PROLOGUE
The ‘leveled’ ground is a specific object to the city.
The city’s nature is to generate randomness. Citizens and their belongings move freely at any time of the day. Their movement define the city’s metabolism, and shape the economy, the social structure etc. Whether by car or on foot we live and travel today on mostly horizontal surfaces. We do so because it is much more efficient to travel in a straight line with the least vertical variations possible. The city embodies that efficiency as citizens converted chaotic movements of a forest or a desert to an aggregation of straight segments which section’s is simply a horizontal line. I am referring to the streets. The streets are not only efficient but they also make movement in a city predictable. As the city developed from antiquity it became more organized. Its progress is embodied in its artifacts, including but not limited to roads, houses and the systems to make them function. These artifacts depend and exist around a universal reference we call the ground.
The word ground will be used in this paper to refer to the man-made object stratifying the city. The latter reduces the randomness of natural topography and is a subject of the physical and programmatic city. The word ground comes from ’grund’ signifying the “foundation, the surface of the earth,” also “abyss and bottom of the sea”. The etymology is a cue to understand how we perceive the ground and interpret the object in our imagination. It affects how we design it. ‘Foundation’ conceptually puts the ground under, and ‘abyss’ puts it over. It encompasses both what we see and what we don’t. Thus, we can define two realms which are mediated by the ground: the apparent and the hidden. Between them the ground is the psychological political and mathematical reference of zero.
The ground exists as a physical object and as an image. In the apparent realm, the object is a commodity of cleanliness, safety, efficiency etc. and its physical appearance characterizes a scenery like the scenery of a street. Opposite to it, in the hidden, the object is made of infrastructure, the physical and/or organizational structure we prefer not to see. Its image is the anti-scenery and encompasses mythologies and monsters that weaponize the invisible in the name of the scenery’s rationality.
This paper will examine the tension of visibility inherent to the ground section, in three parts. The ground as a concept, mediating between two worlds, as a physical object responsible for the manifestation of the scenery, and as a practice of architecture.
Conceptual
Genesis 1:1 – In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.
The creation of the world recounted in the Bible starts with the duality between heaven and earth. Hierarchy of ground within the universe is established. There is an above and a below. The grace of God comes from above, to the ground and the realm of the living. Under the ground, in the realm of the hidden dwells Mephistopheles, where those judged unworthy of resuscitation will find themselves for eternity, in Hell. Religion instrumentalizes the tension between what we see and what we don’t to establish a rationality to space and to give it a direction. It is also found in ancient Greek mythology where the hierarchy starts from Mount Olympus, passes through the surface and continues into the ground in the kingdom of Hades. The Underworld is as ‘divine’ as Olympus but stands for the opposite qualities. Both believe, the ground is conceptually the in-between of two realms: good and divine above, and bad and corrupted below.
Directionality manifests itself clearly in buildings like Hagia Sophia, which becomes a role model for multiple churches and mosques: The dome bathes the indoor space in light and is structurally designed on arches to give it a floating impression. It’s theological association to the Heavens testifies to the directionality of space and the subject looking up.
Directionality of space becomes confusing when the ground reference is extended into the subterranean, and needs to be re-defined.
During the same period of Emperor Justinian’s reign, the Cistern Basilica is built 150m south of Hagia Sophia underground to stock drinking water for the Byzantian Empire. The space is programmed to provide a resource to the surface. Suddenly, what is in the ground is not there to be forgotten but to the contrary is celebrated by intricate architectural ornaments carved on a forest of columns. Among those columns stand two peculiar ones displaying each at their base a Medusa head upside down. The inverted Gorgon head inverts the direction logic. It supposes that whatever happens in the Cistern is upside down. The tension inherent to the space being in the ground but not from the realm of the corrupt and the anti-scenery is reconciled by flipping its reference to the surface. It is fair to say that designing the ground is a non-neutral exercise. It inherently must mediate between two realms and the attitude towards designing it subsists in the modern world as we struggle still with the things we choose to hide and those we want to display. The next part of this essay will examine the physical object resulting from the struggle of this mediation.
