World War when he gave the order to keep St Paul's Cathedral standing during the London Blitz. He realized that the structure, whose silhouette dominated London’s Skyline at the time, symbolically represented London itself and through it the spirit and pride of Britain.
Surveillance crews were on 24 hour watch to put off any fire that occurred around its premises and, although severely damaged, St Paul's Cathedral, survived the German bombings. While the whole city was covered in rubble and dust, St. Paul’s dome could be seen from the distance standing beyond the smoke, and every Londoner knew that in spite of all the damage ‘the city’ was still standing.
War is a cultural entity, a universal phenomenon whose form and scope varies but never the less repeats. The problem of destructiveness has been a constant element along human history as if it was just an unavoidable component of human nature.
‘Death Instinct’ was described by Sigmund Freud, in 1920, as a compulsion, a ‘compelling aspiration’, a need (conscious or unconscious) leading towards death, destruction and forgetfulness. Destructiveness, he explains, is the product of the constant human struggle between two opposites: Eros and Thanatos: The former looking for creativity, harmony, sexual connection, self preservation…life; the latter looking for aggression, repetition, disruption, self-destruction…death. He discovered that the ‘compulsive repetition’ of certain patterns of human behavior was, in a way, inevitable.
Although the instinctive nature of this concept is questionable, its repetitiveness can be taken for certain as human history can be described by an infinite cycle of destruction and renewal.
As human nature struggles to find a balance between life and death, inevitably, cities will be destroyed and rebuilt, scars and scabs will appear and the question of reconstruction will always be faced by the double necessity of remembering and the struggle to forget; governments will be replaced, boundaries will move, countries will change names…but the cities will remain there as the true palimpsests of history.
No comments:
Post a Comment