write-ups

Zaha in Qatar: The “duty” of the architect

Posted by

4

.
The prominent Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid has recently come under fire in the press due to her alleged indifference over labor conditions in Qatar. Hadid’s curvaceous design for the al-Wakrah soccer stadium was selected by the Gulf state to house the 2012 FIFA World Cup competition. Revelations emerged in the Guardian newspaper last week regarding the extraordinarily high number of worker fatalities involved in the execution of her design, particularly among precarious migrant populations. Five hundred or more Indian workers have already perished in the construction of the building so far, in addition to almost four hundred deaths of Nepalese nationals.

Confronted with these figures, Zaha first pleaded ignorance and subsequently claimed powerlessness. She said:

I have nothing to do with the workers. I think that’s an issue the government — if there’s a problem — should pick up. Hopefully, these things will be resolved.

[W]hat do I do about that? I’m not taking it lightly but I think it’s for the government to look to take care of. It’s not my duty as an architect to look at it.

I cannot do anything about it because I have no power to do anything about it. I think it’s a problem anywhere in the world. But, as I said, I think there are discrepancies all over the world.

Zaha’s remarks came across as cold and detached, if not utterly insensitive. Though she spoke of her “concern” over the situation, she refused to take the blame for any of it. In the opinion of many analysts and architectural critics, this simply confirmed what they’d suspected about her all along: namely, that Hadid is an architect without an adequate sense of civic responsibility, a near-perfect embodiment of the “designer” (in Hal Foster‘s sense) in the neoliberal age. Dezeen points out that even close peers and contemporaries such as Richard Rogers or Daniel Libeskind, who have often been criticized along the same lines as Hadid, have spoken out about the architect’s duty to society at large.

Actually I tend to agree with Zaha here, though it probably bothers her — it should bother anyone — on a purely human level. (Which she has already said that it does). Hadid must be made to answer for her designs, however, specifically “as an architect.” Personally, I think this qualification is crucial to any balanced assessment of her what she said. Unless there was something intrinsic to her design that would necessitate cruel labor conditions or expose workers to undue risk, there’s nothing about the project that demands she take responsibility “as an architect.” Continue reading →

Lenin of Borg

Posted by

1

.
It’s likely, after all, that the Borg Collective in Star Trek was based on Evgenii Zamiatin’s satiric — if not dystopic — depiction of a collectivized society in his 1921 book We. So it is only right and natural that Lenin would eventually be assimilated into its hive mind as well. Patrick Stewart of the first-person plural.
.
STTNG_S4_Still_193-08-PICARD-AFTERLocutusOfBorg23671148774528ameanwhile-in-russia-52-pics_45b

“…the end of the innocent notion of the essential black subject” — Stuart Hall, 1932-2014

Posted by

0

.
Stuart Hall, the British Marxist and cultural theorist, died today. He was the author of numerous articles on Marxism, cultural identity, Thatcherism, and the politics of difference. Below is posted an extract of his brief 1989 article on “New Ethnicities,” in which he discusses “the end of the innocent notion of the essential black subject.” This was, as my friend Dakota Brown pointed out, a provocation that has largely gone unanswered since it was first announced (indeed, largely unanswered by Hall himself). While I don’t share Hall’s predilection for Gramscian notions of “hegemony” and the “war of maneuver,” having long since been assimilated into the mainstream of cultural politics, he at least recognized the potential danger of such concepts leading to “a sort of endlessly sliding discursive liberal-pluralism.” Moreover, Hall discusses the often problematic encounter between “black politics” and postmodernism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and feminism. All these have been discussed recently on this blog, and so I’m here republishing this excerpt.

