Alternative Architecture: Cold Corners by Eva Rothschild

video walking through installation at Tate Britain

Architecture as archive, time and memory

Rem Koolhaas interviewed by Hans Ulrich Obrist Art Review July 2006

HUO: I saw the historian Eric Hobsbawm yesterday and he was saying that his life was a kind of protest against forgetting. Which I think is really beautiful. I was wondering about memory in relation to the (London) pavilion, because it's also archived, an archive of previous discussions. Could you speak a little bit about Hobsbawm's idea of a protest against forgetting?

RK: In an architect's case it's either involuntary in the sense that you create structures that stay around in the best cases, and sometimes for a very long time, so that they contribute to a sense of history, but also potentially to a sense of depth in terms of time and memory. Or it's much more a kind of journalistic level, but perhaps in the current avalanche of forgetting, journalism also becomes closer to history writing.

Strangeways/prison interiors

Strangeways Prison

Strangeways and its image problem

BBC Manchester: Saturday, 4 September, 2004
Manchester Prison, formerly known as Strangeways, hit the headlines in 1990 when a riot ended after a siege lasting 25 days.

Starting in the chapel, the violence claimed the lives of two men and caused damage put at £66m.

Its then governor spoke of "an explosion of evil" as images of a rooftop protest dominated the news.

Although rebuilt at a cost of £55m and even renamed, to most people the prison will always be known as Strangeways.

In 2000, the then governor John Smith said the jail was no longer a "penal dustbin" which saw inmates locked up for 23 hours a day with no access to sanitation in their cells.

But in 2002 inspectors condemned staffing levels there as "unsafe" following cuts of 30% in the workforce.

Work and training

In a report, the Chief Inspector of Prisons Anne Owers also said some prisoners were kept in "degrading conditions", sharing one-man cells with unscreened toilets.

Built in the Napoleonic era, at the time of the 1990 riot the jail contained 1,647 prisoners in accommodation designed for only 970.

The prison takes people jailed and remanded in custody by courts in the Greater Manchester area.

The current regime, with an operational capacity of 1269, includes both full and part time education classes.

Training and work is provided in the workshops and laundry, farms and gardens and the works departments.

There are courses in anger management, alcohol awareness, improving coping skills and courses for prisoners convicted of sex offences.

Strangeways Prison

Strangeways Prison in Southall Street, Manchester was built to replace New Bailey prison in Salford which closed in 1868. It was designed by Alfred Waterhouse in 1861, using the Panopticon (radial) concept that was being employed all over Britain at the time. Waterhouse was assisted by Joshua Jebb, the Surveyor General of Prisons, who had also been involved with the design of London's Pentonville Prison. Construction was completed in 1869 at a cost of £170,000.

The new brick built prison stood on the site of the original Strangeways Park and Gardens, hence its name, and was able to house a 1,000 prisoners. There are two imposing gatehouses and a central dodecagonal hall, with wings A to F radiating off from it. The 234 feet high tower, which was used for heating and ventilation, has been a local landmark ever since it was built. The T-shaped F wing is used to house the administration on ground floor with the prison chapel above. A plaque in the entrance commemorates the official opening on the 25th of June 1868.

Strangeways also became the place of execution for the area after the closure of Salford prison. It initially had a purpose built execution shed in one of the yards, as this was the normal practice for private executions from 1868 up to around the end of World War 1.
The later 20th century condemned cell and execution room were situated at the end of 'B' wing in the central area. Strangeways had a permanent gallows, one of the few English prisons to do so, up to the abolition of capital punishment. In total, there were 100 hangings carried out within its walls, all in private. Twenty eight men and one woman were hanged there between 1869 and 1899, the first being a young man of 20 called Michael Johnson, who was hanged by William Calcraft for murder on the 29th of March 1869.

