SAH Blog

Anne Delano Steinert is a recipient of the 2022 H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellowship. All photographs are by the author, except where otherwise specified.

Walking through the center of Prague is like visiting an outdoor museum of the Art Nouveau (and Art Nouveau-adjacent forms of experimental and hybrid early modernism). Every turn seems to bring a new treasure into view.

Figure 1: Buildings like these at 11 and 13 Gorazdova štít are ubiquitous throughout Prague. It seems like every corner you turn reveals new Art Nouveau facades like these.

Figure 2: Upper-level details at Gorazdova štít 13.

Figure 3: Door detail at Gorazdova štít 11.

Figure 4: Corner detail at Gorazdova štít 11.

I was surprised by the way Art Nouveau details and ornament were freely mixed with other styles in Prague. Often Art Nouveau features were applied to more traditional façades, or they were combined with other elements that were more Art Deco.

Figure 5: Though this building at Masarykavo 8 has applied ornament at the door that I would call Art Nouveau, the overall façade is more complicated and favors geometrical forms which lean more toward Art Deco.

Figure 6: Door detail at Masarykavo 8.

I have long been drawn to Art Nouveau. I am taken with the graceful fluid organic forms of flowers, trees, and human bodies. I love the innovative uses of materials and the provocative sense of motion. Prague has all these things plus color. Buildings here are painted bright colors and they feature colorful mosaics, tile work, and frescos. Most of these buildings are five- to six-story apartment buildings and hotels with storefronts at the ground floor, but there are also more use-specific buildings like the main train station and the Prague Municipal House.

I did some research and learned that Art Nouveau architecture came to Prague in the late 1890s. There was a building boom in response to the 1893 law which called for the modernization of the old urban slums leading to mass demolition, especially in the old Jewish quarter. (It is worth noting here that this pattern of destroying the oldest and least modern homes housing citizens with the least resources for “urban renewal” is a pattern that repeats again and again in urban history, particularly in the destruction of African American neighborhoods across the United States in the 1950s and 60s). Newly vacant lands were redeveloped as housing for wealthier urbanites, a good deal of it built in the Art Nouveau style.¹ The first known Art Nouveau design in Prague was the interior of the Café Corso designed by Friedrich Ohmann, professor at the Prague School of Applied Arts, in 1898.² As in all cities, the Art Nouveau here was a reaction against the formality of nineteenth-century architectural styles and part of the beginning of the quest for a modern architectural expression of the complexities of the new urban industrialized landscape. As industrialization brought new wealth, new technologies, and new materials, it also brought crowded urban conditions and new ways of living in cities now connected by electric rail lines where large department stores displayed glittering piles of goods available to a new urban elite. The number of Art Nouveau hotels in Prague is an indicator that travel was also an important part of modern Prague. (Today’s Palace Hotel, Hotel Central, Hotel Grand Europa, and Hotel Meran are a few of them).

The adjacent hotels Grand Europa (originally Hotel Archduke Stephan) and Meran (originally Hotel Garni) on Wenceslas Square were given their Art Nouveau facades between 1903 and 1905. Sources differ about attribution but agree that Bedřich Bendelmayer was the primary designer.³ The buildings are currently undergoing a massive renovation (as you will see from the photo), so the interior was closed, but the exterior is fantastic.

Figure 7: The Hotel Europa and Hotel Meren on Wenceslas Square.  

On one of my many walks through Prague, I happened across the Hlahol building designed by Josef Fanta and Čeněk Gergor and built between 1903 and 1906. The building was locked so I didn’t get to go inside to see the concert hall, which I learned later included paintings by Alfons Mucha, but the stunning exterior was enough to reminded me that architecture is really public art.

Figure 8: Hlahol at Masarykovo nábřeží 16 features Art Nouveau tile, metal, sculpture, and painted detail.

Figure 9: Hlahol building roofline detail.

Figure 10: Hlahol building door detail.

Figure 11: Hlahol building sculptural detail.

The Prague main train station, formally known as Franz Josef Station, was built between 1901 and 1909 and designed by Josef Fanta.⁴ The smaller original station has now been joined to a massive modern train station and shopping mall, making the original part of the station hard to find and photograph, but the original entrance rotunda is intact and well restored. I also stumbled upon an unrestored bit of the station in front of the baggage check room. This section includes a non-functioning clock flanked by two figures above the modern concourse. You can see from my photos that this guano-stained remnant of the original architecture stands out starkly against the blah interiors of the modern station.

Figure 12: Franz Josef Station rotunda.

Figure 13: Art Nouveau clock and sculpture visible from the lower level of the modernized station.

Figure 14: Clock detail. This clock is only right twice a day!

The Prague Municipal House is a total riot of color, pattern, and ornament encrusted on nearly every surface, almost to the point of absurdity. The multi-purpose building includes a café, two restaurants, a cavernous basement beer hall, formal presentation halls for the mayor and other dignitaries, offices, and a concert hall currently seating 1,259 with an entire floor of coat racks. Stylistically it is a hybrid. It has a baroque-inspired façade and concert hall with layer upon layer of Art Nouveau and distinctly Czech ornament. It was built between 1904 and 1912 on the site of the former Royal Court by Antonín Balšánek and Osvald Polívka.⁵ The applied ornament includes metal work, railings, mosaics, floor tile, upholstery, tapestries, clocks, stained glass, and paintings executed by a huge group of artists (including Alfons Mucha, who contributed paintings in the anteroom of the Mayor’s chamber). Sadly, the result of involving so many artists is a decorative program that doesn’t hold together very well. Each individual piece is beautiful and masterful, but as a whole, the building feels disjointed and disorganized, as the photos will show.

Figure 15: The Prague Municipal House exterior shows an explosive mix of styles.

Figure 16: Municipal House concert hall ceiling showing Baroque-inspired forms with Art Nouveau metal work and stained glass.

Figure 17: Municipal House stair hall view into the lower level showing multiple materials and decorative approaches.

Figure 18: Municipal House lower-level beer hall.

Figure 19: Municipal House second floor tapestry detail with a uniquely Czech stylistic approach.

Figure 20: Municipal house second floor metal ventilation grate.

Figure 21: Municipal Hall second floor ceiling panel painting by Alfons Mucha

I understand that Art Nouveau is not everyone’s favorite. I know many people find it garish and over-the-top or argue that it is nothing more that the application of a falsely innovative surface onto a traditional exterior, but I do think that my attraction to it illuminates a few things about how non-experts (which I definitely was in Prague!) perceive the world around them. This brings me back to the subject of my previous blog post. For folks who haven’t read that post, my premise was that if we want to preserve historic buildings, we need to make sure that they are valued, so we need to find ways to communicate their value beyond trained experts.

I have tried to explore every possible means available to ordinary folks who want to learn about the history of cities and architecture. I have visited urban history museums in Athens, Budapest, Marseille, Vienna, and Barcelona. I have taken public and private walking tours. I have read signs and plaques, looked at works of art, and climbed up to see views from tall towers. I have read guidebooks and listened to audio guides. (Thank you, Rick Steves). I went to light shows in Chartres and Rome, and I even checked out a virtual reality history program in Vienna called “Time Travel Magic Vienna History Tour,” then put on VR goggles to view a sister program called “Sisi’s Amazing Journey.” (They were both deeply troubling). I have taken boat rides and a bus tour and tried to take advantage of all the ways people might find to learn about cities. I have watched people interacting with the built environment, including my own child. A few patterns have emerged.

What I found is that using the built environment as a way to teach about the past is not about providing accurate factual information. Even where such information exists, very few people take advantage of it. While having the facts on hand is useful, the first and more important step is generating enough curiosity to get people to stop and look. You might know that Eleanor Roosevelt quote where she said, “I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity.” Of course, she was right. What I have observed is that if buildings, exhibits, signage, and the like can generate curiosity, then the observer will follow that curiosity to generate questions and then investigate the questions to get the answers they’re seeking. Having factual information or historic photos available in an exhibit makes the answers easy to find, but with the internet most people can instantly find answers just by typing in a few simple search terms.

So how do we generate curiosity? Well, first people have to look. Everywhere I have been folks are busy looking down at their cell phones rather than up at all the amazing architecture they are passing. Cell phones, much as they are handy to help us answer our questions, are a huge impediment to generating questions. If people are watching a TikTok or texting their bestie, the chance of noticing the Municipal House as they walk by goes way down. In my experience across Europe the three attributes most likely to generate a look up, and therefore curiosity, have been color, motion, and authentic immersion (these attributes clearly echo those that draw me to the Art Nouveau). I’m going to offer a few examples of each. Some overlap.

The best and simplest example of color as a tool for curiosity creation in the built environment were the historic markers in the city of Parma in Italy. They are bright yellow. The text is written in big letters and the sign is placed in an obvious spot next to an important landmark. These are the equivalent of our American “brown signs,” but they have color working in their favor. While neutral brown blends in and is easy to overlook, these bright yellow signs scream at you and tell you there is something important to notice.

Figure 22: Historic signage in Parma, Italy.

Color was also an important part of the nighttime light show in Chartres, but it added motion, too. This light show may have been the most engaging thing I’ve experienced on the whole trip. The show offered free projections on buildings throughout the town for two hours each night. Some of them were merely beautiful, but the projections onto Chartres Cathedral were also designed to spark interest in the history of the church. There was a classical music soundtrack playing and the projections mapped exactly onto the details of the building, calling out shapes and spaces visitors might have missed in the daylight. The show offered details from medieval construction methods and historical figures associated with the building. It didn’t offer much information about them, but it combined a few details with light, color, and sound in a way that generated curiosity, even in my eleven-year-old. The show raised the kinds of questions that would motivate many people would go home and google answers.

Figure 23: Chartres Cathedral light show using light to highlight architectural details.

My second nighttime light show was of Julius Caesar’s forum in Rome. This one was something visitors have to pay for and a reserve a time. Visitors use an audioguide set to their preferred language as they move to specific locations through a set path in the nighttime dark of the forum (with a human guide there to keep us moving along). The audio guide offered descriptions of specific sites as they lit up with light. It was like an immersive history lesson where I had a lecture in my ears and the pointer illuminating each piece of the talk as I walked past. Using light, the production was able to fill in missing pieces of the ruins or highlight the ways buildings had changed over time. Being immersed in the space made it easier to imagine life there. It was incredibly effective at both generating curiosity and providing accurate information. It added a reality and sense of connection, which is missing in the stark white ruins visitors see during the day.

Figure 24: Roman light show of Caesar’s forum uses a building exterior to project a historic interior cut-away view

Part of the advantage of using buildings to teach about the past is that interacting with architecture is an immersive and sensory experience. We move into buildings, feel their textures, see their colors, experience their volume. We hear how sound can be contorted by walls and openings. We experience the echoes of stair halls and bathrooms. We feel the temperature change when we step into a shaded courtyard. This interactivity generates curiosity. We wonder because we have had an experience, and the space has become relevant to use because we are in it. These spaces are authentic—where something really happened—where we can allow ourselves to be transported in time.⁶

This authentic immersion was a key piece of the power I experienced in a small museum on Via Tasso in Rome—the Museum of the Liberation of Rome. In this nondescript apartment building there is a museum made up of two former apartments that were used by the SS as a prison during World War II. The museum clearly operates on a limited budget. Their displays are old-school and relatively simple, and yet being in the space where prisoners were actually kept (and killed) makes reading the smuggled notes from their families feel so much more moving. A highlight of the museum was a closet that was used by the SS as a solitary confinement cell. The walls of this space are covered in graffiti carved by prisoners—many of them sending a last message to a loved one, or making peace with their actions before their death. The closet included a projection of some of the graffiti being read out loud and then translated to English. It was incredibly moving. I sat on the floor of that closet for a long time.

My favorite heart-wrenching piece was “Love Italy more than you love yourself, more than the realm of your beloved, more than life itself and more than your dear ones, beyond limits with unshakable faith in its destiny.”

Figure 25: Graffiti on the cell walls at The Museum of the Liberation of Rome.

Figure 26: Graffiti projected as being read out loud in Italian and English.

Beyond the authentic immersion of being in the space where something actually happened, I want to add that interacting with the past is sometimes most compelling when the experience is unexpected. Yes, I was deeply connected to history at the Museum of the Liberation of Rome, but I chose to go there and I paid a fee to enter. Knowing that this is a powerful place doesn’t actually help reach everyday people, and so I want to add a few examples of effective forms of urban serendipity—places where people can just stumble across opportunities to interact with the past as they go about their lives.

The first of these are the stumbling stones used to mark the former homes of Jewish people murdered by the Nazis. I first saw these in Venice, but have now also seen them in Vienna, Prague, Budapest, and Berlin. These are small bronze squares fitted into the pavement replacing ordinary pavers. Each one bears one person’s name, birthdate, date taken by the Nazis, and, for most of them, date of death. They are placed in front of that person’s last known address. As people walk through cities they will “stumble” upon them and are free to interact with them in any way they like. I know, largely through conversations with European historian Emily Gioielli, that these stones are contested for several reasons. I admit that they are imperfect memorials, yet I want to talk about some of the reasons I think they work. Visitors (myself included) come upon stumbling stones by accident outside an ordinary apartment building. They are permanently embedded in the pavement and they will be there whether we notice them or not, but if we do notice them, they give a surprising jolt of “Something horribly tragic happened in this place. This ordinary place exactly where I am standing.” For me the next thought was, “If it could happen in this place, it could happen anywhere, like in my neighborhood or my city.” This cautionary impact is, to me, their greatest value. Yes, they pay homage to one person and commemorate an individual death. They become available to families to visit as a gravestone would for people properly buried. They bring echoes of the past into the present. To me, their greatest power is to remind us not to ever let the past they mark into our future.

Figure 27: Stumbling stones in Venice.

To close I will offer two more humble and human forms of interaction I saw in Budapest that I think might offer models for public historians and preservationists. The key to these monuments is that they involve ongoing human action and interaction.

The first is Budapest’s Memorial to the Victims of German Occupation. Here the government put up a monumental sculpture without public input. The monument seems to imply that big-bad Germany, symbolized by an eagle snatching the royal orb from the hands of innocent Hungary, was solely responsible for the murder of Hungarian Jews. The reality is that Hungary was complicit in the murder of the nation’s Jews. There was so much controversy over this monument that it was actually erected in the middle of the night. When Budapest’s Jewish community saw the lie this new monument implied, they built a moving counter-memorial across the street from the official one. This makeshift monument, now weathered and decaying in a very evocative way, includes shoes and suitcases of murdered Jews dug out of attics and closets and offered up in protest. It includes photocopies of photos and documents, and typed stories of the harm Hungary did to its own Jewish population. This second monument has a powerful loud voice and tells visitors that something important is going on. It invites interaction as visitors leave stones as one would at a Jewish grave.⁷

Figure 28: Memorial to the Victims of German Occupation, Szabadsàgtèr, Budapest showing counter-memorial across the street

Figure 29: Detail of the counter-memorial.

Finally, there is a more formal form of ongoing interaction with the past I found in Budapest. This is the hanging of wreaths. The city is covered in plaques on façades commemorating this or that famous person or this or that historical event. These are exactly the kinds of plaques that most people completely ignore in their real lives. What is different in Prague is that under most of these plagues, there is a small hook where people can hang wreaths and other memorials. When I asked a guide about who puts the wreaths on the hooks, he said it was usually the neighborhood councils, but that if an individual person put up a wreath or a ribbon that would be fine, too. What this regular active commemoration did was to transform these wall plagues from a static background to urban life into an active changing place. A new green wreath or colorful bows would appear at some important moment in the year, then wilt, weather, and fade until they were taken away to be renewed again next year.

Figure 30: Plaque with wreaths in Budapest. Though this one clearly features an early figure in Budapest’s history, plaques with a hook below are all over the city and commemorate figures up to the very recent past.

When I wrote my first blog post I naively thought I might find one brilliant model that would help everyday people read and appreciate the built environment. What I have found instead is that that work will require new creativity and innovation. I think I have identified some of the components that make might generate curiosity in urban environments, but I definitely haven’t discovered a magic formula. I am hopeful that reading this blog will stimulate your creative thoughts about reading buildings and creating engaging urban experiences. Maybe together we can unlock the secret. I would love to know what strategies you have seen and what you consider the best tools for urban engagement.

Adil Mansure is the 2022 recipient of the H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellowship. All photographs are by the author, except where otherwise specified.

After Crow made the world, he saw that sea lion owned the only island in the world.
The rest was water—he’s the only one with land.
The whole place was ocean!
Crow rests on a piece of log—he’s tired.
He sees sea lion with that little island just for himself.
He wants some land too so he stole that sea lion’s kid.

“Give me back that kid!” said sea lion.

“Give me beach, some sand,” says Crow.

So sea lion gave him sand.
Crow threw that sand around the world.
“Be World,” he told it. And it became the world.¹

I write this report while in the Yukon, upon land that has been cared for and stewarded for thousands of years by the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations. As I mentioned about in my previous H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellowship report, the act of writing about an oral history project continues to be an odd feeling. And the notion of orality of course bears special significance here as I am surrounded by several Indigenous peoples, who only recently—if at all—took to writing. Colonization has been tremendously brutal to them, having targeted where it hurt the most: killing the continuity of their language and their oral traditions, which were the primary means of propagating their knowledge and culture. I truly believe that world-building occurs primarily in and through language, and language is the site of my modeling Indigenous knowledge systems, which are wonderfully comprehensive, complex, and adaptive. This oral history project highlights the shape that orality itself gives to traditional (Indigenous) knowledge.

As I go about talking to members of various First Nations in the Yukon, I am repeatedly told that for what I want to do—conduct an oral history project where I talk to elders and knowledge-keepers of various Indigenous peoples to understand how thousands of years of (holistic and sustainable) architectural knowledge is embedded in their myths and stories—I am about 5–10 years too late. That the last generation of elders who lived purely off the land, relatively un-influenced by British and Canadian colonization, have recently passed on. Yet, in talking to various communities and hearing them recall memories of what they were told by their elders and knowledge-keepers, seeing them sustain a muscle-memory of sorts through their arts and other tactile practices, and in their efforts to preserve their knowledge through language regeneration, one cannot but be hopeful and aspire. Despite being still in a kind of post-trauma condition, where Canada is still making at-best feeble apologies to these peoples for various ill-doings, (especially sending their children to residential schools—which in some conversations I have had with Indigenous peoples have even been compared to Nazi concentration camps), the resilience of these peoples shows in the regeneration of their languages, practices, and their incredible spirit of adaptation and resilience. This is what makes learning about architecture here valuable; this spirit is what I will attempt to articulate in what follows.

I want to note first that any accounts I am sharing are deliberately being kept anonymous. This report is not the space to disclose personal stories or make "human subjects" out of the people who were kind enough to have conversations with me. I have made promises to not record or transcribe, but simply describe through abstract and third-person narratives, the attitudes and ideas that have struck me as most remarkable.

In the Yukon, I have been visiting the traditional territories of the Champagne and Aishihik First Nation, the Carcross/Tagish First Nation, the Kwanlin Dün First Nation, Ta’an Kwachan First Nation, the Kluane First Nation, the Teslin Tlingit Council, and the White River First Nation. Some of the structures that I have come across that are common to many of these peoples and these lands, includes the injall (a Southern Tutchone word told to me orally, and that I have probably misspelled), the longhouse (for larger gatherings), the tipi, sod houses, and caches for storing food (most built on stilts to keep away from animals, but some buried in the ground with wooden logs atop). Some other artifacts built using similar methods and exhibiting similar tectonics include conical fish traps, boats, drums, and baskets. The point here is not to lay out a written taxonomy of these structures and artifacts, but rather to say a bit about what I learned about the cultures of habitations and migration that these buildings and artifacts afforded. And perhaps most importantly, to understand some of the attitudes associated with these lifestyles.

Let us begin with the latter, and with an anecdotal example. First, note that several of these lands I mentioned have witnessed record levels of condensation in the last 2 to 3 years, both from plenty of snow melt in the summer and also from record snowfall in the winter. It is noticeable how high waters are on lands that are not used to them, and how both the peoples and ecosystems are already adapting to them. (But this also means tree roots being over-watered and therefore trees dying out, insects that breed off still water increasing in numbers, and animal migration patterns being rapidly disrupted.) Even in Southern Yukon terrains of innumerable lakes, these recent changes are severe. In one particular example, an injall had got somewhat submerged, and the person who built it was wondering about how to navigate the waters and the situation. The instinct, however, was not to preserve the building or keep the water out using aggressive high-technological methods—which I have observed to be the case in places with cultures of owning and valuing property rather than stewarding both the lands and the waters—but rather this elder person’s instinct was to move, reassemble, salvage, and move on. There was an understanding and an appreciation of any kind of unpredictability with regard to not only land and water, but also other agents bringing uncertainty. And it was clear that these changes were not linear or reversible, in fact, each minor change would cause a complex series of un-forecast-able ripple effects. The elder’s approach wasn’t one to safeguard from change, but to move along with. What is key here are these attitudes toward mitigating change, and not specific techniques, technology, or methods of building. And arguably, land is not a given and is by no means static or permanent; as is also evident in the orally transmitted origin story of the Crow: it emerges from and can dissolve back into the water.

The buildings, building methods, and migratory lifestyle all made sense to me in a new light. The Southern Yukon First Nations always lived lives of migration which put first the health of the ecosystems they depended on. First, the seasonal migration: usually centered around picking berries and other plants in the summer, fish and bigger game in the Fall, and smaller game in the early Spring. But there are also longer-duration migrations involved. For example, moving away from certain areas so as not to deplete the growth of berries or not over-fish or over-hunt. Of course, weather-related incidents such as forest fires also led to migrations to nearby areas. The instinct was not to put them out (as is the case with many forestry departments today) but to understand them as natural and necessary, let them occur, and change one’s course accordingly. In Southern Yukon, forest fires are often followed by the growth of fireweed, a pink flower that can rapidly paint burned-out landscapes and flood them with color and life. The circle of life and death, and fire and water are wholly and simultaneously evident. Generally speaking, thinking of land as so precious so as to attempt to effectively remove it from the course of natural environmental change has not been the Yukon First Nations’ way, and their architecture follows this understanding.

Other migrations also occurred due to their tribal, community, and family structures. The primary factors are the moiety and the clan.² The moiety structure (wolf and crow in most of the Yukon First Nations I mentioned), which was maternally passed on, ensured a diverse gene pool as marriages were only to be cross-moiety. A significant socio-cultural practice associated with the moiety structure, as pointed out to me by an elder, was that a young man would go spend some time (often a year or two) with his maternal uncles who might belong to different First Nations (but to the same moiety) to learn their ways. Such chosen cycles of migration also led to knowing large terrains well, and to building empathetic relationships with the species of flora and fauna that inhabited them. And this also ensured a cross-pollination of traditional knowledge associated not only with hunting, trapping, fishing, and reading the information-rich land and waters but, and especially in the last three to four centuries, understanding the complex relations owed to the growing trading networks. The phenotypical expressions, as it were, of these gene pools of the Southern Yukon First Nations were thus prone to continuous diversification and enrichment. And these expressions were well encapsulated in their traditional knowledge, myths, and stories all passed on through their oral traditions.

I have digressed… somewhat. Returning to the incident about the injall being submerged by the new pools of water formed, the elder’s attitude toward packing up and moving or dis- or re-placing made immense sense. My initial thoughts (having been over-exposed to Western and Enlightenment attitudes of the stasis of settlement and ownership, and always protecting the land from the water) harbored a sadness at the prospective architectural loss of the sun-silvered patina of the wooden injall, the falling apart of the roots that had wound around and between its various logs, and the falling away of the sod that inhabited its various joints. To these thoughts, the elder’s very different attitude taught plenty. For him, what was valuable was not that specific material or property, but the knowledge and ability to adapt, redo, remake, and live on—and the decision-making skills factoring in the longevity of relations between peoples, species, and spaces. The migrations and lifestyles discussed earlier ensured that such attitudes and skills permeated the connected tribes and formed their common ground. We might attribute some of these current changes like the record levels of condensation to recent climate change narratives, and think that our actions as architectural thinkers must move towards working with these changes; however, with the communities in Yukon I have spoken to, what was significant for them was not climate change, but change itself that always occurs over the longue durée of environmental history. And it is centuries of adapting to the latter that prepares them to deal with the changing climate or any other changes today. In the stories I have heard from members of various South Yukon First Nations, this much is clear: that in their relatively young geo-scape, the land is not what is permanent, but appears and disappears over the years amidst the changing courses of rivers and glaciers, formation and dissolution of peaks and valleys, and hence also of islands, lakes, and forests. The land appears amidst the water in both time and space; and the migratory lifestyle (both seasonal and generational) and architecture all reflect this deep understanding. And this is precisely what the creation story of the crow—which has been repeated since time immemorial—encapsulates. The trickster raven or crow may throw many a détournement our way, how do we stay afloat? Ultimately the emotion I remember from this community on the verge of one or another predicament related to the changing course of waters was not devastation (although there would be loss and pain) but laughing off the lack of luck, and even a curiosity about how to do it differently the next time—and anticipating that there probably would always be a next time.

Animism, empathy, and Indigenous space

Let us think through some of the traditional activities of the South Yukon First Nations and further understand how notions of space emerged from their know-how. As might be evident by now, these peoples’ lifestyles revolved around the various supplies of food, its responsible harvesting, while of course care-taking of the land and the waters. Hunting, trapping, fishing, and foraging still often form the baselines of conversations in the region. For thousands of years, the various techniques associated with these activities were currency in their trades and other exchanges that occurred between families and bands. In fact, in talking to various First Nations, while sharing their knowledge, they have often asked me to share techniques or methods from my culture(s) of how we processed wood, fish, hide, beads, etc.

Architecture, or rather spatiality, also first emerges out of their lifestyles and traditional activities. Primary conceptualizations of space are evident in the peoples’ relations with animals and their bodies. Unlike Western conceptions of neutral or homogenous space (or general theories of space derived from the proportions associated with the human figure in the ages of Humanism), the spaces that we are dealing with here are not understood in the abstract, but rather, quite directly and empathetically from the various animal organs out of which objects of daily use were made from.³ For example, the intestines of moose and caribou used as vessels to store in, and their stomachs used as vessels to boil and cook in.⁴ These organs and membranes have astonishing plasticity and variances, and these properties are evident in the peoples’ conceptualization of space. Furthermore, the geometry that they work with is astoundingly complex, dealing with topologies of both curvature and flexibility. The knowledge of how to work these surfaces is very much tactile—and even tacit—and propagated by being practiced communally. In being shown some traditional methods that make use of different parts of an animal, I have marveled at the sheer ingenuity of some of the chemical combinations, for example, the tanning of hides using moose brain. A deep understanding of the animal body, the various networks of arteries of fluids, and the relation of these to other parts of the body are all consonant to, and in some way mirrors to understanding their shifting terrains of land and water. What happens in the animal body is a reflection of what occurs outside, and vice versa. Space is thus conceptualized abstractly and through a holistic understanding of both species and spaces.

It must be noted first that the harvesting of the animal body was a sacred act of sorts. It had to be done in ways that paid full respect to the animal. The traps and snares usually ensured that the deaths of animals would be almost instant and least painful. This of course is another dimension of empathy. Generally speaking, only what was necessary should be taken from the land. There is a complete absence of the notion of waste in the traditional techniques I have observed. This is also perhaps where the ethos of the spiritual realm of respecting an animal align with the rather practical scarcity of materials in the sub-Arctic north. "No waste"—which is tacitly practiced—is perhaps the most astounding aspect of Indigeneity I have noticed, and a trigger for immense ingenuity, creativity, and the invention of clever instruments and artifacts. For example, the numerous uses of the skin of a caribou or moose.⁵ There are of course animal furs that are used as clothing. Skins are often tanned and these membranes (leather, effectively) have found many uses. Several skins stitched together provide large fabric surfaces which are used for tenting. Babiche is a kind of strong string produced by cutting up processed or tanned hide in a variety of desired widths, and is used in bows, snowshoes, and several other instruments and articles. Smaller skins yield a variety of artifacts such as hand drums, clothing, floor and wall layers (such as rugs), and so on. The inland Tlingit First Nations (in Teslin and Atlin, for example) produce the outer surfaces of canoes and kayaks using stitched-up hides, as these fine specimens made by Doug Smarch from Teslin show. (Fig 1 & 2) These are dried to produce both translucency and lightness, but also hardness and sturdiness that one might today associate with a material such as fiberglass. Incidentally, the drum and boat hide surfaces are similarly stretched out with numerous babiche strings, and the boat surfaces even acquire a tonality when stricken, and could probably be tuned like a drum by controlling the tension in the strings. This is what is perhaps captured by Copper Caribou (Montana Prysnuk and Delaney Prysnuk) in their artwork Vadzaih dhòh (Caribou Skin). (Fig 3) I can imagine even thinking about boats in terms of aurality, tonality, and pitches. But perhaps this is not too far to imagine; traditional knowledge emphasized listening to the sounds of nature, so perhaps boats were, even if not deliberately or explicitly, instruments involved in a wet aural ecosystem. "No waste" is evident in these examples, too. And not only is this empathetic (because of a deep understanding of the animal body), but the notion of space is itself empathetically produced, practically speaking, out of the understanding of working various membranes, organs, and geometries found in nature. And it is a holistic notion of space that encompasses not only visuality, but also touch, taste, and sound. A key idea in this all is, that innovation and the invention of simple yet highly sophisticated technology using various parts of the flora and fauna available were ultimately also ways of paying respect to the animal that the peoples believed had offered itself to them, which is indeed a significant dimension of empathy.