.
[The politics of representation] is a complex issue. First, it is the effect of a theoretical encounter between black cultural politics and the discourses of a Eurocentric, largely white, critical cultural theory which in recent years, has focused so much analysis of the politics of representation. This is always an extremely difficult, if not dangerous encounter. (I think particularly of black people encountering the discourses of poststructuralism, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, and feminism). Secondly, it marks what I can only call “the end of innocence,” or the end of the innocent notion of the essential black subject. Here again, the end of the essential black subject is something which people are increasingly debating, but they may not have fully reckoned with its political consequences. What is at issue here is the recognition of the extraordinary diversity of subjective positions, social experiences and cultural identities which compose the category “black”; that is, the recognition that “black” is essentially a politically and culturally constructed category, which cannot be grounded in a set of fixed transcultural or transcendental racial categories and which therefore has no guarantees in Nature. What this brings into play is the recognition of the immense diversity and differentiation of the historical and cultural experience of black subjects. This inevitably entails a weakening or fading of the notion that “race” or some composite notion of race around the term black will either guarantee the effectivity of any cultural practice or determine in any final sense its aesthetic value.

We should put this as plainly as possible. Films are not necessarily good because black people make them. They are not necessarily “right-on” by virtue of the fact that they deal with black experience. Once you enter the politics of the end of the essential black subject you are plunged headlong into the maelstrom of a continuously contingent, unguaranteed, political argument and debate: a critical politics, a politics of criticism. You can no longer conduct black politics through the strategy of a simple set of reversals, putting in the place of the bad old essential white subject, the new essentially good black subject. Now, that formulation may seem to threaten the collapse of an entire political world. Alternatively, it may be greeted with extraordinary relief at the passing away of what at one time seemed to be a necessary fiction. Namely, either that all black people are good or indeed that all black people are the same. After all, it is one of the predicates of racism that “you can’t tell the difference because they all look the same.” This does not make it any easier to conceive of how a politics can be constructed which works with and through difference, which is able to build those forms of solidarity and identification which make common struggle and resistance possible but without suppressing the real heterogeneity of interests and identities, and which can effectively draw the political boundary lines without which political contestation is impossible, without fixing those boundaries for eternity. It entails the movement in black politics, from what Gramsci called the “war of maneuver” to the “war of position” — the struggle around positionalities. But the difficulty of conceptualizing such a politics (and the temptation to slip into a sort of endlessly sliding discursive liberal-pluralism) does not absolve us of the task of developing such a politics.

Mapping the “bloody week”: The last days of the Paris Commune in a cartographic narrative

Posted by

8

.
Originally posted by Fosco Lucarelli over at Socks-Studio. A couple of grammatical and formatting edits have been made, and Friedrich Engels’ 1891 reflection on the Paris Commune has been further appended. Check out Socks-Studio’s website for more great posts and information.

.
The events that occurred in the last month of La Commune — the socialist government that briefly ruled Paris from March 18 to May 28, 1871 — are mapped out in this extraordinary plan, drawn up by Mr. L. Meunier and P. Rouillier in 1871 in a simple yet informative manner.

“Paris en Mai 1871. Plan indiquant les opérations de l’Armée contre l’Insurrection. Dressée par L. Meunier et P. Rouillier. Échelle de 1 : 32,000”

Cartography is used here as a narrative device to display the military movements of the Versailles army, its general strategy, the countermeasures taken by the insurgents, and the rapidly unfolding events taking place in space and time across the urban territory.

For more information about the events of La Commune and some related texts, we leave you with: “La Commune Project by Raspouteam” (2011), an entire site (only in French) dedicated to the events during the insurrection, Le Funambulist’s “Paris 1871 Commune recounted by Raspouteam” and “Processes of smoothing and striation of space in urban warfare.”

We thank our friend Mike Ma for letting us use his photographic reproductions of the plan.

Legend:
In blue: Versailles army lines
In red: elements of the insurgents or destroyed buildings

Click the following image for a hi-def of the whole plan:

paris-mai-1871-01-large

Click any of the following thumbnails to see the images close-up:

The plan also includes an historical summary of military events:

The plan also includes an hystorical summary of military events from March, 18th to Mai, 29th

1891 introduction to The Civil War in France

Friedrich Engels
On the 20th anniversary
of the Paris Commune

.
If today, we look back at the activity and historical significance of the Paris Commune of 1871, we shall find it necessary to make a few additions to the account given in [Marx’s] The Civil War in France.