A further 71 people were executed at Strangeways in the 20th century - 68 men and 3 women. In the latter part of this period, executions became quite rare - no one was to be hanged there between 1954 and 1962. James Smith was executed in that year and then one of the last two UK hangings of all was carried out at Strangeways at 8.00 a.m. on the 13th of August 1964. Gwynne Owen Evans (real name John Robson Walby) was hanged by Harry Allen (assisted by Royston Rickard) for the murder of John West, a laundryman, in the course of robbing him in April 1964. Peter Anthony Allen was hanged at the same moment in Liverpool's Walton prison for his part in the crime. Murder committed in the course of robbery was still a capital crime under the 1957 Homicide Act.

There were 4 double hangings, all the rest being carried out individually. William Calcraft officiated at the first 3 executions within the walls of Strangeways (Michael Johnson plus Patrick Durr in December 1870 and Michael Kennedy in December 1872) before William Marwood replaced him and introduced the long drop method.

The condemned block is reputed to be haunted by the ghost of one of the hangmen who officiated there. Staff on night duty have reported seeing a mysterious man in a dark suit carrying a small briefcase. He is always seen walking along 'B' wing from just outside the condemned cell towards the central control area. When they try to follow this dark suited man, he vanishes just before the old iron staircase leading up to the main office. One wonders if this could be John Ellis who committed suicide in 1932.

more on executions

"I'm trying to help you, to keep you."

Friday 1 April 2005 Guardian

Strangeways here we come

On April 1 1990 a riot in Manchester triggered a wave of protests in prisons across Britain.

Strangeways prison rooftop protest, 1990. Photograph: Denis Thorpe

On April Fools' Day, 15 years ago, 300 prisoners filed into the chapel at Strangeways prison, Manchester, to attend the Church of England service. They heard a sermon from a visiting Church Army preacher, and at 11am, the prison's chaplain, Noel Proctor, rose to continue the service.

What happened next was tape recorded, along with the sermon. The transcript of the tape reads thus:

Noel Proctor: "After that remarkable message that has ..."

A prisoner (later identified as Paul Taylor): "I would just like to say, right, that this man has just talked about the blessing of the heart and how a hardened heart can be delivered. No it cannot, not with resentment, anger and bitterness and hatred being instilled in people."

(noise, over which) A prisoner: "Fuck your system, fuck your rules."

Proctor: "Right lads, sit down."

(More noise)

Proctor: "Right lads, down. Down. Come on, this is no way to carry on in God's house."

(More noise)

A prisoner: "Fuck your system."

Proctor: "Right lads, sit down. This is completely out of order. Sit down."

A prisoner: "Why is it [out of order]? It's been waiting to happen forever. It will never change."

Proctor: "Come on. This is terrible."

(More noise; banging, shouting, cheering)

Proctor: "All of you who want to go back to your cells, go to the back of the church please."

A prisoner: "What? You're a fucking hypocrite, you."

Proctor: "I'm trying to help you, to keep you."

A prisoner: "Leave it, mate."

(More noise until microphone goes dead)

rest of article

Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin

Diomede II, 1989-90, from Projects 1981-1990
Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin
Both Russian, born 1955
Etching 11 x 17
©1990 Brodsky & Utkin, courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York

Smout Allen-Geofluidic Landscape

The Geofluidic Landscape

The passage of abundant water on the Oslo site provides a source of kinetic energy that invades the building. Trenches, gullies, and reservoirs are cut into the rock to channel water and counterbalances and weights shift building pieces. The floors become walls, panels move to reveal new spaces, and garden beds are raised and tilted toward the sun.

Smout Allen-Blooming Landscape, Deep Surface

http://www.smoutallen.com/

Smout Allen-Ballistic Devices

Ballistic Devices

A series of ballistic instruments are designed to momentarily occupy the space between the sky and the ground. Camouflage strategies can be designed to accentuate and reveal figure and position. The instruments use shape, shine, shadow, and silhouette to enable visual recognition of form and consequently to examine the apparent depth of the horizon.

