Category: Johns Hopkins

Memory, culture and ‘architectural cleansing’

ATHENS – You’ve heard of ethnic cleansing. Architect Christos Floros of Athens popped out with a new term on Monday: “architectural cleansing.”

Sadly, I needn’t have listened to the long history of demolitions in Athens to have been able to understand the term. Hey, I live in Charlotte, where what we really need to memorialize at The Square in the heart of the city is not another piece of odd, or clumsy, public “art” but a bronzed bulldozer.

(I’m at a conference, in Athens, of the Johns Hopkins University International Fellows in Urban Studies. [Hat tip needed, here, to other sponsors: Chicago Dwellings Association (akin to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Housing Partnership), the Museum of the City of Athens, Panteion University of Athens, SD Med Association, Pantheon-Sorbonne (Paris 1) University and UMP Geographie-cites (CNRS). And a disclosure: The International Fellows Program paid my travel expenses to the conference.)

The conference theme explores whether memory (that is, the past as reinterpreted by the present) is an asset or an obstacle in urban revitalization. In a city this ancient you’d think the Athenians would revere the past. And you’d be wrong.

The city has had numerous eras in which the buildings of previous eras were simply wiped away. The most recent came with rapid population growth of the 20th century. Most of the 19th Century neoclassical buildings (which had, themselves, wiped away Ottoman and Byzantine architecture) were demolished. Much of the city is now vaguely Modernist-style buildings of little delight or distinction.

Architectural cleansing, Floros said, can accompany war, religious conflict, rapid population growth, ignorance, greed or one-dimensional ideology. It can accompany wars, such as the Persian invasion of 479 BC, in which Athens was demolished, but Floros made an exception for some wartime destruction that takes place without intent to destroy a culture.

Ignorance about the value of the monuments on the Acropolis led to architectural destruction during the Ottoman Empire’s 400 years of rule here. Fueled by greed, it took place during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the era when Lord Elgin carted away the Parthenon frieze to England.

It took place due to one-dimensional ideologies during the first Greek state, founded in 1830, when northern Europeans decided the only architecture of value was neoclassical. Byzantine and Ottoman buildings were razed or allowed to fall to ruin during that era.

And it took place during the 20th century, fueled by rapid immigration to Athens from all over Greece. The rebuilding here was influenced, as in most Western cities, by the Modernist architectural movement – founded, ironically, with the 1933 Charter of Athens – which rejected pretty much anything that had ever been done, on the theory that the city must be completely reinvented.

Floros quoted Lord Byron, the English poet who came to Greece to fight in its war for independence in 1821 and died of a fever: Athens is “the most injured and the most celebrated of cities.”

Although if you want to narrow the competition to destruction of memories of the past, from what I can see Charlotte wins – in a New York minute. I’m pondering whether the destruction of downtown was fueled more by greed, or rapid population growth, or an unconscious effort to wipe away the black neighborhoods, or the wish to demolish a memory that people didn’t want to have to remember.

Next up: Was the Charter of Athens just simply wrong? (Sure seems that way to me.) Asking that question appears to make many architects deeply uneasy.

Update, Thursday June 24: I got an e-mail from Floros, asking that I be sure to note that some of the buildings that have been victimized by “architectural cleansing” in Athens are some important mid-century Modernist buildings. And he’s right to be concerned that yet another era of architecture is being wiped away – and not only in Athens. The Charlotte City Council set a precedent in October 2008 when it refused to designate as historic a mid-century Modern house – the first time it’s refused a request from a property owner – apparently because council members just didn’t think the building was all that significant.

Unfamiliar places, familiar issues

ATHENS – We’ve taken a rest in a bench in the shade, on a 95-degree afternoon climb up to see the Acropolis. Hearing our English another perspiring American tourist asks to share our bench and as we chat about where we’re from it emerges that not only had he lived in Charlotte (on The Plaza) but he knew several of our friends.

Three days later at an elegant former residence that’s now the Museum of the City of Athens I chat with a smartly turned out Athenian with impeccable British-tinged English. It turns out she’s an alumna of East Carolina University and has relatives in Greenville. N.C.

Indeed the world is small. That was driven home when I did an informal survey of some three dozen planners and urban academics from around the globe, at a Johns Hopkins University-sponsored conference in Athens. What’s the biggest problem your city faces, I asked. Despite different histories, cultures and governments, the list would sound familiar to any U.S. observer of cities:
problems of urban regeneration/gentrification.
maintaining social cohesion/integrating immigrants.
retaining jobs/boom-and-bust economies.
corruption/maladministration.
undeveloped infrastructure.
sprawl.

