Zambelli Scandalous Space

Betwen architecture and archaeology
1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-3-88778-909-1
Verlag: AADR – Art Architecture Design Research
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, Band 4, 258 Seiten

Reihe: The Practice of Theory and the Theory of Practice

If architecture is a design-centred discipline which proceeds by suggesting propositional constructions then, Zambelli argues, archaeology also designs, but in the form of reconstructions. He proposes that whilst practitioners of architecture and archaeology generally purport to practice in future-facing and past-facing-modes respectively, elements of these disciplines also resemble one another. Zambelli speculates that whilst some of these resemblances have remained explicit and revealed, others have become occluded with time, but that all such resemblances share homological similarities of interconnected disciplinary origin making available in the scandalous space between them a logically underpinned, visually analogical form of practice.

Zielgruppe

Architekturstudenten, Architekten, Doktoranten, Hochschullehrer, Forscher

Autoren/Hrsg.

Zambelli, Alessandro

Leseproben

Fig. 1 Alessandro Zambelli, Chart of the Scandalous Space Between Architecture and Archaeology.   Introduction As the fifteenth-century Kentish rebel Jack Cade struck London Stone, he pronounced himself transformed into Lord Mortimer and Lord of the City of London (Cade was not related to Richard Duke of York as the surname ‘Mortimer’ would, then, have implied, there is substantial doubt that his name was even, in fact, Cade). As he struck the Stone he decreed also that “piss” running in the public gutters be transmuted into wine. Five hundred and seventy years later a fragment of the Stone remains on Cannon Street not far from, but not exactly, where Cade struck it.1 Later, William Shakespeare was quite clear that Cade’s power to turn the world upside down was ratified in the striking with his staff of this, London’s fetish stone, its protective palladium. The Stone itself bears witness to and so validates the transubstantiations wrought through Cade’s revolt: foot soldier to Lord; rural naïf to urban adept; water to wine. Cade’s transgression of social and physical categories recalls the story of Christ’s miraculous transformation of water to wine, but Shakespeare’s Cade is a bathetic rather than a transcendent figure and under his stewardship these alchemic transformations stem from baser material, even, than everyday water. At the end of the fifteenth-century claret was not, as it later became, a synonym for red wine from Bordeaux, instead it qualified the colour of the wine; somewhere between red and white, and not exactly rosé either. And, of course, claret has also come to stand in for blood. Four hundred and fifty-one years later Rebecca Daisy who had, for eighteen years, kept a “sweetstuff stall” next to London Stone protested, when asked to move on from her pitch, that “she [would] go quietly” only when she was “removed in a narrow box.”2 This overthrow of social order – and the ‘spilling of a little claret’ – is rife with transgression, with slippage; Cade, like Mrs. Daisy, was no blue blood but neither was he quite, any more, a commoner – as he struck London Stone he and his staff became something in-between; Cade, a scandalous practitioner of his own new Law and his staff, an instrument instantly reforged through contact with London Stone, for the enforcement of that Law. We will return to the adventures of Jack and Rebecca in the final two chapters of this book. London Stone is an artefact of oolitic limestone whose manufacture may date from Roman times.3 And yet it is scarcely an ‘archaeological’ artefact at all, since almost no work of that category has ever been done upon it, set adrift, as it has been, from its ancient physical contexts. Indeed, the work that has been done in connection with the Stone which most closely approximates archaeological practice is much more like what might be categorised as historical practice. E. H. Carr would have seen this as a positive attribute, for him, “archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics, chronology” are mere “’auxiliary’ sciences of history.”4 Africanist historian and anthropologist Jan Vansina more conventionally characterises the differences thus, “most historians deal with written or oral messages. Most archaeological findings document situations, while historians often focus on sources which document events.”5 Those that have attempted to describe London Stone have tended to treat it as if it were such an “event,” a prolonged event recorded in words and sometimes in drawings or photographs, but always tied to London around it, both physically through its ever-eroding presence and through complex, as I shall go on to describe, networks of analogical connectivity. Such is the transformative power of analogy; its unique ability to carry meaning, anaphorically, across fields of knowledge and, for the purposes of this account, disciplinary fields, forging, “the most beautiful bond possible” the bond of analogy.6 The logic and the sympathetic magic of analogy underpin the arguments of this book just as it underpins the interdisciplinary structures it describes and employs. Throughout, I will describe experimental practices performed in the space provided by these