S K Y L I N E | 18 | History as a Cudgel
…and the Week Ahead for May 10
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In this week’s newsletter, Harish Krishnamoorthy reflects on Afghanistan’s cultural heritage, Katie Angen and Michael Levy speculate on a time after concrete, and NYRA editor/publisher Nicolas Kemper takes in a film.
As the spring semester comes to a close, lectures, conferences, and panel discussions have slowed to a trickle. Nevertheless, we’ve turned up several events well worth your time. Here’s a sampling—scroll down for more:
Monday, 5/10 Architecture | Colonialism | Palestine with Sandi Hilal and Nora Akawi at 11:30am; Wednesday, 5/12 Cities Matter: Resilient Cities after COVID-19 at 10:00am; and Thursday, 5/13 Democratizing the Public Realm with Seb Choe, Lindsay Harkema, Margaret Jankowsky, Inbar Kishoni, and Justin Garrett Moore at 12:00pm.
DISPATCHES
5/6 — Hand in Hand
Nearly twenty years have passed since the War on Terror began in Afghanistan, and the United States has only just signaled a strategic exit from the country. As it prepares to do so, there are fears that the Taliban will regain its foothold in Afghan society, thus potentially marking a return of its destructive policies toward heritage sites and cultural artifacts. A conversation held by the World Monuments Fund between preservation advocates OMAR SHARIFI, SHOSHANA STEWART, and RORY STEWART underscored the importance of avoiding such a fate, with Sharifi arguing that “cultural heritage is one of the three pillars of Afghanistan.”
Though tinged with a sense of foreboding, the evening’s talk did have its lighter moments, as when in a heartfelt exchange each of the panelists selected their favorite landmarks in the country. Shoshana Stewart, head of the international NGO Turquoise Mountain, spoke about the Great Serai in Murad Khani, a lush and intimate Kabuli residence that she and her team restored; Rory Stewart, an author, diplomat, and long-distance walker, pointed to a vast caravanserai he encountered while trekking across the famed Bamiyan Valley; and Sharifi, a director of the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies, singled out the intricate Shrine of Hazrat Ali he has spent many years researching. Hundreds of years old and materially aged, these monuments have over time been integrated into villages and modern cities alike, giving them a vitality that many cordoned-off landmarks lack.
In this way, the preservation of Afghanistan’s monuments, particularly those in out-of-the-way sites, is directly tied to the health of the communities that surround them. As Shoshana Stewart explained, campaigns to protect and restore these monuments must go hand in hand with a concerted effort at the level of peace talks and high-level policymaking to keep alive cultural practices and trades. This is easier said than done, but Rory Stewart urged advocates to avoid lapsing into a “lazy pessimism” or seeing the country as being less dynamic than others. “Afghanistan is a rigorous and rich society today,” he said, “and we must keep actively working with them. We cannot give up.” Harish Krishnamoorthy
5/7 —Concrete’s longue durée
LUCIA ALLAIS, a professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, opened the virtual conference After Concrete: Redefining Materials and Energy in the Anthropocene by drawing an interesting parallel. Similar to how wood traditionally functioned as a material and cultural heuristic, concrete today provides us with “a matrix for thinking about all human making in a technologically intense age,” she said.
The event, the second in a series organized by Allais and Princeton University School of Architecture assistant professor FORREST MEGGERS, weighed the seeming permanence of reinforced concrete against its vulnerability to carbonation, which brings on its failure after 100 or so years of use. (This lifespan is ironic, said Allais, because of béton armé’s emergence at the turn of the century, when “centennial fervor” was at its peak.) Subsequent presenters widened the historical aperture. NIMROD BENZEEV told of the arrival of Portland cement in Palestine in the early 1900s and how it helped pave the way for Zionist settlements; later, in the decades after 1948, Palestinians came to dominate wet work in construction. ATEYA KHORAKIWALA located concrete’s role—alongside that of grain—in the narrative of Indian nation-building, a theme echoed by GABRIEL LEE’s presentation on the material’s “cult of permanence.”
Attendees were left to ponder what future cities made from LOLA BEN-ALON’s Earth-crete might look like, after the sand needed for conventional concrete has been exhausted. At this speculative juncture, KIEL MOE introduced Alfred North Whitehead’s “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” so as to demonstrate architecture’s blinkered view of the world and the spatial-temporal relations that characterize it. In place of a “concrete” understanding of the built environment, with its simplistic life cycle assessments and material substitutions (e.g., mass timber), Moe proposed a more “literal” framework, through which we might glimpse ecological processes unfolding over vast registers of time. It’s a mind-boggling thought but one that lived up to the event’s premise: there’s nothing concrete about concrete. Katie Angen
Concrete coda
ON BARAK’s keynote at After Concrete extended the discussion by implicating the material within a broader ecology. Barak, who teaches history at Tel Aviv University, highlighted concrete’s entanglement with coal beginning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in what now appears to us “as a chicken and egg situation,” he said.
