photo: http://www.flickr.

com/photos/stevenh/136006906/

Memory and the City

Informal/instant response missing person walls

photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thenails1/3406271201/

Ritualistic/commemerative, but still informal (1 year later)

Tribute in Light 2002-2003

Michael Arad, Peter Walker & Partners, Davis Brody Bond, Bond, Snhetta

National September 11 Memorial & Museum (1 decade later)

Before Benjamin, some questions: How might we describe urban memory? Beyond monuments, how do cities remember? Are there any differences between public and private memory? What is the difference between place and space?

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)

Benjamins major works: Critique of Violence, 1921 Goethes Elective Affinities, 1922 Origin of German Tragic Drama, 1928 One Way Street, 1928 The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936 The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire, 1938 On the Concept of History / Theses on the Philosophy of History, 1939 The Arcades Project, 2002 incomplete, published posthumously

Benjamins mode of working is marked by the techniques of archiving, collecting, and constructing. Excerpts, transpositions, cuttings-out, montaging, sticking, cataloguing and sorting appear to him to be true activities of an author. His inspiration is inflamed by the richness of materials. Images, documents and perceptions reveal their secrets to the look that is thorough enough. Benjamin was interested in the incidental. He loved to think in marginal areas, in order to push out from there to the centre... Fragments recombined into new things; this researcher converted them into something distinctive. Walter Benjamins Archive, pg. 4.

Benjamins style, approach

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)

The Parisan Arcades

photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sea-turtle/3541655540/

The Parisan Arcades - origin of retail space

Present day Arcade

These Arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble paneled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such enterprises. Lining both sides of the arcade, which gets its light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the passage is a city, a world in minature. Illustrated Guide to Paris (quoted by Benjamin)

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Paul Klees Angelus Novus

Paris, Capitol of the Nineteenth Cenury

They [technological, social developments] are manifest as phantasmagorias. Thus appear the arcadesfirst entry in the field of iron construction; thus appear the world exhibitions, whose link to the entertainment industry is significant. Also included in this order of phenomena is the experience of the flneur, who abandons himself to the phantasmagorias of the marketplace... where people appear only as types, , are the phantasmagorias of the interior, which are constituted by mans imperious need to leave the imprint of his private individual existence on the rooms he inhabits pg. 14 keywords: phantasmagoria, flneur, iron, the interior

Andreas Gursky, 99 Cent II Dyptichon (detail)

Retail space is the window to the soul?

Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milano / photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/beholder/194280522/

A. Fourier, or the Arcades

Fouriers Phalanstere -self contained community / megastructure -community of 1620 -each wing, dedicated task. centre: quiet activities (studiying, meeting), one wing for noisey activities, another as interface to public (outsiders paid access fees)

Paris, Capitol of the Nineteenth Cenury

The secret cue for the Fourierist utopia is the advent of the machines. The phalanstery is designed to restore human beings to a system of relationship in which morality becomes superfluous... Fourier does not dream of relying on virtue for this; rather; he relies on an efficient functioning of society; whose motive forces are the passions. In the gearng of the passions... Fourier imagines the collective psychology as a clockwork mechanism. Fouriest harmony is the necessary product of this combinatory play. pg. 16

Joseph Paxtons The Crystal Palace (1851)

B. Grandville, or the World Expositions

Paris, Capitol of the Nineteenth Cenury

World exhibitions glorify the exchange value of the commodity. They create a framework in which its use value becomes secondary. They are a school in which the masses, forcibly excluded from consumption, are imbued with the exchange value of commodities to the point of identifying with it: Do not touch that item on display. World exhibitions thus provide access to a phantasmagoria which a person enters in order to be distracted. Within these divertissements, to which the individual abandons himself in the framework of the entertainment industry... pg. 18

With Baudelaire, Paris becomes for the first time the subject of lyric poetry. This poetry of place is the opposite of all poetry of the soil. The gaze which is allegorical genius turns on the city, betrays, instead a profound alienation. It is the gaze of the flneur, whose way of life conceals behind a beneficient mirage the anxiety of the future inhabitants of our metropolises. The flneur seeks refuge in the crowd. The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city is transformed... The flneur plays the role of the scout in the marketplace pg. 21

D, Baudelaire, or the Streets of Paris

1871

E. Haussmann, or the Barricades

The true goal of Haussmanns projects was to secure the city against civil war. He wanted to make the erection of barricades int he streets of Paris impossible for all time... Haussmann seeks to forestall such combat in two ways. Widening the streets will make the erection of barricades impossible, andnew streets will connect the barracks in straight lines with the workers districts pg. 23

E. Haussmann, or the Barricades

Index Urban Taxonomy

Selections for readings included:

Dream House, Museum Spa The Flneur The Streets of Paris

Given todays presentation: What was your reaction to the readings? Could you finish them? Thoughts on the structure? What is Benjamins strategy here? More importantly, what kind of model does this text provide for how we might think about memory and the city?