Fig 1 & 2: A kayak and canoe made by Doug Smarch from Teslin, exhibited at the Adäka Festival 2022 in Whitehorse, Yukon.


Fig 3: Vadzaih dhòh (Caribou Skin) by Copper Caribou (Montana Prysnuk and Delaney Prysnuk), exhibited at the Yukon Arts Center, Whitehorse

This empathy precedes the harvesting of an animal: many Indigenous peoples around the world believed that the hunting of animals involved complex human-animal relationships. Hunting did not simply imply the domination of all animal species by the human⁶; but as some scholars argue, human-animal relations can be construed in similar terms as human-human relationships, where notions of exchange, trade, and gift-giving, respect, and so on apply in all cases. The fact that numerous hunts could fail, that some animals appeared to allow themselves to be hunted, and other such factors have been vastly documented and interpreted as animals also having agency in the human-animal relationship.⁷ It is also claimed that some animals understand the ways that humans protect them; for example, keeping wolves and other predators away from herds of caribou and reindeer, and they reciprocate by offering few of their kin.⁸ It is evident that Indigenous peoples saw the relation between hunter and hunted as a courtship of sorts, where the gift of meat and other products was given by the animal to only those humans they perceived worthy. In such cases and anecdotes, the specificity of the context of each place, time, and human and non-human involved is significant, and much is lost if abstracted to any general theories. Indigenous notions of space are nuanced and information-rich, and only accessible when care and empathy are exercised from the beginning of any relationship.

As each animal is different, each tree is also different. As an elder pointed out to me, in traditional ways of boat building, logs were often floated out on the water to see how they would behave, float, turn, etc. Each log had a predisposition to become a certain kind of boat (or other artifact), and one had to pay special attention to what to do with each piece of material, as this was not predefined. An agency of sorts was thus given to each tree involved, too. Furthermore, boats and carvings were usually made from fallen trees; humans, animals, and inanimate beings were similarly and co-involved in the lifecycles of these artifacts. Harvesting material, both floral and faunal, was thus an act of a deep understanding of the complex ecosystem, its history, and the many actors involved. While philosophers such as Alfred North Whitehead and even Bruno Latour offer conceptual frameworks to attribute similar tropes (actors and agents, in the case of Latour) to human, animal, and inanimate objects; with various Indigenous cosmologies, stories, and art forms, we can see this reified and occurring naturally and inevitably when empathy and care are involved in these peoples’ foraging, fishing, hunting, art-making, and building of buildings.

Regeneration

In the last few decades, much progress has been made in Canada in empowering Indigenous First Nations to return to self-governance and to return to practicing their traditions (hunting, fishing, etc.), which they have been denied for many decades. Much effort has also been made in attempting to regenerate their languages, which colonial powers had barred them from speaking, causing severe generational ruptures of knowledge transfer. Although most conversations today about becoming whole again and cultural regeneration in the Yukon inevitably begin with residential school experiences, there is also much hope, enthusiasm, and effort expressed in the regeneration of traditional activities, languages, and importantly, art. What the cosmology of the land amidst the water of the Southern Yukon First Nations also represents is their deep understanding of various cycles of disruption and regeneration in history, and thus also their abilities to adapt and regenerate. This is precisely what is evident in their continuing and augmenting their traditional activities, their reparation of the fabric of their languages by teaching and speaking them, and in their renewing their traditional art forms by reinvigorating lost methods and even integrating them with contemporary ones. While much of their knowledge is protected, and to be passed on only through the moieties and clans of the Yukon First Nations, much else is common and told repeatedly to regenerate a common ground of the region. An inductive research method such as mine opens one up to precisely this common conversational fabric. In this brief report, I hope I have not shared anything that wasn’t mine to share or that couldn’t be gleaned by someone present in the places I have been. I want to end with simply mentioning my immense gratitude to those who, through conversation, shaped a rendition of what Southern Yukon is and used to be.

Anne Delano Steinert is a recipient of the 2022 H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellowship. All photographs are by the author, except where otherwise specified.

The first chapter of John Stilgoe’s Outside Lies Magic, aptly named “Beginnings,” lays down some rules for observing the world in meaningful ways. The goal is to generate inquiry, to find questions rather than answers. The goal is wonder.¹ The first one of Stilgoe’s rules is to slow down. The second is to put down all technology. I have been assigning this chapter to classes of high school and college students for more than twenty years, and yet I don’t often make the time to follow Stilgoe’s rules. Hold into this thought. I will get back to John Stilgoe in a minute.

One of the goals of my Brooks Fellowship is to explore the ways ordinary people make meaning of the built environment. This quest emerged from historic preservation struggles I have witnessed lately in my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio. In Cincinnati we have lost several buildings recently which, to my mind, were significant monuments to the city’s multi-layered history. The one I had the most to do with was Revelation Baptist Church, which was built as a synagogue in 1865 and, according to a notably non-scholarly website that tallies such things, would have been the tenth oldest purpose-built synagogue in the country at the time of its demolition in May 2020.² It was also the church where Civil Rights leader Fred Shuttlesworth was pastor during the most successful period of his activism. The building was demolished by the owners of a new Major League Soccer stadium nearby. They thought they might someday build something on the now vacant site.

Figure 1: Revelation Baptist Church, formerly John Street Temple, built in 1865 in Cincinnati Ohio. Demolished in May 2020.

In addition to recent losses, Cincinnati is also struggling with the stewardship of the Terrace Plaza Hotel designed by SOM (Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie DuBlois) in 1948, which was recently denied landmarking by our planning commission. If you want to learn more about the amazing Terrace Plaza, check out the article about it in the February 3, 2021, Architectural Digest by Laura Itzkowitz (available online) or check out the excellent original black and white photos available on SOM’s website.

What I have witnessed in most of these cases is that few citizens and fewer people in power understand the value in these buildings. I believe (though this may be naïve) that if more people understood why these buildings matter, then more of them would be saved.

This brings me to thinking about how people understand the built world. How does the everyday passerby learn the value of a place? A building might have historical/cultural value and/or it might have artistic/architectural value. People probably need different ways to understand these two different measures. What I am thinking about on this trip is how people read buildings to understand or assess their value and what interventions or interpretive aids help build this skill. Buildings of artistic and architectural merit are probably easier to interpret because you can see that there is something special about them. The spark for this blog post came from a seemingly ordinary building, which led me to lots of questions, and then some answers, and then more questions. I hope you’ll enjoy the ride.

Returning to John Stilgoe, I left on this trip on May 25 and had been going non-stop ever since. We arrived in Paris and, after wrestling with some jetlag, hit the ground running. I feel like I have been moving ever since. I want to see everything, so I have been dashing around to take it all in. I have been taking lots of photos. I have even been relying on Google Maps to tell me where to go. What I haven’t been doing is slowing down and putting down my technology.

I am incredibly grateful to the fellowship committee, because I recognize that my application was a little unusual. I am a single mom, and there wasn’t really any way for me to do the Brooks Fellowship without bringing my eleven-year-old along. Bringing him with me also meant I would need a babysitter to care for him while I was looking at and thinking about architecture. The Brooks committee understood this and were willing to accept a proposal for all three of us to travel. We are staying with friends and family or in other low-cost lodging and using Eurail passes to stretch the budget. All of this is to say that I’ve got an eleven-year-old and an eighteen-year-old along on this trip—and oh-boy do they like technology. One night in Barcelona I returned to our humble and crowded hotel room, dead phone in hand, to find them watching Pirates of the Caribbean Three on the computer. It was loud and took up all the “space” in the room, so I went out for a walk. In my exile I found myself sitting in a small plaza near our hotel just looking at the seemingly ordinary building that happened to be directly in front of the bench I had chosen on Carrer De Las Ramelleres. As I felt the rush of the day drain out of me, completely liberated from my phone, now home on the charger, I gave myself over to “reading” the building.

I am going to briefly articulate the process I went through. For some readers this will probably seem overly simplified or a statement of the obvious. I am doing it because I think it is important for architectural historians to “show our work” and be clear on how we get from one idea to the next. If we want people who are not trained as architectural historians to appreciate buildings and help save them from demolition, it is important to make our processes and values transparent and user-friendly.

Figure 2: The door to Casa de Misericordia, Barcelona, Spain

I was drawn to the building by a mysterious incongruity between a historic door surround and a fresh plaster façade. The door gives the sense of a buried past popping out from a modern façade. The door has a triangular pediment topping an entablature held up by two simple engaged pilasters. On the slope of the pediment are stone orbs held up on little feet. All of this is beat up—pock marked, chipped, and discolored. The battered stone doorway has been left exposed, but the rest of building around it has all been plastered over, presumably to clean up a façade as down on its luck as the doorway (the building’s simple window lintels and surrounds were also left exposed). Today a sign on the modern glass door reads, “Casa de Misericordia.”

Once I took in the general shape of the doorway, I began to see the finer details. I noticed a faint shadow of something painted above the doorway. It reads “Casa D Infants Orfens.” Ah-ha! It was an orphanage!

Figure 3: Close up of ghost of painted sign above the door.

This squares with another detail—inside the triangle of the pediment is a carved Catalan crest. The crest leads me to believe that from the time the doorway was carved it appears to have been an official or institutional building. It was at some point used as an orphanage, but that could have been a later use, because the sign I read was painted onto the façade rather than being carved in. As I stand up and go closer, I see that there is more carving of the two sides. It says “I.S.” on one side and “78” on the other. It is as I turn away from the doorway that I notice the most amazing piece of the puzzle, but I am going to provide a little more of the building’s general layout and details before I reveal my big find.

The building is three stories high. The masonry façade is mostly solid, so there are big spaces between the relatively small window openings. It is nine bays wide, but the façade curves out slightly after the fourth bay. The door I’ve been describing is located at the second bay from the left which was (and is) clearly the formal entrance to the building. This entrance faces onto a public plaza (Placa de Vicenc Martorell) with benches and a playground. The building has doors at the street level in the first six bays, though the major entrance is the one I’ve described at the second bay. The others now sport roll-down gates covering shop windows at night. One is a great bookstore. Above these doors are small horizonal windows covered in a grid of heavy iron bars. I wonder who they wanted to keep in or out. Were the kids trying to escape from the orphanage? Or did they need protection? There is a rust-streaked carved plaque over another door, with a date of 1790, commemorating the construction of some part of the hospital (see figure 7).

Figure 4: View of the entire Carrer De Las Ramelleres Street façade of Casa de Misericordia

Figure 5: Building from a distance showing its location on a busy plaza and playground. Note the door surround pictured above and the small round opening at the door to the right of the main door.

I notice lots of other details, but I’ll spare you. Some pieces I can make sense of right away and others I will push to the side. I experience this process like dumping out the pieces of a new jigsaw puzzle. At first you’re not sure where your focus should go. Should you sort them by color? Should you find the faces? Here I just observe all the parts of the building and try to figure out how to make meaning of the puzzle.

Figure 6: Close up of the façade with details.

Figure 7: Dated plaque above a door in the third bay. Raquel Lacuesta Contreras’ article notes that this plaque has been moved from its original location on the ground floor to a perplexing location at the second story.

So now, back to my ah-ha moment at the door. As I turned away from the carving over the door, a round opening in the façade caught the corner of my eye. It was a round hole, maybe a foot in diameter, with a wooden frame and filled in with a slightly bowed board. Above it to the left is a small donation slot.

Figure 8: Round opening and donation slot

I knew instantly what this was, but only because I had some very specific knowledge acquired through my dissertation research. I wrote a chapter that highlighted the desperation of unwed and poor pregnant women in the time before sexual liberation and pasteurized milk. From this research I knew that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century orphanages in Paris and London had included windows (sometimes called foundling wheels) where desperate women could leave their babies anonymously in a wall of the orphanage. It had never occurred to me that a building with this baby port might still exist, but there it was, right in front of me. And I knew right away that’s what it was. As I looked around a little stunned by this discovery, I saw that there was, nearby, a graffiti-covered interpretive panel with information and photos about the little hole.

Figure 9: Text of the interpretive panel

Figure 10: Side view of the interpretive panel covered in graffiti

This panel had been put up to try to teach the public about the importance of this strange feature of the building’s façade. I read the panel and it confirmed that yes, this little porthole had been a baby abandonment drop-off station for desperate women. Suddenly this building transformed for me into a monument to the struggles and difficult choices of generations of women.

The English-language side of the panel says this was the “Provincial House of Maternity and Foundlings of Barcelona,” and explains that industrialization resulted in the arrival of many poor single women from the countryside who had come to Barcelona seeking work and that at the same time the rate of “illegitimate” births increased “exponentially.” The sign doesn’t make the connection between the powerlessness of these poor women and the rise in pregnancy in unmarried women, but clearly their poverty and lack of support networks put them in a position where they could be easily taken advantage of. The panel goes on to say that the social stigma of the day resulted in abandonment of many children to the care of charitable institutions. It then reads, “the foundling wheel in this wall, where newborn babies could be left, represents a host of dramas and injustices. On top of the stigma, mothers faced the pain of abandonment.” It goes on to note that, “most infants died before their first birthday,” and to explain that those who survived were transferred to another orphanage where boys would be trained “to be shopkeepers” and girls would be “trained for domestic service.” The panel also includes three photos, one of a room with both a bed and a crib, and another of rows of kneeling children in prayer.

What I learned in writing my dissertation is that as single women flooded into newly industrialized cities to find work, they often worked as live-in domestic servants. In this circumstance they were in constant and potentially close contact with their employer—a person with significant power over them. It would have been difficult to refuse physical contact. Alternately, these women might just have been lonely and in need of human connection. If, by these or any other circumstances, an unmarried women found herself with child, she was stuck. If the pregnancy became known, no one would marry her. If she tried to raise the child alone, it would be nearly impossible to find work. In an age before pasteurized milk, the only way to feed a baby was with breast milk. How could a mother work to earn money and nurse her new baby? She could not possibly afford a wetnurse.

I write this blog post just days after Roe v. Wade, which guaranteed women privacy to make their own reproductive decisions, has been overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. I fear we are about to return to an era of very difficult choices for many women. A few weeks before I left for my fellowship trip, a draft of the Supreme Court decision was leaked, and I was interviewed about my dissertation chapter by Cincinnati’s local NPR station. My work was included in a story about what life was like for women in Cincinnati before legal abortion. You can read that story here. This building suddenly feels even more relevant as a document of the impossible choices unmarried pregnant women had to make.

The little baby port in the building has clearly survived many changes to the building. It remains today as a powerful document of this building’s role in the lives of hundreds or thousands of women and babies over possibly hundreds of years. The interpretive panel exists to explain this history to the public so they will appreciate this building’s past. Yet, as I looked around at the graffiti on the panel and even on the little wooden door itself, I watched hundreds of tourists stroll by without even a glance. Even this totally intact clue to this building’s history, clearly marked with an informational panel, even if a somewhat abused one, does not catch people’s notice or communicate its significance.

Figure 11: Graffiti on the foundling wheel

At one point I debated about going inside the government office to ask if they knew anything about the history of this building or if I could see the inside of the foundling wheel, but I decided I didn’t want to go into a building with a police officer stationed in the lobby to ask crazy questions in a foreign language. A few days later I did ask the cashier at the bookstore. She told me that she thought the building had been a convent and that there was a crypt underneath.

Here I should note that the bookstore (called La Central) also complicated my understanding of this building. When I entered the bookstore it was into a small room, but that small space opened into a larger one and then a series of small little cells, a coffee bar, and even a courtyard with a restaurant. There were at least three different ways out on three different streets. It was a bit of a maze and I have to admit I got turned around in there more than once.

With all these clues and questions, I turned to written resources I could find on the internet. There were several blog posts about the foundling wheel, but most useful was an article (a report really) published in 1992 in a Spanish-language publication called Espacio, Tiempo y Forma (Space, Time and Form) by Raquel Laquesta Contraras. The article is entitled “La Casa municipal de Misericordia de Barcelona. Historia de su evolución arquitectónica” or “The Municipal House of Mercy of Barcelona. History of its Architectural Evolution.” I don’t read Spanish, so I read the article by pasting it into a word document and using Google Translate. It wasn’t a perfect translation, but I could get the idea. The article is sixty-two pages long, so just to summarize I learned that this building was part of a larger complex occupying a significant portion of a large city block. It had been founded by a man named Diego Perez de Valdivia as a house of mercy for the poor in 1581. The first building bears a date of 1603, but most of the current buildings date to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The façade I have been exploring on Ramelleres Street was added to the complex in 1788, probably designed by Rafael de Llinas and P. Modolell. The House of Maternity and Foundlings was officially added to the complex in 1852, “occupying the east wing of the building, which overlooks the street of Ramelleres,” though the complex had been serving young women prior to this official designation.³ The complex held a diverse array of uses including a convent with chapels, courtyards, and orchards. The article makes one perplexing note that, “the [historical] documents mention the existence of some dungeons.” I hope the use of the word “dungeon” is just a translation error! The complex was bombed twice, first by the regent of Spain’s young queen in the 1840s and again in 1938 during the Spanish Civil War, which helps to explain the pock marks on the door. It has been subject to multiple renovations and reconstructions over 500 years. I was able to get some of this by observation, but it was comforting to have the written records confirm my hypotheses. But this step of moving from questions to the documents with comforting answers is something most people won’t be able to do. How does this impact their connection to historic architecture?

After writing most of this post, I stopped off in Florence for a day. I remembered that the Ospedale degli Innocenti (Hospital of the Innocents)—paid for by Florence’s silk merchants and designed by Filippo Brunelleschi beginning in 1419—had once also included a baby portal, so I went there to check it out.

Figure 12: View of Ospedale degli Innocenti, designed by Brunelleschi, Florence, Italy. Note the foundling window to the far left at the top of the steps.

What I found was a window covered with thick metal bars at the top of a staircase on a main square. Here there was also an interpretive panel. It taught me that the bars allowed only very small newborns to be passed through and that they could be laid on a velvet pillow inside the window where a nun slept on a cot ready to care for any deposits. I am a little skeptical about this panel because I know for sure that my almost 9-pound baby would not have fit through those bars.

Figure 13: Close-up of the window   

Figure 14: Interpretive text panel

As a side note, this building is also famous for the blue and white glazed terra cotta rondels sculpted by Andrea della Robbia and added to the building in 1487. Each rondel features a swaddled baby. In only one the baby’s bindings are falling away, illustrating the potential (and unfavorable odds) for babies at the hospital to be liberated. The opulence of this circumstance contrasted the austerity of the building in Barcelona, but the heartbreaking reality that women had to abandon their babies remained the same. I’m not sure the buildings themselves (even with interpretive panels) are doing such a great job of communicating this reality.

Just across the square from the hospital was a much more urgent and effective monument to a different kind of human suffering. This makeshift monument to murdered transgender people used in-your-face placement and bright colors to draw attention to itself. There is an urgency to this hand-written raggedy memorial drenched in the symbolism of locks and fuchsia fabric. Centuries old buildings and formal institutional text panels don’t have the same power, but I wonder if there isn’t something we could learn from this powerful and well-placed memorial.

Figure 15: Transgender memorial in the Piazza della Santissima Annunziata in Florence in front of the Hospitale degli Innocenti

Figure 16: Text panel on the transgender memorial

I have just been reading Vince Michael’s “Diversity in Preservation: Rethinking Standards and Practices” in the spring 2014 issue of Preservation Forum. He quotes Raymond Rast saying that “for most people, buildings don’t ‘speak’ very coherently,” and that “the average person does not have the experience to ‘read’ a building or judge its integrity or even know whether it was built in 1830, or 1930 or 2009.” My experience with the Casa d’ Infant Orfens both proves and disproves this statement. I believe that the deep observation I did of the building is something anyone could have done. It generated a few answers (this was an orphanage at some point) but mostly questions. I think most people can use their eyes to look at buildings and generate questions. According to Michaels, Rast might say that I believe this because I am trained to read buildings and that I can’t not read them—just like once you know how to read you can no longer see words as just a string of shapes. My brain automatically gives meaning to the clues I see and starts to build a story from those clues. I disagree with this to some extent. I believe that people without my training can read buildings, and my years of teaching Stilgoe to students absolutely confirms this.  Anyone can find the puzzle pieces if they look. But putting the puzzle pieces together is harder.

Making sense of the foundling wheel is something I could do because I had very specific background knowledge which most people wouldn’t have, although the interpretive panel on the site also made some of that information available to passersby if they take the time to read it. I also see that understanding the foundling wheel and the desperate circumstances of the unwed mothers made the building more meaningful to me. This context makes preserving this building more urgent in my mind. If the idea of preservation is that buildings educate us all about our shared past (rather than just those of us with specialized training or extra information), will it work if people lack the ability to read the story the building tells? How do we make sure the built world is legible to non-experts? How can we present information in meaningful ways to help the everyday viewer value buildings? This trip is all about that question, and I am already generating some answers, but you will need to wait for my next blog post to find out more about what I’m thinking.

Adil Mansure is the 2022 recipient of the H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellowship. All photographs are by the author, except where otherwise specified.

Fig 1 & 2: Found objects in Icelandic history, photographed at the The Settlement Exhibition in Reykjavík

Speaking to people in Iceland—to micro-historians, architects, anthropologists, folklorists, Medieval literary scholars, and artists—it became clear that beginning here offered me an opportunity to explore and unpack the nuances of what has been often proposed as the (unfair) binary of orality vs. writing or literacy. I don’t quite see a clear separation, nor do I wish to. It is in a fogginess that language, culture, architectural and other knowledge, and world-building are at their richest. Yet terms such as oral, written, etc., offer useful dialectical tools to think and self-debate. As I write this on my way to the Yukon, driving across the vast expanse of Canada, and in preparation for what I believe will be more about the oral dimensions of language and architectural knowledge, I mull over that placeholder binary of ‘oral vs. written’; not only about how it has been generally discussed in literature, but also how they intersect in the unique case of Iceland.

Fig 3 & 4: Reconstructed turf house complex, highlighting the kitchen (fig 4). Transported to and exhibited at the Skógar Museum

Fig 5 & 6: Turf house complex renovated by Hannes Lárusson at Austur-Meðalholt in South-Iceland

There are several dimensions of orality that I learnt about in making oral histories. Let us walk through a few. For one, the recitals of Medieval manuscripts and poetry, which were often communal activities performed as ways to get by the long winters of the land, when many folks had much time to pass. One can imagine the oratory resonances of stories told in the cozy interiors of the turf-house and long-house compounds that the early Icelanders were known to have inhabited. The transcription of poetry and copying of manuscripts is also known to have occurred during these long winters.² Speaking to Icelanders of a certain age (now in their 60s and beyond, and many of who were raised in turf houses), I have also heard common recollections of entire families weaving, spinning, carving, and so on in the main common space (usually at the back of turf houses) during which times much storytelling also took place. These stories could be recreational, but could also be tales that inform, tell, and remind of significant aspects of the land, its people, and their history. Legends were often recited when family or others visited, or when larger numbers of a family were gathered together under the same roof. The oral dimensions of rhythms, pitches, and rhymes were especially important in recitation, as these could be powerful means to spread information. That is, oral language can often foreground not the content, but the means of propagation, especially at some events. This ‘aurality’ is also significant in recitations that had a significant role in dealing with grief, expressing joy, and so on. Such aspects can sometimes complement, but at other times also overwhelm what is exactly written and ‘meant.’ In my conversations, what has been most striking to me in this aspect of orality or the reciting of literature are the domestic spaces and cultural life that the descriptions of recital practices have invoked and portrayed. Even though I did not explicitly seek to research Icelandic traditional architecture, the spaces of the turf house emerged as an important aspect of the oral history making of the island.






Fig 7, 8 & 9: Hut for drying cod fish in the turf house complex renovated by Hannes Lárusson, Austur-Meðalholt

Fig 10 & 11: Interior of the main/living room at the turf house complex renovated by Hannes Lárusson, Austur-Meðalholt

While turf houses were the dominant dwelling building type before the twentieth century, they declined suddenly during the middle of the twentieth century as Icelanders took to contemporary urban and sub-urban dwellings of the kind built across Scandinavia. Larger family and kinship structures also gave way to nuclear families. Today, many turf houses are found abandoned across Iceland, consumed and inhabited by moss, algae, and insects. Yet, these houses are very much alive in the collective memories of the generations who were raised in them. These are predominantly fond memories, I am told. Recently, there have been several efforts to restore turf houses, build new ones, and for a few, take to turf-house living again. There are turf house museums, of houses both ancient (for example, the reconstructed Viking dwelling at Ströng) and recent (for example, Hannes Lárusson’s turf house and museum near Selfoss, and others that teams led by him are renovating). Much of the ‘contents’ of the houses, the kinds of domestic spaces they afforded, and the techniques used to build them are chiefly inspired by the collection of oral histories that artists—and implicitly oral historians—such as Lárusson have embarked upon. As per Lárusson’s recollections of these oral history makings, it is after talking through many matters of everyday life, hearing about the significant events (births, deaths, holidays, etc.) that transpired in peoples’ lives, and talking through many clichés and their collective memories that some elders have been able to point to not only specific aspects of living in turf houses, but also the techniques and activities that encompassed that life centered around building them.³ It is through these oral histories that Lárusson collected that he was able to learn about the variety of building elements, materials, and techniques that building turf houses entailed. Different parts of the island also inspired different kinds of stories, as there were also significant cultural differences between, say, sheep herders upon the highlands and fishermen by the coast. In the case of the tools used to build the houses and the various techniques used, aspects of orality and oral histories here include being conduits through to tacit knowledge in ways that writing would not permit. Not to mention the colloquialism of an oral history interview that even permits significant bits of architectural information to emerge almost by accident in the telling of stories that may not have been explicitly about architecture. These are also tropes that I noticed in my own oral-history-making.


Fig 12: Abandoned turf house at Vik

Fig 13 & 14: Abandoned turf house at Drangurinn í Drangshlíð

Another aspect of the oral epistemological format (pertaining to the divulging of information about architecture and the landscape) is the fact that stories often aided navigation. This was important in the history of Iceland, since many people seasonally moved, for example, from the highlands to the coast and back to switch between fishing, cattle raising, house-building, and so on. These stories might mean little in writing—that by its nature can exclude important cultural context—but could mean very much when told and remembered along the way. Even folklore and stories that featured creatures such as ogres, trolls, and other huldufólk (or hidden folk) contained important tips about wayfaring, times of the day and season to navigate certain landscapes, and other do’s and don’ts. These stories were effectively mnemonic devices. And given their oral format, they could be adapted to the relatively dynamic geo-scape of Iceland that still features active volcanoes, changing rock formations, flooding and shifting courses of rivers and surface water, varying places and levels of activities of hot springs, and so on. The different kinds of huldufólk in Icelandic mythology are associated with various kinds of landscape formations, for example, ogres with caves in the mountains, dwarves with big boulders, and elves and smaller creatures with cliffs and hedges. Thus, these stories and their protagonists become a record and an archive of various phases of landscape and environmental history itself. An example is the rock formation at Reynisfjara; the story is one of trolls who strode across the landscape by night (as they were usually believed to), but running late, met the light of day and was then petrified or turned into rocks. Recently, successful one-to-one comparative studies have also been undertaken showing correlations between geology and other records of environmental history with mythology or stories about the land.⁴

Fig 15: Basalt rock formations at Reynisfjara

Incidentally, folklore and myths continue to have an importance in wayfaring, even in current times. For example, many stories exist about recent road constructions being plagued, especially by construction equipment breaking, when the planning of roads did not factor in that the construction might be disrupting huldufólk dwellings⁵ (for example, the believed-to-be elven dwelling behind rock-cuts in Reykjavik. See fig 16.) I have been told about accounts of people even negotiating with huldufólk about how and where they might build. Attitudes toward such myths, legends, and stories range from disbelief and condemnation to staunch belief in seeing and communicating with these other-than-human species. Many harbor an agnostic attitude, that is, they don’t choose either extreme, yet, many are content to go a little out of their way so as to align with the appeasers of these folk. In Icelandic orally narrated stories and even in common-speak, I am told that these beliefs find surprising penetration and agency. For me, what is important is not whether these folk exist or not, but how the existence of these beliefs shape patterns of human behavior and imagination, which ultimately significantly impact the occupation and making of spaces and landscapes.


