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A One Day Symposium

When: 8 June 2018, 10:00 — 17:00


Venue: Gordon Square Cinema, School of Arts, Birkbeck, Gordon Square 43, London, WC1H 0PD
Booking details: Free entry; booking required

The Ha-ha wall, a classic feature of the English park, is said to derive its name from the surprised reaction and
amusement of passers-by when confronted with the barrier previously concealed in the landscape. Unseen
from one side and obvious from the other, a visual tool for uninterrupted views and a physical barrier at the
same time, the Ha-ha wall seems to almost caricature the dichotomies inherent in the wall: both a dividing and
a linking element, a condition of both segregation and co-existence, a carefully concealed obstacle and a
deterrent visible from far away. It is the wall's Janus-faced character, which, paradoxically, allows it to occupy a
space beyond the division it engenders. This raises questions about the nature of this most traditional building
element as well as its contemporary embodiment as a high-tech tool of control. What is it made of? How can a
linear element that is a wall be inhabited? What does it mean to occupy the wall itself instead of one or the
other side? And finally, how is it possible to breach the wall? Trump’s wall on the Mexican border, the wall on
the West Bank as well as barriers, fences and walls in Europe, erected during the refugee crisis in 2015, all point
to a dystopian resurgence of the wall in all its political relevance and aesthetic and symbolic complications.

There have been a number of symposia and academic discussions about the recent return of the wall as a
spatial manifestation of politics. The organizers of the proposed conference are, however, convinced that
focusing merely on the most recent manifestations of spatial divisions without addressing and rethinking
intrinsic architectural and aesthetic properties of the wall misses an important opportunity to locate the
political not only in the actual historical events but also in the material and spatial make-up of the events
themselves. The wall both as a political tool of division and as a material and aesthetic phenomenon frames our
ways of perceiving and experiencing historical events. This is why an interdisciplinary discussion, focusing not
only the imminent effects of newly-erected spatial divisions, but also questioning the all too self-evident
properties of the wall as an architectural element, is vital at this historical moment.
TIMETABLE

9:30 Coffee

10:00 – 12:15 Panel 1: Constructing Walls

10:00 Leslie Topp: Boundaries lightened, naturalized and reinforced

10:25 Alistair Cartwright: Partitioning practices in postwar London multiple occupancy homes, c. 1960

10:50 Miloš Kosec: Absent walls: Entrepreneurial voids in Elemental's social housing projects

11:15 Michael Diers: 'Build it big, build it beautiful': Donald Trump's US-Mexico border wall prototypes
and the artistic intervention by Christoph Büchel

11:40 Discussion

12:15 – 13:00 Lunch Break

13:00 – 14:45 Panel 2: Inhabiting Walls

13:00 Mark Crinson: Colin Rowe’s lurid wall – violence, anxiety, and the art-architecture nexus in
formalist analysis

13:25 Christina Parte: Loving and living with the Berlin Wall – fetish and its subversion

13:50 James O'Leary: Milk, Confetti, Erratics—A Stratigraphy of ‘The Interface’

14:15 Discussion

14:45 – 15:00 Coffee Break

15:00 – 16:45 Panel 3: Controlling Walls

15:00 Janet Ward: Agency at the Berlin Wall

15:25 Kasia Murawska-Muthesius: Berlin Wall and techniques of the Cold-War observer

15:50 Wendy Pullan: In the shadow of the wall: The iconicity of Jerusalem’s Separation Barrier

16:15 Discussion

16:45 – 17:30 Drinks and informal discussion

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ABSTRACTS

Alistair Cartwright: Partitioning Practices in Postwar London Multiple Occupancy Homes, c. 1960

Four solid walls and a roof over one’s head. These, for an essentialist conception of home - which
Heidegger formulated most famously in his philosophy of ‘dwelling’, but which leaves traces of itself in
commonplace artefacts like children’s drawings of houses - form the minima of homely existence.
Walls in this sense are the ground of ontological security. But what happens when conditions such as
overcrowding and poor amenities deny that security or reconfigure it? What happens when walls are
no longer stable givens, but become consistently contested? What happens, in other words, when the
solid wall becomes flimsy or mobile, an object constantly made, unmade and remade, both by
inhabitants and exterior forces?