The members of the Commune were divided into a majority of the Blanquists, who had also been predominant in the Central Committee of the National Guard; and a minority, members of the International Working Men’s Association, chiefly consisting of adherents of the Proudhon school of socialism. The great majority of the Blanquists at that time were socialist only by revolutionary and proletarian instinct; only a few had attained greater clarity on the essential principles, through Vaillant, who was familiar with German scientific socialism. It is therefore comprehensible that in the economic sphere much was left undone which, according to our view today, the Commune ought to have done. Continue reading →

Love letters from the Twitter “feminist” Left

Posted by

11

Image: On the pleasure of
hating, by William Hazlitt

.
Much luv to the h8rs; I do it for y’all. Especially touching are the threats of violence, even if they’re ultimately empty — just a way to strike a militant pose. The world has never known such profound impotence.

Got screenshots of these also, as backup, but figured I might use the neat “embed” feature while they’re still undeleted:
.

https://twitter.com/frkbmb/status/428380426869030913

https://twitter.com/frkbmb/status/430263792186834944

.
Needless to say, the people sending these tweets seem pretty upset. Continue reading →

Soviet travel brochures from the 1930s

Posted by

9

In 1928, Stalin established a government-run foreign travel agency under the name Intourist (a contracted portmanteau of Иностранный [foreign] турист [tourist]). Though it had by that point already evacuated its international obligation to foment world revolution, Stalin’s regime was still looking to raise interest in the fledgling socialist state. All of the following brochures targeted potential tourists from the most advanced capitalist nations in the West — Germany, England, France, the US.

Stylistically, these pieces vary. Many are rather naïve, pastoral, even vaguely Orientalist, especially with respect to the more “exotic” Soviet Republics. Continue reading →

Narkomfin — A web documentary by Luciano Spinelli and Natalia Melikova

Posted by

3

.
Natalia Melikova, the mastermind behind The Constructivist Project, is collaborating with Luciano Spinelli and others from Ogino Knauss on a new web documentary about Ginzburg’s Narkomfin building in Moscow. This comes not too long after Isabella Willinger’s excellent documentary Away from All Suns, released late last year.

Their description of the project is reproduced below. For further information on Dom Narkomfin, consider the following:

Moisei Ginzburg’s & Ignatii Milinis’ Narkomfin Workers’ Collective for the People’s Commissariat of Finance (1928-1931)
Narkomfin upon opening (1930)
Narkomfin in the construction stage, with Moisei Ginzburg supervising (1929)
Nikolai Miliutin, author of Sotsgorod and editor of Sovetskaia arkhitektura, inside his penthouse suite atop Ginzburg & Milinis’ Dom Narkomfin (1932)

.
NARKOMFIN — A web documentary

.
Project in progress — expected completion spring 2014.

Authors: Luciano Spinelli and Natalia Melikova, with Inna Erosh and Stepa Dobrov.

Summary: NARKOMFIN is a web documentary project that captures the atmosphere of current life in 2013 in this historic constructivist building located in Moscow, Russia. The virtual platform of the project invites the viewer to explore the hallways, knock on doors, and get to know some of the inhabitants. A variety of possibilities for interaction with the space and people of Narkomfin allows for a subjective experience for each visitor. By entering some of the apartments, one will have a chance to listen to the residents tell about who they are, what kind of work they do, how the communal architecture influences their everyday life and why they live in this particular building.

Why: The architectural significance and the various circumstances surrounding the fate of the building are widely discussed. However, few can freely visit Narkomfin because of its limited access, therefore little is known about what it is actually like to live there. After having the opportunity to live there for a couple weeks, we wanted to know more about how people appropriated and interpreted their space inside this famous building. This project takes a closer look at the homes and people hidden behind the ribbon windows.

How: In our project, we applied a photo-ethnographic approach of the space, perceiving the long corridors through the viewfinder and meeting new people with our cameras in hand. Progressing from casual conversations, we then asked each of the participants identical questions. In this way, we were able to acquire general information as well as giving the residents an opportunity to share their opinions. More than just a subject in front of our lens, their participation influenced the development of the project. Those that did not want to partake, did not. Those that did, they opened up their worlds to us, shared their homes, their stories, and their talents.

