The Place of Silence

Architecture / Media / Philosophy

Mark Dorrian, Christos Kakalis

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350076617
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Architecture
• Categoría: Architecture Criticism

The Place of Silence explores the poetics and politics of silence in architecture. Bringing together contributions by internationally recognized scholars in architecture and the humanities, it explores the diverse practices, affects, politics and cultural meanings of silence, silent places and silent buildings in historical and contemporary contexts. What counts as silence in specific situations is highly relative, and the term itself carries complex and varied significations which make it a revealing field of study. Chapters explore a range of themes, from the apparent 'loss of silence' in the contemporary urban world; through designed silent spaces; to the forced silences of oppression, catastrophe, or technological breakdown. The book unfolds a rich and complementary array of perspectives which address – through the lens of architecture and place – questions of sound, atmosphere, and attunement, together building a volume which will form the key scholarly resource on architecture and silence.

PART ONE

Mediating silence

1

‘Then there was war’:

John Hejduk’s Silent Witnesses as nuclear criticism

Mark Dorrian

As my title indicates, this chapter will focus on John Hejduk’s Silent Witnesses project from the mid-1970s, but I want to approach it in the first instance by way of Roland Barthes’s reflections on the ‘Neutral’. This is the topic of the lectures that Barthes delivered at the Collège de France in the spring of 1978, just two years before his death. The course was organized through a series of considerations of terms that, Barthes observed, came together to form less a dictionary of definitions than what he called ‘scintillations’.¹ For him the Neutral was, he explained, a passionate question and a passionate condition. His interest in it was propelled by a desire for the ‘suspension of orders, laws, summons, arrogances, terrorisms, puttings on notice, the will-to-possess’; in short, the ‘refusal of [a] pure discourse of opposition’.² He recalled playing a version of ‘tag’ as a boy, in which those caught were immobilized but could be released when touched by a free child. His greatest pleasure was found, he said, not in catching but in this act of freeing that re-set the game to its point of origin or degree zero or neutral condition – ‘neutral’ because it returned it to a point prior to the establishment of the paradigm of opposition between the catcher and the imprisoned, which is to say the freedom, or better, the openness, of the ‘not yet’. In the second lecture, one of the ‘scintillations’ that Barthes elaborates concerns ‘silence’, which he suggests in its fully neutral state draws close to mystical visions such as the conception of God of the late-sixteenth/early-seventeenth-century German theologian, Jakob Böhme – an a-symbolic ‘“calm and voiceless eternity”, homogenous, without oppositions, etc’.³ Yet although he notes at one point that ‘silence is not a sign, properly speaking; it doesn’t refer to a signified’, Barthes quickly goes on to warn: ‘As we know … what is produced against signs, outside of signs, what is expressly produced not to be a sign is very quickly recuperated as a sign. This is what happens to silence … silence itself takes on the form of an image, of a “wise”, heroic, or Sibylline, more or less Stoic posture.’⁴

Now Barthes here gives us a very specific kind of entry into ‘silence’ and I have begun with it because the Neutral is something to which I want to return in due course – but also because he alerts us to the inevitability of the differentiations of what we call silence. And this opens onto the question of the experience, conditions and meanings of particular silences, and the related issues of what counts as silence, for whom, and in what situations – these in turn no doubt being related to what we attend to, what we find meaningful, and our expectations and anticipations. This is simply to say that there are many silences. There are those that mark the passing of some kind of limit condition, such as the limits of representation as associated with the sublime, where the magnitude of that striving to be expressed is beyond symbolization and so can only be indicated by language’s inadequacy; or those that aim at a heightened or renovated attentiveness, whether that is directed outward or inward or is anticipatory (silences observed as reflectiveness in acts of memorialization and mourning are of this kind); or those experienced when expectations are confounded or alterities encountered; or those exercised as rights or observed as ethical principles. But then there are also silences that signal the denial of an act of recognition or acknowledgement, or that are produced out of relations of violence and subjection, whether it is the silence that arises from the interdiction of speech or that by which acts of torture authorize themselves.

One of the things that is striking when we list an array of silences like this is that we usually – and perhaps we have to – silently assume the presence or at least the possibility of a listener, of someone or something that ‘witnesses’ the silence. But this then raises the question of how we might think about the silence that falls with the disappearance of any condition of reception – that is to say, a catastrophic silence, the event of which would eliminate the conditions of possibility for its own recognition and registration. Would it indeed then make any sense to consider this as silence at all? Wouldn’t it rather be the case that silence, as marker of a limit condition, with this loss of witness passes beyond its own limit? It is this that I want to think about and, in doing so, bring into contact with Hejduk’s Silent Witnesses, usually dated from 1976, in the hope that it will lead us to a new kind of reading of the work.

A celebrated architect and educator, Hejduk was first chair and latterly dean of the School of Architecture at the Cooper Union in New York from 1964 until his death in 2000. During the period of his directorship, the Cooper Union developed a reputation as one of the most important international schools of architecture, the other obvious candidate being the Architectural Association in London. Where the AA’s chairman Alvin Boyarsky operated in the mode of an architectural impresario, selecting and appointing tutors who then took up positions within the school’s studio unit system, Hejduk was more like a permanent artist-in-residence whose presence – both through his person and his projects – infused the school, becoming, in a way, materialized in his own renovation of the Cooper Union building. Where the AA became known for the ‘lateral’ unit system of its diploma school, under which each unit followed a different line of exploration, the Cooper Union became renowned for its cross-year curriculum, which was celebrated in the exhibition (and accompanying book), Education of an Architect: A Point of View, shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York between November 1971 and January 1972.

Something very evident in Hejduk’s thought, but I think not much remarked upon, is his concern with ambience or atmosphere. Indeed, it seems to me there is a case to be made that ‘atmosphere’ becomes a kind of master-category that is implicit everywhere in the way Hejduk talked about what he did. Not only was his work atmospherically sensitive, born out of atmospheric conditions, but equally the condensation of a particular atmosphere was what the work aimed to achieve. Characteristically, in the dedication of his 1985 collected works, Mask of Medusa, he acknowledged ‘certain places and specific friends’ who ‘created an atmosphere in which my work could move forward in exploration’.⁵ And he later went on to explain how the elements in his 1979–83 Berlin Masque were affected by the specific atmospherics of the day on which they were drawn – in the words of his interlocutor Don Wall, ‘overcast days having an analogous affect, humid days affecting the quality of the lead, hence the density of the architecture; and with Chicago, the cold-sickness, heightened sensuality of the body – derelict, impending doom’.⁶ This preoccupation with atmosphere carries, it seems to me, implications for how we understand Hejduk’s work and, in particular, its representational conditions. Here he is, for example, speaking of architectural drawing:

What is important is that there is an ambience or an atmosphere that can be extracted in drawing that will give the same sensory aspect as being there, like going into the church and being overwhelmed by the Stations of the Cross (a set of plaques which exude the sense of a profound situation). You can exude...