Barak drew on the Port Said Lighthouse, the first reinforced concrete structure to be built in the Middle East, its completion corresponding to the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Novel for its time, the lighthouse’s construction involved “the localization, or the making local, of concrete production,” which would make reinforced concrete the modern building material par excellence. This type of production, however, would not have been possible without the global coal economy, but—getting back to Barak’s initial point—coal soon needed concrete maritime infrastructure (ships, canals, customs houses, seawalls, jetties, harbors, lighthouses, etc.) for its continued proliferation. The result was a powerful synergy that was later reproduced in the twentieth century, with oil overtaking coal.
But Barak was also careful to point out another energy source necessary to both regimes: human labor power. Concrete’s rise occurred alongside the transformation of “humanity as a geological force,” sped on by capitalism’s instrumentalization of time. “We are the biblical deluge, as it were,” he said, “and what better example of this than concrete, [through] which humans accelerate the processes of rock formation and are suddenly discovering the relative ephemerality of their manmade rocks.”
In his concluding remarks, Barak challenged the temporal dimension of the Anthropocene framework, suggesting the need for “counter tempos” capable of excavating connections between geology and society. Before beginning to contemplate a time “after concrete,” we have to first realize that there’s no escaping concrete’s history. Michael Levy
5/8 — History as a Cudgel
“They try to separate us from our land,” says AHMAD KAYED, a farmer and the proprietor of Al Kayed Palace guesthouse in the Palestinian town of Sebastia, in the film, Sebastia, by DIMA SROUJI. On Saturday afternoon a small crowd gathered in a vacant Williamsburg storefront for a screening of the 20-minute film to open Srouji’s two day pop-up exhibit, Hollow Forms, featuring spindly whimsical glass vases and volutes crossing, explains Srouji’s website, “ancient techniques of glass blowing used in Palestine and contemporary design.” On the walls were a set of drawings, also by Srouji, called The Remains of Na’aman—Na’aman being a river tied to the history of glassblowing, so rich with minerals and silica it was said it “flowed with water on one end and flowed out as a bed of glass on the other.”
Dealing out tunes as DJ was SHIRINE SAAD, but dancing was still a step too far for the fresh-from-quarantine. The crowd, marveling at the simple pleasures and awkwardness of gathering in-person (“It’s polite to ask someone if they have been vaccinated, right?” “Sure, it’s really a courtesy!”) was a mixture of architects and members of the Palestinian diaspora, including some new arrivals to the city. BRYAN MADDOCK, of Fantastic Offense and dimensions.com, was on hand, as was QAIS MALHAS, who plans to reopen his popular Amman restaurant, Shams El Balad, a Covid casualty, in Brooklyn.
The film intercuts archival footage and contemporary interviews to show how Israeli land grabs around Sebastia not only served to expand the Shavei Shomron settlement (thus barring Palestinian farmers from their own land), but also gave cover for an aggressive expropriation of archaeological remains, such as those at the site of ancient Sebastia, a city with more than 10,000 years of history. The juxtaposition of the contemporary (yet ancient!) art and the film, whose story Srouji also wrote about in a piece for the magazine +972, underlined the political potency of historical research; or as she put it, “There is no separation between design and research for me.” Roaming the crowd afterwards, Srouji had her attention squarely on today’s struggle: #savesheikhjarrah.
Sebastia, courtesy e-flux & the Het Nieuwe Instituut, is available to view here. Nicolas Kemper
IN THE NEWS
…Rest in Power
…in Profile
A Los Angeles Times reporter spoke with Maya Lin ahead of the opening of her latest building, a library for Smith College. Then the pandemic got in the way.
…in Goodbyes
Tokyo’s Nagakin Capsule Tower is set to be demolished.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Have a hot take? Write a letter to the editor! Link here. Letters run weekly.
THE WEEK AHEAD
Monday, 5/10
Architecture | Colonialism | Palestine with Sandi Hilal and Nora Akawi
11:30am, RISD
Future Streets: Lessons & Paths Forward from Open Streets
12:00pm, Columbia University Center for Resilient Cities and Landscapes
Tuesday, 5/11
Building Brands: Corporations and Modern Architecture with Grace Ong Yan
6:00pm, The Skyscraper Museum
Wednesday, 5/12
Cities Matter: Resilient Cities after COVID-19
10:00am, AIA NY
Thursday, 5/13
Origin Stories: Wrapping with Metahaven
8:00am, Architectural AssociationDemocratizing the Public Realm with Seb Choe, Lindsay Harkema, Margaret Jankowsky, Inbar Kishoni, and Justin Garrett Moore
12:00pm, Urban Design ForumPublic paint session for What Black Is This, You Say? with Amanda Williams
5:00pm, Storefront for Art and ArchitectureVision and Value: Cotton and the Materiality of Race with Anna Arabindan-Kesson
7:30pm, MIT
Email us if you would like to write up any of the above events for SKYLINE: editor@nyra.nyc.
Five desk editors run NYRA: Alex Klimoski, Phillip Denny, Carolyn Bailey, Samuel Medina & Nicolas Kemper (who also serves as the Publisher). They rotate duties each month—the current SKYLINE editor is Samuel Medina, and the Issue Editor is Alex Klimoski.
If you want to pitch us an article or ask us a question, write us at: editor@nyra.nyc
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