CUIUS REGIO, EIUS SPATIUM
If anyone ever stood on a narrow street blocked by a solid mass of a baroque Jesuit church, or found himself on the steps of the monumental Wroclaw Voivodeship Administration building right on the bank of the Oder, or recalled the sky-cutting spire of the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, then he would harbor no doubt that the marriage of authority and architecture was not only a union of reason, but also of necessity. Authority, stemming from any and all sources, requires an official narrative about its very own subject matter, and which narrative it most often also self-provides – either through mass-communication propaganda, literary tendencies, national symbolism (referring, for example, to the worker-farmer alliance or to the state’s superpower ambitions) or even through the erection of public sector edifices.
I can’t stop admiring the most recent issue of the Krakow-published “Autoportret” [1 (22) 2008], whose editors dedicated this entire number to the spaces of authority. An impressive iconographic material and superb writing transform the issue into a miniature album, whose different parts, even though varied in content, create a whole as well-defined as modern architecture, telling a story not only about the spaces of authority, but also about the authority of spaces. The editors enter then into a realm not meant for a single human being, but for the masses – of faithful, subjects, citizens – packed into a tight crowd, participating in state ceremonies, or simply faced with a colossal edifice, which leaves them feeling small and inconsequential. Governmental architecture can provide not only a narrative on the subjects of power or the state’s own subordinates, but is also a form (and probably the most expensive form, too) of social engineering.
Such thinking about architecture has far-reaching symbolic roots, and not only has it played a part in the erection of actual structures, but also provided an inspiration for the creation of utopian projects and designs since the days of the Renaissance. If we analyze modern utopian works from the point of the architecture they present, we notice that their architecture and space are not at all neutral, instead they belong to a much greater polito-socio-metaphysical scheme designed to create a new man along with a new political collective.
Taking a look at even Tommaso Campanella’s “The City of The Sun”, we see that even in this social renaissance fantasy, there is a clear order established by the relations between the higher and lower (authorities and subjects) societal levels, which is in addition aided by metaphysics and religion (the symbolism of a mountain in the spaces of power is described using Prague in Odkrywanie wzgórz. Praga i jej akropole / Discovering Hills. Prague and its Acropolis by Vladimir Czumalo). From Campanella it’s easy to step into the present; the philosopher from Stilo was one of the writers most beloved by soviet communists, and not only due to his life-long battle with the official institutions of the Church, but also no doubt, thanks to his larger political and architectural vision.
So architecture acts not only a medium for harnessing the space, it can give the society a specific, desired by those in power, shape. To achieve this it’s not necessary to employ a vast arsenal of means – as described by Paweł Jaworski using the example of Sosnowiec City Hall (Ratusz w Sosnowcu. Pomiędzy faszyzującym modernizmem a „stylem urzędniczym” / City Hall in Sosnowiec. Between Fascist-influenced Modernism and ‘Bureaucratic’ Style). The tale of a little applicant and a grand state apparatus is illustrated with the aid of simple geometrical blocks and through clearing of the space surrounding the building to make it dominate over the area and unmistakably indicate where the center of the city and the region is located. In Jaworski’s story, the disturbing theme of the connection between avant-garde, revolutions and the creation of totalitarian systems is still clearly visible. To this day the projects of soviet constructivists continue to fascinate us, Warsaw’s “Pekin” became fused with the rest of the war-scarred city, and even the most restrained modernistic office architecture can be a delight for the eyes prone to visual asceticism. This restraint however is somewhat paradoxical due to its minimalism, which in turn works to provide a maximum intensity impact obvious to anyone making use of the building – “in here you are dependent upon the powers, who decide your fate.” A sinister aspect of modernization and of modern architecture manifests itself here, an aspect that is also reflected in a different way – in the colonization of the Western cities by “international style” edifices, and in the dehumanization of the beings inhabiting modernistic cubes of apartment blocks. Modernism employed by totalitarianism, modernity serving the system – these are the examples of fascist Italy, soviet Russia and nazi Germany.
Yet it’s also true that the alienation of political spaces belonging to the authorities does not have to relate to a totalitarian regime. The continuing bureaucracy of the European states and the creation of grandiose office complexes cause people to avoid them and perceive those fragments of the city tissue as unsuitable for day-to-day living. This has been the fate of Brussels when it became the central office block of the European Union, or in the case of Berlin – as reported by Jarosław Trybuś in Komunikat władzy. Plac Republiki w Berlinie / Communiqué from the Authorities. Republic Square in Berlin – where the area around the restored neo-Baroque Reichstag became a no-man’s land intended for nobody in particular.
For several years already in Krakow, the city where “Autoportret” is published, a local supplement to “Gazeta Wyborcza” has been running an annual “Archi-Szopa” poll for the worst construction investment of the season. The poll participants normally object to the unjustifiable, and sometimes almost criminal intrusions into the historic parts of the city. This year, the readers selected the so-called “Altar of Three Millennia” erected by the Pauline Father’s church in Skałka. Of particular significance is the fact that the area is neither commercial nor private, as is often the case with other eccentric superstructures, but instead belongs to a religious and symbolic domain. The altar seems to scream to its audience that they are standing in front of an immense monument honoring a triumphant union of Catholicism and national history, a monument that towers over the current religious space and shows a glaring lack taste and intuition on the part of its designers. One does not need to look far to find such ill-fitting attempts to harness and fill the space, even at the cost of suppressing the assets of the already-existing architectural structures.
How do we deal with this? “Archi-Szopa” is certainly a good answer, but we can try even more refined ploys. The article by Terry Kirk – Metafizyka i homoerotyka / Metaphysics and Homoerotica which opens the issue, shows how fascist-inspired sculptures (full of “embarrassing delight” – as all fascist art) were ripped out of context and turned into homoerotic icons. The photographs by George Mott of the sculptures depicting athletes were published under the patronage of Giorgio Armani, which adds a slightly risqué flavor to the topic and clearly suggests a game between the world of fashion, invention, liberty and freedom of imagination, and the world of authority enticing with its alluring pretenses and intellectually crude at the same time. The same principle can be applied to the space of authority – in order not to be trapped in it, or excluded altogether one must play a subversive game, which can neutralize the pompous monumentalism of the architectural narrative.
Let’s read and visually admire “Autoportret” this summer, and embark together on an architectural hunt.
Michał Choptiany
Translated by Anna Etmańska
Discussed journals: Autoportret