Except for this: The architect/planner/professor from Calcutta and the architect/planner from Mexico City both pretty much said, “all of the above.”

Cities with strict urban growth boundaries – that is most of the rest of the world except the U.S. – still struggle with sprawl. In Greece it manifests itself in people building illegally, on land preserved for agriculture, and then eventually becoming legal, and demanding sewer service, schools and other urban infrastructure. Hmmmm. Except for the part about it being illegal that’s pretty much the pattern in the U.S. as well. We may sprawl, but at least we’re not creating as many criminals while doing it.

And speaking of criminals, Athens traffic engineer and professor Thanos Vlastos told me that for 30 years Athens has had a law that you can only drive into the center of the city every other day. They check for odd-even license tag numbers. If you get caught, the fine is substantial, he estimated it at about 700 Euros. But, he said, everyone ignores that. It’s not well-policed. And it simply inspired people to buy a second car. We humans do have a way of trying to outsmart most everything.

(Disclosure note: The Johns Hopkins Urban Fellows Program paid my travel expenses to Athens for the conference.)

Charlotte: The Venice of the Carolinas?

I’m blogging from a conference of the International Urban Fellows of Johns Hopkins University, in Athens (Greece, not Georgia). I’ll be updating this and sending more posts as time and internet access allow.

ATHENS – Laugh if you want. I’ve just had a conversation with an Italian professor from Venice that made me think Charlotte and Venice may have a lot in common.

Without the canals, the seaside locale and the splendid cathedrals.

Pier Luigi Sacco, who grew up in a town in central Italy but who now teaches at the University of Venice, started saying that Venice doesn’t respect its historic buildings or its tradition of arts and culture. My response was only slightly more coherent than, “Say what?”

We un-cultural Americans, of course, think of Italy as a land of high culture, where beauty and art are worshipped daily.
Not so in practical Venice, said Sacco. Venice values the arts only if they can be shown to improve economic development, he said. It’s a city with a centuries-old history of commerce, which has led to a very practical and mercenary outlook on such things.

Sound familiar? Charlotte is also the kind of place where artists have to justify the arts as an economic engine. (To be fair, that’s true of many other American cities.) Our Arts & Science Council does studies of that sort routinely. So do state arts agencies. I know New York City did a similar study not too long ago.

Sacco described how an important art historian in Venice had told a conference of other art historians that the importance of the arts was so that tourists would leave the city with empty pockets. (!) That’s putting it a bit nakedly, I guess, but if you listen to our local boosters you’ll hear a lot of similar thinking, more politely couched, about Charlotte arts groups.

Now, about those canals …

(Disclosure note: The Johns Hopkins Urban Fellows Program paid my travel expenses to Athens for the conference.)

Look for blogging from Athens starting Sunday

I’m spending a few days in Athens (yes, Greece) for a conference that starts Sunday, sponsored by Johns Hopkins University’s Institute for Policy Studies and its International Urban Fellows program. I hope to do some live-blogging from the conference. The topic is “Memory” and its effects on how a city grows and develops. We’ll tour the 2004 Olympics facilities, among other events.

My just-graduated from high school daughter (see last Saturday’s op-ed on that emotional milestones) and I are here early, playing tourist so the scholarly and expert discussion about the city will have some meaning. We spent the hottest day of the year so far (at least 95 degrees, possibly hotter) touring the Acropolis, where there is very little shade and there were long lines for the water fountains. But it is a more stunning experience than I was prepared for.

Then we opted for the air-conditioned spendor of the new-last-year Acropolis Museum, which has a magnificent display of Greek antiquities from the Acropolis, especially the Parthenon. I won’t launch into a travelogue here, but suffice to say that the display — with plaster casts filling in for the sections of the carvings that Lord Elgin took away to England and which are now displayed at the British Museum — makes painfully clear that those artworks deserve to come home and be reunited. There are sections where a rider’s head is in London, and the rest of the body and the horse are in Athens. Or a leg is in one country, the body in the other. The artwork is too beautiful to have to endure, severed.

NPR did a piece today about the dearth of tourists in Greece. Here’s a link. Having only arrived at noon today, I can’t say whether the relatively deserted streets today (and “deserted” in Athens is about like a noonday weekday crowd at Trade and Tryon in Charlotte) were a result of a tourism slump, or the 95-degree heat, or the World Cup game in which Greece was playing (and beat) Nigeria. We heard TVs on in many homes we passed.