Fig 16: A rock in Reykjavik, which is believed to have halted construction activity⁶






Fig 17: Basalt rock formations at Reynisfjara, mirrored in the Hallgrímskirkja (fig 18) and the National Theater of Iceland (fig 19) buildings in Reykjavik.

A theme I want to highlight in these stories is that of animism. Not only are supernatural occurrences recorded by shaping protagonists in stories that correspond to them (the various huldufólk) but geological, natural, and environmental history are themselves understood by way of oratory practice and recital. As I have discerned also from knowledge-keepers of various First Nations in North-Western Canada, tall creatures of the forests who inhabit dual realms—physical and metaphysical or spiritual, human/animal and non-human/animal—have been claimed to have been witnessed by many of the peoples along the latitudes I am traversing. Perhaps this is a circumpolar theme wherein some similarities of landscape and climate are captured in stories in similar ways?

Iceland is a geologically young landscape, parts of it (south and east) younger than others (west). Driving through, one is immediately struck by how dynamic the floodplains of rivers are, changing locations of hot ground water eruption, the overwhelming of hardscapes by seasonal bursts of lichen and algae, and so on. In Iceland various place-names reify the existence of stories of the land, even if they are used and repeated in modes of low-attention or in passing references. Examples of place-names include: Egilsstaðir, referring to Egill, the first farmer of the land, as per one of the Sagas; and Barnafossar, a waterfall translating to ‘children fall,’ referring to where children (have) fallen. (I am sure that much is lost here in my understanding being a non-speaker of Icelandic!) There is a nature that emerges somewhere between these physical environmental phenomena and their understanding and representation through stories. Neither can be seen exclusively.

Animism literally carries through in architecture, too: in illustrating the techniques of building the turf house, Lárusson mentioned how blocks of earth were dried and then used akin to bricks (interspersed between blocks and layers of stone). Eventually, the roots of grass would grow through the earth/turf blocks, forming a homogenous but ‘alive’ building mass. And animism persists in the mainstream histories of architecture, too, implicitly rather than directly. For example, theories dealing with the notion of ‘empathy,’ which are well evident in the collection of essays edited by Mallgrave and Ikonomou.⁷ These address how we (humans) perceive architectural and other objects by projecting upon them human-centric tropes and properties. Wölfflin’s essay in this volume has become a seminal piece foregrounding the importance of ‘proportion’ in architectural history; what has been less appreciated, however, is that Wölfflin has conceived of the process of apportioning proportion in an ‘empathetic’ manner.⁸ A question that arises here is: why has empathy understood in this way excluded the notion of ‘care’ in (German) aesthetics, and generally in Western histories and theories of architecture? If we can see tropes of ‘human’ in buildings and other objects, how could we not extend them with human notions of care? Such are precisely the questions that I find Icelanders and the other Indigenous peoples I am talking to, to be implicitly asking. What is most significant about animism then is not only that certain cultures perceive inanimate objects to be animated or ‘spirited,’ but that there reemerges the potential to rethink our historical lineages in architecture, use the design methods and processes currently in use, but now twist them toward cultures of care.






Fig 20–22: In-progress portions of the turf house complex being renovated by Hannes Lárusson at Austur-Meðalholt

What I have shared are recollections of words, ideas, and experiences that emerged in dialogs with several people, all muddled in my mind and re-composed along my slow journey from Eastern to Western Canada. My conversations in Iceland were not interviews, and neither were they trying to extract exact information. I have thoroughly enjoyed the casuality, colloquialism, and the incredible leeway for conversations to seamlessly drift. After all, is this not one of the wonders of orality: that one can seamlessly shift between thoughts and sentences, topics, intensities and emotions? Broken and grammatically incomplete sentences often seem not only fitting but at times even more informative. And these are often not closures or completed understandings of matters but rather questions and openings in knowledge that only probe further and deeper than one might have previously imagined. 

As for credit in an oral history endeavor, I could not be any more grateful to everyone I spoke to and everyone who helped me find connections in Iceland.⁹ I have felt incredibly welcome and simply overwhelmed with their more than gracious engagement. Their love of their land and their generosity of sharing it with me have been absolutely heartwarming. So what must I credit with to these lovely people—everything!

Sundus Al-Bayati is the 2019 recipient of the H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellowship. All photographs are by the author, except where otherwise specified.

As I sit in my Sarajevo rental and reflect on how the Bosnian War, thirty years ago, made this place the way it is, the view of the green hills unfolds before me, dotted with colorful gabled houses that ascend the mountain until their red-tiled roofs touch the blue sky. A magpie stands on the utility line that drops down to a neighboring house. Sarajevo is a city shaped by nature. Its growth followed along the Milijacka River in the valley of Bosnia. The urban history of Sarajevo, defined by the Ottomans, the Astro-Hungarians, and socialist Yugoslavia flows along this east-west axis so that the architecture of each period lines up distinguishably next to one another. Looking up, I thought about how these same picturesque mountains that surround Sarajevo and its residents lent a convenient position for shelling and bombing the city for three-and-a-half bloody years during the Siege of Sarajevo in 1992–1995. The war claimed the lives of 11,540 people.

Figure 1. View of Sarajevo from my window

Figure 2. View of Sarajevo from the Yellow Bastion

Figure 3. Sarajevo Cable Car has been transporting passengers from the old city to the mountain Trebevic since 1959.

Figure 4. Red line shows the territory controlled by the Bosnian Serbs during the Siege of Sarajevo. Image from the Tunnel Museum.

“It was not a civil war. It was an invasion.” These words by our tour guide stayed with me. He drove me and three other people around Sarajevo recounting the history of the Siege and his own personal experience fighting against the Bosnian Serb forces that surrounded his city. He was sixteen when he joined the Bosnian Army. His older brother was killed fighting the Serbs. When we arrived at the Tunnel Museum, the location of the 800-meter-long tunnel that was dug in 1993 to connect two Bosnian-held territories, encircled by the Serbian forces, our tour guide pointed out his brother’s name on a wall that listed the soldiers who died during the war. Our tour guide was a kind and humorous person, even when he was describing painful memories from his past after losing his brother or the long years he was in the hospital recovering from a war injury. But he still laments how the international community waited so long to intervene in Bosnia. He said the only reason the West didn’t try to stop the bloodshed sooner was because the majority of the people getting murdered were Muslims. The Western world just didn’t care for Muslim lives.

Figure 5–8. Tunnel Museum in Sarajevo. A “Sarajevo Rose” is seen on the ground at the entrance.

Reconstruction as Memorialization

I am thinking of Lebbeus Woods again because his contentious theory of postwar reconstruction, portrayed in his infamous provocative drawings where ruins from the war are preserved and integrated in new construction, as a reminder of the war experience, were specifically proposed for the reconstruction of Sarajevo after the Bosnian War. Woods’ theory was problematic for a lot of academics, architects, and residents of war-torn societies who saw that people might not necessarily want to be reminded of the traumatic experience of war on a daily basis. Maybe Woods’ proposal was impractical in its architectural form and implementation but its theoretical basis, that the experience of war must be marked and remembered, is not so different from how Sarajevo memorializes the war in its urban landscape. It is not possible to walk anywhere in the city without being confronted with the wounds of the siege. It is like the city has become a museum to the atrocities of the Bosnian War expressed in different forms and scales of memorialization.

First, there are the symbolic structures that were built to commemorate the victims of war, which often lists their names and ages, like the Memorial to Children Killed during the Siege of Sarajevo in Veliki Park across from the BBI center. In the same park, there is the sculpture, “Nermine Dodi,” that recalls the Srebrenica genocide through the story of Ramo who was calling for his son, Nermine, to come out of hiding. Both father and son were executed by the Serbs after they were reunited. The walls of Kovaci Sarajevo Memorial are assembled from bricks that carry the names of the soldiers in the Bosnian Army who were killed while fighting the Serbian aggressors. Second, there are the large number of graveyards and cemeteries that stretch all over Sarajevo and recall a time when a lot of urban parks and even playgrounds were turned into burial sites to accommodate the increased number of bodies that fell every day for nearly four years. In the vistas of green covered hills and red roofs of Sarajevo, patches of white tombstones distinctly render the city’s landscapes. Lastly, there are the physical scars from the destruction and violence that constitute so much of the spatial experience of Sarajevo, seen in the bullet holes that decorate many of the city’s buildings or in the pavements, etched by the “Sarajevo Rose,” where explosions from mortar shells were filled with red resin to mark the locations where three or more people died. It’s hard to walk in Sarajevo without remembering the war, because eventually you’ll step on a “red rose” or walk by a bullet-scarred wall.

Figure 9. Lebbeus Woods’ speculative drawings on reconstructing a typical apartment block in Sarajevo. Images from: https://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com

Figure 10. Statue “Nermine Dodi” in Veliki Park, Sarajevo

Figure 11. Names of the children who died during the Siege of Sarajevo in Veliki Park

Figure 12–13. Walls of the Sarajevo Kovaci Memorial carry the names of the soldiers in the Bosnian Army who were killed during the war

Figure 14–15. The Martyrs’ Memorial Kovaci Cemetery for soldiers in the Bosnian Army who were killed during the war

Figure 16–17. “Sarajevo Roses,” sites where mortars exploded killing three or more people, are painted red and are seen all over the city

Figure 18–27. Bullet-scarred buildings from the war 30 years ago are a typical sight in Sarajevo.

Rebuilding a Divided City

When the Bosnian War ended in 1995 with the signing of the Dayton Accords, 65% of Sarajevo buildings were damaged and 80% of its utility infrastructure was devastated.¹ The most drastic change, however, was the city’s demographics. Under the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the “Jerusalem of Europe,” as Sarajevo was called for its ethnic diversity, consisted of 44% Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), 32% Orthodox Serbs, and 17% Catholic Croats.² Ethnic tensions and political divisions existed in Yugoslavia but were kept under control by Josip Broz Tito’s government, but following his death in 1980, a period of economic decline resulted in the rise of ethnic strife. In 1991, Slovenia and Croatia were the first two countries of the former Yugoslavia to secede. When the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina passed a referendum for independence, the Bosnian Serbs didn’t vote and boycotted its outcome. After Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence in 1992, Bosnian Serbs, supported by the Yugoslav People’s Army and the Serbian government, encircled Sarajevo and began shelling the city in what became the longest siege in history. The Croats, who first were on the side of Bosniaks, also began fighting against them. After the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement, Bosnia and Herzegovina was divided by the Inter-Entity Boundary Line (IEBL) into two major entities: the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina where Bosniaks are a majority and the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska. The third territory is the small city of Brcko, which falls under both entities but is governed independently. Following the split of BiH, a mass exodus of Bosniaks and Bosnian Serbs took place across the IEBL, which runs through the Dobrinja neighborhood in Sarajevo and essentially creates two cities, Federation Sarajevo and East Sarajevo of Republika Srpska. Hence, Sarajevo emerged from the war divided, no longer the multi-ethnic city it once was and with a Bosniak majority that made up 87% of its population.

After a traumatic period of violence and destruction of the urban environment, the case of Sarajevo proves that post-war reconstruction becomes more than the physical restoration of services and repair of buildings. It is a process of bringing a city back to normalcy, to resurrect its pre-war spirit, which was the result of diverse groups of people living and interacting with the spaces of the city and each other. Sarajevo, however, was a different city after the war. How it was rebuilt and what was rebuilt reflected a new and more ethnically homogenous society, which in turn cemented those divisions in the urban form. In addition to the proliferation of war memorials and graveyards all over Sarajevo, there was a rise in the construction of mosques and churches in both Sarajevo and East Sarajevo, respectively. Esther Charlesworth concludes in her book, Architects Without Frontiers: War, Reconstruction and Design Responsibility, that postwar reconstruction in a divided city has the potential to either resolve conflict or lead to more conflict.³

Figure 28. Old Town of Sarajevo

Figure 29. The Academy of Fine Arts is housed in the only evangelist church built during the Astro-Hungarian period. It was destroyed in 1992 and reconstructed after.

Figure 30–31. Mevlevijska tekija, built in 1492, was demolished for the second time in 1957. It was rebuilt in 2011 with the financial help of the Turkish municipality of Selçuk and through the Turkish Agency for International Cooperation and Development (TIKA).

Figure 32–33. Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque, the oldest mosque of its size from the Ottoman period in BiH

Figure 34–35. Gazi Husrev-beg Library was rebuilt after the war by funds from Qatar

The flow of international capital into Sarajevo to aid in the reconstruction process also followed along political and ethnic lines and shaped Sarajevo according to the interests of these foreign countries. There were a lot of investments from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Malaysia to construct religious structures such as mosques and Islamic education centers.⁴ I was surprised by how many mosques there are in Sarajevo for such a small city and especially one that was under a communist government for a long time. Walking towards the reconstructed Ottoman mosque, Gazi Husrev-Beg, I passed by the Gazi Husrev-Beg Library. In front of the entrance, a marble plaque reminds the passersby that the library is a gift donated by the state of Qatar. The same international governments also led and funded the construction of office and commercial developments that dominate Sarajevo’s skyline such as the BBI Centar, the SCC, and numerous other shopping malls. These additions to Sarajevo’s cityscape were often built in a generic and globalist style that ignored the architectural context and local character of the city. The flux of foreign funds into Sarajevo, welcomed by corrupt local administrations, dictated how the city developed and they continue to shape Sarajevo’s identity even today.⁵ I didn’t expect that the moment I’d walk into the Sarajevo Airport, I’d be welcomed by an enormous billboard in Arabic of the Kuwaiti Injazat Real Estate Development Company. I see similar billboards hanging on some of the derelict buildings by the river, anticipating its future as a residential or commercial development, reading in English, coming soon. East Sarajevo was also shaped by investments from the Serbian government to build new churches and residential blocks, which can be seen in the Dobrinja neighborhood across IEBL.

Figure 36. BBI Centar, a shopping mall, part of a privately owned development that was built after the war to replace an iconic state-owned department store Robna kuca Sarajka that stood on the site since 1975

Figure 37–39. Sarajevo City Center

Figure 40. UNITIC Twin Towers were heavily damaged during the Bosnian War but remained standing.

Urbicide and the Role of Cultural and Public Spaces in Reviving a War-torn City

Sometimes a city is destroyed in the process of warfare, as cities often are the battlefields, and sometimes the purpose of destruction is the city itself for what it embodies of the cultural and social values of a place. The term “urbicide,” violence directed at a city, came into popular usage to describe the destruction of cultural heritage of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War.⁶ While the Bosnian Serbs who encircled and shelled Sarajevo from the hills increasingly targeted its Ottoman heritage like the destruction of Sarajevo’s biggest mosque, Gazi Husrev-beg, the bullets fell indiscriminately all over the city, with an emphasis on cultural sites.⁷

One of the most symbolic images from the Bosnian War was the burning of the Sarajevo City Hall, the celebrated neo-Moorish structure built during the Astro-Hungarian period in 1891 to house the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The library held 2 million volumes including rare manuscripts and national archives. Other than a small number of books saved by heroic librarians braving sniper bullets, almost everything was reduced to ashes in the three days the library burned.⁸ There is an iconic photo of the Bosnian musician Vedran Smailovic playing his cello among the ruins of the city hall that captures the psychological trauma of violence directed at erasing places of shared cultural and national identity. Today, the entrance to the city hall is inscribed with these words: “on this place Serbian criminals in the night of 25-26. August.1992 set on fire National and University’s Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Over 2 million of books, periodicals, and documents vanished in the flame. Do not forget. Remember and warn.”

Figure 41–43. Sarajevo City Hall

The Oriental Institute met a similar fate when the Army of Republika Srpska shelled the building, burning one of the richest collections of Islamic and Jewish manuscripts and Ottoman documents in the region.⁹ The Olympic Museum, which is a symbol of one of Sarajevo’s most celebrated periods, the 1984 Winter Olympic Games, was one of the first to be bombed during the siege after it was hit with projectiles. The museum reopened in 2020, almost three decades after the war. The Bosnian Serb forces were so determined to dismantle Sarajevo’s cultural institutions that, once these buildings started to burn, sniper fire followed to prevent people or fire fighters from possibly saving the structures or their contents.¹⁰ It is like the Serbs wanted to cleanse Sarajevo of anything that they perceived to be historical evidence of non-Serbian existence and past.

Figure 44. The Olympic Museum

Figure 45. National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Foreign financial aid shaped Sarajevo’s postwar urban identity as urban programs and priorities of reconstruction were determined by external actors and organizations. International intervention in the restructuring of Bosnia and Herzegovina began with the Dayton Accords that ended the Bosnian War in 1995 and continued through the appointment of a Higher Representative of BiH that was granted substantial powers to make laws and lead the political and economic transition of the former socialist country into a democratic and free-market state. International aid organizations, notably, the World Bank, European Union and United States Agency for International Development (USAID), to name a few, led the recovery response in Sarajevo during and after the war.¹¹ While the recovery plans were successful in restoring infrastructural functions in a short time, the early stages of reconstruction neglected the value in reviving destroyed cultural heritage and their importance for restoring a sense of normalcy for residents that allows them to reconnect with their city, especially when the cultural symbols of Sarajevo were precisely under fire from the Bosnian Serbs.

Figure 46–48. The Old Jewish Cemetery is one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Europe and was on the front line during the Bosnian War. It was shelled and heavily mined by Bosnian Serbs.

Figure 49–50. The abandoned restaurant Osmice was a sniper position for Bosnian Serbs overlooking central Sarajevo

The postwar plans also lacked a holistic urban vision or a masterplan for the development of Sarajevo. The flow of foreign aid went to fund local cantons and municipalities but the lack of coordination between donor funds and local programs created redundancy and corruption, which was exploited by political elites to issue illegal construction permits that eventually led to the neglect of cultural institutions and destruction of public space in the city.¹² The example of Sarajevo illustrates the significance of the symbolic dimension of postwar reconstruction: the cultural and public spaces of the city where diverse groups of people and ideas co-exist define a city’s identity, and when reconstruction fails to understand the meaning in reviving spaces of cultural memory and co-existence, it risks deepening divisions and delaying the healing process.

Figure 51. Dilapidated building in Sarajevo awaiting its new future. SCC peaking in the background


Figure 52. Abandoned building overgrown by trees in Sarajevo

My memories in Sarajevo will always be defined by its natural landscape, even though those mountains also carry the scars of war, being the positions from where the city was shelled under the siege, and some still have unexploded landmines. But it is still the thing I found Bosnians to be most proud of. I understand, when your country becomes associated with war, it becomes the only thing people know. When I took a taxi to visit the Skakavac Waterfall, one of the tallest waterfalls in the Balkans, my taxi driver and I chatted about nature and inevitably the war. He told me he was 17 when he fought in the Bosnian army. He was shot by a sniper bullet as he was dragging the dead body of his friend to a safe shelter so he could give him a proper burial. A little later he was proudly showing me photos of his time in the mountains and recommending me places to hike in Bosnia. My tour guide, who lost his brother in the war, told me to “tell people about Bosnia.” So I am telling everyone who reads this to visit this beautiful country.

Figures 53–55. Hiking to Lukomir Village

Figures 56–57. On route to Skakavac Waterfall

References:

Manuel "Saga" Sánchez García is a PhD candidate at Politecnico di Torino and Universidad de Granada, and an appointed 2022–2023 Junior Fellow on Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks. He lives between Italy and Spain (although that is about to change) and has been a member of SAH since 2019.

Can you tell us about your career path? 

I started my studies in architecture at Universidad de Granada, under the shadow of the Alhambra. There I met my mentor Juan Calatrava, director of Granada’s architecture school at the time, who had just coordinated the facsimile reedition of Le poeme de l’angle droit by Le Corbusier (1955). That book blew my mind and encouraged me to explore a career in writing, publishing my first digital book in 2009 thanks to an EU Euroeditions grant, and participating in national conferences with small independent works before acquiring the architect license in 2013. Right after that, I moved to Bogotá, Colombia, where I pursued a two-year master’s in architecture and worked first as a research assistant and later as a lecturer, researcher, and consultant until 2018. Those were lovely years full of exciting projects, including my graduate thesis ”Granada Des-Granada” published in 2018 by Universidad de los Andes. I also worked with the team in charge of creating a new school of art, acting, architecture, and design in Bogotá named ”Facultad de Creación” and led by the architect Juan Pablo Aschner. Supporting the birth of a new higher education institution is a fantastic adventure.

Finally, I moved to Turin (Italy) in 2018 as a PhD fellow in the program “Architettura: Storia e Progetto,” under the supervision of Professor Sergio Pace. Eventually, we achieved a co-tutelle agreement with the PhD program on Art History at Universidad de Granada under the supervision of Prof. Juan Calatrava. It could be said that we closed the circle in some way. I started participating more often during the pandemic in SAH activities and with EAHN, the European Architectural History Network. In January 2021, I became the Editorial Assistant of Architectural Histories, the Journal of the EAHN, working closely with its Editor-in-chief, Samantha L. Martin.

Today I am just weeks ahead of my PhD defense. It’s an exciting moment. After that is finished (fingers crossed), I will be moving to Washington, DC, for a research stay at Dumbarton Oaks. It is one of the most important academic achievements I have ever earned, and I feel immensely thankful. They also happen to be welcoming and kind people. I got to meet a sizable group of Dumbarton Oaks current and former scholars in Pittsburgh during the SAH Annual International Conference, and I must tell you: They are really great.

What interests you most about architectural history? 

My research topics are kind of split into two big sides. Two faces of the same medal. My main line of work deals with medieval and early modern urban history, including Christian/Andalusian cities in Spain, colonial urbanism in the Spanish Archipelagos and Latin America (mainly in Colombia), 16th-century atlases, etc. As it happens with most Granadan architectural historians, my work is also connected to Nasrid architecture and the Alhambra, which largely impacted later Christian buildings in the region and their romanticist reimaginations during the 19^th century, as well as many 20th-century and contemporary architects across the world. In 2020 I developed a GAHTC module of six lectures on these topics with Juan Calatrava and Eva Amate. It is freely available on GAHTC’s website.

Parallelly, I am very interested in the intersection between the fields of architectural history and game studies. The area of game studies was born in the early 2000s to delve into the impacts of video games on our society. Even though plenty of architecture-related topics are being discussed at game studies conferences, not many specialized architectural historians are participating in them. Even fewer game-studies-related topics are dealt with in international meetings such as SAH’s or EAHN’s. However, this trend is changing as we speak. The call for papers for the 76^th SAH Annual International Conference features two digital sessions dealing with software and “playfulness” in architecture, while one of the in-person sessions explicitly mentions their interest in the presence of Islamic architectural reimaginations in video games. The same is happening in other disciplines such as art history, sociology, and political studies, as it happened before with media like television, radio, magazines, and films when they were considered ‘emergent.’

What projects are you currently working on? 

My projects are divided in the same way. My main endeavor right now is my PhD thesis titled “Siblings Overseas.” It deals with notarial documents and foundational registers of cities following the famous Spanish grid, which has been traditionally seen just as a morphological model without not so much regard for the political and legal nuances behind it. For example, I studied the foundational records of four new towns created in Andalusia in 1539 through the same principles as the colonial capitals settled in America in the same decade. I delve into the confrontations between a diversity of agents in favor and against the foundation of these new towns, which I analyzed in a comparative fashion with similar complaints and judicial processes that occurred in America between founders, settlers, native leaders, encomenderos, priests, and other groups. It is an amazing but difficult topic since these records are scattered in different archives and conserved through copies of copies made across five hundred years, often manuscripts in complex handwriting styles that are not easy to read for scholars not specialized in paleography.

My upcoming project for Dumbarton Oaks is a continuation of this line of research under the title “Uncovering colonial Lawscape.” In it, I will work further on the concept of Lawscape,¹which refers to the times and spaces where the complex relationship between law and landscape is clearly visible. Of course, the landscape of actions and procedures leading to the foundational moment of a city are good example of lawscapes. I will focus on a selection of early colonial documents held at Dumbarton Oaks’ Rare Book Collection that present other lawscapes featuring native and mestizo leaders, comparing them with the manuscripts I have already studied in other countries.

Parallelly (always parallelly), I continue growing my research on architecture and game studies. A couple of years ago, I edited a special collection on this theme, published in Culture & History digital journal. In 2021 I co-supervised a fantastic group of students at Universidad de Granada in collaboration with Prof. Rafael de Lacour. They focused their undergraduate capstone project on games such as Assassin’s Creed, GRIS, and Calvino Noir. Their designs were included in the exhibition Gaming Through Architectural Drawing, which I curated myself, also including materials from other students and collaborators with whom I have been working since 2014. This exhibition was hosted by Meetaverse, a cultural center located and built in the metaverse, 100% virtual. It was an exhibition on video game buildings that was, quite literally, built inside a video game. I also continue writing on the topic, and right now I have a couple of manuscripts that will be published soon.

Do you have a particular memory of when you first became aware of the significance of architecture or when you knew you wanted to study it? 

I think I always had some sort of connection with architecture. When I was a child, I used to play at Plaza Nueva and Plaza de Mariana Pineda, two of the most vibrant squares in Granada’s city center. There I met with other children to play together. We often walked uphill to the Alhambra and played at Plaza de los Algibes, an unpaved open space built over the water reservoirs of the royal medina between the Islamic castle and Charles V Palace. Playing there was natural for us as there were not as many tourists as today. There was even a small kiosk, designed in the 1950s and still standing today, where we bought ice cream in the summer.

Later on I decided to be a writer, so I considered studying journalism even though it was considered a “lesser” career in Spain. A relative of mine who works as a journalist said to me, “If you want to write, you will write. Focus your studies on what you want to write about.” I wanted to write about my city, so I ended up studying architecture. Almost 18 years have passed from that moment, and here I am, once more, writing stuff about Granada and its architecture. My relative’s prediction was incredibly accurate.

Who has influenced your work or career? 

Many people, of course! As it is usually said, I stand on the shoulders of giants. I was fortunate to find professors Juan Calatrava and Rafael de Lacour early in my undergraduate studies. While Prof. De Lacour has always been very supportive and involved me in all kinds of activities, Prof. Calatrava is the most central mentor in my career as an architectural historian. They maintained contact after I moved to Colombia, so the Granadan connection never disappeared. That made it possible to “close the circle” in the PhD stage, as I mentioned before.

At Bogotá, I worked under the wing of Prof. Cristina Albornoz Rugeles, a Colombian architect who always pushed me to fly higher. During the last years, I have been a close collaborator of Prof. Sergio Pace, my Italian PhD supervisor, taking his courses on historiography and assisting his lectures on history of the material culture. He was a student of Profs. Carlo Olmo at Turin and Paolo Portoghesi at Rome so, through him, I feel kind of connected with the Italian “line” of baroque architectural history. Finally, I have been incredibly gifted by the opportunity of collaborating with Prof. Samantha L. Martin and the Editorial Board of Architectural Histories. They are not only an incredibly group to work with, the kind of conversations and debates at the journal's core have brought my intellectual horizon to a whole new level.

Finally, if I may mention two influences I never met personally, I would like to name the Swiss art historian Titus Burckhardt and the Polish architectural historian Joseph Rykwert. Their writings introduced me to the kind of symbolic, political, and ritual connections I seek in the architectures I study, may they be built materially or digitally. It is true that today we approach research and writing in a totally different fashion, but I always keep in mind the level of clarity of their arguments and the kind of seduction they inspire through their narrative.

What is your biggest professional challenge? 

After almost a decade of changing countries/continents, I would say my biggest challenge right now is to find a more stable position in academia without renouncing good job conditions or to the fantastic international experiences I get to live right now. A symptom of this longing is that my library is scattered in boxes (many boxes) stored in different places. Putting it together for the first time is something I look forward to.

When and how did you become involved with SAH?  

I knew about SAH when I was in Bogotá, mainly because of JSAH. When I moved to Italy in 2018, I became more involved in academic associations, including SAH, EAHN, and RSA. Near that point, I also became a member of national associations like AhAU in Spain, AISU and AISTARCH in Italy, RedCHU and SCA in Colombia. Then something special happened: I got to attend the 2019 GAHTC Member’s Conference in Miami, where I met a lot of the people that make SAH and EAHN what they are. Amazing experience. That trip moved me to a closer engagement with SAH activities.

How has SAH enriched your experience in architectural history? 

