Architecture as Strategy:
Introductory Essay to War & Architecture
Adam Drisin & W.E. Newman
The Israeli army reads Gilles Deleuze. They also read Christopher Alexander, Guy Debord, and John Forrester. It is surprising that the destruction of war is linked with the construction of architecture in this way, but it is. This suggests that the new means to wage the art of war is somehow similar to the strategies of architecture. Brigadier General Aviv Kokhavi, in an interview in Frieze magazine, described their methods learned by studying urban design as an ‘‘inverse geometry’’ or the ‘‘reorganization of the urban syntax by means of a series of micro-tactical actions.’’1 The spatial tactics of reorganization translate literally as a new way to
conceive of the urban fabric. Soldiers move through domestic space, not around it. They traverse a city by way of meters of overground tunnels bored through the city fabric regardless of program or occupation. Soldiers violate the rationalized relation between street and building: openings are manufactured as needed in walls, floors, and ceilings. The normative apparatuses of architecture, such as stairs, alleys, hallways, and doors, no longer accommodate their movement. The army carves through living rooms, bedrooms, offices, or schools
without regard to their architectural syntax: their appropriation of the language of architecture sentences the city to silence. Interiority becomes exteriority. Public space and domestic space collapse in a single gesture that annihilates their capacity to speak within the city. The city becomes the ‘‘medium of warfare,’’ and architecture is both battleground and house, both field of death and life. Manfredo Tafuri proposed that architecture is the bearer of the rationalized principles of capitalist ideology. The crisis of architecture was a defeat in the face of its own muteness—a condition that emerges with the impossibility of the image to bear a legible meaning in society and architectural content within the perfection of its own geometry.2 What then becomes of architecture in a society where war is continuous and amorphous, and the unremitting present of the modern—that is, the constant search for the new—does not need the
language of space or the legibility of the rationalized city? What becomes of architecture when the city is no longer a stable condition of meaning— when there is no difference between public and private, interior and exterior? After World War I, Paul Valery imagined the final image of our cities as the ‘‘perfect and ultimate anthill’’ materializing just at the moment when we no longer need our ghosts to remind us of our follies. This is when we succumb to the illusory
‘‘fatal precision’’ of progress and life borrows the advantages of death.3 The built memorial signifies nothing; rather, it attests to our failure to take into account the past, trapped as we are, in the lure of the constant present. After World War II, in response to our collective defeat in the face of the lessons of monuments to the past, Siegfried Giedion advocated spectacle over pseudomonumentality.4 By the 1950s, he saw the failure of modernism and its promise of reconciliation between capitalism, power, and the politics of public space. But the ephemeral monument as spectacle was itself a false promise. It was increasingly hard to distinguish the celebration of peace from the triumphal march of war. Today, when the spectacle is, at most, the flicker of images on a television screen and the memorial is the justification for the war rather than its denouement, we wonder how things got this far and how architecture (or any cultural production) can matter.5 We hope this theme issue will help propel a dialogue that provokes a response beyond the limits of these pages. All the authors in this issue challenge and address the theme of war and architecture not limited to the dichotomy of construction and destruction. Dialectic, even negative dialectic, ignores the complexity of the modern city and the images it produces. First, there is a history to the relation between architecture and war that, Antoine
Picon suggests, diagrams a balance between an iconography of reassurance and threat while challenging the possibility (or impossibility) of either. He offers an alternative paradigm: that of legibility as an event at the interface between architecture, local and global. Interface is an open-ended event that denies architecture a perfect closure through an active search for continuity between past and future. It offers an antidote to the eternal present of modernity by creating, even if illusory, the social dimension of the past and future. The politics of architecture are intimately linked to how we define public space and its inverse, private space. Private space disappears when we indulge in the global fear of the personal act of random violence. As private space evaporates, it takes with it the public space of political action. Public space is consumed by fear and capitalism in equal measure—Tafuri did not see that one coming. In their article on the Weather Underground and the Chicago Haymarket bombings, Richard Sommer and Glenn Forley underscore the relation between social stability and the politics
of democracy. The story they tell takes on an urgent meaning in our contemporary context of the politics of personal action and the erosion of individual rights for the sake of a perceived collective safety. Eric Mumford argues that the spatial politics of war has social consequences. In the American condition, this inaugurated the contemporary suburb but more importantly opened a fissure between the urban designer, regional planners, and developers that has yet to be healed. In his article on the migration of defense workers during World War II, he shows how the worker’s diaspora not only caused a reconfiguration of the inner city but also fixed the racial tensions of the prewar condition into a permanent wound on the American psyche
and set the social agenda that we struggle with to this day. Included on that agenda are the politics of exclusion, the illusion of the nuclear family with a stay-at-home mother and working father, and the reification of the perfect lawn as a birthright of the white middle class, just to name a few. Language matters. In ‘‘Warchitectural Theory,’’ Andrew Herscher examines our assumptions about war by exploring the meaning of ‘‘warchitecture.’’ The term emerged in battle-torn Sarajevo in the early 1990s to describe the condition of war waged specifically as the destruction of architecture. In the first instance, architecture is understood as the material environment of the city and in the second, the extension of civilization. The complexity arises when we realize that it is at the very moment of the erasure of architecture as an ontological category that it operates as an icon of power and identity in the politics of war. Finally, the semantics of war and architecture, war as architecture or warchitecture, returns us to our first premise: the past strategy of architecture to rationalize the city is ineffectual when the very terms by which it is defined are redeployed as tactics in war, both literal and phenomenal. The city for the Israeli army is continuous, porous, spatially homogenous and at the same time constantly in flux, infinitely malleable, and impermanent. The architecture of the city silences itself when the language of architecture cannot speak.
Notes
1. From Hannah Greenberg, ‘‘The Limited Conflict: This Is How You Trick Terrorists,’’ in Yediot Aharonot, ed., http://www.ynet.co.il (accessed March 23, 2004). Aviv Kokhavi interviewed by Eyal Weizman on September 24 at an Israeli military base near Tel Aviv.Translation from Hebrew by Eyal Weizman, reprinted in ‘‘The Art of War,’’ Frieze, http:// www.frieze.com/issue/article/the_art_of_war (accessed March 14, 2006).
2. Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976), p. 181. The full quote reads as follows: ‘‘The ‘fall’ of modern art is the final testimony of bourgeois ambiguity torn between ‘positive’ objectives and the pitiless self exploration of its own objective commercialization. No ‘salvation’ is any longer to be found within it: neither wandering restlessly in labyrinths of images so multivalent they end in muteness, nor enclosed in the stubborn silence of geometry content with its own perfection.’’
3. Paul Valery, ‘‘The Crisis of Mind,’’ in P. Valery, The Outlook for Intelligence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), p.101. The entire quote is ‘‘Farewell, ghosts! The world no longer needs you—or me. By giving the names of progress to its own tendency to a fatal precision, the world is seeking to add to the benefits of life the advantages of death. A certain confusion still reigns; but in a little while all will be made clear, and we shall witness at last the miracle of an animal society, the perfect and ultimate anthill.’’
4. S. Giedion, ‘‘The Need for a New Monumentality (1944),’’ in Architecture, You and Me: The Diary of a Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), pp. 25–39.
5. Ibid. The text is a collection of Giedion’s essays with extended comments by the author. In a frequently quoted statement, he admits of the problem by calling for the need ‘‘to bridge the fatal gulf between the greatly retarded powers of thinking and greatly retarded powers of feeling of those in authority,’’ a condition that modernity had never overcome. That is, even as he gives this role to the artist, he confesses that the gap that modernism was to eliminate still exists.