Skeletal Cities, or the “Destructive Character” of the Art of Building

Abstract

Our point of departure is a phrase that evokes the horrors of devastation while creating a spiral of sublime complicity in our contemplation—a “looking from behind” (Rückenfigurs) at the catastrophe of the others and at the pristine void of the buildings they once occupied. The voiceless others are the losers. A voyeuristic allure for ruins echoes in the void of the winners’ words. Does a city, rendered a ruinous skeletal structure, amount to radical loss, or rather to its exposed ontological predicament—or both? What kind of meaning does the haunted void unravel by the very structure which was supposed to hold that content in place?  Why should architecture, furthermore, have anything to do with these notions of war or conflict, catastrophe and violence? In order to fathom the reasons and principles which are necessary to master the art of building —the “meaning” of “architecture”— it seems misleading to privilege the eros (jouissance) which guides the art of building without exposing the polemos (war) inherent in such need/demand/desire to build. The “catastrophe” is inscribed in the very art of building that lacks its purported meaning. Agamben’s “means without end.” We propose to design the domain whereby indulging into this questioning is possible. A reciprocal commitment to create the conditions for a suspension of judgement – the conditions whereby the humane dialogue takes place. We invite architects to partake in it and “take [them] to the threshold of the building [they] shall not build” (Eupalinos, or the Architect).