analogical networks. Working, in particular, directly upon London Stone, using it as a common locus for the interconnected disciplines of architecture and archaeology as revealed through their shared drawing practices – disciplines which have, in various ways, claimed the Stone as their own. I suppose, architects and archaeologists could be regarded as procedurally equal but temporally opposed: after all the very same tool – the trowel – that the builder uses to fabricate the architectural forms of the future is used by the archaeologist, in the excavation of a site, to reveal the forms of the past.7 What are archaeologists and architects doing, and what do they believe they are doing, when they pick up a pen or pencil, or when they open a piece of C.A.D. software (we will come to trowels in Sites of Encounter: Must Farm below)? What do their respective disciplines purport to be doing when their practitioners employ drawing practices? Do architects and archaeologists draw differently and do the instrumentalities implicit in their drawings stand opposed to one another as is often casually assumed – one future-facing and the other orientated towards the past? Tim Ingold, in the quotation above, illustrates one way of thinking about the tangled relationship of architecture and archaeology, relationships which this book aims to demonstrate and explain, even as it uses those knotted connections to make interdisciplinary work between them. In fact, I aim to show that architecture and archaeology are not at all “procedurally equal,” but that they share a more nuanced relationship of procedural resemblance, and that, even more emphatically, they do not stand “temporally opposed.” The relationship of archaeology to that other purportedly past-facing discipline, history, provides evidence of the dangers of assuming, or seeking, direct connections to the past. In historiography, superficially at least, the dangers of this view do seem to have been understood. In 1995 writing of the mid-twentieth-century Annales School, Aron Gurevich observed that; the historians of a new cast are very far from the old illusion of being able to ‘resurrect’ the past, to ‘live themselves into it’ and to demonstrate it ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen war’. They clearly understood that historical reconstruction is no more and no less than construction, that the historian’s role is incomparably more active and creative than their predecessors believed.”8 “Wie es eigentlich gewesen” is usually translated as “how things actually were,” an influential principle in the rise of source-based history from Leopold von Ranke’s 1824 work, Geschichte der romanischen und germanischen Völker.9 By going to primary sources, sources often personal and only obliquely related to the main subjects of mainstream histories, von Ranke’s idea was that a closer approximation, a more accurate reconstruction, of historical cultures could be made. Tod Presner describes this account of the relationship between event and narrative as demanding, “a structural homology between real events and the narrative strategies used to represent, capture, and render them meaningful.”10 For von Ranke and his followers the past was, through these empirical reconstructions, solved or at least rendered solvable. Walter Benjamin like Gurevich, was unconvinced, and described von Ranke’s “wie es eigentlich gewesen” as, “the strongest narcotic of the [nineteenth] century.”11 By the time E. H. Carr wrote in his influential What is History in 1961 that, “by and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants. History means interpretation”12 interpretive and reflexive historiographies had already marginalised empirical reconstructions understood, as they were, to be part of this now discredited empiricist historiography. Following suit, archaeology became freer, it seemed, to make reconstructions through multivalent, reflexive interpretations of hitherto mainstream archaeological evidence.13 Work at, for example, Çatalhöyük14 in Turkey or the explicitly titled Cotúa Island-Orinoco Reflexive Archaeology Project15 have now established a kind of archaeology without (professional) archaeologists in the spirit, perhaps, of Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture Without Architects16 though shorn of architecture’s alternative central tradition of the vernacular. Where Rudofsky’s “non-pedigree” architect might tap into ancient local practices of building, no equivalent tradition is available to an archaeologist. Instead, as I will argue, architecture as an overtly design-based discipline can lend to archaeology ways of re-casting its own reconstructive practices to reveal forms of propositional making already latent within them. Chapter 2 will examine in detail the kind of making characterised by its ‘propositional’ nature – propositional that is in the sense derived from Bruno Latour’s “proposition” which, “designates a certain way of loading an...

Über Autor(innen)

Zambelli, Alessandro
Alessandro Zambelli (PhD) is an architect, academic and researcher at the University of Portsmouth. He publishes and participates in the developing field of architectural / archaeological / anthropological interdisciplinarity, especially as it relates to design and drawing. As part of the collaborative Wastes and Strays project he also researches urban commons and commoning.