So, after that experience in Miami, I told myself, “Manuel, here there is a long and interesting path to be walked. You just need to take the first step.” That year I applied to SAH Annual International Conference (including the graduate students fellowship) and GAHTC’s targeted acquisition grants. I had been rejected several times before in US-based competitions, but this time was my time, and I got both of them!

Even though the 2020 in-person conference was transformed into a digital one, the chair of my session, Prof. Jeffrey Klee, made the change smooth and productive. It served as an academic engine, boosting digital relationships with people like former SAH President Victoria Young, my fellow Spaniard Macarena de la Vega, and colleagues from Colombia like Ingrid Quintana, among others I got to meet in person for the very first time at Pittsburgh’s conference. For me, SAH operates as the center of a triangle connecting my research interests in the Mediterranean basin, Latin America, and North America. Being continuously exposed to its influence forces me to connect the local aspects of my research and my cultural roots to the global debate on architectural history, diversity, and social justice.

Do you have a vision for how SAH should evolve in the future? 

I appreciate very much the work SAH does for all of us. It is one of the most caring and participative communities I know, and I am in no position to say or decide how it should be in the future. This being said, I feel that while SAH presents itself as an international network and many of its programs are effectively geared towards supporting international projects and emergent scholars, most of the debates at its core are heavily framed by the North American academic context, only extensible at some points to the rest of the English-speaking world.

At the SAH IDEAS Committee Listening Session in Pittsburgh I argued that, while I understand the necessity of these debates and connections between scholars based in the US and Canada, there should be room for more horizontal discussions where it is assumed that all scholars come from different contexts with diverse systems, hierarchies, and rules. The issues affecting research funding, career development, survey teaching, and unions, among others, are totally different from what we experience in other places. Those coming from outside force ourselves to learn about the problems you care most about so we are able to participate, which is very enriching but eventually extenuating. When I get back home (wherever that may be) after some nice and intense days with SAH, I often find myself trying to explain to my colleagues the ideas and values that were in discussion. Their conclusion is usually the same: “That would never happen here” or “We live in a different world.” In my opinion, we are not.

If SAH, while being led from the US, aims to represent the global community of architectural history, it needs to incorporate these other international issues and support the connection with national institutions outside of the English-speaking world. That is the vision I would propose.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to enter your field? 

Let me approach this question as the early millennial that I am:

THREE THINGS YOU SHOULD HAVE IN MIND TO ENTER THE FIELD OF ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY:

1. “It is not about you; it is about your community.” In academia, as in life, nobody gets anywhere alone. If you want to grow and advance, you need to collaborate with people and listen to them while also making them listen to you. Care as much as you can for others, and do not be shy when granting small favors. Academic relationships fluctuate in intensity but they never disappear completely, and since the world is a small place, the good you did in the past will eventually become worthwhile. It is a matter of time.
2. “It is not about your work; it is about how it fits.” Rejection is a close companion of every academic. Regardless of our skills and achievements, we are all rejected many times before achieving any worthy grant, prestigious conference, or ambitious position. It doesn’t matter how high or low you aim because, once your application is sent, it lives its own life. There will always be many circumstances affecting your chances of success other than your work’s “objective” quality, if such thing even exists. You can spend endless hours strategizing and even then, there will be things escaping your control. So, learn to flow and always aim high. Produce ideas and proposals that are innovative and engaging but without getting too attached to them. Train your “application muscle.” If you persevere, your time will come.
3. “It is not about them helping you; it is about you asking for help.” During the many stages of your academic career, you will meet plenty of people who are supposed to mentor you and help you grow. Many of them won’t. Others will try, but you will not be the better fit for each other. So, seek the people you feel more aligned with, and do not be shy: ask for their support. They may be experts in the topics you are interested in. Perhaps you happen to work together on some random project, or maybe you just like how they navigate their academic life. Arm yourself with your best smile and seek their help. Not always will they be able to do so, but it is worth trying. Worst case scenario: they will know that you exist and that you are ambitious. That is an investment. Best case: you will receive good advice. Maybe you will gain a mentor. Perhaps a long-life friend.

Sundus Al-Bayati is the 2019 recipient of the H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellowship. All photographs are by the author, except where otherwise specified.

It is fitting that the Triumph of Death painting is displayed in one of Palermo’s many palazzis, the Palazzo Abatellis, where Antonello de Messina’s Annunciation is exhibited awkwardly in the middle of a room. It is unknown who painted the Triumph of Death, a large fresco extending the two-stories height of the Regional Gallery of Palazzo Abatellis. Having been engrossed recently in the bloody and grotesque history of the Mafia wars in Palermo, at their height between 1978 and 1993, this 15^th-century painting seemed to speak of a grim recent past when hundreds of dead bodies populated the streets of Palermo. It wasn’t long ago that I stood in front of another Triumph of Death painting, the one by Bruegel in the Prado museum in Madrid, painted a century later, and influenced by the Italian version hanging then in Palazzo Sclafani in Palermo. Confronted with Bruegel’s Triumph of Death, I was unsettled by the bleak brown and black landscape that dominates the painting, but the army of skeletons pouring into the realm of the living, some wearing hats or bandanas, with stiff dramatic gestures, felt almost humorous.

There is nothing comical about the Triumph of Death in Palermo. Death is a lone figure, mounted on his skeletal shrieking horse, who jumps out of the center of the painting. The horse is also dead but retains its fleshy mouth and tongue to express its suffering. The well-dressed, beautiful kings and queens suffer calmly as their bodies are pierced with Death’s arrows, nothing like Bruegel’s horror-stricken gesticulating figures running for their lives. The poor and devout either await their turn or have escaped Death’s march, for now. In the eighties and early nineties, the Mafia, like Death on his screaming horse, had triumphed in Palermo. 

Figure 1. Triumph of Death, Palazzo Abatellis, Palermo. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/

Figure 2. Triumph of Death, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Museo del Prado in Madrid. Image from https://www.museodelprado.es/

The Mafia wasn’t an outlawed organized crime group working on the fringes of Sicily. They unofficially ruled Sicily and were allowed and supported to amass political and economic control of the island, because of their usefulness to different groups from aristocratic landowners, politicians in the Italian state whose elections depended on votes from Sicily and the American government in its fight against communism. Because of Mussolini’s repression of the Mafia, it made them look naturally anti-fascist to the Americans who, after the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943, appointed Mafia bosses and made men into administrative and local government positions in Sicily, perhaps not intentionally.¹ Nonetheless, this move was crucial in resurrecting the Mafia and allowing it to become an unstoppable system of power that controlled everything and everyone. 

Cosa Nostra’s newly gained political power in Palermo allowed their control of the construction industry and led the rapid destruction of Palermo’s green belt to make room for the acres of concrete that constitute the cheap and grim high-rise apartment buildings outside of Palermo’s historic center. Besides being a way to launder drug money, construction and real estate development also gained Cosa Nostra the trust of the aristocratic class that owned the land around Palermo and were eager to reap the benefits of the Mafia-controlled rapid urbanization of the Conca d’Oro, traditionally agricultural land.² Additionally, within the context of cold war politics, the Mafia was backed by some connections in the Italian and American governments for their effort in targeting socialist and communist organizers and trade union activists that were gaining popularity among laborers and workers in Sicily for the issue of land reforms that was a direct threat to the Mafia business model that was predicated on feudalism. 

I arrived in Palermo at night, and I got a taxi right away. Except for the orange lights of the highway, the darkness hung over everything. I forgot I just landed on an island and was absent-mindedly gazing out of the window until my eyes made out the silhouette of Mount Pellegrino, which took me by surprise. The next morning, I had two simple goals in mind: find some food and go for a walk around the city to get an idea of the place that I’ll be living in for the next month. I stopped at a restaurant near the port and had the pasta alla norma, a classic Sicilian pasta dish made with eggplant and ricotta cheese. I was ready to start exploring.

Palermo’s old city center is close to the waterfront. The harbor was strategically important for the Italian and German air bases and was bombed by five different air forces by the end of the war: French, British, American, Italian and German. The historic center suffered a great loss. Walking by the waterfront, I saw some buildings that still look damaged and yet have merged in their ruined state with subsequent shoddy additions that sit on top of the rubble or to the sides. One of the buildings overlooking La Cala port caught my attention on that first day. Its south wall was covered by a mural of two men conferring and laughing with each other. I wondered who they were but soon forgot about it.

Figure 3. Dilapidated buildings near the port in Palermo’s historic center

Figure 4. The Gothic-Catalan loggia of the Santa Maria della Catena near the Cala Port

Figure 5–7. Foro Italico, a pedestrian path and park in Palermo. Rubble from the destroyed buildings in WWII were dumped into the sea adjacent to Foro Italico creating an artificial beach.

I would later find out that the two men on the wall of the Gioeni Trabia Nautical School building were Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, two famous Sicilians. They were the prosecutors who investigated the Sicilian Mafia in the 1980s and whose work led to the Maxitrial, the biggest effort in Italy's history to bring the members of the Cosa Nostra to justice. It was also the first time the Italian state acknowledged the Sicilian Mafia’s existence as a criminal organization who was responsible for countless murders in the years after the war. Falcone and Borsellino were both brutally murdered a few months apart in 1992 by the Mafia.³ Palermo is full of these opposites: the city of Mafia and anti-Mafia, derelict structures on one block, exuberant Arab-Norman and Gothic-Catalan buildings on another, Mafia-built concrete blocks and monuments to the victims that fought them. 

Figure 8. Mural of Falcone and Borsellino on the Gioeni Trabia Nautical School, Palermo.

Figure 9. Piazza della Memoria in front of the Justice building in Palermo named after the victims of the Mafia whose names are displayed on the steps of the staircase. Eleven steel-marble-brass columns represent the magistrates killed by the Mafia.

The Sack of Palermo

Palermo was heavily targeted during the Allied bombing of Sicily between 1941 and 1943. It was the second-most bombed city in Italy after Naples in World War II. Other than Baghdad, which I consider to still be in a state of war, Palermo was the first city in my travels where many ruined buildings from the war eighty years ago still stand. On my way to the Vucciria market, I passed by the crumbling graffiti-covered buildings in and around Piazza Garraffello where a 16^th-century fountain, Fontana del Garraffello, somehow survived the bombs that gutted the surrounding structures. In 2014, one of those damaged buildings collapsed even further after heavy rain. Graffiti covers the exposed internal wall of a demolished building and depicts the Fontana del Garraffello with the year 1943 inscribed in the middle of it. Walking a bit further, at the intersection of Via Maqueda and Via Vittorio Emanuelle, known as the Quattro Canti, is a splendid, monumental 16^th-century fountain, Fontana Pretoria. Once again, the eye is confounded by beauty and dilapidation. Across from the mayor's office of Palermo and one of the four corner buildings is the abandoned 16^th-century Palazzo Chiaramonte Bordonaro, whose restoration began in the 1990s but has been halted since. In Midnight in Sicily, Peter Robb describes the unusual sight of the ruins in the historic center of Palermo on his visit in the 1990s. Thirty years after his writing, some parts of Palermo still display the open wounds of war:

“Other cities have been bombed in the forties, and many worse than Palermo. What was unique to Palermo was that the ruins of the old city were still ruins, thirty years, fifty years on. Staircases still led nowhere, sky shone out of the windows, clumps of weed lodged in the walls, wooden roof beams jutted toward the sky like ribs rotting carcasses. Slowly, even the parts that had survived were crumbling into rubble.”⁴

Figure 10–16. Damaged buildings around the historic center of Palermo

Figure 17–19. Decrepit buildings in Piazza Magione

Figure 20–21. Fontana Pretoria, Palermo

Figure 22–24. Abandoned Palazzo Chiaramonte Bordonaro across from Fontana Pretoria

What is also unique to Palermo among cities destroyed during World War II is the story of its postwar development, led and controlled by the Sicilian Mafia that irreversibly altered the urban and natural character of the city as well as its immediate surroundings. So destructive was the postwar period between 1950s until mid-1980s for the city that it is referred to as the Sack of Palermo: a story of an elaborate and corrupt alliance of local, national, and international political actors whose interests aligned with Cosa Nostra’s criminal and financial hegemony at the cost of permanently damaging the identity of the city and impoverishing its population. Not long after the war, Palermo was another battlefield. The historic center experienced the most damage during the war to its rich architectural heritage and was completely neglected and left to decay while resources and attention were given to unregulated, Mafia-controlled construction of cheap, low-quality apartment blocks on the city’s outskirts such as Nuovo Borgo, Zen and CEP.⁵ The green hinterlands of Palermo, known as the Conca d’Oro (the Golden Shell), the citrus plains that surrounded the city and populated with 19^th- and early 20^th-century Art Nouveau and Liberty Style villas, were largely destroyed to accommodate the Mafia flats. Thus, a large part of Palermo’s natural landscape was lost and with it the livelihoods of the farmers and laborers who cultivated the land and looked after the estates. 

One of the main tourist attractions in Palermo are three bustling outdoor markets: Ballaro, Vucciria, and Capo, that are frequented by both tourists and locals. Smells, textures, colors, and the loud noises of vendors and customers overwhelm the first time as one learns to navigate this social scene while wading through stalls of fruits, vegetables, grilled seafood, raw chunks of tuna, shiny swordfish, pane and panelle, and the Sicilian sfincione. The markets are unique not only because they hold on to a tradition that goes back to the Arabs that ruled Sicily, but also because they are the last remaining examples of the local enterprises that encompassed social and economic lives in Palermo’s historic neighborhoods before the war. The poor population that worked and socialized in the historic center were forced into the Mafia housing blocks as their neighborhoods lay in ruins and their livelihoods terminated. Wealthier residents were moved to the slightly better apartment buildings along Via della Liberta.⁶ The breakdown of socio-economic ties in the city facilitated the domination of the Mafia as more people needed jobs and housing. The bosses were the ones that decided who deserved them. Therefore, the Mafia’s grip of Palermo became stronger as the poorer population began to see the Mafia-built flats a sign of progress and modernization that was badly needed and Cosa Nostra as the main employer in the city.⁷

“When you walked into the new parts of Palermo it was like walking into the mafia mind. The sightless concrete blocks had multiplied like cancer cells. The mafia mind was totalitarian and even on a summer day it chilled you.”⁸

Figure 25. Mafia-built housing blocks on the outskirts of Palermo. Images from google earth

A City Endures

Figure 26. People lined up to enter the Palatine Chapel within the Norman Palace complex.

Figure 27–28. Byzantine mosaics in the Palatine Chapel dating to the 1140s.

Figure 29. Muqranas wood ceiling in the Palatine Chapel.

Figure 30. Example of the opus sectile mosaics decorating the walls and floors of Palatine Chapel.

Examples of this multi-layered architecture from the Arab-Norman period are seen all over Palermo. One of my favorite buildings is the church of San Cataldo with its three distinguished red domes, combining a rectilinear church layout on the inside with Islamic domes and arches on the outside. It is not until I arrived in Sicily and visited the Palatine Chapel, Monreale Cathedral, and Cefalu Cathedral that I’ve seen such complete, well-preserved and elegant Byzantine mosaics, juxtaposed with opus sectile decorated floors and walls, arranged in star-shaped polygons typical of Islamic ornamentation. 

Figure 31. Cefalu, Sicily.

Figure 32. Cefalu Cathedral dating back to the 12^th century.

Figure 33. Entry portal of the Cefalu Cathedral.

Figure 34–35. View towards the mosaic-covered apse portraying Chirst Pantokrator.

Figure 36-37. Byzantine mosaics in Monreale Cathedral, Palermo.

Figure 38–39. Benedictine Cloister at Monreale Cathedral from 1200. Pointed arches display diaper work and sit on marble columns decorated with mosaics.

My Airbnb host left me many tourist pamphlets for what to see and do in Palermo and it is precisely this prosperous period of the island’s history under the Normans that is emphasized the most. But between the end of the Norman rule and Italy’s unification in 1870, Sicily experienced more foreign invasions, ending with the Spanish Bourbons who exploited the rich agricultural lands around Palermo and invested their returns in extensive building of Baroque buildings in the city center after destroying much of its medieval architecture.⁹ Greek, Roman, and Baroque architecture permeates Sicily but it is its Norman legacy that is the most romanticized and connected to a Sicilian national identity. Starting in early 19^th century, restoration of buildings in Sicily focused on returning buildings to their Norman image by removing later additions to reveal the “true” Norman form and sometimes reconstructing elements that had long been gone. ¹⁰ 

Figure 40–45. Church of San Cataldo in Palermo, a unique example of Arab-Norman architecture from 12^th-century Sicily.

Before World War II, theories guiding the historic preservation of buildings and monuments in Europe began to form in the 1930s as were determined in the Athens Conference of 1931. The principles of preservation that were discussed and promoted for adaptation during the conference were based on minimal alteration of historic buildings and where modifications were required, a conservative and scientific approach informed by data analysis of existing elements were to be implemented. Additions were to be stylistically differentiated from the original.¹¹ The massive damage to cities that was made possible by the evolution of aerial warfare technology during World War II posed unprecedented challenges to the previously accepted theories of historic preservation. In Italy, like the rest of Europe, the strict and conservative preservation rules that were established before the war were thwarted for the sake of saving national heritage. Post-war restoration of historic buildings in Palermo continued the pre-war approach of freeing Arab-Norman buildings of their unwanted pasts.¹² The destruction caused by the bombs cleared what stood in the way to further disencumber the authentic heritage of the city. When war destroys a city's history, reconstruction has the potential to re-write it.

Notes:

² Vincenzo Scalia, “The Production of the Mafioso Space. A Spatial Analysis of the Sack of Palermo,” Trends in Organized Crime 24, no. 2 (2020): pp. 189–208, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12117-020-09395-7.

³ Peter Robb, Midnight in Sicily (New York: Picador, 2007).

⁴ Ibid, p.9.

⁵ Vincenzo Scalia, “The Production of the Mafioso Space. A Spatial Analysis of the Sack of Palermo,” Trends in Organized Crime 24, no. 2 (2020): pp. 189–208, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12117-020-09395-7.

⁶ Ibid

Sundus Al-Bayati is the 2019 recipient of the H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellowship. All photographs are by the author, except where otherwise specified.

Barcelona has been punished throughout history for being the capital of the autonomous Catalan community. Even the city’s urban form reflects a historical Catalan struggle for independence. After the end of the War of Spanish Succession (1701–1714), a neighborhood in Barcelona was flattened in retaliation for resisting the Franco-Spanish forces. Architecture is often used as an instrument of power, and especially during war, to showcase territorial control or mark a political shift. But the story of Barcelona’s urban transformation is not limited to a history of political and social subjugation. On the contrary, Barcelona’s development shows a city that has always been resilient and intentionally planned. I was searching for the traces of the Spanish Civil War in Barcelona, but I found myself as interested in earlier conflicts whose effects contributed to how the city developed across centuries. 

From a Citadel to a City Park

Only a small part of the medieval working-class district of La Ribera exists today in Barcelona. The district was razed after the defeat and capture of Catalonia by the Bourbons in the War of the Spanish Succession in 1714. The destruction of the district was not a casualty of war. The residential neighborhood was devoid of any military defensive structures. The demolition was ordered by Philip V after the war ended to punish the city and to clear a space for the construction of a new Ciutadella (citadel). The fortress stood at the current location of Parc de la Ciutadella for more than a century before it was demolished. However, lost parts of the Ribera district can be seen in Barcelona today. In 2013, archeological ruins from the medieval Ribera neighborhood were discovered during excavations beneath a 19^th-century cast iron market, Mercat del Born. The excavations were part of a project to build the Provisional Library of Barcelona inside the market. After the discovery, the library project was relocated and the market was transformed to a cultural center to preserve and display an important recovered piece of the Catalan’s past. 

Figure 1–4, El Born Culture and Memory Center (CCM), Barcelona

Figure 5–6, Plans of the destroyed Ribera district and the citadel that replaced it. Image from CCM, Barcelona.

Not far from Mercat del Born, stands one of Barcelona’s main attractions, Parc de la Ciutadella, with its monumental fountain, Font de la Cascada. The park is a microcosm of Barcelona’s urban history since the 18^th century. This was the site of the great citadel ordered by Philip V after the demolition of the Ribera neighborhood. The fortress, which was the largest in Europe in its time, was constructed to ensure greater control of Barcelona should a rebellion arise against the King. With the exception of Barceloneta, an area that developed outside the medieval city walls to compensate for the need for housing caused by the demolition of La Ribera neighborhood, Barcelona’s growth was limited inside these walls.¹ For over a century, the Ciutadella stood as a symbol of control and subjugation of the Catalan city by the Spanish absolutist government and was thus hated by its residents. 

Figure 7, Font de la Cascaada, Parc de la Ciutadella, Barcelona

Figure 8–10, Parc de la Ciutadella, Barcelona 

The fortress was destroyed in the mid-19^th century and the rest was turned over to the city council. The site was transformed to a public city park as part of the first comprehensive urban reform in Barcelona, the “Extension” plan by IIdefons Cerda in 1859. The development of the park was further incorporated in the urban transformation of Barcelona when it was selected to host the 1888 Universal Exposition.² From a symbol of Spanish control and subjugation, the site of the former Ciutadella became the soil for a flowering of Catalan industrial and architectural innovation and expression. One of the most prominent buildings of the Exposition, still in the park today, the Castle of Three Dragons, designed by Lluís Domènech i Montaner, is an example of Modernisme, a sort of Catalan Art Nouveau, whose most famous practitioner was Antoni Gaudi. Not all the buildings within the old Ciutadella were lost. The current Catalan Parliament sits inside an 18^th-century arsenal building that belonged to the citadel, in the place where arms were kept to defend against a Catalan rebellion. 

Figure 11–12, The Castle of Three Dragons, Parc de la Ciutadella, Barcelona

Figure 13, The Catalan Parliament Building, Parc de la Ciutadella, Barcelona

Bunkers, Street Fighting and George Orwell

When I arrived at my Barcelona rental, one of the first recommendations I received from my landlord was to check out the Carmel Bunkers at the Turo de la Rovira nearby. It has one of the best views of the city, she said. The hill was a strategic location for an anti-aircraft battery structure that went up in 1937, a time where a lot of bunkers were built quickly in Barcelona to shelter residents from the aerial bombs dropped by Franco’s Fascist allies during the Spanish Civil War. I had only been a few hours in Barcelona and someone actually mentioned the Spanish Civil War. I could already begin to see the difference in how the cultural memory of the war is dealt with in Barcelona compared to my experience in Madrid. In general, I found Barcelona’s cultural institutions such as Montjuic Castle, el Born Culture, and Memory Center or the Carmel bunkers, to better confront the memory of the war. 

Confronting the legacy of the Spanish Civil War in Barcelona might be less controversial than in Madrid. Barcelona is not the capital and was not on the front line during the war. After Franco’s victory, Madrid, especially, was to communicate, through its urban form and architectural language, the image of New Spain and its Falangist principles. Franco’s takeover of Madrid, a city that has resisted a two and half year siege against his forces so that it became an icon of anti-Fascism, was ideologically important. During the Francoist era, Barcelona was neglected. Franco’s totalitarian regime suppressed Catalan culture and nationalism in Barcelona. The Catalan language was forbidden in government institutions and in the media. Autonomous Catalan institutions were abolished. After Franco’s death and Spain’s transition into a democracy, Barcelona was able to begin restoring its Catalan identity, which meant an automatic denunciation of the policies and decisions made during the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship. 

Figure 14–22, The Carmel Bunkers, Barcelona

From below, I could see the Carmel bunkers sticking out, covered in graffiti. The spot is popular among locals and tourists as a place to hang out or have a picnic and enjoy the expansive views of the city. After the war, a large number of informal settlements emerged in Barcelona due to the lack of housing and the disused anti-aircraft battery became the home of Els Canons shanty town until 1990. From 2011, Museu D’historia De Barcelona (Barcelona History Museum) has transformed the structure into a heritage site with indoor and outdoor exhibition spaces that walk through the history of the bunkers.

After a week in Barcelona, I went on a Spanish Civil War tour led by a British historian named Nick Lloyd. The tour walks through sites in the Gothic Quarter, Placa de Catalunya, and the Rambla, where significant events and fighting took place during the years 1936–1939. When Nick asked us why we were interested in such a tour, few people had a similar reaction, that they have been in Spain for a while or multiple times and they haven’t heard Spaniards discuss the Spanish Civil War much. The beginning of the tour addressed the revolutionary and anarchist beginnings of the war in Barcelona and buildings that had become iconic during the conflict, like the Telephone Exchange building, where the clashes of the May Events started. 

The May Events or the May Days refer to the five days in May 1937, where deadly clashes took place between the different parties and militias of the Republican side in the streets of Barcelona. The confrontation started when the Assault Guards, sent by the Republican government to take over the Telephone Exchange building that was controlled by the working-class anarchist CNT group. In Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell, who came to Barcelona in 1936 to fight in the Spanish Civil War against Fascism and was on guard in one of the POUM-controlled buildings during the May Days, describes this bloody and complicated confrontation. His account shows how the city was transformed into a battleground and its streets and buildings were divided among the different political factions:

“What the devil was happening, who was fighting whom and who was winning, was at first very difficult to discover. The people of Barcelona are so used to street fighting and so familiar with the local geography that they knew by a kind of instinct which political party will hold which streets and which buildings. A foreigner is at a hopeless disadvantage. Looking out from the observatory, I could grasp that the Ramblas, which is one of the principal streets of the town, formed a dividing line. To the right of the Ramblas the working class quarters were solidly Anarchist; to the left a confused fight was going on among the tortuous by-streets, but on that side the PSUC and the Assault Guards were more or less in control. Up at our end of the Ramblas, round the Palaza de Cataluna, the position was so complicated that it would have been quite unintelligible if every building hadn’t flown a party flag.”³

Towards the end of the tour, we stopped at the church of Sant Felip Neri. The façade of the church carries the scars of the war. Attached to the church is a convent where children sheltered from the bombardment by Franco’s air force on January 30, 1938. On that date, bombs fell on the square, damaging the whole building and killing 42 people, most of them children. During the Franco dictatorship, a different story was told about the events that took place in Sant Felip Neri square. According to Francoist propaganda, the marks on the façade were caused by bullets from anarchist executions of church priests. Today, next to the scarred façade, a black plaque reads: “In memory of the victims of the bombing of Sant Felip Neri. 42 people died here - most of them children due to the action of Franco's air force on January 30, 1938.”

Figure 23–26, Church of Sant Felip Neri, Barcelona

Unearthing a Roman Past

Barcelona’s urban development was stunted under Franco, with the exception of one prominent project, the opening of the Avinguda de la Catedral (Cathedral Avenue) in front of the Barcelona Cathedral. In the map of Barcelona, it is one of the wide avenues that carves through the historical urban fabric, right next to the Gothic quarter. The project wasn’t envisioned by Franco’s government. The opening of the Cathedral Avenue was first proposed in Cerida’s renowned urban plan for Barcelona in 1859. Since then, it had been proposed and approved in multiple urban reforms. In each plan, the objectives were sanitation, improved circulation, and better views of the Cathedral. Critics of this urban intervention feared the loss of centuries-old residential and mercantile buildings and the network of narrow streets that gave the area a unique historical character. The bombs dropped by Franco’s air force during the Spanish Civil War flattened a lot of buildings that stood in the way of opening up the Cathedral Avenue.⁴ So when the war was over, the project resumed as planned. Franco’s interest in the project grew bigger for its economic potential and ideological implications for his regime when Roman ruins, discovered in the early 20^th century, took a central importance.

Figure 27, Cathedral of Barcelona

Figure 28–30, Views of the Cathedral Avenue, Barcelona

In front of the Gothic Cathedral of Barcelona stood the Roman city wall that marked the northwestern edge of Barcino (Barcelona’s ancient name). In the early 20^th century, sections of the walls that ran along Tapineria Street were discovered and their restoration and disclosure were completed in 1953.⁵ Although the area’s architectural legacy encompasses many historical periods, its Roman one was highlighted and selected for restoration by the new government. The revelation of Barcelona’s Roman past was a fitting message for the regime’s Falangist identity that liked to align itself with the Roman and Hapsburg Empires. The excavations continued following the path of the Roman wall adjacent to the Cathedral towards Placa Nova where two Roman towers mark the city’s gate. Further destruction of the old houses in between the towers revealed an ancient military belt, which formed the northwestern edge of the Roman settlement.⁶ Not only did the project destroy whatever stood in its way to expose the Roman ruins, a non-surviving arch that was part of the aqueduct that carried water to Barcino was recreated next to one of the towers.

Figures 31–33, Barcino’s Roman walls and the two towers that formed the city’s gate

Figure 34, A reconstruction of a section of the aqueduct that carried water to the old city of Barcino

References

Sundus Al-Bayati is the 2019 recipient of the H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellowship. All photographs are by the author, except where otherwise specified.