When: 2013 (majority of material capture in May 2013, additional capture summer 2013).

Content: images, video, stop motion, audio, text.

Languages: English / Russian

Special thanks to the people that opened up their doors to our project and shared with us their stories! Continue reading →

A threefold apology

Posted by

1

.
In view of some of the justified anger that has recently been directed toward me for not having deleted a post from a few months back, I think a public apology is in order. The post itself was deeply problematic in some of its insinuations, and moreover contained a number of hateful comments left by trolls directed against an organization to which I formerly belonged and disparaging someone I used to date. Additionally, in my own responses to these awful comments I thereby ended up reprising, stupidly but unwittingly, much of what made them so problematic in the first place.

So I hereby apologize, unconditionally, for the three following reasons: Continue reading →

Moisei Ginzburg, competition entry for the Palace of the Soviets (1931)

Posted by

5

.
In previous posts, I’ve tried to give some sense of the magnitude of the international competition for the Palace of the Soviets project in Moscow. So far I’ve dealt with some of the entries by German architects such as Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer, Erich Mendelsohn, and Hans Poelzig, as well as the Swiss architect Le Corbusier’s famous entry. This would turn out to be one of the last major Soviet competitions in which modernist proposals featured prominently. (Another competition, for the Commissariat of Heavy Industry [Наркомтяжпром], took place in Moscow around 1933-1934, but only submissions from Soviet architects were considered).

Moisei Ginzburg was the chief theoretician and, besides the Vesnin brothers, probably the most accomplished practitioner of architectural constructivism in the Soviet Union. His project for the Palace of the Soviets, jointly carried out with A. Gassenpfliug and S. Lisagor under the supervision of A.F. Loleita, a specialist in matters of construction, and S.Ia. Lifshits, an acoustic technician. It was without a doubt one of his most futuristic proposals to date, almost resembling a landed spaceship faced toward the Kremlin.

One might perhaps compare it with his earlier submission to the 1922-1923 Palace of Labor competition, in terms of its scale and purpose, as the architectural historian Selim Khan-Magomedov has done. But formally, Ginzburg’s vision for the Palace of the Soviets was much more advanced. The multi-tiered central building was designed with stepped storeys parabolically curved upward toward a skylight crowning the dome. His scheme for its main thoroughfares and points of access would have accommodated huge crowds of visitors and personnel, with a series of platforms, ramps, and stairs expediting circulation into and out of the Palace.

Courtyards and terraces were to surround the different structures in the ensemble, with covered walkways connecting them to one another. Not only with respect to its internal composition was the Palace of the Soviets meant to be broadly accessible, either, as the building was easily open to approach from without. The variety of volumes included in Ginzburg’s plan may have clashed stylistically with the preexisting urban fabric of Moscow, but it would have been spatially integrated rather elegantly.

A few paragraphs pertaining to Ginzburg’s Palace of the Soviets appear below in the original Russian, extracted  from Khan-Magomedov’s book on Moisei Ginzburg. See also his excellent Narkomfin building.

Поиски новых типов общественных зданий в первом периоде творчества Гинзбурга завершаются конкурсным проектом Дворца Советов (1932 г.), который выполнялся им совместно с А. Гассенпфлюгом и С. Лисагором при консультации А.Ф. Лолейта (конструкция) и С.Я. Лифшица (акустика). По масштабу и роли в ансамбле центра Москвы Дворец Советов сравним с Дворцом труда (конкурс 1922-1923 гг.). Близка даже в какой-то мере и программа этих зданий (большой и малый залы и Ñ‚. д.). Сравнивая выполненные Гинзбургом проекты Дворца труда и Дворца Советов, разделенные всего девятью годами видно, какой большой и сложный творческий путь прошел их автор. Объемно-пространственная композиция Дворца Советов необычна по трактовке для предыдущего творчества Гинзбурга. Как правило, в более ранних проектах он использовал два композиционных приема: членение здания на отдельные корпуса, соединенные крытыми переходами (павильонный тип), или создание сложной композиции из соединенных между собой различных по форме и величине объемов. Continue reading →