Physical
Entitlement to the Toilet Seat
“Francois, King of France by the Grace of God, makes known to all present and all to come our displeasure at the considerable deterioration visited upon our good city of Paris and its surroundings, […] it is so filthy and glutted with mud, animal excrement, rubble and other offals that one and all have seen fit to leave heaped before their doors, against all reason as well as against the ordinance of our predecessors, that it provokes great horror and greater discomfort in all valiant persons of substance.
[…]
Article 4 of the Hygiene edict of 1539 by Francois King of France – We forbid all emptying or tossing out into the streets squares of the aforementioned city and its surroundings of refuse, officials, or putrefactions, as well as all waters whatever their nature, and we command you to delay and retain any and all stagnant and sullied waters and urines inside the confines of your homes. We enjoin you to then carry these and promptly empty them into the stream and give them chase with a bucketful of clean water to hasten their course.”
Moses’ injection to the children of Israel, as they approached the Promised Land, to dig a hole and cover it up’ when they had a ‘bowel movement’ was appropriate for a nomadic people crossing the arid plains of Moab on the eastern shore of the Dead Sea. Perhaps they were the first words ever spoken concerning personal hygiene and sewage disposal. The scenery of Paris in 1539 is interfered upon by Francois, King of France, in the format of a hygiene edict. During that period, the act of defecating is done in the public realm and this new policy changes the relationship the Parisian has with his feces. We witness the domestication of waste, as a result of which the subject sees his excrements assigned to their “true” place; that is to say, to his home, in domus. It is probably because of it that the compartmentalization of space accounts for defecation and makes it invisible both to sight and smell. The toilet seat is an interesting invention in that context since it responds almost directly to the last sentence of Article 4 stating: “carry these and promptly empty them into the stream and give them chase with a bucketful of clean water to hasten their course.” The toilet seat is the object of private defecation which manages coexisting with our own feces until they are flushed. It has only one direction: whatever it receives is sent into the ground never to be seen or smelled again. Slavoj Zizek asserts a unidirectionality of usage to the object that is “terrifying” when reversed. Things that come back after they escape into the anti-scenery create intense discomfort.
Zizek compares three types of toilet seats found in the western hemisphere, each reflecting a cultural relationship with the act of defecating and the defecations themselves. It is through the position of the exiting hole within the seat section that he finds a cultural nuance between the three objects and their process of making feces disappear. The Dutch seat puts the hole in front so that feces are deposited on a sort of plateau to be examined before they are flushed. The French one is aligned with the body and makes way for a quick escape. And finally, the Anglo Saxon one is more flooded than the other two which Zizek considers a liberal approach to the relationship with feces. They each defines a temporality to the sequence and project the ritual on the rest of space around it. The object is specific. Not only is it specific to the plumbing system but more importantly to the cultural ritual it emanates from. There is an overwhelming seriousness and specificity around the toilet seat and its infrastructure. When put side by side, it is clear we do not have the same process of making our feces disappear, and that the vector of directionality of the ground mentioned above is still the same but the way it is followed defines the identity of a place.
I conclude this paragraph with Marcel Duchamps’s urinal, Foutain. The format of a sculpture defines it as a non-fixture and means it will never be put on a wall to function, it will stay on its stand for ever. Displaying the urinal horizontally, isolated and signed, is tampering with the familiar directionality of the object and its ability to flush things out of sight. Its placement on a wall allows a practice of identity, Duchamps’s sculpture denies the practice of identity and within the format of its presentation asks a wider question about art.
The Street Section and the representation of urban space
The next three examples are about the underground of Paris’s Street and the way it was represented and abused in the name of creating urban space’s image.
The First Sewer Drawings
“The line of the sewer re-echoes, so to speak, the line of the streets which lie above it. There were then in Paris two thousand two hundred streets. Let the reader imagine himself beneath that forest of gloomy branches in that which is called the sewer”. Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, 1862.
Victor Hugo’s image of the sewers denies the possibility that it could participate in the urban space discourse, is it a place of darkness with a chaotic form and its image is left to the imagination of the reader who will let the anti-scenery stories flood the space with monsters and atrocities that would keep any brave Parisian to dare step foot underground. His image of a place for the imaginary serves the stories he wrote as it adds a lot of mystery, while of course referencing the actual reality. This image is directly disrupted when it is represented in a drawing. The drawing removes the veil of darkness and denies the imagination, as Pierre Patte casts an image of the underground as a part of the system constituting the street of Paris and the physical reason for the house to function properly.