On this traveling fellowship I have enjoyed the ability to access a host of masterpieces, pictures I’ve seen only in art history books or on a screen. Every time I stood in front of one of these works of art, I reminded myself of how lucky I am to be on this journey. Likewise, when I altered my travel itinerary for the fifth or sixth time to go to Spain to look at the effects of the Spanish Civil War, I was excited by the prospect of seeing artworks by prominent Spanish artists like Velazquez, Goya, and Picasso.

Pablo Picasso’s Guernica is perhaps the most well-known artwork about the tragedy of war. When I entered the room where Guernica is displayed in the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, I was agape by the size of the painting. A collage in grey tones depicts a jumble of contorted shapes resembling figures and animals screaming in pain and sprawled on a canvas that measures 25 ft, 6in across and 11 ft, 5 in tall. The painting represents the bombing of Guernica in the Basque region by Nazi forces in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War, but it could be describing the trauma of any war. 

Figure 1. Guernica, Pablo Picasso, 1937. Image from: www.museoreinasofia.es

The power of Picasso’s anti-war message in Guernica involves an embarrassing and symbolic incident at the UN where a tapestry reproduction of the painting is displayed. In February 2003, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell headed to the UN to plead his case for the war on Iraq while Picasso’s Guernica hung behind him. His staff noticed the irony of Guernica’s anti-war screaming faces and asked to cover the painting while Colin Powell gave a speech about why they should invade Iraq. The New Yorker’s cover from March 17^th, 2003, (three days before the Iraq invasion) captured this moment in history showing Picasso’s Guernica draped in red curtains.

Figure 2. New Yorker cover from March 17, 2003. Image from: www.newyorker.com

During the Spanish Civil War, Madrid became a symbol of anti-fascist resistance, enduring a two-and-a-half-year siege, fighting against the rebel forces led by Francisco Franco. Madrid was the first major city in history to experience aerial bombardments of its residential neighborhoods and civilians, which was ordered by Franco as punishment and aided by German and Italian aircraft to extinguish the Republican resistance.¹ For a city that was bombed and attacked for such a long time, it was surprising to find out when I got there that the traces of the Spanish Civil War in Madrid, a city that has become a symbol of resistance against fascism, were hidden and undetectable. During the Franco dictatorship, post-war reconstruction was a means to bury any evidence of Spanish resistance against Franco and his Nationalist army. By rebuilding destroyed residential neighborhoods like Arguelles, which was heavily bombed during the siege of Madrid, patching up ruined iconic buildings, and sometimes removing a building altogether as if it never existed, as in the case of the barracks of La Montana de Principe Pio, later generations would grow up unaware of the historical events that shaped their city. 

The inability to read the effects of the Spanish Civil War in Madrid was not only the product of Franco’s censorship and controlled rhetoric but a characteristic of the amnesty law that was agreed on as Spain was transitioning into a parliamentary government following Franco’s death in 1975. For the purpose of national reconciliation, political parties on the left and right agreed to create the Pact of Forgetting, a law that prevented invoking the legacy of Franco and the Spanish Civil War, as well as not prosecuting war crimes committed during the war and the Francoist period. The consequences of this law permeate every aspect of Spanish material culture, including its post-Civil War architecture and monuments such as the controversial Valley of the Fallen in San Lorenzo de El Escorial, built by the dictator himself.

My search for the traces of the Spanish Civil War in Madrid was proving difficult, but I was aided by a book that I’ve come across by two architects and professors at the Polytechnic University of Madrid, Madrid Bombardeada: Cartografia de la Destruccion 1936–1939 (Madrid Bombed: Mapping of the Destruction 1936–1939). The book recounts the difficulties the two authors faced in their extensive research to piece together and map the damage inflicted on Madrid during the Civil War. It is supplemented by a large map of Madrid where instances of impact by bombs or artillery are registered in red, resembling blood stains. With a glance at the map, one is able to have a sense about the areas that were damaged most during the civil war. So, with map in hand, I walked around Madrid trying to distinguish what was destroyed and rebuilt and what was untouched during the war. For example, the Arguelles neighborhood, north of the Royal Palace, sustained a lot of damage during the battle of Madrid from being so close to the attacks that were launched from Casa de Campo Park. 

Figure 3. Map illustrating the location and extent of the damage in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War. Image from the book Madrid Bombardeada: Cartografia de la Destruccion 1936–1939.

To understand the effects of the Spanish Civil War on the urban environment, I decided to look more closely into two iconic sites in and around Madrid: La Montana de Principe Pio, where the Egyptian Templo de Debod stands, and the Alcazar de Toledo, some 45 miles outside of Madrid. 

Military Barracks of La Montana de Principe Pio (La Cuartel de la Montana)

La Montana de Principe Pio is a hill in Madrid where La Cuartel de la Montana, a 19^th-century military barracks used to stand until its demolition after the Spanish Civil War. The site of the barracks holds a symbolic significance for Madrid as the place where Spanish fighters in the Spanish War of Independence were executed by Napoleon’s soldiers in 1808, as it was famously depicted in Francisco de Goya’s painting, The 3rd of May 1808. The military barracks were built in 1860 following the Carlist Wars close to the Royal Palace.² In 1936, the barracks were the site of yet another iconic uprising that propelled the Spanish Civil War in Madrid. A group of rebel Nationalist officers opposed to the Republican government sieged the barracks with a plan to march out, but their coup d’état ended after a bloody confrontation with Republican militias. 

Figure 4. The 3rd of May 1808 in Madrid, or “The Executions,” Francisco de Goya, 1814. Image from: www.museodelprado.es 

As the barracks lay in ruins, both the Republican government during the war and the Franco regime after the war targeted the site for ambitious and representative projects that sought to communicate their interpretation of the events of July 1936 and post-war Madrid. For the Republicans, the barracks were the site of heroic Madrilenian resistance against fascism and for the Nationalists, it was the place of the first dissenting voices. The government of the Spanish Republic had set up a reconstruction committee for the planning of post-war Madrid and the plan included a new parliament building on the site of the barracks.

After Franco won the war, a new architectural style and planning were required to mark the ideological and political shift in Spain. Similar to Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, the architectural style advanced by the Falangist Party were the grand and monumental architecture of 17^th-century Madrid that aligned a New Spain with the imperial Hapsburg dynasty. The planning scheme included a proposal to build the headquarters of the Falange party on top of the former barracks. In the end, the grand reconstruction project never materialized. According to Olivia Munoz-Rojas, Franco wanted to distance himself from the fascist governments of Hitler and Mussolini who expressed their ideologies through monumental architectural projects. In addition, Spain was struggling economically after the Civil War, which led to the abandonment of these grand plans. The site eventually became a public space and the chosen location to exhibit the Templo de Debod, a gift from the Egyptian government in 1968. The site joins Parque del Oeste to the north, where the frontline during the Spanish Civil War passed through.

Figure 5–7. Templo de Debod and surrounding park in Madrid.

Strolling in the park today, it’s difficult to imagine that one of the bloodiest confrontations of the war in Madrid took place there. The only physical traces that are seen in the northern side of the park are derelict remains of bunkers, nestled between the trees, with no sign or plaque explaining what they are or the charged historical legacy of this site. In Madrid, the legacy of the Spanish Civil War is well buried and curated by years of Franco’s dictatorship.

Figures 8–15. Bunkers from the Spanish Civil War in Parque del Oeste.

Figure 16–17. Bullet holes on a statue of Federico Rubio in Parque del Oeste.

The Alcazar of Toledo

From Madrid, I took the train to Toledo, about 35 minutes. Toledo is a popular tourist destination for its preserved medieval layout and rich architectural legacy that includes a Gothic cathedral, a mosque from the 10^th century, synagogues and the towering fortress, the Alcazar of Toledo, where the Toledo Army Museum is located. During the Spanish Civil War, the Alcazar of Toledo became another symbolic site in an ideological war. Between July and September 1936, Nationalists and right-wing groups and their families occupied the fortress and fought against the Republican forces as they bombed and destroyed most of the building. The battle to win the Alcazar was driven by its charged symbolic value rather than the need for territorial control. The fortress that dominates Toledo’s views was the royal residence of Spanish kings for centuries after they re-captured the town from the Moors in 1085.³ Before the 1936 siege, the fortress housed the Military Academy in Toledo. For the Nationalists, the Alcazar of Toledo is an icon of Spanish imperial history that cannot be lost to the Republicans. The extensive damage to the fortress can be seen in one of the Army Museum’s small rooms where a miniature model shows the Alcazar in its original state (plexiglass) and ruined state after the siege of Alcazar.

Figure 18–21. Views of the Alcazar of Toledo and its surroundings
 

The post-war story of the Alcazar of Toledo shows how architecture can be utilized to control the narrative of a place or the retelling of its history by those in power. After Franco won the war, the fortress was left in ruins and its image was disseminated and used in propaganda material as a memorial to the Nationalist victory.⁴ The restoration of the building started in 1950, many years after the war ended. Franco paid special attention to the reconstruction of the fortress establishing it as a tourist destination that celebrated Spanish victories, most importantly of which is the patriotic display of courage by the Nationalist rebels during the Siege of Alcazar.⁵ By turning the Alcazar to a commemorative space for his own conquest of Toledo, Franco aligned himself with Spain’s imperial rulers, strengthening his image as protector of Spain and further legitimizing the dictatorship. 

Figure 22–26. Views from inside the Alcazar of Toledo.

Inside the Army Museum at the Alcazar of Toledo, I walked through many rooms that displayed weapons, apparel, miniature models of battles, and objects that celebrated the greatness of the Spanish Empire and its colonial reach. At some point, I was confronted with a crypt that contains the remains of Nationalist soldiers that died during the Siege of Alcazar, but I couldn’t find an exhibit that discussed the iconic event that led to the total destruction of the fortress during one of the most contentious episodes of the Spanish Civil War. I was surprised to find that critical history of the building was confined to one small room on the periphery of the museum floor under the name "The History of the Alcazar." When the Army Museum announced it would move from Madrid to the Alcazar of Toledo in 2003, it caused controversy that the collection would be housed in a famously Francoist icon.

Figures 27–32. Model shows the damaged Alcazar of Toledo after the siege of the building during the Spanish Civil War. The glass containing the ruins represents the original building before destruction. Photos were taken at the Army Museum housed in the Alcazar of Toledo.

Figures 33–36. Representations and photographs from newspapers reporting on the damage of the Alcazar of Toledo. Photos were taken at the Army Museum housed in the Alcazar of Toledo. 

Traveling to the Alcazar of Toledo cemented my understanding that the historical memory of the Spanish Civil War is still fighting to break from the controlled rhetoric molded by years of the Franco dictatorship. Spain is still unsure of how to treat its historical monuments that were built after the war and until Franco’s death or re-tell the story of Spanish Civil War from a different point of view in fear of opening past wounds, which means a lot of scars that were inflicted by the winning side remain hidden and unaddressed. My experience in Madrid re-contextualized my view of Berlin and its incessant struggle to understand and come to terms with its memorials and architectural legacy from the Nazi era and World War II. What is Spain going to do to face its past? 

References

³ Raychaudhuri, Anindya. The Spanish Civil War: Exhuming a Buried Past. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013.

⁴ Aronsson, Peter, and Gabriella Elgenius. National Museums and Nation-Building in Europe, 1750-2010: Mobilization and Legitimacy, Continuity and Change. London: Routledge, 2017.

Seeing the need for continued conversation extending from last year’s successful Method Acts series, the organizers of the 2021–2022 workshop series aimed to continue to explore the constellation of issues framing this call for expansive attention to architectural methodologies. Issues of power, agency, and authorship framed this year’s series while continuing the much-needed conversation on bias, exclusion, and accessibility brought forward by last year's workshops. This year’s events were organized by our 2022 Graduate Student Advisory Committee consisting of Leslie Lodwick, Charlette Caldwell, Katerina Bong, Antonio Pacheco, and Aslıhan Günhan.

Screen shot of Method Acts workshop "Questions of Archives and Resources"

We wondered how this generation of scholars would learn to navigate shifting global frameworks as well as how shifting guidelines on health and safety would affect practical and logistical concerns around conducting research. This lack of sure-footedness seemed to highlight questions about the fundamental nature of knowledge itself and how these are made and known in architectural history, while on seemingly perpetually shifting global platforms. Additionally, we asked what lessons were learned from the last two years of the global pandemic and how we might apply questions gleaned from our contemporary sphere to our own work.

The early career scholars’ research clarified, challenged, and extended these questions in exciting and, at times, unexpected ways through the Method Acts Workshops. The workshops were thematically organized around questions of fieldwork and archives. In the first workshop, fieldwork, Javairia Shahid presented her work on the history of the Calcutta Emigration Camp in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries constructed via field-related documents; Mingqian Liu addressed phenomenological methods of preservation research in a residential neighborhood, Dongsi, in Beijing; and Abhishek Bhutoria highlighted experimental methods needed to write the history of domestic architecture in Barpak, a Nepali Himalayan village destroyed by the 2015 earthquake. In addition to exemplifying the creativity of architectural methods, these researchers also employed art, stories, imagining, remembering, and song to weave narratives and accounts of the built environment.

In the second workshop organized around questions of the archive, Matthew Allen discussed technologies of architectural software and how they might be understood as frameworks for rethinking periodization; Burcu Köken’s research on the archives of Turkish architectural journal Mimarlık prodded temporal linearity in architectural histories, and Chelsea Spencer proposed a qualitative reading of numbers in construction archives toward reconsidering histories of architectural speculation in defining modernity. All three presenters’ research methodology came together to ask broader questions about assembling fragmented and abstruse information while making it accessible and legible for the general readers. Numbers, software codes, and non-English archives (Turkish) also sparked discussions of translation and interpretation that directly impacted how scholars interacted with these forms of language. Challenging the conventions of archival methodology through Method Acts provided a fruitful discussion and platform for further exploration.

Each presenter shared texts and images central to their work prior to engaging with a direct conversation with workshop participants. Challenging the conventions of methodology through Method Acts provided a fruitful discussion and platform for further exploration of architectural history in the changing global dynamics. While the Covid-19 related lockdown initiated the Method Acts in 2020, we are hoping to continue our conversations on architectural history in an ongoing and global context.

Sundus Al-Bayati is the 2019 recipient of the H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellowship. All photographs are by the author, except where otherwise specified.

The Unending War 

“So, what do you think of Baghdad?” is a question I was asked by family and friends in the month I was “home,” visiting for the first time in 10 years. It was the first destination in my fellowship travel that I was in a place where the nuances of culture and language were accessible to me. I wasn’t a tourist this time. When I envisioned my itinerary for this fellowship, I didn’t include Baghdad because the city is still in a state of war but also it is because of Baghdad that I went on this journey to see what can be learned from the long-term consequences of war on how cities develop. But when does war end and reconstruction begin? What do these long years of recovery look like? Berlin and Warsaw allowed me to observe established models of post-war reconstruction and their effects across a long span of time. Baghdad, however, is still undergoing sporadic conflict and political instability and offers a look at those intermediate years of struggle and recovery where consequential decisions about the urban environment are made.

Growing up during wartime becomes normal. After leaving Iraq and having the perspective of a normal life, I was able to start to process my experience and realize how unusual our lives were. I was born three months before the first Gulf War and the beginning of the thirteen year-long sanctions by the United States Security Council on Iraq as punishment for Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. I was thirteen years old when the US invaded Iraq under false pretenses. I was twenty when I left for the US. My sister was born two years after the Iran-Iraq war; my brother two years before its end. My mom and dad lived through the end of the British-instilled Iraqi monarchy, the establishment of the Baath Party, the rising of Saddam Hussein to power and his wars. War creates its own timeline through which we measure our lives. It permeates our everyday language. Significant life events are situated in relation to their proximity or distance from war, “so and so graduated three years after the war; so and so left five years before the war.” Sometimes it’s the “war with Iran,” sometimes it’s the “war with Kuwait,” but when it is just “war,” it refers to the most recent one, the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. 

The Consequences of War 

So how does Baghdad look? Ruined. It is safer now than it was before I left. The bombings that used to disrupt our daily lives and keep us confined to our homes have subsided and public life is thriving again with new cafes, restaurants, and more recently, malls. However, unfettered corruption in governmental and public institutions and non-existent regulations are accelerating the decline of Baghdadi neighborhoods. They are destroying any historical character left in this city. 

I arrived in Baghdad from Istanbul at 3 am. The Baghdad International Airport is unlike any in the world. People aren’t allowed to show up to the airport to pick you up for security reasons. There are shuttles that take you to a public square where your family or special taxis can pick you up. However, a friend who has connections in airport security managed to get my brother on a vetted list of people who can enter the airport within the specific time window of my landing there. So there was my brother, taller than I remember, and now with a beard, waiting for me. We hadn’t seen each other for 10 years. 

On the drive from the airport, I looked out the window to see what had changed. There are the quintessential palm trees still, albeit diminished in numbers. Concrete blast barriers and security checkpoints are still lining up the streets, the outcome of years of suicide bombs (Figure 1). When I arrived to the Harithiya neighborhood, where my mother and brother live, it was too dark to discern yet how this once quiet and old neighborhood had dramatically changed. I used to come to this neighborhood once a week, to my grandparents’ house where all my aunts, uncles and their kids would convene every Friday. Now my grandparents’ house, which used to have a huge garden where we’d played soccer as kids, had been demolished. Five new houses sprung up in its place, inhabited by different households, including my brother’s. The houses are tightly packed next to one another to utilize every centimeter of highly valuable land. Where is the garden?

The fate that my grandparents’ house met is part of an uncontrolled and chaotic construction trend that is changing the shape and urban quality of many Baghdadi neighborhoods. Older houses with gardens and an architecture that worked with the hot climate of Baghdad are being scrapped to accommodate multiple houses that cover the whole lot, and often the sidewalks. The streets that I used to roam and play in with my cousins are no longer walkable. Cars, escaping the traffic on major streets, crowd the inner neighborhood streets and with no sidewalks, eradicate any sense of pedestrian life.

A consequence of the 2003 War is the spread of corruption at all levels of governmental institutions, not excluding the municipality regulating construction practices in Iraq. Violations of building regulations are routinely permitted through bribes. This is why public sidewalks are disappearing or multi-family apartment buildings are popping up next to single family houses. Corruption, a long lasting consequence of the war, is destroying what’s left of Baghdad’s identity. The old ways of building that mitigated the harsh summer heat are replaced with overbuilt concrete lots that lack any open space for shade or ventilation. As new houses are getting narrower to fit as many as possible on the lot, they are growing taller, violating height regulations and transforming the scale of traditional neighborhoods. Along with an egregious mishmash of façade materials and styles that are often meant to communicate socio-economic status, Baghdadi neighborhoods are breaking with historical and architectural continuity. 

I sat through many amusing conversations listening to my mom’s friend telling of her treacherous experience navigating government bureaucracies to have permission to demolish her old house and build three apartments in its place. With every step of the process that has been ongoing for a few months already, she was turned away for trivial things such as not having enough photocopies of a certain document or a mysterious old unpaid electricity bill totaling two dollars. Every obstacle would set her back a few extra weeks, unless, of course she reached for her purse and dispersed some “red ones,” referring to the 25,000 Iraqi Dinar bill. My mom’s friend’s quandary is exacerbated by the fact that she was inexperienced in smoothly handing out bribes. It was both comical and unsettling to watch her friends teach her how to be a smooth operator, otherwise, they said “you’d still be in the same place next year.”

A lot has changed in the 10 years I’ve been away from home. New types of architectural projects have appeared as both a symptom of the current dysfunctional state of government and as an escape from a present that is lacking in basic needs. I was struck by the sight of the gated residential developments going up all around Baghdad (Figure 2–3). Baghdad has traditionally been a low-rise sprawling city, so the sprouting of these towers significantly alters its shape and scale. These new self-sufficient neighborhoods consist of apartment buildings, hospitals, pharmacies, schools, etc. They become cities of their own, possessing an alternate reality shaped by real estate developers and independent of the one run by the government outside its gates. That’s not the only thing rising up in Baghdad’s skies. Baghdad is experiencing an increased popularity and proliferation of shopping malls. From my mother’s house, I can see the electronic billboards of Baghdad Mall (Figure 4). People in Baghdad kept telling me that the only new things that get built these days are restaurants and malls because “what else is there to do than eat and shop?” 

The rise in the number of shopping malls going up around Baghdad can be explained further by this paragraph from Omar Sirri on the connection between the political situation in Iraq and shopping malls:

“The popularity of Baghdad’s new shopping malls does not mean the city’s residents have acquiesced to this order of things. Nor do they believe shopping centres are the most ideal places of pleasure and entertainment. Rather, during years of physical insecurity in Baghdad, the secured shopping malls—with their metal detectors, watch towers, and armed private security contractors—became safe places in which residents could ‘breathe’. Insecurity in the city helps facilitate new shopping malls as sites of social pleasure that are vital to everyday survival; they are frequented in part because nothing else is on offer.”¹

Figure 1 Unsightly Concrete blast walls still stand in many parts of Baghdad

Figure 2 Iraq Gate apartment complex. Image from http://iraqgate.com/

Figure 3 Al-Ayadi apartment complex. Image from http://www.ayadigroup.com/

Figure 4 Baghdad Mall in the background

The Scars of War 

I was one year old when the U.S Air Force dropped two “smart bombs” on the air-raid shelter of Al-Amiriya in Baghdad. The attack resulted in the death of approximately 400 women and children. The numbers vary as the book that documented the number of civilians sheltering in the building was incinerated inside. The first bomb made a hole in the three-meter-thick reinforced concrete. The second one entered through the opening and exploded, incinerating everyone inside.²

The shelter is not too far from my maternal grandparent’s home in the Amiriya neighborhood. I went to see the building with my mother and aunt on the way to my uncle’s house, which used to be my grandparents'. As I was approaching the shelter, it became clear that it is not open to the public nor is it a memorial space as it was suggested online. The building looked deserted and closed. Piles of trash stand inside of its fenced walls and broken glass is everywhere. My aunt asked a guy on the street if the shelter is open. He told her to go over to the gate and knock and a security officer should be there to answer her question. So we went over and knocked on the gate and waited. A minute later, a security officer showed up. We asked him if the shelter is open and if we can take a look inside. He asked if we were journalists; he is not allowed to let in journalists. I told him that I am an architect writing about war and destruction. He seemed hesitant. He said he usually lets people in who want to say prayers for the souls that were lost on that miserable night in 1991. He said he often had visitors who lost their loved ones inside the shelter.

The kind security officer opened the gate for us. Before we entered the shelter, we stopped to look at the memorial commemorating the victims of the shelter (Figure 5–6). The officer said he is tired of chasing after kids who would break in and destroy the gravestones. He didn’t understand those kids. He asked us if we are okay to go inside the shelter on our own or if we need him to come with us. He warned that it is completely dark inside and there might be stray dogs. We all voted that he should guide us through the building. We didn’t understand at the beginning that this building was abandoned. There was no light or electricity. It was open to the elements. We turned our phone flashlights on as we entered. I held my mom’s hands, worried she’d trip over the debris and broken pieces of glass, concrete, and wires. Through the main entrance, black and white photocopies on cheap paper that display the victims’ portraits are taped to the walls. We entered through the heavy steel door of the shelter, which after it was subjected to the intense heat from the missile, melted and sealed shut, trapped everyone inside. Then it was dark. We walked slowly and carefully until there it was, frozen in time and unchanged, the hole in the ceiling from the missile 30 years ago, illuminating the darkness below. War is cruel.

Figure 5–6 A memorial for the victims of Al-Amiriya Shelter

Figure 7 Entrance to the shelter

Figure 8 Photocopies of the victims’ portraits taped to the wall of Al-Amiriya Shelter

Figure 9 A meter-thick steel door

Figure 10 One of the shelter’s corridors, a blackened wall on the right

Figure 11 The hole in the reinforced concrete ceiling where the missile entered

Figure 12 Flowers for the dead lay underneath the missile’s entry hole

Figure 13 Walking towards the exit from the unlit and pitch-black interior of the shelter

Figure 14 Monument to commemorate the victims of the Amiriya Shelter stands outside the building

There have been a lot of bombings in Baghdad since 2003, but the memory of some lingers with Iraqis more than others for their unprecedented brutality and terror, like the Karrada explosion in 2016. A suicide truck bomb exploded in the Shia’ neighborhood of Karrada next to the popular shopping center Al-Hadi during the holy month of Ramadan. The explosion killed 340 civilians and injured hundreds. I wasn’t living in Baghdad by that time. When I was in Baghdad, my mother and her friend took me to the Karrada neighborhood to take a look at the site under construction. 

Figure 15–16 Reconstruction of the shopping center that was destroyed in the 2016 Karrada

In the Company of Women: Women and Urban Space in Baghdad 

I grew up knowing Baghdad from the car while being driven around by my parents, the school bus, and other adults. I remember being able to play outside in my neighborhood and ride my bike with my neighbor until one day it wasn’t acceptable. I had crossed the threshold from kid to girl. Hereafter, I mostly experienced the city in the car as I was going to and from school or from one house to another. The public realm of the city wasn’t accessible to me. It was the domain of men and boys. With time, it became uncomfortable walking outside and being subjected to unwanted looks and advances. The war and unsafe conditions on the streets only pushed us girls and women more inside the house. The first time I experienced the joy of walking on my own and exploring the city was when I lived in Damascus for a year when I was 19. 

But things are different in Baghdad now. The city is safer for everyone but it is still a gendered space. My mode of exploration for the past four months of this fellowship involved a lot of walking around, even during the cold winter of Poland. But here in Baghdad, especially in some of the historical areas, I felt uncomfortable as a woman walking around with a DSLR camera. I felt myself walking fast and not stopping too long to get a good picture. Quickly, I learned to explore in a different way in Baghdad, not by myself, but in the company of other women. My mother, her friends, and my own friends were more than happy to take me around Baghdad and to accompany me to site visits. My favorite moments were when they told me that I showed them a new part of Baghdad they’ve never seen.

The State of Architectural Heritage in Iraq 

The sad thing about the destruction of architecture in Iraq is that it hasn’t only been the result of direct fighting during the war or from suicide bombs, but mainly from the failure of the government and municipalities to protect architectural heritage and enact regulation that would prevent the ceaseless destruction of historical neighborhoods. It is a manifestation of the long-lasting effects of war in crippling a country’s soul for years to come. The crumbling buildings of Al-Rasheed Street are not the product of bombs but of a broken system in a war-torn country that is still struggling to form a stable nation-state and suffers political and social instability. As Iraq is still struggling to address basic economic and social needs of its society, its architecture is reflecting the corruption and dysfunction of its institutions. 

I don’t think I’ve ever been to Al-Rasheed Street before this visit even though I’ve read and written about it before. It was the first boulevard built by the Ottomans in 1916 and is one of the most important cultural and political spaces in Baghdad (Figure 17–26). Most recently, the 2019 demonstrations that stunned the country in the biggest form of civil unrest since 2003 also manifested in Al-Rasheed Street, despite endangering its already collapsing historical structures. The state of Al-Rasheed Street now almost brought me to tears. I’ve seen images of it in its heyday with its beautiful colonnades shading pedestrians from the summer heat. Now its colonnades and balconies are tilting and collapsing. The life around it, so accustomed to loss and destruction, keeps on going, almost oblivious to its slow death. I started my walk at Maidan Square and walked through Al-Rasheed Street until I arrived to the most famous and beloved street in Baghdad, Al-Mutanabbi Street (Figure 27–31). Named after the Abbasid poet from the 10^th century, Al-Mutanabbi, this whole pedestrian-only street is dedicated to one thing: selling books. Established bookstores and small book stalls line up both its sides while pedestrians walk in the middle browsing new releases or used old books. This peaceful avenue wasn’t spared the violence either. In 2007, a suicide bomb exploded there and killed around 100 people. The street has just celebrated a major renovation right when I arrived in Baghdad in December. 