Not art but communism

Posted by

7

.
Early in 1921 the Soviet Commissar of Enlightenment Anatolii Lunacharskii nominated the young avant-garde artist El Lissitzky to serve as the USSR’s cultural ambassador to the West. At the time, the civil war in Russia was still waging, but the end was in sight. Narkompros, the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment, was ordered by Lenin to prepare to make cultural inroads in Western Europe, where revolution had stalled out but might yet be reignited. When David Shterenberg, the director of IZO (Narkompros’ Fine Arts Department), accused Lissitzky of cynically using the funded trip to Germany and the Netherlands as simply a way to promote UNOVIS, the artistic group to which he belonged at the time, the artist immediately shot back:

We are taking not art but communism to the West.

Despite the reservations expressed by art historians such as Victor Margolin, Margaret Tupitsyn, and Henk Puts about the political intent of Lissitzky’s mission, the late Detlef Mertins uncovered evidence a couple years ago that this indeed was the case. On the surface of things, of course, this statement by Lissitzky seems startlingly naïve. How could revolutionary form automatically convey revolutionary content?

Could an abstract shape (think of Beat the White Circle with the Red Wedge) really communicate a communist message? Fredric Jameson once remarked, in his 1992 lectures on The Seeds of Time, that “[i]t was one of the signal errors of the artistic activism of the 1960s to suppose that there existed, in advance, forms that were in and of themselves endowed with a political, and even revolutionary, potential by virtue of their own intrinsic properties.” The same charge might be made against the 1920s, of course, leveled against the artistic and cultural avant-garde of that era. I should like to propose another option.

Perhaps it was not just delusional exuberance or an overactive imagination that led them to make such rash claims for themselves, but rather in that moment revolutionary form and revolutionary content appeared to have merged. Or at least, things seemed to be approaching this point. Lissitzky and Ehrenberg, in their otherwise apolitical article appended below, on the end of the Western naval blockade against the fledgling Soviet Union, said as much when they wrote that “we are unable to imagine any creation of new forms in art that is not linked to the transformation of social forms.” The two appeared indissolubly interconnected. Afterward, of course, revolutionary forms of art would be banished from most of Western Europe by fascism and from the Soviet Union by Stalinism. It flew across the ocean to Chicago and New York, where the United States was rapidly in the process of becoming a global superpower. Nevertheless, nothing like the revolutionary social content prevailed in the US, and in the USSR, where this revolutionary social content was still present, revolutionary forms of art were absent. The two had become decoupled.

I’d like to thank Aleksandr Strugach for bringing these fabulous images to my attention, and the Petersburg architecture blogger and historian Sergei Babushkin for posting them. You can access his blog by clicking here, and I hope you’ll forgive this brief meditation on my part. Check out posts on PROUN and Lissitzky’s design for a yacht club also. Enjoy!

The blockade of Russia is coming to an end

El Lissitzky
Ilya Ehrenberg
Veshch (1922)

.
The appearance of Objet is another sign that the exchange of practical knowledge, realizations, and “objects” between young Russian and West European artists has begun. Seven years of separate existence have shown that the common ground of artistic aims and undertakings that exists in various countries is not simply an effect of chance, a dogma, or a passing fashion, but an inevitable accompaniment of the maturing of humanity. Art is today international, though retaining all its local symptoms and particularities. The founders of the new artistic community are strengthening ties between Russia, in the aftermath of the mighty Revolution, and the West, in its wretched postwar Black Monday frame of mind; in so doing they are bypassing all artistic distinctions whether psychological, economic, or racial. Objet is the meeting point of two adjacent lines of communication.

We stand at the outset of a great creative period. Obviously reaction and bourgeois obstinacy remain strong enough on all sides in Europe as well as in disoriented Russia. But all the energy of those who cling to the past can only, at the very most, delay the process of constructing new forms of existence and communal work. The days of destroying, laying siege, and undermining lie behind us. That is why Objet will devote the least possible amount of space to combating the epigones of the academy. The negative tactics of the “dadaists,” who are as like the first futurists of the prewar period as two peas in a pod, appear anachronistic to us. Continue reading →