(Some) Takeaway point from The Arcades Project: 1. Cities are comprised of multiple narratives 2. Spatial organization & experience are extremely political 3. The past manifests itself in everyday ritual 4. The ephemeral/trivial is loaded with meaning 5. Architecture is social control 6. Progress is a myth, decay much more pervasive 7. Grand narratives are simplistic And observing the structure of the text: 1. The whole is more than the sum of its parts 2. Archival research can be an art 3. Montage is an effective means of constructing arguments

If we were executing this exercise in Toronto what would we look at?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54Z2XAS3Ss0

Benjamin Bardou Paris, Capital of the 19th Century (2010)

photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/yourdon/3835288186/

Vietnam Memorial (Designed by Maya Lin in 1982)

photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/steffsmith_fotos/267461282/

Vietnam Memorial II

photo: Cyrus Irani

Toronto Police Funeral Procession for Sergeant Ryan Russell

photo: National Post

Toronto Police Funeral Procession for Sergeant Ryan Russell

Not all memories affect thousands though how might we use technology to annotate space and share more personal memories?

Its history from the ground up, told by the voices that are often overlooked when the stories of cities are told. We know about the skyscrapers, sports stadiums and landmarks, but [murmur] looks for the intimate, neighbourhood-level voices that tell the day-to-day stories that make up a city. The smallest, greyest or most nondescript building can be transformed by the stories that live in it. Once heard, these stories can change the way people think about that place and the city at large.

Shawn Micallef + James Roussel + Gabe Sawhney

[murmur]

photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/spacing/2692329935/ & http://www.flickr.com/photos/spacing/2616258614/

[murmur]

Cassidy Curtis, 2005 http://www.otherthings.com/grafarc/flash/view.htm

Graffiti Archaeology

History can be a tool for social change. It is often said that the victors of history write the history books in their favor. Some stories are promoted, and others are left to dwindle in obscurity. The Missing Plaque Project tries to stand as a force to stop this from happening, by shedding light on the hidden histories. But why are some histories overlooked? Racism and other biases are partly to blame... Another part is that many of the people who do work around the citys history come from a narrow background and happy to focus on the history of the British and the rich. Many of them are interested in what most people find banal. Often are happy to look at the history of buildings in the city rather than the people who lived here, and the social turmoil of the past.
Tim Groves (2002)

Missing Plaque Project

Rocky Darrell Dobey (picture taken in 2005)

Copper engraving/Fixtures (Dobey has been active since 1977)

The City, The Cinema: Modern Spaces

Some opening questions: In what way might we consider the city cinematic? How does cinema relate to memory? What are some examples of films that focus on the city?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=pF0GOo-LSZ4#t=118s

Dark City (1998)

Inception (2010)

The City, The Cinema: Modern Spaces

If Benjamin is wildly unfocused and over ambitious, James Donald is a relatively focused taskmaster. In this text Donald: -reveals tensions between public and private narratives -highlights films attuned to the rhythms of the city, which the cinematic apparatus is attuned to capture -weaves narratives of Anthony Vidler, Baudelaire, Hugh Ferris together city is mythic (not unlike Benjamin in this regard) -provides a pretty great list of films to investigate

If the city stages dark space in bright space, cinema projects a bright light in a dark space. To bring the two together by looking at some of the ways in which the city has been represented is not wholly arbitrary or tangential. The modern(ist) metropolis and the insitution cinema come into being at the same time. Their juxtapositions provides more clues to the pragmatic aesthetic through which we experience the city not only as visual cutlure, but above all as physical space. pg. 84

Hugh Ferris

Candyman (1992)

...a mediation on contemporary percpetions of the city. The film is punctuated by aerial shots of Chicagos townscapes: the circulation of traffic on freeways, barracklike housing, monumental but silent ampitheatres. From that Gods eye view, the city presents a dehumanised geometry. People are as invisible, or as insignificant... From below on the streets the black underclass who live in the projects make sense of the citys irrationality in terms of myths and subcultural legends... It is concrete, but just as brutally it is fantastic. pg. 78

Cinema revels in the tension between representations of panopt

Man with a Movie Camera (1928)

quote from A Conversation with the Inspector of Taxes about Poetry

Vladimir Mayakovsky

However rationalised and disenchanted modern socieites may have become, at an experiential level (that is, in the unconsious) the new urban-industrial world had become fully re-enchanted. In the spectacular shopping arcades and department stores of Second Empire Paris, in its huge adveritising billboards, images jostled in mythic or dream like combinations. But, for Benjamin, even the most rationalised urban plans, with their uniform streets and endless rows of buildings, have realised the dreamed-of architecture of the ancients: the labyrinth. pg. 83