Figure 17–23 Deteriorating buildings on the historical Rasheed Street

Figure 24 The Abboud building, a modernist building by the Iraqi architect Rifaat Al-Chadirji, also neglected and deteriorating

Figure 25 A man that works in one of the shops on Al-Rasheed Street. His friend asked me to take his photo while I was photographing the building

Figure 26 Haydar Khana Mosque,1826

Figure 27–30 The newly renovated Mutanabbi Street

Figure 31 The famous Shabandar Café is an old and beloved space in Al-Mutanabbi Street since 1907

Baghdad was established as the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate in 762 A.D. There are few remnants of Abbasid architecture in the city, although neglected and in desperate need of repairs. One wonders how long before they, too, disappear from the urban fabric and the public’s consciousness. While I was out with my newly acquired friend, Zina, in a café near Al-Mutanabbi called Al-Mdalaal, the owner approached us with a flier. He told us about an upcoming trip he is organizing to visit Al-Ukhaider Fortress, the Abbasid structure south of Karbala, Iraq. I was delighted. I’ve been trying to find a way to go to Al-Ukhaider and this opportunity just fell from the sky. I took the flier. I went with my mother, her friend, and Zina on a day-long trip (Figure 32–49). The structure seemed to be in a good shape on the outside, probably due to its isolated location in the desert of Karbalaa. It is not protected nor maintained, as evident by the graffiti and trash left by visitors. After exploring it on the inside for a while, it was clear that this historical building is falling apart as well. It was built in 778 by Isa ibn Musa, the nephew of Abbasid Caliph As-Saffah. The massive structure encompasses courtyards, residences, and a mosque. The building displays the early architectural innovation of the Abbasid period, such as the use of the pointed and transverse arches, which became characteristic of Islamic architecture. It is one of the earliest examples of Abbasid palaces that exists till this day.³ However, it has been on the Tentative List of UNESCO World Heritage sites since 2000.

Figure 32–49 Al-Ukhaider Fortress

My favorite piece of architecture during this visit in Baghdad has to be the Zumurrud Khatun Mausoleum (Figure 50–59). It’s another gem from the Abbasid period, which displays the unique nine-layered, conical muqarnas dome rising over tombs of important Imams or political figures (Figure 51). But this was built by sitt Zubayada, the mother and wife of Abbasid Caliphs. She commissioned the building of the mausoleum while she was still alive.⁴ The mausoleum is situated in Sheikh Marouf Cemetery in the Karkh side of Baghdad (Figure 58). The tomb is enclosed in an octagonal structure that supports the base of the conical dome. The muqarnas dome is pierced with openings letting daylight to the inside of the tomb space creating a mesmerizing play of light and shadow. On the outside, the walls of the enclosure are covered with geometric patterns and pointed arches. When we arrived at the tomb, we were met by a poor family that lived in or near the cemetery. They offered to guide us for a little tip. The man told us that all his family is buried next to the mausoleum and that’s where he will be, too. He guided me up the narrow and claustrophobic staircase from inside the room of the mausoleum to the top of the base where I had a good look at the cemetery and Baghdad at large. I was able to take a closer look at the muqarnas dome on the outside (Figure 54–56). I saw it is cracking and splitting and noticed the steel cables trying to hold it together. I worried about this beautiful and forgotten spot and its eventual loss if the Iraqi state continues to neglect its monuments.

Figure 50 Zummurd Khatun Mausoleum, 1202

Figure 51 Conical muqarnas dome from the inside. Three windows and small holes in the muqarnas dome allow daylight to enter the space below.

Figure 52–53 Ornate brickwork and pointed arches from the Abbasid period

Figure 54–56 Muqarnas dome on the outside shows cracking and wearing away of some parts

Figure 57 Domed entrance to the mausoleum from the later Ottoman period

Figure 58 Sheikh Marouf Cemetery where Zummurd Khatun Mausoleum is located

Figure 59 The current state of the cemetery

On the way back from Al-Ukhaider, which is some 100 miles from Baghdad, my mom and others suggested to the Midalaal crew to organize a tour of historic sites in Baghdad. They welcomed the idea and planned one right away. So on a nice sunny day in the mild winter of Baghdad, we went to the Midalaal café, had our Arabic coffees, and set out to walk around. We arrived at the Abbasid Palace, and while others went to look at another historical building nearby, I beat the crowd to the palace to take some photos. I entered the quiet courtyard of the palace through a monumental iwan, ornate with geometric and vegetal designs characteristic of Islamic architecture (Figure 60–66). Historians are not sure if this structure was actually used as a palace or if it was a madrasa (school). Its design is very similar to Al-Madrasa Al-Mustansyria in Baghdad. Opposite to the entrance and on the other side of the courtyard, stands another elaborately ornate iwan, which is flanked by the most striking design element of this two-story palace, muqarnas-decorated arcades. It was the first time I saw anything like it.

Figure 60 Entrance to the Abbasid Palace

Figure 61 Entry iwan of the Abbasid Palace

Figure 62–66 Geometric and vegetal brickwork designs on the exterior walls and entry iwan of the Abbasid Palace in Baghdad

Figure 67–72 Interior courtyard of the palace

Figure 73–74 Muqarnas-decorated arcades

References:

Bridget Maley is the owner of architecture + history (a + h), an architectural history and historic preservation consulting firm. She lives in San Francisco, California, and has been a member of SAH since 1995.

Can you tell us about your career path? 

I started my career in historical archaeology at Old Salem, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina then at Monticello and Poplar Forest, both sites affiliated with Thomas Jefferson in Virginia. I received a master’s degree in Architectural History from the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia (UVa). I benefited from an incredible network of academic and professional mentors while at UVa and after! I moved to San Francisco, California, and began working for an architectural firm specializing in historic preservation, Architectural Resources Group (ARG), as their first in-house architectural historian. I helped ARG grow a historic resources and architectural history studio, at one point managing seven architectural historians in two offices. My time at ARG taught me that you can manage a business while doing the work that you love. I started my own practice ten years ago and I love the flexibility of working for myself!

What interests you most about architectural history? 

I think it’s the stories that buildings and sites tell us; they provide a tangible, visible reminder of our past. I particularly enjoy the research component…finding that one piece of information that completes the puzzle and really informs how we interpret a particular historic place.  

What projects are you currently working on? 

The past three years, I’ve had a significant focus on National Park Service (NPS) projects. I’ve participated in several Historic Structure Reports (HSR) on Mission 66-era NPS Visitor Centers in California and Alaska. I’m working on a project in Mount Rainier National Park looking at historic resources from both the NPS Rustic Architecture period and the Mission 66 era at Ohanapechosh Campground. I also have a project at Tule Lake, a component of the World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument, documenting several of the only remaining built resources from the Tule Lake Segregation Center. I’m participating in an HSR for two employee cabins at Lassen Volcanic National Park. Lastly, I’ve contributed recently to a Maintenance Plan for the Glacier Bay Lodge in Alaska, one of the few Mission 66-era lodges built in the National Park system and am documenting 1960s Pan Abode-constructed (kit) cabins in Alaska’s Katmai National Park, that are threatened by some very large bears who like to gnaw and scratch on their wood components!

Additionally, I’ve had several projects at the University of California, Santa Cruz, one of the most significant collections of modern campus buildings in California. Lastly, I am currently leading a team of historians writing a National Register of Historic Places Historic District Nomination for St. Francis Wood, a designed residence park with over 550 homes in San Francisco, laid out by the Olmsted Brothers. On a more personal level, I’ve been researching the California architect, John Carl Warnecke, with the intent to publish something…at some point…in my free time!!

Do you have a particular memory of when you first became aware of the significance of architecture or when you knew you wanted to study it? 

As an undergraduate, I attended Salem College in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The college is set within Old Salem, a preserved historic Moravian village set in a surrounding urban environment. Old Salem is a collection of historic sites, gardens, and buildings open to the public with extensive interpretive programs, including working trades people demonstrating various craft practices. Within my first year of college, I began to understand the importance of place and history through experiences at Old Salem. The summer after my sophomore year I participated in an archaeological excavation of the tannery site in Salem. This opened my eyes to how historical research and informed field investigations intersect to shape the stories we tell at historic sites.

Who has influenced your work or career? 

There have been several key individuals who served as wonderful mentors throughout my career. First, Michael Hammond, my undergraduate Anthropology / Archaeology professor and the Archaeologist for Old Salem. William Kelso, historical archaeologist, who I worked with at both of Thomas Jefferson’s homes, Monticello and Poplar Forest. Drake Patten, who managed the archaeological laboratory at Poplar Forest. Richard Guy Wilson and Barbara Burlison Mooney, who I studied with at UVa. J. Murray Howard, the former Architect for Historic Buildings and Grounds at UVa, who I had the great fortune to work with for a summer. Bruce Judd and Stephen Farneth, founding Principals of Architectural Resources Group (ARG); Nina Pascale, Marketing Director at ARG; and really all the amazing colleagues I worked with over 16 years at ARG. Lastly, San Francisco Architectural Historian, Anne Bloomfield, who died way too young, and who took me under her wing when I first moved to San Francisco.  

What is your biggest professional challenge? 

Time management!! As a sole practitioner you do the field work, conduct historical research, write reports, correspond with clients, generate invoices, pay incoming invoices, manage subconsultants, and solve IT problems. Whew!! I don’t have time for time management!!

When and how did you become involved with SAH?  

I joined SAH as a graduate student at the University of Virginia where the Thomas Jefferson Chapter was founded and continues to be very active. I served as president of the chapter for the 1992–93 academic year. When I moved to San Francisco I joined the Northern California Chapter of SAH and wrote and produced the newsletter for a few years and also served as chapter president for a period. My first SAH conference was Seattle (1995) where I gave a “Work in Progress” talk in a focused session for graduate students and emerging scholars. I served as the national SAH Chapter Liaison from 2004 to 2011. I’ve stayed active in SAH helping organize the Pasadena conference in 2009, participating on a book award committee one year, and most recently serving on the SAH CONNECTS Advisory Committee.

Do you have a vision for how SAH should evolve in the future? 

It has been very rewarding to see SAH embrace the digital humanities, encourage a more diverse membership through targeted outreach, and actively engage a broader audience. These initiatives indicate a leadership and membership committed to staying relevant in a changing academic, research, and publication landscape. I think if SAH continues to evolve within an academic and scholar-focused environment the organization will be poised to remain a leader in the humanities.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to enter your field? 

Network, network, network. This is a small field and it's critical to meet others with similar interests and career paths. Most of us are more than happy to mentor a younger generation because we benefited from interaction with excellent mentors ourselves.

SAH members engage with the history of the built environment through a broad array of specializations, professional fields, and areas of interest. Member Stories is a regular feature that recognizes the expertise and unique experiences of our members.

As has been the case for many scholars, my dissertation research was fundamentally changed by Covid-19. While it quickly became clear that my ability to travel and access certain archives would be postponed, what I wasn’t able to anticipate were the ways in which research in the pandemic age would push me to develop new analytical methods in order to work with the materials that I did have access to. My research traces a settler colonial history of the U.S. Land Grant college program, including federally funded schools for Native American and African American students in that legacy and foregrounding the relationship between the land dispossession and exploitative labor practices that determined campus designs and the racially segregated industrial curricula that took place there.

While I had planned to spend extensive time on-site at my case study schools, Covid meant pivoting to email exchanges with incredibly helpful and accommodating archivists, often supplementing those primary archives with materials at other institutions with the resources to make materials available digitally. Ultimately, it has shifted my emphasis on small-scale student work and issues of representation within these schools’ curricula in addition to spatial analysis of campus buildings and often difficult-to-access and digitize drawing sets. I am grateful for the support of SAH's Gill Family Foundation Dissertation Research Fellowship for the ability to have such materials digitized for closer study at home.

In part, this pandemic-mandated shift has also pushed me to consider how architecture figured into those schools’ curricula beyond design and building programs—that is to say, not only through labor but through ideology. These connections often took place obliquely, thanks to pedagogical theories of correlation, as instructors referenced architectural typologies and building materials in the teaching of say, essay-writing, world geography, or geometric proofs. The racialized thinking of Progressive era pedagogues went that such concrete, material examples were helpful for students unaccustomed to or racially incapable of abstract thinking. Building on the work of other historians on nineteenth-century race-science and architectural style, my research helps us understand how architecture was used as a metric of civilization in these schools (and, therefore, deculturalization and assimilation).

The following two drawings, from the Minnie Linton collection of materials from Indian Schools at the Autry Museum of the American West, help to illustrate my point. They are taken from essays completed in 1899 by two Indigenous eighth-grade students at the Sherman Institute, an off-reservation boarding school in Riverside, CA. While they don’t ultimately figure directly into my dissertation, which focuses on older students at a series of different case studies, they have proven integral to shaping the way that I think about architecture’s role as a knowledge system in practices of cultural genocide and attuning myself to the subtle forms of resistance to or refusal of that settler colonial project that we can find in the colonial archive.

From top: Drawing by Joseph Lewis Wellington (Pima), Eighth Grade, Sherman Institute; George Bancroft, “A Navajo Home” Eighth-Grade Report, Sherman Institute. Written exams and essays created by 7th- and 8th-grade students from the Sherman Institute in Riverside, California, Folder 3, Minnie H. Linton Collection Collection of Indian School Papers & Drawings, before 1919, MS.1316, Autry National Center, Braun Research Library.

It seems that the students were asked to write something reflecting on traditional and modern forms of housing and their relationship to civilization, to their culture, and to the future development or improvement of both their land and their race. These are all reasonably common tropes for Indian education in the late nineteenth century, but it’s unusual to see them worked out so materially, referencing built structures in a way that both is and is not metaphorical. The resulting drawings and short essays address the development of housing amongst the Pima people and the Navajo or Diné, both historically and in the present time.

The two students take the assignment in quite different directions, one emphasizing transformation of architectural typologies and the other arguing for the appropriateness of their housing type to their lifeway and culture. The first, by Joseph Lewis Wellington, starts with a wickiup, a brushwood round house typical of numerous nomadic peoples across the southwest, but labeled as “primitive.” We then see a literal trajectory of development traced, first to a simple, single-room structure, which looks like it could be a mixture of sod or rammed earth with timber, and finally to a timber framed, multi-room structure with a pitched roof, a fully westernized home. He closes with “one more step to go…” It’s illustrating a process of transformation, or what was often called improvement, visually. Architecture as a visible index of racial development—both biologically and in reference to Native peoples’ acceptance of the single-family home and allotment homestead in rejection of communal living arrangements, on traditional homelands or reservations. In some ways, this first drawing is an illustration of the ideal outcome of such an assignment, then.

The second drawing from the Linton collection opens up a different direction, however: the possibility of refusal, however subtle, of this narrative of racial improvement and civilization by eighth-grade student George Bancroft. To find this counternarrative to the official government curriculum, we must carefully read between the drawing and its accompanying text. It depicts a naturalistic rather than schematic representation of a hogan (hooghan), a dwelling and ceremonial building type commonly built by the Navajo people from the fifteenth to the early twentieth century. The dome-shaped structure, an interlocking core of Ponderosa pine or cedar plastered with mud and bark, isn’t depicted as an isolated specimen as in Wellington’s drawing, but rather is integrated into a scene that emphasizes its everyday use, as well as the visual resonance between the dwelling and the geological forms of the monadnocks beyond, sacred sites for the Navajo on the Colorado plateau.

Bancroft’s text argues for, rather than against the Hogan, explaining its role amongst many different forms of dwelling, living, and sustenance within his family: “The reason why we live in this kind of hut is because if we stay in one place our flocks and herds will have nothing to eat. So we wander over the desert land roaming from place to place with our flocks and herds in the summer and seeking shelter sometimes in the foothills but often high up on the mountainsides in the winter, where we can secure fuel for our rudely constructed Hogan which we call our home.”

Apparently, the hogan could even explain well-behaved children, as his description of the housing typology was followed immediately by an explanation of his experience of life within it: “As a rule, in my tribe each man rules his home by kindness with no abuse or scolding. The children are hardly ever punished for the reason that we never disobey. We are always dutiful, respectful, and obedient to our parents and they are always considerate, kind, and thoughtful of us.”

It is only a throwaway line at the end of the essay that (alongside its acquisition and filing alongside Wellington’s essay and other student work) makes it clear that the assignment was intended to address the relationship between housing and civilization: “Since the last several years we are realizing about civilization, so we have begun to seek for civilization of the future.” Assignment accomplished, but not really. The total picture depicts a eulogy to a lifeway quickly being eroded on multiple fronts: both the disappearance of Indigenous building typologies based on new federal guidelines that restricted funding for home loans and other housing programs to standardized government plans, and the alienation of children from their parents and communities based on their removal to faraway boarding schools like Sherman. It was no small thing for an eighth-grade student to acknowledge these losses in his interaction with authority figures, however obliquely. Student works like Bancroft’s open up a window for architectural historians into the complex entanglement of architecture’s politics and participation in these settler colonial cultural and political histories.

Sundus Al-Bayati is the 2019 recipient of the H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellowship. All photographs are by the author, except where otherwise specified.

A Detour and a Different Kind of Reconstruction in Istanbul

Hello from Istanbul, a city I didn’t think I’d visit in the course of my fellowship travel. The city wasn’t wiped out in any war in recent history that dramatically altered its appearance, like Berlin or Warsaw. People visit Istanbul to revel in the persistence of history at the site of three great empires. The Istanbul panorama, a landscape of hills dotted with domes and minarets straddling the sea elicits a sense of timelessness. This isn’t to say there hasn’t been conflict or destruction in Istanbul’s history. In my investigation of war and its consequences on how cities develop and grow, I’ve come to recognize the processes of globalization as another powerful force that damages the historic and social character of cities. What might have survived the air raids and bombs gets destroyed later to make room for a new mall or luxury housing. Istanbul’s accelerating development has mostly been the product of planned destruction that is associated with profit-led urban renewal projects. Some might remember news from Istanbul’s iconic Taksim Square in 2013 where protests broke out against the government’s plans to raise Gezi Park to make room for a commercial development and a new mall. Taksim Square is one example of many neoliberal market-driven urban transformation projects that have been shaping the historical city since the 1980s. But there are other reasons why I find myself in Istanbul, a combination of the ongoing global pandemic, an economic crisis, and visa limitation for an Iraqi passport holder like myself.

After Warsaw, I had planned to visit Beirut to explore the effects of the Lebanese civil war on the city. As I followed the news of the recent economic crisis in Lebanon and growing political instability, it was becoming clear that I needed an alternative plan. I settled on Nicosia, Cyprus. Nicosia, divided in the middle by the UN-buffer zone, would be a good alternative to Beirut as an example of a city divided by civil conflict. I’d like to share with you, if you indulge me, my visa experience with the Cyprus embassy in Berlin, to illuminate a small part of what it means to be a passport holder of a Third World country when traveling for research or academic scholarship. For all my friends and readers who are holders of US or European passports, unlike you, I cannot travel to a country for tourism without undergoing a lengthy visa process with indeterminate outcomes. With three months in the EU, I thought I had plenty of time to work out my visa with the Cyprus embassy. 

Initial correspondence with the Cyprus Embassy in Berlin seemed encouraging and that they were willing to work with me. The embassy asked me how long I plan to stay, for what purpose, to send copies of my passport, green card, fellowship information, and reservations for flights and accommodations. I convinced them to schedule my appointment a month before I needed to leave the EU instead of the two weeks they suggested. Once I got in touch, I didn’t hear anything for almost two weeks, and then I got an email asking me again for the purpose of my travel and to describe in detail my “meetings, appointments, and specific schedule of my time there.” I referred them to my fellowship letter and website and explained again that this is a self-directed project and I didn’t have any “appointments” with any institutions. I am two weeks away from needing to leave Warsaw at that point. When they finally called me to set up a visa appointment, they added two conditions: first, I can only receive a third of the time I requested to stay in Cyprus as they are not convinced that I need to be in Cyprus for that long to “just look at buildings.” Second, I needed to show them nonrefundable tickets for my accommodation in Cyprus before they approve my visa. This process was extremely discouraging and uncertain. I had to let go of Cyprus for now and think of something else. So I headed to Istanbul.

In Istanbul, I’ve become aware of a different kind of reconstruction that is not the result of war, one that is driven by power, political hegemony and efforts to restructure Turkish national identity through the city’s symbols and iconic urban images. These new projects, led by the Justice and Development Party (AKP), translate its ideological and political agenda into the urban form with a host of flagship projects transforming the historical narrative of the city as much as its future development. Similar to the way Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and his government adopted modernist architecture as the language of the new Republic in a determinate effort to detach from Ottoman culture and symbols in the urban space, the AKP seeks to resurrect Turkey’s Ottoman and Islamic past by building a large numbers of mosques in a Neo-Ottoman style and converting existing historical churches into mosques, most prominent of which is the Hagia Sophia which was reclassified as a mosque in July 2020. 

Taksim Square against the Forces of Urban Transformation

Taksim Square holds symbolic significance as the heart of Istanbul. The site, where the Republic Monument celebrates the beginnings of the Turkish Republic, has historically been the place of political expression and demonstrations (Figure 1). In 2013, people rushed to Taksim Square to protest against an extensive development project by Istanbul Municipality to restructure the square and the adjacent Gezi Park. The plan proposed removing one of the few remaining green spaces in the city and replacing it with a shopping mall that carried the façade of a former 19^th-century military barracks building from the Ottoman era. The protests were a testament to the growing dissatisfaction of Istanbul residents with an increasingly authoritarian government and its neoliberal economic policies that have transformed their city since the ascension of the AKP and its founder, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to power in the early 2000s. The development project would transform Taksim Square and Gezi Park from an open public space that allows for political expression to another space that prioritizes a consumerist-based experience, right next to the biggest commercial street in Istanbul, Istiklal Caddesi.  

Figure 1. Republic Monument and Taksim Mosque in the back

The urban transformation plan of Taksim, while heavily driven by prospects of economic gains, underlines the motivations by the AKP government to chip away at the legacy of the Turkish Republic and solidify its own ideological presence in the most iconic part of Istanbul.¹ The project also included the controversial addition of a mosque in a typically secular urban space in Istanbul. This part of the plan came to fruition with the construction of Taksim Mosque, which was inaugurated this year by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In addition, the old Ataturk Cultural Center, an iconic cultural institution from Turkey’s modern age, which stood there since 1969, was also part of the reform of Taksim Square. It was demolished in 2018 after a decade of neglect. The reconstruction replicates the façade of the original building but aims to surpass it. 

In the middle of the square, the Republic Monument commemorates the formation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923 under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who is depicted in the sculpture as both a military commander and a political leader. East of the monument stood the old Ataturk Cultural Center, an iconic modernist building completed in 1969 as a cultural and educational space that comprised an opera house and concert hall, among other cultural activities. The old Ataturk Cultural Center’s modern façade and progressive cultural programming became a symbol of Ataturk’s vision of Turkey as a modern state with a new secular identity that broke with the religious rule of the Ottoman Empire.² Symbols of the Republic permeate Taksim Square and explain why it has been the target of redevelopment projects by the AKP government that seeks to significantly reconstruct its image to display president Erdogan’s own vision of Turkey, a return to the grandeur and Islamism of the Ottoman Empire. The current Ataturk Cultural center in Taksim Square is a new construction that was completed in October of this year (Figure 2–4). To the surprise of many, the façade of the new building looks almost the same. This is partly because the new building was designed by Murat Tabanlioglu, the son of the architect who designed the original building. 

Figure 2–4. The New Ataturk Cultural Center

At the other end of Taksim Square and across from the Republic Monument and the new Ataturk Cultural Center, stands one of President Erdogan’s mega-projects and triumphant symbols of his presidency, the new Taksim Mosque (Figure 5–11). The mosque opened this year, in the same week that marked the eighth anniversary of Gezi Park protests. The project was part of the redevelopment plan that sparked the protests in 2013 as it purposefully altered the secular identity of the square and reinforced Erdogan’s image of a religious Turkey. More importantly, the mosque ensures that Erdogan leaves his own legacy in Taksim. The massive size of the mosque dominates the existing landmarks of Taksim from the Republic Monument and the Ataturk Cultural Center to the Hagia Triada Greek Orthodox Church. 

Figure 5–11. The new Taksim Mosque

Urban Renewal in Two Istanbul Neighborhoods: Tarlabasi and Balat

Running along Taksim Square is the Tarlabasi thoroughfare, which I walked by a couple of times and noticed the glaring contrast between new shiny luxury and crumbling apartment buildings. The Tarlabasi neighborhood houses primarily low-income Kurdish residents, Syrian refugees, and Romani communities. Tarlabasi is an example of prevalent state-led urban renewal projects of dilapidated areas of high real estate value, often without regards to the underprivileged communities that are displaced in the process. The neighborhood has been the target of aggressive government “regeneration” projects to boost the Turkish economy.³ In 2005, law No. 5366 was passed, which gives municipal governments power to seize run-down but valuable land for redevelopment with the premise of protecting the historical character of these derelict buildings⁴ (Figure 12–16). One example of such development in Tarlabasi is the Taksim 360 project, a luxury residential and office complex, which began in 2010 with the eviction of residents and demolition of buildings and it is still under construction today (Figure 17–23). It’s hard to miss the stark contrast between the freshly built luxury apartments of Taksim 360 and heaps of trash at the front of decaying buildings just one street over. The project’s website is especially tone-deaf to the realities of the area in their description of the project as a lifestyle. The logo reads “you are at the center of this 360-degree lifestyle.” 

Figure 12–16. Rundown and Renovated Tarlabasi buildings

Figure 17–23. Taksim 360 project in Tarlabasi

Balat is another historical neighborhood in Istanbul that was the subject of controversial urban revitalization projects (Figure 24–38). Balat was historically considered the "Jewish Quarter” of Istanbul but was also home to different ethnic and religious groups including Armenian and Greek Orthodox peoples. By the 1940s, most Jewish, Greek, and Armenian residents left the neighborhood and immigrants from Anatolia moved to the area in large numbers to work in the emerging industries that developed there.⁵ During the 1980s, government-led urban regeneration projects sought to revitalize historical areas like Balat, that have become dilapidated due to industrialization and overcrowded conditions. These projects included removing industries and destroying historical buildings in the process, which led to the decline of the neighborhood.⁶ Between 1997 and 2008, Balat underwent a more positive urban transformation project led by UNESCO and Fatih Municipality, among other non-profit organizations. The project prioritized preserving the historic character of the neighborhood by restoring local architecture and renovating decrepit buildings. 

At the same time, Balat was experiencing a second type of urban transformation that was more market-driven and focused on transforming the neighborhood into a tourist destination. The second plan sought to undo some of the work from the first phase of transformation by demolishing rehabilitated buildings and constructing new ones that match the local architecture of Istanbul but doesn’t historically reflect what actually stood there.⁷ While parts of the project were halted by a court order in 2012, as the area is historically protected, for-profit piecemeal transformation projects, empowered by Law 5366 that disregards the social and economic implications of urban transformation projects, has given private development companies a lot of power in shaping the neighborhood. Walking around Balat, it is easy to see the forces of gentrification working their way through the neighborhood. New coffee shops and restaurants adorn the ground level of derelict and sometimes empty buildings. The street level and the top levels seem to inhabit two different dimensions. English signs to restaurants and cafés are clear indications that these places are targeting the tourist crowds. People still go to Balat for its historic streets and colorful houses. It’s a shame that soon this historical place will be reconstructed to be “instagrammable” at the expense of local residents and their buildings. 

Figure 24–38. Balat neighborhood

Figure 39–40. Kirmizi Kilise, Fener Greek Boy’s High School, built in 1881

Figure 41. Palace of the Porphyrogenitus, 13^th-century Byzantine palace

A New Mosque on the Hill

It wasn’t until a couple of days of being in Istanbul, absorbing its panorama of domes and minarets, had passed did I notice how odd the mosque on the Asian side looked. It looked different from the other ones. Perhaps it stood out more because it was the only mosque of its size on that side of Istanbul but for all I knew, it could have been another mosque from the Ottoman period dating back to 16^th or 17^th century. It sure looked like it. I didn’t know then that I was looking at the biggest symbol of President Recep Tayyib Erdogan’s regime, only completed in 2019 (Figure 42–66). The Camlica Mosque, built in a Neo-Ottoman style to resemble the 17^th-century Blue Mosque on the European side, is a physical embodiment of Erdogan’s continuous molding of Turkish national identity as both Ottoman and Muslim. As the patron of this great mosque, Erdogan is a modern day Sultan and Turkey, his empire. Not only is the mosque located on the highest hill in Istanbul, Camlica Hill, but its massive structure, which can accommodate 63,000 people, makes it visible from all around Istanbul. Camlica Mosque is one of many hundreds of mosques that are popping up all over Istanbul and Turkey without input from communities whether they are needed or not. When I entered the mosque, I was quickly directed by the male guard to walk towards the periphery, that is the women’s section. I told him I am just interested in seeing the mosque and wanted to look up at the dome but he insisted that I leave the “men’s” section, which is the heart of the mosque and observe from the side. This is the only mosque where I have experienced this. Reluctantly, but slowly, I walked to the women’s section and snapped my photos along the way. 

Figure 42–66. Camlica Mosque

References

² Ibid

³ Arıcan, Alize. "Care in Tarlabaşı amidst Heightened Inequalities, Urban Transformation and Coronavirus." Radical Housing Journal, December 6, 2020. https://radicalhousingjournal.org/2020/care-in-tarlabasi-amidst-heightened-inequalities-urban-transformation-and-coronavirus/.