This paper examines how multiple occupancy tenants in postwar London used a range of improvised
devices to control and reshape domestic space. Drawing on documentary photographs, oral histories
and contemporary fictional representations, it explores a range of ‘partitioning practices’, such as the
use of hanging blankets, folding screens, and flexible arrangements of furniture. These practices, I
argue, demonstrate the ‘staying power’ of immigrant and working class households at a time of
aggressive urban development in the late 1950s and early ’60s. At the same time, partitions that
amounted to something less than a solid brick wall - often in plasterboard - were also an instrument in
the hands of property speculators intent on extracting maximum value from a declining private rental
sector. The paper thus considers the double status of the wall-that-is-not-quite-a-wall. It examines the
physical hazards as well as the uncanny psychological impact of such objects and associated forms of
everyday life.

Alistair’s PhD research (Birkbeck college) explores the visual culture of postwar London’s ‘rented rooms’. His
writing has appeared in Jacobin, Counterfire, Bright Lights Film Journal, Litro and elsewhere. He co-edits the
creative non-fiction publication, differentskies.net and is a steering committee member of the Stop the War
Coalition.

Mark Crinson: Colin Rowe’s lurid wall – violence, anxiety, and the art-architecture nexus in formalist
analysis

This paper presents a detailed exposition of Colin Rowe’s 1962 essay ‘Dominican Monastery of La
Tourette, Eveux-Sur-Abresle’. It is an alluring essay, full of flashes of vivid prose, the peak of Rowe’s
formalist mannerism. But it is also an enigmatic and difficult essay, the most extreme example of his
extraordinary visual analyses, and this is perhaps why it has been much less discussed than Rowe’s
other essays. It all centres on the largely blank north wall of this monastery, designed by Le Corbusier,
beyond which the essay barely moves. For Rowe, the wall is the latest in a series of blank flat objects,
parts of buildings that fascinated him from his MA thesis (with Rudolf Wittkower) that discussed
delicate advances and recessions and the rhythms of precise planar contrasts in the work of Inigo
Jones and Andrea Palladio, to the puzzling blank panel in Le Corbusier’s Villa Schwob that initiated his
1950 essay on ‘Mannerism and Modern Architecture’. The La Tourette essay is worth placing beside a
number of other contemporary writings – by Alison Smithson, for example, or Maurice Merleau-Ponty
– which also reflected on embodiment and materiality. But unlike these and relating more to an older
German tradition of art history, in Rowe’s essay the wall becomes a site for reflecting on the relation
between the flatness of painting and the spatiality of architecture, a fraught questioning of the claims

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of autonomy in any medium. The old tradition of empathy, seemingly at its endgame in the work of
Heinrich Wölfflin, is resuscitated in existentialist guise. The wall is a demonstration of the impossibility
of being an architectural critic.

Mark Crinson is Professor of Architectural History at Birkbeck. His most recent books are Rebuilding Babel:
Modern Architecture and Internationalism (2017) and Alison and Peter Smithson (2018). His paper for the Walls
symposium comes from work he is doing with Richard J Williams for a book titled The Architecture of Art
History - A Historiography, due out later this year.

Michael Diers: 'Build it big, build it beautiful!' Donald Trump's US-Mexico border wall prototypes and
the artistic intervention by Christoph Büchel

The lecture introduces the current project MAGA ('Make Art Great Again') by the Swiss artist Christoph
Büchel, who tries to define the prototypes of the border wall commissioned by the American president
and erected near Otay Mesa as a Land Art project and to put it officially under protection by the state.

Michael Diers, art historian and critic, is Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Fine Arts
in Hamburg and Extraordinary Professor of Art History at the Humboldt University of Berlin. In 2017/2018 he is
a Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. His research focuses on Renaissance Art,
modernism and contemporary art, photography and new media, art und media theory, political iconography
and the history of science. He has written many essays and books on the aforementioned topics, among them
„Warburg aus Briefen“ (1991), „Schlagbilder. Zur politischen Ikonographie der Gegenwart“ (1997), „Hans
Haacke, ‚Der Bevölkerung’“ (2000, co-editor), „Film, Fotografie, Video. Beiträge zu einer kritischen Theorie des
Bildes“ (2006), „Topos Atelier. Werkstatt und Wissensform“ (2009, co-editor); „Das Interview. Formen und
Funktionen des Künstlergesprächs seit Vasari“ (2013, co-editor with Lars Blunck and Hans Ulrich Obrist); “Max
Liebermann: Die Kunstsammlung. Von Rembrandt bis Manet” (co-editor, 2013). His last book (“Vor aller Augen.
Studien zu Kunst, Bild und Politik”) has been published with Fink publisher in 2016. He is co-editor of the
Collected Writings of Aby Warburg and was the longstanding editor of the paperback series „kunststück“ (one-
work-series) and „Fundus“. In addition, he works as a freelance writer for the German and Swiss newspapers
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”, Süddeutsche Zeitung” and Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

Miloš Kosec: Absent Walls: Entrepreneurial Voids in Elemental's Social Housing Projects

Walls are perhaps the most time-tested way for the architects to exert spatial control. Contrary to
that, architect Alejandro Aravena and his company Elemental have pioneered the so-called
‘incremental principle’ with designing the absence of walls. Implemented in their social housing
projects in Chile, the architects designed only first half of the final settlement with the inhabitants
gradually completing it according to their own needs and means. The result is a picturesque rhythmical
exchange of discipline and chaos, of utilitarian concrete walls and a spontaneous pastiche of colourful
individual partitions.

