Below is an excerpt of a conversation I had with my friends, Maja Trudel (M), and Johann Reble (J), when they were guests in my home last spring. Maja and Johann are young Swiss architects, and it was pleasure to talk with them about building, cities, space and perception. Here’s the part about grids:

J: What I was thinking about for a long time is that there are very different scales of structures in the city. A building can be destroyed at any time when you don’t want it anymore. Maybe the structure didn’t fit anymore, maybe it’s the façade people don’t like anymore, and it’s just cheaper to tear down the whole building and build a new one. Look at New York. New York is a perfect example. The structure, the layout of the streets, and even the subway lines, can never be changed. It’s there forever. There would have to be a very [horrible event], like the worst war ever, to destroy the structure you have here. And it all began one day, when some guy drew some lines on a paper.

A: The grid.

J: So it’s there. You cannot change it. You can destroy all the houses and build new ones, but the structure is still there. These are the scales of structure, which are very important—the bigger the scale, the more time you need to destroy it, or change it. And the other thing I think is very important, is what is the order of the scale, who says what scale it is, and what it is about.

A: Yeah, I think about the grid a lot. I used to teach a course called, “We Built this City.” Students expected to learn about large scale structures like the Brooklyn Bridge, the Empire State Building, and other iconic structures of New York. But students are always surprised that I spend so much time at the beginning of the course on the grid. The reason we have to start there is exactly what you said before. The Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building—they don’t really matter as much as that grid.

Inside of that grid there are whole lives. Even small sections of the grid can be the space of a whole life. In that sense, there is this big structure, there is this scale, but it doesn’t matter, if you don’t experience life at that scale. Within that grid, there can be infinite variation.

M: Mmm

J: Yeah

A: Within that grid there can be so many different shapes and pathways, and layers and layers of life, going up and down. Of course, in the conventional way that I have to teach how things are built—giving the names of the architects, teaching accepted ideas of what is a city, and conventional methods for studying it—I begin with the grid, because I have to teach my students about structure, and I am oriented, in my training, towards what is stable. That’s what I’m supposed to teach. But secretly what I’d like to figure out is how we can look at anywhere in the grid, maybe a block, and see for ourselves how that space is really unlimited in actuality.

It makes a difference, whether you look at the stable, or you look at the moving, constantly changing things; whether you think that the structure is most important or movement is more important. This perspective makes a difference politically, and in you methods of working.

J: Take your “Archiving the city” project. Now we have this whole other layer of the internet, and virtuality. So this means there are new grids, right? Different grids. Have you studied them?

A: Oh! I have a book called “THE GRID BOOK”!

[We all laugh]

J: Do you think the patterns in grids can change over time? Like the form of the grid itself? Or is there some kind of universal human form that always [asserts itself] in the grid?

A: Huh. That’s a tough one.

J: Obviously there’s a reason why the floors are flat, (our professor talks like this), and not tilted. It just kind of makes sense: we like to walk on flat surface.

[We all laugh]

J: So there are some kind of basic parameters in the form of the grid.

A: I guess that’s a version of the age-old question: Amongst all the phenomena on earth, all the variation, is there some common denominator? And I don’t know.

Bamako (2006) dir. Abderrahmane Sissako

The storytelling that thrives for a long time in the milieu of work—the rural, the maritime, and the urban—is itself an artisan form of communication, as it were. It does not aim to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information or a report. It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again. Thus traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel.

–Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller”

I am leading a workshop on Friday, March 11, 2011 called “Just Stories: Storytelling and the Imagination of Environmental Justice.” It is part of the 10th Annual Nature, Ecology Society Conference, to be held here in New York. If you’re in New York on March 12th, please stop by. It’s FREE, but you should register here.

Beirut Outtakes (2007), by Peggy Ahwesh

This beautiful film is cut from pieces of film found in an abandoned movie theater in Beirut. The film clips appear to show segments of newsreels, advertisements and trailers for films that one might have seen a Beirut theater in the 1950s, 60′s and 70′s.

What is eerie about Ahwesh’s video is not only the glimpse we get at life in Beirut before years of constant war, but also the strange combination of violence (American westerns), Orientalist sexuality (gyrating belly dancers), and feminine domesticity (women shopping for home appliances). This cocktail of violence, sexuality and domesticity seems so painfully modern, so appropriate for a forward-looking city, ‘the Paris of the Middle East.’ Ahwesh’s film is a cloudy mirror, a surface which shows us the reversed, distorted, but absolutely accurate image of what we are (not) now.

