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Donald Maurice Kreis
Thank you, Peter Eisenman, for coming to Dartmouth
In particular, thanks for being vox clamantis
in deserto - the proverbial "voice crying out in the desert"
of the official Dartmouth motto - in the sense that, as you so forthrightly
noted, you were favoring us with your presence in the boondocks
of the Ivy League on January 22 when you should have been in Berlin,
defending yourself against an onslaught of media criticism about
the latest delay in the construction of your still-unbuilt Holocaust
Memorial in the heart of the German capital.
Hanover is indeed a long way from the precincts
generally prowled by the Herbert Muschamps and the Paul Goldbergers
and the Robert Campbells of the world, but thanks anyway for inoculating
your talk about "Monument and Memory after the World Trade
Center" against the intrusions of any roving architectural
journalists who might have found their way to Grafton County. It's
a novel trick, demanding at the outset of your lecture that everyone
in the room put down their pens, and then making a big show of turning
on the small cassette recorder in front of you on the table, as
if to dare anyone to try to quote you.
Thanks, too, for the imperfection of this ruse,
for getting so interested in what you were saying that you forgot
to keep the machine running during the second half of your lecture,
after the first side of your tape apparently ran out. As a result,
the world might just have to rely on this as the definitive record
of what was said that day in Room 3 of Rockefeller Hall.
Given the title of your lecture, it was a particular
treat to have a sneak preview of the memorial you have designed
for the Staten Island waterfront, to commemorate the people of that
borough who died in the attack on the World Trade Center. The Fresh
Kills landfill, final resting place of the remains of this tragedy,
is on Staten Island, and the borough's northern waterfront has a
shockingly clear view of the forever-marred lower Manhattan skyline.
So Staten Island is a special place in terms of September 11, a
kind of Ground 1.0 to Manhattan's Ground Zero. On a site overlooking
the skyline, you propose to memorialize Staten Island's victims
with forms that will represent the shadows of the twin towers, both
at the moment they were hit by the terrorists and the juncture,
somewhat later, when they fell to earth.
It's beautiful, but it owes far more to Maya
Lin than your hero Jacques Derrida. You forthrightly confess that
if Berliners were allowed to cast a secret ballot, 90 percent of
them would veto your Holocaust Memorial design because they would
prefer "the Burghers of Calais with Jewish noses" to your
far more challenging plan to cover a field near the Brandenburg
gate, the former site of Goebels' bunker, with four thousand pylons,
whose height and orientation are determined by references to the
physical circumstances on the site at two arbitrary points in history.
Your typical New Yorker has in common with your
typical Berliner a non-understanding of the semiotics with which
you and Derrida have concerned yourself. You spoke often in your
lecture of the distinction between the "sign" and the
"signified" and you stressed that architecture is a kind
of language. The Berlin memorial, when built, will signify the Holocaust,
which is to say that its purpose is to cause its visitors to become
lost among the pylons and thus feel something of the despair and
alienation that the National Socialists unleashed upon Europe -
or, at least, to disconnect from the present and reflect upon the
past. This is a challenge to the user of a memorial. It is a task
that you confessed has been made more difficult by the World Trade
Center's destruction because the video images of the skyline carnage
have such primacy in our memory that the message any memorial architecture
might seek to convey cannot compete for our attention.
New Yorkers also like Burghers. Their preferred
memorial to the hundreds of fallen firefighters is a sculptural
representation of the three firemen who hoisted the Stars and Stripes
above the ruins, Iwo Jima-style, in the immediate aftermath of the
destruction. The only dispute is whether to render these fireman
as they truly were - all Caucasian - or as the New York City Fire
Department (which is still predominantly white) would wish them
to have been, which is as a multicultural assemblage.
So the question for Peter Eisenman becomes:
Why design a semiotically correct memorial to the six million Jews
murdered by Hitler, but not the Staten Islanders who perished at
the hands of Mohammed Ata and his fellow suicidal fanatics? Someone
asked the architect a version of this question, and Eisenman just
shrugged and smiled. He said he designed the Staten Island memorial
in three hours, so as to get it funded and approved for construction
before its patron, Mayor Guiliani, left office on January 1.
This rush to memorialize into which Eisenman
has been swept in New York makes an interesting contrast with the
situation he described in Berlin. There, the original plan was to
build the pylons of concrete, but the construction of prototypes
suggested that concrete pylons would look terrible within five years,
replete with stains and imperfections. So Eisenman rooted around
and found a kind of solemn and durable slate, from Spain, of which
he would like his pylons to be constructed. This will delay the
project, which Eisenman said had caused an attendant controversy
in media and government circles in Berlin. He derided this concern
as an unwelcome and unhelpful urge to "make the trains run
on time."
In fairness to Eisenman, he was careful not
to propose anything of a memorial nature, or indeed of any nature,
to be constructed at Ground Zero itself. He said he would be investigating
that very subject with a team of students from Princeton over the
next few months. Eisenman prefers to sprinkle his insight across
the breadth of the Ivy League, rather than making any one campus
his semiotic landfill.
He did say this about Dartmouth, though: It
is a campus where "all the buildings look the same," regardless
of their function. A sly member of the audience thought he saw an
opening and invited Eisenman to critique the much-maligned Berry
Library design of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. This Eisenman
deftly but firmly refused to do.
The posturing aside, apart from the ago, and
ignoring the aversion to quotation (which is actually quite reasonable
given the equation of architecture with language, which ought to
make a master builder the master of all he communicates), Eisenman
truly does deserve gratitude for what he brings to the table. He's
right about Dartmouth's buildings, and it will be a happy day when
Dartmouth hires someone as challenging as a Peter Eisenman to build
there.
More importantly, Eisenman is right to revel
in dichotomies at a time when those who can see only one thing -
usually money - are so dominant in shaping the built world. It bothers
Eisenman that there is a distinction between "figure"
and "ground," i.e., the built object and the earth upon
which it rests. So his boldest work seeks to reconcile the two,
effectively revolting against the cartesian grid itself - and one
sees traces of this rebellion even in more superficially pleasing
efforts like the Staten Island memorial.
This might be difficult for the random person
who wandered into Rockefeller Hall on January 22 to grasp, but it
is welcome in Hanover nonetheless. One more person sent scurrying
to the shelf to find Derrida's Gramatology is possibly one less
person whose idea of good new architecture is rebuilding the faux-rustic
camps of gilded-age robber barons. We've seen a bit too much of
that lately in the Dartmouth-area desert.
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