⁴ Arıcan, Alize. “Behind the Scaffolding: Manipulations of Time, Delays, and Power in Tarlabaşı, Istanbul.” City & Society 32, no. 3 (2020): 482–507.

⁵ AYSEV DENEÇ, Evren. “The Re-Production of the Historical Center of i̇stanbul in 2000s: A Critical Account on Two Projects in Fener - Balat.” METU JOURNAL OF THE FACULTY OF ARCHITECTURE, 2014.

⁶ Mutman, Demet, and Hulya Turgut. “Colliding Urban Transformation Process: The Case of Historical Peninsula, Istanbul.” International Journal of Architectural Research: ArchNet-IJAR 12, no. 1 (2018): 164.

⁷ AYSEV DENEÇ, Evren. “The Re-Production of the Historical Center of i̇stanbul in 2000s: A Critical Account on Two Projects in Fener - Balat.” METU JOURNAL OF THE FACULTY OF ARCHITECTURE, 2014.

Destruction of architecture by a conquering power has often been performed as an act of cultural cleansing. To intentionally destroy a city is to deprive it of cultural and historical continuity, erasing its character and damaging its people’s sense of belonging. In recent memory, the images of ISIS destroying ancient sites and monuments in Palmyra, Syria, and Mosul, Iraq, have proliferated in the public consciousness. ISIS published chilling photos of explosives they planted in the 2000-year-old temple of Baal Shamin in preparation for the spectacle of its doom. The Nazis in Warsaw, like ISIS, used the purposeful destruction of architecture as a weapon to annihilate Polish civilization. The Nazis thought that by razing the architecture of Warsaw, they would strip the Polish people of their historical and cultural identity, which equaled reducing them to uncivilized, second-class citizens that were meant to serve the superior German occupiers. The Nazis carried out this process of deconstructing Warsaw’s architectural heritage in a methodical and purposeful manner.

When I mentioned that I was going to Warsaw to anybody from Europe, they suggested I “go to Krakow.” I understood that the reasons behind this lack of enthusiasm about Warsaw would be very much related to my topic of interest: the consequences of war on how the city looks. The historic center of Warsaw, which was reduced to rubble in 1944, is a facsimile construction that was completed in the 1950s. It was largely rebuilt according to how the city looked like in the 18^th-century paintings of Italian Renaissance artist Bernando Bellotto, known as Canaletto. Visitors to Warsaw’s Old Town come across plaques displaying Bellotto’s paintings of the building in question standing in front of the actual reconstruction (Figure 1).  Reconstructing the historical quarter of Warsaw based on a representation of the city in art, one that portrays a nostalgic view of the past, emphasizes the symbolic importance of Old Town for national identity. However, its authenticity as a historical reconstruction has been widely questioned.

Figure 1. Carmelite Church, 1780 Warsaw, next to a painting of the Church by Bernardo Bellotto. This particular church, however, managed to survive the war unscathed.

From Berlin, I took a six-and-a-half-hour train ride to Warsaw. As I stepped out of Warszawa Centralna train station, a celebrated modernist building completed in 1975 (Figure 2), I was welcomed by one of Warsaw’s most controversial landmarks, an infamous product of Stalinist architecture, the Palace of Culture (Figure 3). In the following days, shrouded by overcast and gray skies, Warsaw, with its freestanding Soviet-era housing blocks, looked dreary and visually uninteresting (Figure 4–5). Of course, this is one view of Warsaw. There is a sense in Warsaw that the city is still in the process of becoming.

Figure 2. Warszawa Centralna Train Station.

Figure 3. Palace of Culture

Figure 4–5. Modernist Housing Estates, Osiedle za Żelazną Bramą, 1970, Warsaw

Warsaw is unique among other cities destroyed during World War II. The destruction of the city wasn’t only the result of fighting. It was a methodical process of destruction guided by a prewar Nazi German urban plan to dismantle the Polish city and construct a Nazi model city in its place. In 1939, the Pabst plan envisioned the annihilation of the Polish city and its people of 1.3 million inhabitants to make room for a new provisional German town of 130,000 Germans.¹ Warsaw’s Jewish population were the first group targeted to achieve this extreme reduction in population size. Around 400,000 Jewish people were forced into the small area of the Jewish Ghetto and lived in overcrowded and dreadful conditions.  Next, Poles were to be relocated to labor camps across the Vistula River to serve as slave laborers for the new German town. Stanislaw Jankowski, a Polish architect who was involved in the first years of reconstruction in Warsaw, expands on the unusual Pabst Plan:

“This is probably the only document in history that did not even attempt to justify destruction by arguing military necessities. On the contrary, it ordered the destruction of an entire city with the exception of military installations. The order was carried out with precision. A special staff composed of experts and scientific advisers was in charge of the operation. Warsaw was divided into areas for destruction. Corner houses were numbered. On selected buildings and statues special inscriptions were made indicating the proposed date of demolition. Special detachments known as demolition and annihilation squads proceeded to destroy the deserted city- house by house, street by street.”²

The tactical demolition of Warsaw delineated in the Pabst plan was transformed by two retaliatory episodes of destruction. In 1943, the Ghetto Uprising broke out to resist deporting the remaining Jews to extermination camps after 320,000 Jews were sent to the gas chambers of Treblinka in 1942. The uprising ended with the burning of the Ghetto and everyone inside it followed by a leveling of any structure that remained. A year later, the Polish underground resistance organized the Warsaw Uprising to reclaim Warsaw from German occupation. Tragically, the Soviet army, which was supposed to advance to Warsaw to defeat Germany, stopped at the other side of the Vistula River, allowing the Nazi army to extinguish the uprising and unleash the final blow of destruction of Warsaw in retaliation. In 1944, over 85% of Warsaw was in ruins.³

The Old Town has historically been the most representative and celebrated image of the city’s identity (Figure 6–11). The historic center of Warsaw, developed between the 13^th  and 20^th centuries, is a vibrant place bustling with tourists, locals, and kids on school field trips. The Old Town, distinguished by its colorful facades and winding streets, was the economic and political center of Warsaw in the 16^th and 17^th centuries when it became the seat of Polish kings and the meeting place of the Sejms. This historical period is significant for the Polish nation, which ceased to exist as an independent state from 1795 to 1918 with the Third Partition of Poland. The urban and spatial character of the Old Town was a testament to the prosperity of the Polish state. It is because of its status as a cherished symbol of Polish culture and statehood that Warsaw’s historic center was intentionally targeted for erasure by Adolf Hitler. By destroying Warsaw, Hitler wanted to eradicate any historical record of Polish culture (Figure 12).

Figure 6–8. Krakowskie Przedmieście, prominent street constituted part of Warsaw’s Royal Route

Figure 9–11. Reconstructed Old Town Warsaw

Figure 12. Marketplace in Old Town, after the war

The reconstruction of Warsaw, and specifically the Old Town, was seen as a symbolic resurrection of Poland and the inextinguishable spirit of its people to reclaim their city and therefore, their national identity. The Old Town of Warsaw was rebuilt exactly as it was, relying mainly on representations of the city in art and other forms of documentation that took place secretly under German Occupation. Some modifications to the original buildings were made to ameliorate prewar conditions, like eliminating sections of tenement housing and widening courtyards in what were dense and overcrowded housing estates. The replicas might resemble the old architecture on the outside but their interiors were often of modern construction. Reconstruction debates concluded that it was more important to recreate the very image of Warsaw the Fuhrer meant to annihilate in order to give people back what was taken from them. While the reconstruction of Old Town might stem from a nostalgic vision of Warsaw, it is celebrated as an extensive and faithful reconstruction of a historic center, which earned it a place on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1980.

Much of the chaotic and haphazard character of the urban fabric of Warsaw is attributed to the rapid development of the Industrial Revolution in the 19^th century that triggered a massive population growth (Figure 13). Warsaw was under Russian rule until 1918, which not only prevented the expansion of the city outwards to accommodate the population increase, but did not instate regulations and policies to deal with urban growth.⁴ Plans to reshape Warsaw to improve its urban conditions have been in the works since 1918 when Poland regained its independence and continued during the period of World War II. Stanislaw Jankowski, who was an SOE agent, a Polish resistance fighter, and an architect, discusses secret town planning and architectural studies that took place in Warsaw during the German Occupation. Jankowski’s account sheds some light on the preemptive efforts of the planning department of the Warsaw Municipal Council, the Faculty of Architecture of Warsaw Technical University, the Studio of Architecture and Town Planning, and others to secretly prepare plans for Warsaw’s reconstruction after liberation and to document the city’s historical monuments should they get destroyed. These efforts by Polish architects and planners facilitated the process of rebuilding after the war and were an example of the Polish resistance against cultural and historical annihilation perpetrated by the Nazis. Jankowski elaborates on the secret planning efforts:

“This conspiratorial town-planning activity, carried out in conditions of terror unleashed by the Gestapo, implied awareness that planning itself constituted a form of struggle against the invader, and it also expressed the need for continuing professional work and for making preparations for new tasks that were to come.”⁵

Figure 13. A clash of architectural styles, Warsaw

Representations of Warsaw in Polish Art

Bernardo Bellotto’s paintings of Warsaw (Figures 14–16) are the most well-known representations of the city in its prosperous era and became crucial blueprints for rebuilding the historic quarter after the war. Bellotto, who became a court painter to the king of Poland in 1768, executed accurate cityscapes of buildings and squares of the historic center of Warsaw. Even if Bellotto’s depictions are known to be embellished for artistic purposes, the survival of these paintings proved crucial in recreating the image of Warsaw’s golden age that was intentionally wiped out during the war.

Figure 14. Bernardo Bellotto, Church of the Holy Cross in Warsaw, 1778. Photo: Royal Castle in Warsaw.

Figure 15. Bernardo Bellotto, Miodowa Street, 1777. Photo: Royal Castle in Warsaw.

Figure 16. Bernardo Bellotto, Carmelite Church in Warsaw, 1780. Photo: Royal Castle in Warsaw.

Figure 17. Marcin Zaleski , Plac Teatralny, 1838. Photo: Museum of Warsaw

Figure 18. Władysław_Podkowiński, Nowy Świat Street on a Summer Day, 1892. Nowy Swiat Photo: National Museum of Warsaw. Nowy Swiat is a major historic street in Warsaw and part of the Royal Route. It was one of the first to be rebuilt after the war.

In 1905, Witold Wojtkiewicz sketched the uprising that took place in Warsaw as part of the larger revolution in Poland that began in Lodz (Figures 19–20). Across Poland, workers went on strike to demand better working and living conditions, as well as more rights and political freedom. In Witold Wojtkiewicz’s expressionist sketches, Warsaw’s Old Town is the stage where this revolution unfolds connecting the spatial and urban landscape of the city with a distinct Polish resistance similar to representations of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising in the city (Figure 21).

Figures 19–20. Witold Wojtkiewicz, Street Demonstration, 1905. Photos: www.wikipedia.org

Figure 21. The Warsaw Uprising, A Mural by Jarosław Fabis, 2016. Photo: Warsaw Uprising Museum.

Life amidst the ruins was a reality for the many Varsovians that returned to Warsaw after the war despite the city’s unlivable conditions. Warsaw’s rubble landscapes permeated the cultural consciousness and the work of Polish artists. Although the depictions of Warsaw’s ruins were more of a documentation of its alien state after the war than a contemplative fascination with ruins typical of ruins painting.

Figure 22. Antoni Lyzwanski, Warsaw Exodus, 1945. Photo: www.owzpap.org

Figure 23. Antoni Teslar, Pigeons on Bugaj Street, 1952. Photo: Museum of Warsaw

Figure 24. Jan Wisniewski, A View of Ruined Warsaw from Praga, 1945. Photo: Museum of Warsaw

Figure 25. W. Chmielewski, Ruins of the Capuchin Church at ul. Miodowa, 1947. Photo: Museum of Warsaw.

A month after the war ended, the Office for the Reconstruction of the City was established in Warsaw to begin the process of rebuilding. Planners, architects, and politicians argued over whether to rebuild the city as it was or to treat the ruined urban fabric as a tabula rasa to introduce new urban developments and architectural styles. The two paintings by Antoni Teslar in Figure 26 and 27 depict the primary approaches of postwar reconstruction in Warsaw: the historical facsimile reconstruction of Old Town, and the introduction of modern urban planning and architecture. Teslar’s painting in Figure 27 shows the reconstruction of the iconic Marszałkowska Residential District (MDM), the socialist realist residential complex that housed workers (Figure 28–30). The monumental and decorated housing blocks were the inspiration for Stalinallee in Berlin. Similarly, the construction of Constitution Square was meant to host parades and public demonstrations.⁶ The MDM complex was a major urban planning project that was noted for retaining the 18^th century star-shaped urban fabric of the site, perhaps situating the Stalinist “foreign” architecture in an inherently Polish urban landscape, thus eliciting a sense of a cultural continuity.

Figure 26. Antoni Teslar, Reconstruction of Warsaw (Old Town), 1952. Photo: www.artinfo.pl

Figure 27. Antoni Teslar, Reconstruction of Warsaw (Marszałkowska Residential District), 1952. Photo: www.artinfo.pl

Figure 28–30. Marszałkowska Residential District and Constitution Square, Warsaw

During the reconstruction years, the image of heroic Varsovians rebuilding their city was one that the Communist government exploited in its propaganda art to strengthen its own ideological and political power in Poland. Figures 31–33 show examples of these images produced around that time. Figure 31, 32 reads “the whole nation is building its capital.” The Mermaid of Warsaw is in the background in Figure 31, which is a historical municipal symbol dating to the 14^th century. Figure 33 reads, “We are building Warsaw with a joint effort. We are building people’s Warsaw.”

Figure 31. Wiktor Gorka, Propaganda Poster, 1954. Photo: Museum of Warsaw

Figure 32. Propaganda Poster, Wydawnictwo Artytyczno Graficzne, 1953. Photo: www.antykwariatwaw.pl

Figure 33. Left: unknown author, 1948. Right: Witold Chmielewski, T. Tomaszewski, 1955. Photo: Museum of Warsaw

After Socialist Realism became the official style of art in People’s Republic of Poland, Wojciech Fangor painted this allegorical scene of Polish construction workers working together to rebuild Warsaw (Figure 34), connecting once again the Communist cause with the rebuilding of the Polish capital. 

Figure 34. Wojciech Fangor, Murarze, 1950. Photo: Museum of Warsaw

Edward Dwurnki’s painting of the Warsaw cityscape is a bit satirical in its description of Warsaw’s urban identity. The painting, as the title suggests, shows the construction of Warszawa Centralna railway station surrounded by a showcase of Warsaw’s most famous and controversial architectural gestures that transformed the character of the city, and soon to be joined by the modern innovative design of the station. The view tilts up to encompass as much of Warsaw’s urban landmarks as possible, all the result of postwar reconstruction. On the left, a foreshortened and squat Palace of Culture, the most dominating figure in the composition, as well as in Warsaw’s urban landscape. In the center-right, a notable modernist building, the Rotunda (PKO), is shown with its iconic jagged roof. Five years after this painting was completed, the Rotunda was destroyed by an explosion due to a gas leak. The Rotunda was completely rebuilt a couple of times, so that little of the original building remains. In the background, Warsaw’s major thoroughfares are depicted with forceful lines connecting the center of Warsaw with the eastern Praga district.

Figure 35. Edward Dwurnki, Construction of the Central Railway Station, 1974. Photo: Museum of Warsaw.

I did go to Krakow and I can confirm it is a more pleasant city to visit than Warsaw. After all, Krakow was spared the destruction that Warsaw suffered and survived the war almost untouched. Seeing the glaring differences between Warsaw and Krakow, two Polish cities that met different fates, one starts to grasp the lasting effects of war on the urban character of cities.

Figure 36. St’ Mary Basilica, Krakow, a prominent example of Polish Gothic architecture.

Figure 37. St’ Mary Basilica, Krakow. View of the polychrome interior murals.

References

¹ Diefendorf, Jeffry M., and Stanislaw Jankowski. “Warsaw: Destruction, Secret Town Planning, 1939–44, and Postwar Reconstruction.” Essay. In Rebuilding Europe's Bombed Cities, 96. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990.

² Ibid, 94.

³ Bevan, Robert. The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War. London: Reaktion Books, 2016.

⁴ Lupienko , Aleksander. “Reading Warsaw’s Complicated Urban Fabric.” In City as Organism, New Visions for Urban Life 1, Vol. 1. Rome, Italy, n.d., 2015.

⁵ Diefendorf, Jeffry M., and Stanislaw Jankowski. “Warsaw: Destruction, Secret Town Planning, 1939–44, and Postwar Reconstruction .” Essay. In Rebuilding Europe's Bombed Cities, 96. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990.

⁶ Dydek, Maria. “The Architectural Heritage of Socialist Realism in Warsaw.” The Uncomfortable Significance of Socialist Heritage, 2013.

Sundus Al-Bayati is the 2019 recipient of the H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellowship. All photographs are by the author, except where otherwise specified.

War is different than other crises that affect cities like natural disasters or even a global pandemic. War is rooted in the psychological and cultural memory as an experience that is meant to undermine the morale of a society and to ultimately destroy people’s sense of place. In fact, “undermining the morale'' has been an established strategy in warfare since World War I with the advent of air raids. Bombing a city from the air didn’t stop at targeting its military and industrial bases, for the objective was not just to cripple the enemy’s militaristic capacity but to destroy its infrastructure, economy and its housing stock. The goal was to crush the spirit of the enemy by unleashing utter chaos and dysfunction in the city; to stop life in its tracks. 

I remember taking the bus to school at the age of sixteen, three years into the Iraq War and looking out the window and being fascinated by the site of destruction in Baghdad. I snapped a few photos with my old Nokia phone of a destroyed mosque (I even found the images, see Figures 73–75 at the end of the post). The site of destruction remained with me in the way it challenged what’s real or possible. A destroyed landscape is saturated with past social and cultural experiences, among which is the event of destruction. Rebuilding takes on more than just answering to the practical and aspirational needs of a conventional architecture project. The disruptive force of war forces the urban environment to choose between preserving the past and looking forward. If war is personal, then so is the way we rationalize rebuilding.

Reconstruction might be concerned with immediate and basic needs such as providing housing or clearing the rubble but is largely shaped by more abstract notions like national identity and people’s sense of place, exhibited in embraced or rejected architecture styles and urban forms. Whether the need to rebuild is driven by a political and economic ideology, a desire to break from the past, an opportunity to correct certain problems in the urban landscape, or providing solutions to a housing crisis, the process of reconstruction cultivates an image that evokes national associations between people and their environment. Governments, politicians, planners, etc., rely on these images to advance proposals of what replaces a destroyed site. Berlin’s urban landscape is an embodiment of the many images that were at the heart of debate following the war and the ascent of the Berlin Wall.

There is no one dominant approach to post-war reconstruction that describes the way Berlin has been shaped since the end of World War II. An amalgam of influences contribute to the diverse forms of rebuilding. The most important factor is Berlin’s status as a divided city. After the end of a gruesome war of air raids and bombs, Berlin’s urban landscape became the physical and symbolic site for the political and ideological war between East and West. Architecture and ideas about reconstruction followed along this ideological divide. Following 1945, many architects, planners, politicians, and citizens sought to distance themselves from the monumental neoclassical architecture of the Nazi regime. Furthermore, Jeffry M. Diefendorf discusses in his book, In the Wake of War, much of the debate about post-war reconstruction was influenced by arguments of different architectural styles that existed pre-war and that ranged from modernism to traditionalism.¹

Postwar architects and planners grappled with the concept of “Zero Hour,” Germany’s attempt to completely break with its Nazi past after the war, which included the style of architecture embraced by Adolf Hitler and his architect Albert Speer. Diefendorf elaborates that explicit monumentality of Speer’s architecture was not the only thing that was rejected at the time: “The deficiency of imaginative postwar architecture also resulted from the catastrophe of the Nazi experience, which ultimately and thoroughly discredited not only neoclassicism but also the ideas of monumental and representational buildings.”²

Modernism was also a contested style in postwar Germany. Modern architecture had already existed before the war, exemplified by the work of Walter Gropius and the Deutcher Werkbund, but years of the Nazis’ attack on modern art and architecture had limited its growth and popularity. Additionally, there was a movement of traditionalist architecture in Germany that was concerned with questions of historic preservation against the forces of industrialization that swept 19^th-century cities. The Heimatschulz movement (the word literally translates to homeland protection), which advocated for traditional styles, believed German architecture “must be organically derived from the German landscape, climate, and historical traditions.”³ The forces of modernization and historic preservation are among the most critical challenges in almost every city, but in postwar Berlin, years of division between east and west and Germany’s continuous struggle with its tainted past complicate the questions of reconstruction. Brian Ladd describes this infliction in German architecture in his book, The Ghosts of Berlin: “German architecture and urban design cannot escape the crisis of German national identity.”⁴

Some of the questions I was asking myself as I explored Berlin: When does reconstruction actually begin and end? What part of the past is told? Whose past is told? Do we recreate the past right before the war in faithful detail? Do we recreate a different past? Do we preserve the present as a memorial to the war in the form of ruins? Do we see the war as an opportunity to modernize the urban landscape and replace it with a completely new style? 

Reconstruction as Political and Ideological Instrument of the Cold War in Divided Berlin

When the war ended in 1945, Berlin’s devastated landscape became the site of another form of confrontation between the East and West. Instead of one Berlin, there were two and each side claimed that theirs was the real Berlin. Before the Wall formally and physically divided the city in 1961, the governments of East and West Germany used architecture and urban design to express their political and ideological philosophies and to facilitate the creation of two separate German identities.⁵ Nowhere are the competing identities more pronounced in the city than in the housing developments of Stalinallee in east Berlin and the Hansaviertel in west Berlin.

Soviet and Western forces used postwar development to solidify their diverging ideological and political identities in the form of ambitious and innovative architectural models that each regime deemed fit for the reconstruction of their new capital. Both regimes embraced modernism as the language of new Berlin at first, but the GDR soon rejected the style in lieu of the monumental classicism typical of Soviet architecture. After the German Democratic Republic was founded in 1949, it initiated the development of one of the most bombed out districts, Friedrichshain. The major part of the project is Stalinallee Boulevard (Karl-Marx-Allee now). Stalinallee is one of the most emblematic projects of the GDR. The boulevard is 90 meters wide, 3 kilometers long, and extends from Frankfurter Tor to Alexanderplatz in Mitte. It is lined with monumental apartment buildings decorated with architectural tiles. The GDR envisioned Stalinallee as a dynamic boulevard that allowed the mingling of living, commercial, and leisure activities. Commercial uses occupy the street levels of the apartment buildings and the width of the boulevard was to accommodate parades and celebrations. Now the boulevard is dominated by traffic noise of cars zooming in and out of its wide lanes.

I started my walk down the boulevard from the Frankfurter Tor. The prominent twin towers on both sides of the boulevard designed in the Stalinist classicist style by Hermann Henselmann mark the entrance into the long stretch of the project (see Figure 1). Following the domed towers, one might notice a deviation in the street façade from the monumental Stalinist architecture; unadorned, modern looking, five-story apartment buildings stand behind a row of poplar trees. Before the GDR opted for the socialist classicism of the Soviet Union, modernist architects like Hans Scharoun were retained by the Soviet sector for the reconstruction of Berlin. These apartments were designed in the modernist style of the 1920s and were a part of a bigger plan led by Hans Scharoun and his associates to reconstruct the new Berlin (see Figures 2–3). 

Figure 1, twin domed towers at Frankfurter Tor, Hermann Henselmann, Karl-Marx-Allee

Figure 2–3, Arcade Houses, Karl-Marx-Allee

However, after construction started on these buildings, a change in the planning of Stalinallee occurred when a delegation of architects and planners travelled to Moscow and other cities in the Soviet Union to study their architecture and urban planning. The results were presented in the manifesto “Sixteen Principles of Urban Planning” that sought to unify the urban design and architecture of the GDR with a language that is consistent with Stalinist style of other Soviet cities. The rest of Stalinallee pivoted quickly to implement a different style that emphasized monumentality, ornamentation, hierarchy and centralization. Modernist architecture was deemed decadent and capitalist. Hence, a row of poplar trees were planted in front of the modernist five-story buildings to hide their facades. From Frankfurter Tor to Strausberger Platz, stands one of the most representative forms of political propaganda as architecture in East Berlin. Meant as an architectural model for postwar housing, it couldn’t be replicated elsewhere in Berlin as the buildings were expensive and unsustainable to build ( see Figure 4–8).

Figure 4–8, Karl-Marx-Allee, 1950–1959

After Nikita Khrushchev’s ascension to power, the process of de-Stanlinization constituted the third shift in architectural style along the boulevard in the 1960s, starting from Strausberger Platz to Alexanderplatz. The boulevard was renamed Karl-Marx-Allee. Khrushchev criticized Stalinist architecture for its lavishness and inefficiency and embraced modern building aesthetics. Brian Ladd adds, “the best way to house the masses, he argued [Khrushchev], was to develop prefabricated industrial forms for apartment buildings”⁶ Thus, modern architecture made a comeback on the socialist boulevard (see Figures 9–11). The new buildings were simple rectangular boxes of concrete and steel but matched the scale and façade pattern of existing buildings.

Figure 9–11, Karl-Marx-Allee, 1959–1969

The first phase of Stalinallee (1952–1954), was the first major reconstruction project after the war that addressed the challenges of postwar urban planning and housing shortage. It was advertised as the GDR’s showcase of what a newly rebuilt East German city would look like. Not surprisingly, a year later, the West German government promoted the International Architectural Exhibition Interbau for the reconstruction of the residential district of Hansa, adjacent to the Tiergarten, which was completely destroyed in 1943. The Interbau 1957 invited the pioneers of modernism to submit their ideas for the planning and design of a housing project for the Hansaviertel in the International Modernist style, which was professed as the style of a democratic Western society. Plans to rebuild the Hansavietel were discussed since 1951 as the city was suffering considerable housing shortages. Like Stalinallee, West Berlin’s government sought to put their city on the map as the site of innovative architectural designs for the new West German city.

Figure 12, Sketch by Sundus Al-Bayati, Hansaviertel, building by Egon Eiermann

The Interbau 1957 included designs by the most prominent architects of Modernism such as Walter Gropius, Alvar Aalto, Egon Eiermann, and Oscar Niemeyer. One of the most popular events at the Interbau was The “City of Tomorrow” exhibit. It presented drawings and architectural models that disposed of 19^th-century notions of city planning such as dense housing, narrow streets, and the mixing of working, living and commerce. The war presented Berlin with a new beginning. The city of the future will be ordered, decentralized, healthy and democratic. Towers of residential blocks will be scattered in a green landscape that will ensure access to light, air and greenery for all. The “City of Tomorrow” was to be found on the grounds of the Hansaviertel. 

Figure 13–14, Hansaviertel, Building by Walter Gropius

Figure 15, Hansaviertel, Building by Alvar Aalto

Figure 16, Hansaviertel, Building by Fritz Jaenecke

Figure 17–21, Hansaviertel, Building by Oscar Niemeyer

Figure 22, Hansaviertel, St. Ansgar, Building by Willy Kreuer

It felt good to finally step inside a realized utopian modernist project, to be that scale figure that is dwarfed by the tall towers in the landscape. I noticed the decibel level drop down when I walked deeper into the neighborhood. As I looked up at the curvy apartment building by Walter Gropius, I imagined that it must be pleasant to live there, among all the trees, with a view of the Tiergarten. The Hansaviertel surely looked different from the rest of Berlin. Like the first section of Stalinallee, its planning and construction proved too expensive and complex to replicate elsewhere in the city. It remains, like Stalinallee, an architectural model for postwar reconstruction that envisioned a new urban identity for Berlin. In 2022, the city of Berlin will propose both Karl-Marx-Allee and the Hansaviertel to the “Tentative List” for UNESCO World Heritage as unique examples of postwar development projects that occurred concurrently to address the challenges of reconstruction.

Nikolaiviertel: Recreation of a Medieval Quarter and the Question of Historic Preservation in Postwar Reconstruction

A short five-minute walk west of Berlin’s biggest commercial center, Alexanderplatz, sits the historical Nikolai Quarter in the district of Mitte, recognizable by the two towers of St. Nicholas Church at its center and its narrow winding alleys with small cafes and restaurants that are a popular tourist attraction in the area. The St. Nikolai Church is the oldest church in Berlin, dating back to the early 13^th century. The alley and street pattern around the church comprised one of the only remains of medieval Berlin before the war. The site was obliterated during the Battle of Berlin in 1945, except for parts of the church and few remains of other buildings. After the rise of the Berlin Wall, the central area of Berlin became a desolate land. 