However, in order for such apparent relaxation of control to work, the architectural design of the
estates is complemented by an extensive series of workshops and education processes. In my paper I
will argue that the carefully designed voids that seem to signal the withdrawal of the architects (and
the state) from controlling all aspects of social housing could also be read conversely: as a
deterministic and excessively controlled scheme. In it, the colourful walls of the incremental additions
insinuate unlimited potential, but this potential is understood in a strictly entrepreneurial way. The
vibrancy, flexibility and temporariness of incrementally added walls might be less of a consequence

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and more of a condition of the project’s success, preforming the spatial equation of the free market
choice that serves as the ultimate arbiter of legitimacy and social discipline. In analysing the
appearance and representation of such incremental additions I will argue that Elemental’s absent
walls are today perhaps more impregnable than the traditional solid walls of brick and mortar not
despite, but because they are full of voids - deceptively open to possibilities while deterministically
scripted by the demands of the marketplace.

Miloš Kosec is an architect, editor and publicist. His research work is focused on architecture, architectural
history, and the political and social aspects of architectural design. He is a PhD student at Birkbeck, London,
researching the strands of critical passivity in contemporary architecture. Miloš is also a practicing architect and
landscape designer with a number of realizations. He is a member of the editorial boards of Praznine and
Outsider Magazines and the editor of Outsider.si, as well as one of the recipients of the Plečnik medal for
architectural contributions for 2017. He is the author of the book “Ruin as an Architectural Object” published in
2013.

Kasia Murawska-Muthesius: Berlin Wall and techniques of the Cold-War observer

In recent years the tropes of ‘Cold War visuality’ have been examined by scholars from different
disciplines, including cultural history, German studies, photography and media, as well as history of art
and visual culture studies. Referring to Crary (1992), Schneider (1982), Garret (1999) and Komska
(2004, 2015), this paper argues that the metaphor of the Iron Curtain and its product, the Berlin Wall,
played the primary roles in controlling the mechanisms and hierarchies of the Cold War visuality,
generating a whole range of the techniques of seeing available to the Cold War observer. It re-
examines the representation of the East/West border as an optical device, which both constrains and
conditions visual perception, negotiating the viewer/viewed positions on East/West axis. The paper
focuses on one of the most persistent tropes of the Cold War visuality, that is the representation of
the western spectator as an elevated seeing subject peering through, or over, the Wall, used, among
others, by Henri Cartier-Bresson in his Bernauerstrassse (1961).

Kasia Murawska-Muthesius teaches art history at Birkbeck College. She was Curator of Italian Paintings and
Deputy Director of The National Museum in Warsaw, as well as Guest Professor at the Humboldt University in
Berlin. Her publications include Trionfo barocco (Gorizia, 1990), Borders in Art: Revisiting Kunstgeographie
(Warsaw, 2000), From Museum Critique to the Critical Museum (Farnham, 2015, with Piotr Piotrowski). Her
current research is on caricature.

James O'Leary: Milk, Confetti, Erratics—A Stratigraphy of ‘The Interface’

In 1904, as part of the Memoirs of the Geological Survey of Ireland, geologists Lamplugh et al. wrote a
paper called ‘The Geology of the Country around Belfast’ where they surveyed the glacial drifts and
other superficial deposits around the city, organising this cartographical information into a ‘Table of
Formations’. In 2017, The Belfast Interface Project published ‘Interface Barriers, Peacelines and
Defensive Architecture’, where they systematically catalogue each ‘peacewall’, barrier, fence and gate
used to separate and contain Nationalist and Unionist communities in Northern Ireland. In the
conceptual space between these two documents, one can construct a theoretical matrix of artefacts,
agents, designs and policy related to the fields of conflict and desire operating in the territory
surveyed by these publications. In 2014, James O’Leary began to construct such a matrix, with a view
to gaining an understanding of the mutating condition he calls ‘The Interface’.