Three ballistic devices are deployed in the deep space of the horizon.

pg 15

...Palestine emerged as a hologramatized 'hollow land' that seemed spawned of the imaginary world of seventeenth-century British astronomer Edmund Halley, or the nineteenth century novels of Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne, who themselves foresaw a hollow earth inhabited in layers. With it, the imaginary spaces of conflict have seemingly fully adopted the scale of a building, resembling a complex architectural constructions, perhaps and airport, with its separate inbound and outbound levels, security corridors, and many checkpoints. Cut apart and enclosed by its many barriers, gutted by underground tunnels, threaded together by overpasses and bombed from its militarized skies, the hollow land emerges as the physical embodiment of the many and varied attempts to partition it.

"Architecture as event" Richard Wilson on Turning the Place Over

quotes from Hollow Land, Israel's Architecture of Occupation by Eyal Weizman-3

pg 8

Chaos has its peculiar structural advantages. It supports one of Israel's foremost strategies of obfuscation: the promotion of complexity - geographical, legal or linguistic. Sometimes, following a terminology pioneered by Henry Kissinger, this strategy is openly referred to as 'constructive blurring'. This strategy seeks simultaneously to obfuscate and naturalize the facts of domination.

...many settlements were indeed constructed with the aim of creating a 'irresolvable geography'

quotes from Hollow Land, Israel's Architecture of Occupation by Eyal Weizman-2

pg 6

The following chapters form an 'archival probe', investigating the history and modus operandi of the various spatial mechanisms that have sustained - and continue to sustain - the occupation's regime and practices of control.

(see footnote re: use of this term in Mutations published 2001))

pg 6-7

Elastic geography

...the frontiers of the Occupied Territories are not rigid and fixed at all; rather, they are elastic, and in constant transformation. The linear border, a cartographic imaginary inherited from the military and political spatiality oft eh nation state has splintered into a multitude of temporary, transportable, deployable and removable border-synonyms - 'separation walls', 'barriers', 'blockades', 'closures', 'road blocks', checkpoints', 'sterile areas', special security zones', 'closed military areas', and 'killing zones' - that shrink and expand the territory at will. These borders are dynamic, constantly shifting, ebbing and flowing, they creep along, stealthily surrounding Palestinian villages and roads.... The anarchic geography of the frontier is an evolving image of transformation, which is remade and rearranged with every political development or decision.
...
The Separation Wall, merely one of a multiple barriers, is constantly rerouted, its path registering like a seismograph the political and legal battles surrounding it. Where territories appear to be hermetically sealed in by Israeli walls and fences, Pal. tunnels are dug underneath them. Elastic territories could thus not e understood as benign environments: highly elastic political space is often more dangerous and deadly than a static, rigid one.

quotes from Hollow Land, Israel's Architecture of Occupation by Eyal Weizman

pg 4

Against the geography of stable, static places, and the balance across linear & fixed sovereign borders, frontiers are deep, shifting, fragmented and elastic territories. Temporary lines of engagement, marked by makeshift boundaries, are not limited to the edges of political space but exist throughout its depth. distinctions between the 'inside' and 'outside' cannot be clearly marked. In fact, the straighter, more geometrical and more abstract official colonial borders across the 'New Worlds' tended to be, the more the territories of effective control were fragmented and dynamic and thus unchartable by an conventional mapping technique.

pg. 5

the spatial organization of the occupied territories is a reflection on only of an ordered process of planning and implementation, but, an increasingly so, of 'structured chaos', in which the -often deliberate- selective absence of govt intervention promotes an unregulated process of violent dispossession.
...
b/c elastic geographies respond to a multiple and diffused rater than i single source of power, their arch cannot be understood as the material embodiment of a unified political will or as the product of a single ideology. Rather the organization of the Occupied Territories should be seen as a kind of 'political plastic', or as a map of the relation between all the forces that shaped it.