When Eugenio Dos Santos drew the section of a building and its connection to the sewers in 1758, his goal was to assess the repercussions of the Lisbon earthquake on the building. He produced the first known image of the street, the building, and the sewer as part of the same anatomic system.
Eugenio dos Santos, Section of a street of Lison’s Baixa, c. 1758. Copy
Pierre Patte, Profile d’une Rue, c. 1769. Copy
The intent of Pierre Patte is different than Dos Santos’s because he draws the profile of a street for the sake of its representation and in regards to the anatomy of urban space. The home is linked to the sewer via infrastructure, and the underground is not a place of mystery but inherently functional and thus rational.
The Sewers as an Urban Site
In Paris and most other European cities, waste was kept in a jar inside the home and emptied by the window onto the street. The surface of the street was responsible for both the circulation of citizen and the disposal of their defecations in a kennel, which is a slit in the middle of a street section, to carry waste towards a flowing body of water like the Seine. The street ground is slanted from both sides towards the middle gutter, but more importantly it meant that the street could accommodate for a high threshold of dirtiness mixing between city circulation and human detriments. Unsurprisingly the rise in population becomes problematic when bodies and defecations compromise the sanitary condition of the street, and even worse, propagates down into underground water, used for drinking. The rising population density in the 19th century from a hundred thousand to nearly a million was a sign of economic expansion and growth. People were drawn to the city. Nonetheless, it was detrimental to the sanitary conditions being managed by an obsolete medieval sewage system. The disappearance of water and waste from the surface into an organized underground system is a necessary technological development for Paris.
The sewers of Paris have occupied an infamous place in the nation’s history and literature. In Victor Hugo’s les Misérables (1862), which events take place in the period 1815-1832, the protagonist felon Jean Valjean, escapes the tenaciously villainous police inspector Javert through the sewers. Jean-Paul Marat was sheltering in them while fleeing from his enemies during the 1791 Jacobin revolution. The cleaning of the sewers was sporadic and mostly dependent on rainfall and sewer men equipped with rabots-poles 2m(7ft) long, with paddles at right angles, which were used to free accumulated sewage. The notoriety of the sewers was especially felt among the poorer classes whom lived in wretched conditions described in Hugo’s novel. Those conditions caused nine riots between 1825 and 1852, when Napoleon III (nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte) was made Emperor. The latter incorporated the sewers in a plan to recreate the French capital. Baron Haussmann was appointed as Prefect of the Seine in 1853, and tasked with rebuilding the center of Paris to improve sanitation and urban flow. His sewers were designed to be seen. Their scale and nature were expressed by the Baron in heroic language:” Subterranean galleries are the internal organs of the great city and they function like those of the human body… secretions are mysteriously performed and public health maintained without disturbing the running of the city or spoiling its beauty”. They contained signs indicating the names of the streets above and during the 1867 Paris Exposition, Haussmann arranged for 400 visitors a day to be conducted through the sewers in bateau and wagons while others could walk along the walkways that in the sewers ‘so neat and clean that a lady might walk the Louvres to the place de la Concorde without bespattering her dainty skirts’. King Louis of Portugal and Tsar Alexander II of Russia made the trip. Those trips became a regular feature of the city’s entertainment. Hugo’s image of the dark narrow and foul sewers is replaced with vast gas lit and well-organized section comprising waste water channel in the middle and pipes running along the sides carrying both drinking water and water from the seine used to flush the streets. Overdesigning the sewer spaces successfully solves the issue of sanitation and intentionally casts an image of Paris aware and in control of its underground. Haussmann creates an image of the underground which belongs to the realm of the scenery for political gain and using tourism as a medium. Suddenly the space is appealing and its image is disseminated in a consumable format like post cards.