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Physically, The Interface comprises thirteen different wall clusters or ‘peacelines’ situated throughout
Belfast. Specifically designed to respond to an evolving set of local actions, events and spaces of
conflict, the wall clusters both demarcate a territorial condition and form a backdrop for the
performance of expressions of cultural identity. Over many years, the areas around each wall cluster
have accumulated deposits and debris, forming a unique and local archive in space and time. In order
to catalogue this archive, O’Leary uses a technique called ‘stratigraphy’: the branch of Geology
concerned with the order and relative position of strata and their relationship to the geological and
historical timescale. Utilising drawing, video, mapping and writing, O’Leary separates and identifies
one micro-context from another, constructing a case for a ‘congregational understanding of agency’
(Bennet, 2010) related to the assemblage called ‘The Interface’. This work is supported by James
O’Leary’s AHRC TECHNE doctoral award.

James O'Leary is a RIBA qualified architect and installation artist. His work explores the inter-relationship
between human beings and the spatial systems we inhabit. He has held previous positions in architecture
practices including Hopkins, MasaStudio, SoftRoom, Theis & Khan and in academia at the Royal College of Art
and Chelsea College of Arts. He is currently the Programme Director for the MA Situated Practice Programme
at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. With Kristen Kreider he makes work in
relation to sites of architectural and cultural interest such as prisons, military sites, film locations, landscape
gardens and desert environments. Combining visual, spatial and poetic practices, they develop performance,
installation and video work and instigate architectural interventions directly on-site. Their work has been
exhibited widely, including at Tate Britain, the Whitechapel Gallery and the Lisbon Architecture Triennale. Their
book Falling was published by Copy Press in 2015.

Christina Parte: Loving and living with the Berlin Wall – fetish and its subversion

Over the last decade self-defined objectum-sexuals, whose sexual desire is directed towards iconic
architecture made accessible for personal pleasure as scale models, have attracted media attention.
Lars Laumann’s insightful filmic portrait of Eiija-Riitta (Eklöf) Berliner-Mauer’s life with models of the
Berlin Wall in Sweden (Berlinmuren, 2008) shed light on objectum-sexuality. When Eiija-Riitta was
seven, the televised images of the erection of the Berlin Wall brought about an intense object love.
She obsessively collected images and postcards of the Wall, constructed models of the different
generations of the Western Wall, embraced, caressed, touched him on her rare visits to Berlin
between 1961 and 1988, and eventually ‘married’ him in 1979. She ignores his demolition and still
gains sexual satisfaction from the models, which occupy considerable space in her large house.

While the scale models of the Berlin Wall function as phallic substitutes, Eiija-Riitta’s desire for objects
which divide (fences, walls, guillotines) highlights and subverts the role of the fetish in an amusing and
grotesque way. The scale models of the Western Wall are fetishized as screens (screening off the
actual fortification system) as well as dividing agents. I argue that Eiija-Riitta’s object love points to
identifications and affects vis-à-vis the Berlin Wall that go beyond officially sanctioned discourse and
make the Wall’s paradoxical nature and historical situatedness between contested border wall and
object of desire visible.

Christina Parte is currently doing her PhD on the political aesthetics of the Berlin Wall at Birkbeck College,
London. She has taught German as a foreign language for more than thirteen years at UCL, King’s and Birkbeck
College. Her main interets lie in cultural studies, popular culture, gender studies and critical theory; theories of
(cultural) translation and contact linguistics.

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Wendy Pullan: In the shadow of the wall: the iconicity of Jerusalem’s Separation Barrier

For much of its history, and like many ancient cities, Jerusalem was identified and recognised by visual
images of its wall. Today, the separation barrier has become iconic and, arguably, is the image most
associated with the city by a number of modern audiences. This new wall has galvanised public
opinion and is linked to a number of other such barriers – from Belfast, to Berlin, to Nicosia, to
Baghdad, and beyond – that have been used to impose ethno-national divisions in a particularly stark
and tangible way. In some cases, these walls and buffer zones may have resulted in the cessation of
violence, but they have also contributed to radical shifts of populations, severe spatial discontinuities
and human misery.

In Jerusalem, the barrier has been questioned mainly in terms of its political legitimacy, but broader
issues are also present concerning the iconicity of such structures and their power and influence in situ
in the landscape, in the media and in their existential meanings. This paper will consider some of the
ramifications including: the wall as the visible ‘tip of the iceberg’ that reflects only a fraction of the
political and military regime supporting the occupation; the representation and meaning of hard
barriers in inner cities; and finally, remembering the traditional place of a wall as an ancient urban
enceinte, the varying quality of walls in modern cities and the spaces they create or destroy in
everyday situations.