We begin inside a small Baptist church at dusk, on the outskirts of a Lagos neighborhood in the mid 1980’s. We are here for a rare event, the screening of a film depicting the second coming of Christ. This Baptist church is not my church. In my house, going to church is a special event—the whole family piling into the station wagon wearing special shoes and hats, sitting still for what seem like hours—reserved for a few Sundays a year. We are not Baptist, and there are certainly never any films shown at our church. We come to this new lively church on a regular weeknight at the invitation of my friend, a neighbor. I am allowed to go because it is just a short walk from home. The Baptist church is part of the grounds of the neighborhood secondary school, at which my father taught Mathematics and coached football for a few years. The walk is familiar. We pass my cousin’s apartment building, the general grocery store, cut through the quiet market-place with its stalls shuttered for the evening. I have never been to a public film screening before, never sat in the dark with strangers, silently sharing emotions. The large doors close on a crowded room, blocking out the evening breeze. A short speech by the pastor, and then the lights go out. In this dark place, we are rapt, focused on the portable hanging screen set up in front of the pulpit. What we see is a moving picture of the end of the world: radio broadcasts frantically announcing the mysterious disappearance of millions; irons left on, burning hot; eerily empty streets; abandoned cars; desolate shops; and a few very blond, very afraid stragglers screaming, running, left behind in the big American city. We emerge bewildered. Outside it is already night.

Happy Together (1997), dir. Wong Kar Wai
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I saw this movie about 13 years ago, and it changed the way I see.  It still does.

For me it’s mostly the work of a filmmaker to find a shape, find a cinematic way of telling my life. It’s like a puzzle, and I think everybody is a puzzle. You put all the pieces together to make a portrait of somebody. It’s not like a confession–it’s nothing like this. It’s a collage: some pieces don’t fit very well [and] that makes the rhythm of the film.

Brualitat in Stein [Brutality in Stone] (1961), a collaboration between Alexander Kluge (writer, filmmaker) and Peter Schamoni (filmmaker)
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W.G. Sebald, in his essay “Between History and Natural History: On the literary description of total destruction,” considers the work of West German writer, Alexander Kluge. Kluge’s book, New Stories. Nos 1-18 (1977) takes on the prodigious task of examining the aftermath of the destruction of German cities during World War II. Although it makes use of personal recollections of air attack, interviews with military officials and primary source documents, the book is neither a history in the traditional sense, nor is it a traditional novel. Sebald pays attention to Kluge’s method of presenting this diverse material, arguing that confronting catastrophic experience in writing requires the author to challenge and “break out” of the structure and form of the novel, which “owes its allegiance to bourgeois concepts.”

Here is what Sebald has to say about Kluge’s attempt to account for the experience of living in ruined cities:

Kluge’s way of providing his documentary material with vectors through his presentation of it transfers what he quotes into the context of our own present. Kluge does not allow the data to merely stand as an account of a past catastrophe… the most unmediated document… loses its unmediated character via the processes of reflection the text sets up. History is no longer the past but also the present in which the reader must act. The information Kluge’s style thus imparts to readers about the concrete circumstances of their present existence, and possible prospects for the future, marks him out as an author who, on the perimeter of a civilization to all appearances intent on its own end, is working to revive the collective memory of his contemporaries who “with the obviously inborn desire for narrative, have lost the psychological power to remember even within the destroyed city itself.”

Escaping her disgust with herself, she walks out into the night to haunt a familiar tea room—to meet a familiar stranger. An encounter with the stranger, her lover, who asks her to stay here in Hiroshima is the beginning of a slow walk through the empty streets of the night city.

He’s going to kiss me. He’s going to kiss me and I’ll be lost.

She walks on, passing two strolling guitarists, lovers embracing in back seat of a parked car, another car slowing, almost stopping as it passes her, a lone lady in the night. The flickering of Japanese neon is cut with day-lit memories of the sober street signs marking the corner walls of her small French village. Her thoughts drift between both places she must eventually leave, between doomed love affairs. The filmmakers create these flashes of memory through cuts which link tracking shots that seem to keep the camera at the same up-turned angle, creating for the viewer the experience of walking the streets in two different places simultaneously, eyes turned slightly upward to read the signs.

I met you. (Hiroshima)
I remember you. (French village)
This city was tailor-made for love. (Hiroshima)

The walk through post-Nuclear-holocaust Hiroshima at night is full of memories of war-time France. A neon Eiffel Tower flashes on and off like a beacon atop a Japanese bar. One place often bleeds into another—this sort of time travel is possible at night on an aimless stroll, away from oneself.  Both places are bound by war. This walk is evidence of the inevitability and impossibility of love across cultures.

Terror!

In filmic imagination, the end of the world is really associated with the end of the city. World War II saw the full destruction of great cities by radiation and fire. The massive loss of life in the powerful haze of giant mushroom clouds and the slower deaths, memorialized in films like Gojira (1954) and Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) became a real threat for urban dwellers caught in the Cold War. Walking through city streets after seeing this film, how could we not imagine the hot nuclear breath of Godzilla?

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