Felix Nadar defines the image through art and photography
Gaspard-Felix Tournachon, known by the pseudonym Nadar, was a French photographer caricaturist journalist novelist and balloonist. Nadar applied for a patent in 1861. The latter comprised of an artificial light photographic improvement device for his shots of the catacombs in 1862 and later the sewers in 1865. His electric lighting device bolstered his ability to create good pictures in dark places. His work depicts large underground galleries and corridors operated by a specific breed of machines, wagons, and tools. It contrasts with the image that was disseminated through the likes of the book of Les Misérables. His approach is similar to the approach of Pierre Patte. The architectural section, like the electrically lit photograph, is used to produce a new image of urban space.
Patte, Nadar and Haussmann, understand that the quality of the underground is a cultural and urban phenomenon. Each one of them appropriates and casts an image with his adopted medium, and the public responds with fascination. Even if these spaces are inherently present in the proper functioning of the city, we tend to forget they exist. Reimagining their function is up to the one that sees and acknowledges their power to suddenly appear in the urban discourse and disrupt the status quo while also knowing that the everlasting intent is to make them disappear.
Practice
By the end of the 20th century, communism and socialism gain traction in Parisian society and in Europe more generally. Wildcat strikes erupt frequently crippling the industrial production chain and the economy. The upper class abuses the working forces in the industrial sector with long working hours and inadequate pay. Beginning in May 1968, a period of civil unrest occurred throughout France, lasting some seven weeks and punctuated by demonstrations, general strikes, as well as the occupation of universities and factories. At the height of events, which have since become known as May 68, the economy of France came to a halt. These events are linked to others worldwide. The protests of 1968 comprised a worldwide escalation of social conflicts, predominantly characterized by popular rebellions against state militaries and the bureaucracies. In the United States, these protests marked a turning point for the civil rights movement, which produced revolutionary movements like the Black Panther Party.
In 1970, two years after the political unrests, an international architectural competition was launched to build a cultural and arts complex in the center of historic Paris set out by French President Georges Pompidou and chaired by architect Jean Prouve. The prize-winners selected by the jury were Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers and Gianfranco Franchini. The competition entry is the Centre Georges Pompidou Museum. The architects chose to display infrastructure and make it part of the scenery rather than hiding it. They made it their responsibility to design infrastructure as an apparent part of space which is both a political act and a programmatic decision.
The façade style is completely foreign to the center of Paris which brought both confusion and controversy at the time. The building participates in the façade scenery of the Marais by not conforming to the Haussmanian style nor the second empire. Contrasting with context is a commitment to the program of the museum and the conceptual approach to displaying and consuming art. It’s practically suggesting that it does not belong to the same political and social construct which made the Marais what it is but that it belongs to a new breed of thoughts informed by the recent civic movements. In the Centre Georges Pompidou and in the process of design it, infrastructure is abused in the best of ways to take an inherently political role in the discourse of architecture.
The Pompidou slightly slanted plaza inverts programmatically the conventional museum façade. Instead of restraining the programmatic allegiance of a museum to art, it allows it to do the opposite and host everything except art. In a way this is the logic of the entire building. The infrastructure is flanked on the outside and the inside is free to be whatever space it is required to be. The building differentiates neither art nor circulation for that matter. It allows art to be displayed in its own specific genre without casting any sort of architectural style or intent. Art is side by side with infrastructure which is the most neutral part in essence to space.
Conclusion
“I live in peace in the inmost chamber of my house, and meanwhile the enemy may be burrowing his way slowly and stealthily straight toward me. I do not say that he has a better scent than I, probably he knows as little about me as I of him.” – The Burrow, Franz Kafka
Kafka’s first-person narration in the ground reflects on our psychological awareness of things we do not see. Perhaps the best thing to keep from examining infrastructure the ground and visibility is that what makes space is that duality. Pier Vittorio Aureli talks about a veil covering all the systems that exist in domus which puts it in a way relevant to the scenery/ anti-scenery relationship raised in this paper. Conceptually, plumbing, electrical, ventilation systems are overwhelmingly normal and neutral. It is because they serve space that we declare them neutral. Yet I try to showcase that they are easily manipulated and lose their neutrality. As Freud talks about the urban uncanny being as animated as we are, and our feeling of the uncanny coming from that possibility of finding something alive in darkness, we have to accept the power of the invisible to always spark that feeling, and infrastructure to suddenly appear in a different light. (To be continued)