Wendy Pullan is Professor of Architecture and Urban Studies and Director of the Centre for Urban Conflicts
Research at the University of Cambridge. Her recent publications include: Locating Urban Conflicts (2013) and
The Struggle for Jerusalem’s Holy Places (2013). She is a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge.

Leslie Topp: Boundaries lightened, naturalized and reinforced

This paper looks at what happens physically and conceptually to walls when the people erecting them
are embarrased by their existence. Softening operations attempt to recast physical barriers as
something natural and normal, even permeable. Large complexes for the mentally ill were designed in
the first decade of the twentieth century in various parts of the Habsburg empire. These institutions
were based on a paradox: confined within them, patients were supposed to be able to live a life of
considerably greater freedom than before. I'll examine the difficult issue of physical boundaries (walls,
fences, hedges) constructed both around and within the institutions' grounds, showing a range of
responses to the challenge of confining people without seeming to do so. I'll look at examples from
Prague, Krakow and Trieste, and examine the counterexample of Steinhof, the famous Vienna
psychiatric institution designed by Otto Wagner, where barriers were hardenened again, and their
length and height reinforced, both physically and rhetorically.

Leslie Topp is Reader in History of Architecture and Head of the Department of History of Art at Birkbeck,
University of London. Her book Freedom and the Cage: Modern Architecture and Psychiatry in Central Europe,
1890-1914 was published in 2017 by Penn State University Press; she is also author of Architecture and Truth in
Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Cambridge University Press, 2004). She co-edited Madness, Architecture, and the Built
Environment (Routledge, 2007) and co-curated the international exhibition "Madness and Modernity: Mental
Illness and the Visual Arts in Vienna 1900" (Wellcome Collection, London and Wien Museum, 2009-10). She is
currently working on single rooms in nineteenth-century psychiatric architecture; her article "Single Rooms,
Seclusion and the Non-Restraint Movement in British Asylums, 1838–1844" was recently published in Social
History of Medicine.

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Janet Ward: Agency at the Berlin Wall

The Berlin Wall, and indeed the entire GDR’s border system, was a faulty fault-line. Despite its various
modernization phases, the Wall could not live up to its reputation. How can we reconcile the
contradictory coexistence of the imperfections and gaps in the Cold War’s most famous border system
with the top-down, ideological drive toward a closed perfectibility? This paper will explore the
underlying extreme malleability -- and fallibility -- of the Berlin Wall and inner German border
according to human need and context, and help lift us out of the trap of technological determinism.
And yet, in the study of spatial order, especially infrastructural kinds, we can learn much from failures
and repair. Architecture necessarily faces cycles of decay-maintenance, or entropy-improvement.
Moreover the concept of the border, even a hard one like the Berlin Wall, is best understood as a
breathing, interactive membrane.

Janet Ward, incoming Vice President and President-Elect of the German Studies Association, is Professor of
History and the inaugural Faculty Director of the Humanities Forum at the University of Oklahoma. She is an
interdisciplinary scholar of urban studies, visual culture, and European cultural history. An affiliate faculty
member in both Judaic & Israel Studies and International & Area Studies, she teaches courses on comparative
urban modernity, global borders, memory studies, World War II, the Holocaust, and genocide studies. Her
current book project, Sites of Holocaust Memory, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic, and she is the
author of two other monographs, Post-Wall Berlin: Borders, Space and Identity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and
Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (University of California Press, 2001). She has
published thirty-five essays and articles and has coedited four books: Transnationalism and the German City
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Walls, Borders, Boundaries: Spatial and Cultural Practices in Europe (Berghahn
Books, 2012), German Studies in the Post-Holocaust Age: The Politics of Memory, Identity, and Ethnicity
(University Press of Colorado, 2000), and Agonistics: Arenas of Creative Contest (SUNY Press, 1997). She has
also coedited the special issue Terror, Trauma, Memory on the Oklahoma City bombing for the journal Social
Science Quarterly (2016). In addition to an ACLS fellowship Janet Ward has received several grants and awards
from the DAAD, Fulbright, Getty Research Institute, NEH, Summer Institute for Israel Studies, & the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She is currently serving as an elected Executive Council member of the
Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association. Professor Ward received her Ph.D. from the
University of Virginia.

The organizers of the 'Ha Ha: The Weirdness of Walls' Christina Parte and Miloš Kosec would like to thank the
Lorraine Lim Fund and Architecture, Space and Society Centre, Birkbeck, for co-funding the symposium, and
Leslie Topp, Mark Crinson and Güneş Tavmen for advice and help with its organisation.

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