What visitors experience today is in fact a complete reconstruction by the German Democratic Republic during the 1980s. The site remained vacant after the war until the GDR sought its recreation to be completed in time to celebrate Berlin’s 750^th anniversary in 1987. From the perspective of historic preservation, this reconstruction was controversial. After the war, the historic preservation and restoration of inner cities in Germany generated a lot of debate about what can be restored, repaired or completely recreated. 

Figure 23, Nikolaiviertel, Sketch by Sundus Al-Bayati

The conversation centered on individual buildings, as well as on the historical character of the city core or Altstadt. Architects and planners debated whether only important iconic buildings that were slightly damaged should be restored or if a group of buildings that were razed during the war could be completely recreated to document the historical characteristics of inner cities including the scale of buildings and the street patterns. Some critics argued that reproducing copies of historical buildings that were completely destroyed would create a false sense of history that tries to evade the Nazi era that led to the war and the event of destruction. However, infilling what was destroyed with modern buildings risked destroying the character and the identity of inner cities. Most agreed that a significant historical building that is moderately damaged can certainly be restored and parts of it recreated because enough of the original building’s details remain to guide a faithful reconstruction. Some preservation officials supported the recreation of historically significant buildings even if nothing of the original existed because they argued that these buildings were historic symbols or documents of the past.⁷

There wasn’t a unified framework that guided reconstruction and historic preservation principles in Germany after the war. German cities either largely opted for modernization, like West Berlin, or varying degrees of historic preservation in rebuilding their Altstadt; for example, Nuremberg adapted a combined approach to preserving its historic core: iconic buildings that were slightly damaged were restored and new buildings were built that matched in appearance the character and scale of historical buildings. The issue of “Zero Hour” remained at the heart of the debate of modernization vs. preservation: whether to acknowledge a break in German’s history after the war and start a new chapter or recreate vanished quarters of the city to maintain a historical continuity that potentially bypassed the uncomfortable chapter of Nazism and the war.

More than three decades after the war, the Nikolai Quarter remained vacant until the East German government advanced a plan to recreate the historical area, which included restoring St. Nicholas Church and rebuilding a whole neighborhood of 17^th and 18^th century merchant houses that once stood along its medieval narrow streets.⁸ In this reconstruction effort, motivated more so by competing with West Berlin in preparing for the 750^th anniversary celebration of the city rather than historic preservation, the East German government sought to establish a historical continuity that goes back to the Middle Ages, cementing the urban identity of East Berlin as the  true German city. Brian Ladd elaborates on the image that the East German government tried to provoke in creating a replica of the Nikolai Quarter in 1987: “…the neighborhood of merchants testified to the vigor of the new middle class at the end of the Middle Ages, rising to power in a feudal society and thus illustrating (in the most Marxist theory) the bourgeois revolution that was the prerequisite of the proletariat revolution that the Red Army brought to Germany in 1945.”⁹

Figure 24–29, Nikolaiviertel

Visible Ruins 

The sight of ruins has historically been a subject of romanticism and nostalgia in architecture and art but this fascination with ruins became more prominent since the 18^th century as seen in well-known examples like Piranesi’s etchings of Roman ruins or Turner’s Tintern Abbey. These works illustrate the aesthetics of ruins; their persistence and decay as objects of contemplation. They are often tourist attractions to be walked around and enjoyed as one would with art in a museum. But, how do we engage with ruins from the war? Are ruins just the material manifestation of conflict, a memorial for the destruction or could they play a more active role in telling the story of the city and its history? 

I’ve explored ruins in Berlin and Anhalter Bahnhof’s site and its future use in the Exile Museum stood out as more than a mere aesthetic treatment of ruins. Anhalter Bahnhof was one of the three train stations where Jews were deported from Germany and the proposed Exile Museum will tell their story of exile and other stories of displaced people. On the other hand, Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church situated in one of Berlin’s biggest commercial districts has become one of the most popular tourist attractions for its striking look as a war relic. Similarly, the intricate brick façade of Franziskaner-Klosterkirche is the only thing left standing in this church from the 13^th century (see Figures 43–47). Unlike the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, it is tucked away in a park surrounded by trees. Its state of openness as a result of the war is definitely a site to revel in.

Walking in Berlin, sometimes you forget that about half of the city was destroyed in World War II. The scars of war are not as visible anymore. In East and West Berlin, modern planning was the dominant approach to reconstruction after the war. Damaged buildings were rarely repaired or preserved and most were cleared in favor of new modern buildings and wider streets. There are few exceptions that stand out as reminders of what the city looked like after the war for many years. 

One of the most famous symbols of Berlin is the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Kurfurstendamm with its broken and hallow spire (see Figures 30–36). The church was built in 1895 and was damaged during the air raids of 1943. In 1961, Egon Eiermann completed a modern addition to the church that consists of a new church and a separate campanile tower. As excited as I was to see a church with a hole in the middle, an actual ruin from the war, my enthusiasm died down as I walked into the area of Kurfurstendamm. How odd did this church and the bizarre modern addition look in the middle of all the noise, traffic and glamorous shops. The ruins stand in striking contrast to the heavily developed and commercial district around it. When the city was divided between the Allies sector and Soviet sector, the Kurfustendamm became a central area for West Berlin and was one of the first areas to be developed quickly to be the most famous Western district for entertainment, business, and shopping. Egon Eiermann’s original competition entry proposed removing the ruins of the church but public outcry led to the revised current design, where still a big portion of the remaining church was demolished to make room for the new buildings. Ruins can be deceiving at times; their shapes suggest how the forces of war struck them but we forget that modernization and profit-driven developments are as powerful as war in destroying the urban landscape. 

Figure 30–33, Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church

Figure 34, 1961 church addition by Egon Eiermann, interior

Figure 35, 1961 church addition by Egon Eiermann, exterior

Figure 36, Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church and addition by Egon Eiermann

Another prominent ruin that one might encounter in Berlin is the Anhalter Bahnhof (see Figures 37-42). All that remains of the former train station are the ruins of the main entryway and a portion of the front facade. The station was one of Berlin’s most important train stations and so it was targeted during the war. The building was damaged but it was the period after the war that saw its eventful destruction. Anhalter Bahnhof’s history is closely tied with the history of Berlin from Nazism to the Cold War. In Hitler’s great plan for Berlin, the tracks of the station were severed to make room for Albert Speer’s North-South Axis project. The station would have been demolished in Speer’s project and replaced with a public swimming pool but then the war happened. Anhalter Bahnhof witnessed another crucial historical moment in Berlin. The station became a deportation point for almost 10,000 Jews who were sent to Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia. The train station remained barely functional after the war until it was closed in 1952 when East Germany redirected all the train lines to Ostbahnhof since Anhalter Bahnhof resided in West Germany. In 1960, the station was demolished in its entirety except for the front portion. In 2025, the historic relics of the station will be part of a new museum that will sit behind it, the Exile Museum. The museum will tell the stories of exile of those who were deported during the Nazi regime and also of current displaced groups. The Exile Museum offers an example of a meaningful engagement with ruins from the war; the historic fragments become more than a romantic picture from the past, detached from any historical, social and political implications but are essential in telling the story of Berlin from their very charged location. 

Figure 37–42, Ruins of Anhalter Bahnhof

Figures 43–47, Ruins of Franziskaner-Klosterkirche

Invisible Ruins: Berlin’s Parks 

In Berlin, the parks of the city have stories to tell as well. Berlin is a city rich with parks and some of them engage with the history of the war in subtle and striking ways. As you approach and experience the beautiful winding and hilly landscape of Volkspark Friedrichsain and Volkspark Prenzlauer Berg, you might not know that these hills you are walking on were formed from the rubble of World War II. Schuttberg is the German term for a hill made of rubble. After the war, Berlin was covered with mounds of rubble. The task of clearing the rubble and stacking it in piles fell on the women in Germany because of the loss of men during the war. These women were called the Rubble Women. One of the most infamous examples of Schuttberg in Berlin is Teufelsberg. It’s not only a rubble mound that took 22 years to create but underneath it lies the unfinished Nazi training college designed by Albert Speer. 

Burying the destroyed remnants of the city after the war under scenic landscapes reminds me of the tradition of Tumuli, mounds of earth and stone that sit over a grave to mark a burial site. 

Social Housing from East, West and Unified Berlin

In Stalinallee and Hansavierte, East and West Berlin regimes used rebuilding and the introduction of new housing models as a way to generate new identities for their cities. As discussed, both of these projects were unsustainable to propagate due to their cost and planning. Housing shortages and crowded 19^th-century tenement living in both East and West Berlin led to the development of satellite cities outside of Berlin. Unlike Stalinallee and Hansaviertel, there are more similarities than differences in these developments. Both sides used prefabricated mass housing to offer dignified and affordable housing to their citizens that was the opposite of the overcrowded dark tenements in the city. I went to look at a couple of these examples of social housing: Marzahn (1977–1990) in east Berlin and Gropiusstadt (1959–1975) in west Berlin. Literature about these two developments abounds, so I will not get into their history and let the pictures do the work. 

Figure 48–56, Marzahn

Figure 57–63, Gropiusstadt

In the 1980s, West Berlin shifted its urban planning approach from modernization to discovering and preserving the 19^th-century city. The 19^th-century tenement housing that was not accepted in the last three decades after the war suddenly became an important aspect of Berlin’s urban identity. This shift to pre-war architectural styles and urbanity, which was termed “Critical Reconstruction,” emerged during the International Building Exhibition in 1980s. A number of well-known international architects were invited to design housing projects in the center of Berlin as part of IBA 1987. Architects include Zaha Hadid, Aldo Rossi, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, among others. Pictures of some the buildings I explored are below.

Figure 64–65, IBA 1987, Bonjour Tristesse, Alvaro Siza

Figure 66–68, IBA 1987, John Hejduk

Figure 69, IBA 1987, Raimund Abraham

Figure 70, IBA 1987, Zaha Hadid

Figure 71–72, IBA 1987, Aldo Rossi and Gianni Braghieri

Figure 73–75, Photos from my phone, 2016, Baghdad

References

¹ Diefendorf, Jeffry M. In the Wake of War: The Reconstruction of German Cities after World War II. Oxford Univ. Press, 1993.

² Ibid, 63.

³ Ibid, 50

⁴ Ladd, Brian. The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape. The University of Chicago Press, 2018, pp 234.

⁵ Pugh, Emily. Architecture, Politics, & Identity in Divided Berlin. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014.

⁶ Ladd, Brian. The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape. The University of Chicago Press, 2018, pp.186.

⁷ Diefendorf, Jeffry M. In the Wake of War: The Reconstruction of German Cities after World War II. Oxford Univ. Press, 1993.

⁸ Ladd, Brian. The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape. The University of Chicago Press, 2018.

⁹ Ibid, 46.

Sundus Al-Bayati is the 2019 recipient of the H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellowship. All photographs are by the author, except where otherwise specified.

From Baghdad to Berlin

In my first week in Berlin, my Pacer app. registered 62 miles walked. Berlin had unusually sunny weather after weeks of rain, so I didn’t want to waste any days sitting inside recovering from my jetlag, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to get to know the city straightaway. I think Jane Jacobs would agree. On my map, I outlined the sites and buildings I planned to see that were either destroyed during World War II or rebuilt after the war. I wanted to get a sense of the city first. Walking allows your mind to wander. My mind drifted back in time to the early 20^th century, when the German Empire sought to expand its colonial power by connecting Berlin to Baghdad through The Baghdad Railway. 

The Baghdad Railway, also known as the Berlin-Baghdad Railway, built from 1903 to 1940, was a way for Germany to strengthen its alliance with the Ottoman Empire and assert its power as a rival to Britain and France in the Middle East. The Railway would allow Germany to establish a port in the Persian Gulf, granting it access to valuable oil reserves in Iraq, and linking Germany with its colonies in Africa.¹ The Baghdad Railway was part of the Ottoman Empire’s plans to develop railways to link Turkey and Iraq. The increasingly weak and indebted empire granted the bid for the construction of the Baghdad Railway to Germany’s Deutsche Bank. When World War I broke out in 1914, the Baghdad Railway was 600 miles short of its planned destination. I often wondered what kind of Baghdad it would have been had this train route existed between the two cities. Maybe instead of applying for an entry visa to Germany a month in advance, detailing my arrival and departure dates, presenting my bank statements, providing proof of address and legal residency in the U.S. and submitting booked accommodation in Berlin (before I know if I am allowed to enter the country or not), I could hop on a train from Baghdad and find myself in Berlin two days later. Mobility is a theme I fantasize about frequently being an Arab and from a Muslim country. Everywhere I go, my passport is scrutinized, and I am subjected to a lengthy visa process. I never know whether I am going somewhere until I arrive there. This year of travel will be an adventure.

As I navigate the visa process for each destination, the COVID restrictions, and the political climate in my war-torn cities, my itinerary might change. Unfortunately, there are too many cities whose urban landscape has been completely changed by war and conflict that I couldn’t fit in my year-long exploration, which I might explore if my planned itinerary is disrupted. The cities on my list are not unique in their experience of war. War and destruction have always been the history of cities. However, war in these cities is positioned in a time that is not too far in the past and not too recent that enough can be observed about their different processes of reconstruction and its effects in shaping the urban landscape. This is the reason why Baghdad, where I grew up during the UN sanctions of the 1990s and 2003 war, is not on the list. Baghdad is still in a state of destruction.

I cannot think of a more intriguing city to begin this research into the complexity of post-war reconstruction than Berlin. Not only did half of the city get damaged during World War II, but the preceding era of Nazism, and the subsequent years of the city’s division manifested to the world as the Berlin Wall, make Berlin a city that continuously contends with its identity and past. This struggle is present all over the city. 

In his War and Architecture pamphlet from 1993, Lebbeus Woods identifies two patterns of post-war reconstruction: either erasing the old site and creating a new utopia or restoring the site to its previous pre-war condition. Woods distinguishes between two approaches of reconstructing destroyed buildings according to their type: “ordinary buildings” such as apartment buildings and offices, as well as “symbolic structures” such mosques, churches and public buildings.² While I don’t agree with Woods that a building type could solely drive the process and narrative of reconstruction, I think it is important to differentiate between the scale of a singular structure, such as the building block, and the scale of a group of structures like the neighborhood block. For this post, I’d like to focus on two iconic buildings in Berlin that offer two somewhat opposing examples of reconstruction.

Topography of Terror Museum

The first stop I made in Berlin was the Topography of Terror Museum. The site, formerly the Prinz Albrecht Palais, used to house the headquarters of Gestapo, Sicherheitspolizie, SD, Einsatzgruppen and SS Reich Security Main Office. The evolution of this site since World War II is a salient example of one of Berlin’s longest and most contentious debates about post-war reconstruction and its associations with the city’s history and identity. 

Topography of Terror Site (click to view full-size image)

Prinz Albrecht Palaist was built in the 18^th century, and later renovated by Berlin’s most prominent architect of the 19^th century, Karl Friedrick Schinkel. The site was destroyed during the Allied bombing in 1945 and sat in ruins until 1949, when the West Berlin government blew up the rest. By the mid-1950s all the SS and Gestapo buildings were demolished and the rubble was cleared. The buildings weren’t so damaged as to warrant their demolition but nobody wanted to preserve the “most feared address in Germany.”³

The act of deliberately erasing what remained of one of Berlin’s historically critical landmarks and especially one without any public input would later determine the future of the site when a new generation perceived this action as a way for their government and its people to erase their tainted past and deny their connections to Nazi Germany.

Until 1981, the site sat vacant and was leased for different uses, such as to hold debris from nearby construction sites.⁴ In 1986, pressured by the “Active Museum of Fascism and Resistance in Berlin,” the city government led an excavation at the site and discovered the jail cells of the Gestapo.⁵ The discovery led to the establishment of the Topography of Terror exhibit the following year. The positive reception of the exhibit led to a rethinking of the site; following the German unification, a design competition was established to invite architects to design an exhibit space and a documentation center to continue to investigate the Nazi past. Peter Zumthor’s design was selected but the construction stopped few years later due to funding difficulties and debates about Zumthor’s design. The Zumthor design was dropped and a decade later a new architect was selected, the German architect Ursula Wilms. 

As I approached the museum, I was surprised by how desolate the site felt. The new museum consists of an indoor exhibit and documentation center and an outdoor exhibit that occupies a small footprint. The rest of the site is left untouched. I learned that was the most important design criteria established by the museum commission. The sense of flatness and desertedness I felt is meant to document the deliberate flattening of the site and the subsequent years of neglect and disregard by the West Berlin government in its attempt to erase the Third Reich. The site remains a representation of the complicated relationship between Berlin and its difficult past.

The indoor exhibit, a rectangular box of metal and glass, almost hovers on the site to disrupt its history as little as possible. The outdoor portion of the museum brings the visitor close to the exposed jail cellars of the Gestapo where people were tortured and imprisoned. 

Excavated Gestapo prison cells make up the outdoor exhibit 

This example of post-war reconstruction challenges the traditional approach of rebuilding a replica of the old 18^th-century palace that was destroyed and instead documents the historical and political forces that formed the site since the war. This form of reconstruction sees architecture beyond a mere object to be replicated to restore pre-war normalcy, but as a product of lived and shared experiences that constitute the complex narrative of a city. In its minimal intervention, the site retains evidence of the Third Reich and records the city’s dialogue with its uncomfortable past.

The Humboldt Forum 

A thirty-minute walk east of the Topography of Terror Museum stands another controversial example of post-war reconstruction: the Humboldt Forum, or as the political science professor Jan-Werner Müller calls it, “Prussian Disneyland.” It’s a lucky coincidence for me to be in Berlin while the controversy about this building is very much present in the minds of Berliners. The museum opened its doors on July 20^th. Perusing news articles around the time of the museum’s opening gives an idea about the ongoing controversy directed at the architectural form of the building that unapologetically reconstructs an icon of Germany’s colonial past. The debates about the reconstruction of the palace have been ongoing since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

A snapshot of recent articles following the opening of the Humboldt Forum

The newly opened Humboldt Forum, view from the Spree River, Berliner Dome on the right

Reconstructed baroque facades against the modern concrete grid of the eastern facade

Reconstructed baroque facades against the modern concrete grid of the eastern facade

The original Berlin Palace was built in 1443 and became the royal residence of the Hohenzollern until 1918. King Fredrick I of Prussia ordered the expansion of the palace, which was completed by architect Andreas Schluter in 1713 to become one of the largest and most important buildings of Northern Baroque architecture.⁶ The palace was severely damaged during the bombing of Berlin, but other parts of the building, including the iconic facades, survived. After a few years of neglect, the East German government demolished the building in 1950, claiming the site too damaged to preserve. They proposed it become a square for mass demonstrations for the proletariat to express their struggles and needs. The site remained undeveloped for over a decade and was used as a car parking lot until 1973, when a new building was constructed by the GDR government, the Palace of the Republic.⁷ The new modernist building housed the Volkskammer, the parliament of the German Democratic Republic, as well as public and cultural spaces like a bowling alley, cinemas, theaters, and restaurants.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Palace of the Republic was closed due to the discovery of asbestos contamination. In the following decade, controversy about the future of the site took central stage again in Berlin between proponents of demolishing the site and reconstructing the vanished Berlin Palace as a symbol of unified Germany and preservationists and activists who saw the Palace of the Republic an integral part of the history of Berlin and its divided era.⁸ Nonetheless, in 2003 the Bundestag voted to demolish the building, and it was not until 2007 that a decision to rebuild the 18^th-century Berlin Palace—or parts of it—was passed.⁹ The plan was to rebuild three of the lost facades and the Berlin Palace dome, based mainly on photographs since no detailed drawings of the building exist, and have the interior of the building serve as a space for cultural programming. Today, three of those new-old facades stand next to a fourth of a modern architectural style. It now houses a collection of non-European art such as artifacts from Asia and Africa, looted by the German Empire.

The newly reconstructed baroque facades of Humboldt Forum

Humboldt Forum and Berlin Television Tower (Berliner Fernsehturm) to the right 

The Atles Museum viewed from inside the courtyard of Humboldt Forum

An interior courtyard in the Humboldt Forum where modern and baroque walls meet

Close up of the reconstructed baroque details in the interior courtyard of the museum

Before it was reborn as the Humboldt Forum, the Berlin Palace was sort of temporarily reconstructed once before. In 1993, the businessman Wilhelm von Boddien founded a lobby group that was essential in winning the debate to rebuild the Berlin Palace. Using private funding, the group managed to erect two full-scale facades from painted canvas attached to a massive scaffolding structure.¹⁰ The idea was to demonstrate the importance of this reconstruction in reclaiming its place back in the historical center of Berlin next to the Berliner Dome and the Berlin Cathedral. This was a successful strategy to win favorable public opinion. The art mockup is an uncommon example of public participation in the discussion of what replaces a destroyed building in the aftermath of war and its implications for people’s sense of history and place. Was the public manipulated by nationalists? 

Sketch_Understanding the History of the Site (click to view full-size image)

Being the latest creation at the end of a long cycle of construction and destruction, the Humboldt Forum stands as a clear example of how a city’s buildings are continuously molded by ideological and political forces. More importantly, it demonstrates who has the power to decide what stands in the place of a destroyed building and thus deciding what fragment of the past is told. The recent controversy is focused on the use of the Humboldt Forum for the display of looted objects but there is another equally important debate: was the erasure of the Palace of the Republic that already stood there for over 30 years warranted? To intentionally deconstruct an existing landmark that represents the very identity of this city, the city of the Berlin Wall, and construct in its place an empty vessel of a vanished royal past, seems to be no more than an act of vengeance and a symbol of triumph of the neoliberalism that West Germany pivoted to immediately after World War II.

The two iconic sites, on opposite sides of the Berlin Wall, are two among many destroyed during the war but they are exemplary in their ability to present a fundamental theme in the narrative of this city, the ongoing struggle between remembering and forgetting.

History of the Site

The Palace of the Republic lives on in the museum store as keychains and cups among other things 

Marx and Engels Statue remains in Marx-Engels Forum in front of the former Palast Der Republik and the current Humboldt Forum

References:

The Graduate Student Lightning Talks have been welcoming master’s and PhD students to present their ongoing research at the SAH Annual International Conference through quick, 5–7-minute presentations for years. But unlike the more familiar structure of a conventional conference panel, the Talks are a bit more opaque. This is due to the fact that they are not solely a panel, but also an opportunity for graduate students to build community. Indeed, we welcome participants from art history, American Studies, and other programs that are not necessarily centered solely on architectural history. The Lightning Talks are one way for the graduate students, from many fields and disciplines, to come together, exchange ideas, and share our work and build a community through SAH.


"Global Modernisms" Graduate Student Lightning Talk Workshop

So, who organizes the Talks and how are they set up? 

The Graduate Student Advisory Committee, made up of elected graduate students in conversation with SAH leadership, organizes the Talks along with volunteer co-chairs each year. Together they review the submitted abstracts and CVs, and select presenters based on the quality of their work, research methodologies, diversity of interests and backgrounds, as well as their interest in participating in SAH activities. The group selects participants, typically 13–15 graduate students, who are then organized in thematic groups with designated co-chairs.

What are the Lightning Talks workshops?

Since the condensed format of the Lightning Talks makes offering and receiving feedback to presenters a bit complicated, the organizers have this year introduced virtual workshops to connect panel participants with their more established counterparts and receive in-depth feedback on their research and presentations prior to the annual conference. This past year, we held four sessions, focusing on a broad range of themes. Presenters had the opportunity to receive significant feedback directly from faculty mentors at the workshops as well as the opportunity to learn from listening to and participating in the discussions in other thematic groups. Faculty mentors and students developed robust intellectual rapport and then reconnected once again during the actual conference panel.

Read about the 2021 workshops

What else do graduate students gain from participating in the Lightning Talks?

In addition to working with co-chairs, faculty mentors, and peers to prepare their presentations for the SAH Annual International Conference, graduate students become more aware of different institutional networks and intellectual approaches to architectural history. In 2021, Lightning Talks participants connected at a virtual happy hour, where they were able to discuss their favorite conference experiences and plan future collaborations. Panel organizers are hopeful the Lightning Talks can continue to facilitate a kind of network of cohorts, or former presenters who stay in touch and keep each other updated on their research activities through their participation in the Talks.

If you want to partake in the Graduate Student Lightning Talks, make sure you submit your abstract and CV through the SAH portal by the deadline, June 2, 2021.

"Politics of Historic Preservation" Graduate Student Lightning Talk Workshop

Can you tell SAH a little about your background and what interests you most about architectural history?

I have a bachelors in architecture from Syracuse University, but I was always interested in taking architectural history and history classes while completing my undergraduate degree. These interests led me to completing a masters in historic preservation from the University of Pennsylvania and then pursing a doctorate at Columbia University. I think what most interests me about architectural history is uncovering untold stories that are not typically associated with architecture or history in general.

Can you give us a brief summary of your current work?

Currently I’m working on researching and interpreting the role the American Black Church had in the culture of American building in the 19^th century. This research takes a vernacular methodological approach that asks questions about the changing cultural values of the built environment rather than deeming something as “commonplace” or “ordinary”. The major outcome I’m working toward with this research is to show Black agency in the built environment that touches on historic and monumental buildings such as Mother Bethel AME in Philadelphia and smaller unassuming places of worship.

That's really interesting. The 19^th century spans a watershed in American history—the Civil War—which raises other questions. Are there changes in the establishment and use of Black spaces before and after the war, or do you see consistency and persistent attitudes toward the built environment in the Black community?

This is a good question about consistency and change in Black heritage sites. Although I haven't done the rigorous research for this (haven't quite started the dissertation phase of my PhD!), I do see in other places where I've researched or assisted with preservation efforts that there's consistency. That doesn't mean there are not moments of innovation. Consistency is really something everyone deals with; we adapt only when we need to and keep methods and practices that continue to be sufficient. Where I really see change in building practices is when a community responds to popular trends and adapts them to their unique situations. One really good example of this is Mother Bethel AME in Philadelphia, which I mentioned, where renderings of the different church buildings built on the site corresponded to popular building trends. The current building, built in 1890, is a Richardson Romanesque building. The building has the amenities one would expect for AME liturgy, but also the style reflects popular taste at the time in the United States. So I suppose my answer is that it's more of a both/and and a mix of historical and contextual, if that makes sense. Also, who gets to be a tastemaker? But I suppose that's a question for another day.

I would imagine most Black churches were sites of sanctuary and agency regardless of building style, but are you finding more differences or more similarities in how these communities valued monumental buildings versus vernacular types?

My mother is a small business manager at a construction firm in Washington state and she would bring home blueprints that needed review from the project architect. I remember looking through them in our dining room when I was little. That’s the earliest memory I have, but my interest wasn’t really sparked until I began having interest in film and art direction. My father was concerned about my job prospects so I began researching related professional careers and stumbled upon architecture again.

If a layperson asked why we should study architecture and its history, what would you say?

I would say knowing about the past in general is important to learn lessons that could be applied for the future, but architectural history is important especially because it’s something that everyone comes in contact with in their everyday experiences. Everyone has some emotional or cultural attachment to the built environment and it’s crucial to understand that attachment to learn more about people.

When and how did you become involved with SAH and how has the Society enriched your experience in architectural history?

I first became involved with SAH when I started my masters at Penn. It was important to me to learn about the professional opportunities and SAH was one of the top organizations on my list.

Working with other graduate students has been key in my experience with SAH. Serving on the SAH Graduate Student Advisory Committee has shown me more opportunities and possibilities. Also, getting the chance to meet important scholars in our field through attending conferences and talks has been extremely influential in how I work as an architectural historian.

The last year has seen significant changes in our society and in SAH. Do you have a vision for how SAH should evolve in the future, and how do you see yourself as part of that growth?

I think it’s important that SAH responds to historical injustices by elevating historically marginalized voices, but also continuing to instill historical rigor that makes us think deeply about the role the built environment plays in historical scholarship. Also, elevating the work of graduate students could help facilitate a stronger connection among professionals in different stages of their career.

I participated in the first Method Acts Workshop and thought having the opportunity to discuss some interventions I’m hoping to explore with my dissertation was helpful. And despite the moment we’re in, using online platforms allows more people to come into contact with each other, which I thought the workshops did quite well. I do think future workshops could continue discussing archival material and different ways to approach this material. That could be useful for exploring different avenues for research.

Thank you so much for taking the time to answer these questions. I always like to end by asking what advice would you give to a young person considering a career in architectural history or a related field?

I would say take as many history courses as possible, in your interests and outside. This also includes history not explicitly related to architecture as it will expose you to how other historians have been thinking about interpreting the past.

SAH members engage with the history of the built environment through a broad array of specializations, professional fields, and areas of interest. Member Stories is a regular feature that recognizes the expertise and unique experiences of our members.