Answer: A book.
I looked up just now and realized it was already afternoon and I had been submerged for several hours beneath the surface of that ocean familiar to us all – the one created out of words by any writer we stumble upon who happens to match exactly with our mood and temperament.
In this case I have even less excuse than usual because I was not shanghaied (as so often in the past) by a novel, but instead by the speculations and observations and theories of Fred Scott as published by Routledge under the sober title, On Altering Architecture.
One may wonder why so little is written on alteration in the canon of architecture: let me suggest that it is in fact antipathetic to the crucial architectural impulse. At its root, architecture seeks to sweep away the present and build a better, or certainly different world, and this is why alliances so naturally form between architects and the reigning powers. The idea that such intentions would ever need altering is a heresy.
In a sense all styles of architecture are failed social, religious or utopian experiments, that is how the history is made up: the Baroque failed to push back the tide of Reformation following the Council of Trent and failed to return Europe to the Holy Roman Church, just as public housing in Europe failed to create a contented and progressive proletariat in the twentieth century, but neither failure was complete.
Toward the end of the book Fred Scott writes about Berlin's Brandenburg Gate which stood alone in gaunt detachment from the end of World War II until the Wall fell in 1989.
Allied bombing had largely destroyed the surrounding buildings. After the war the Russian-controlled East German government lacked the commitment and/or resources to rebuild.
I should not have to say this: mainly in Berlin in living memory, the worst events in history were planned and commissioned. These events were orchestrated from an almost consecutive sequence of buildings running along Wilhelm-Strasse.
Map showing the offices of the Third Reich in and around Wilhelm-Strasse culminating at upper left in the Brandenburg Gate. Here stood the desks of Himmler, Heydrich, Kaltenbrunner and Heinrich Muller. Here was the 'Hausegefangnis' of the Gestapo, but also the hub of the network of Gestapo regional and local commands and the administrative offices of the Higher SS and Police Commanders that was strung out across Germany and large parts of Europe. From here the genocide of the Jews was prepared, and deportation and extermination [as well as] the Work to Death programs largely applied to Slavs and other 'inferiors' of the 'Master Race'.
Surely the purposes of humanity would have been best served if the relics of this quarter which had survived the Second World War, that once stretched unbroken along the west side of Wilhelm-Strasse, had been cauterized and removed from the everyday life of the city, and maintained empty in perpetuity as a reminder to everyone of the peculiar fragility of civilization under certain conditions. One street in the whole of Europe, one urban intervention, given over as an unavoidable memorial in the heart of Berlin to the terror of facism, so that its scope and power might never again at its inception be overlooked.
Reading this passage while staring at the illustrations gave me a satisfying sense of deja vu. Just over a month ago I wrote here about Tadao Ando's proposal to "construct nothing more" on the site left empty by the destruction of the World Trade Center. Philip Jodidio, author of the Ando book I was reading at that time, pointed out that obviously the very valuable land where the Center stood could never be permanently deprived in this way of its income-producing potential.
And sure enough, once they got the chance the German authorities proceeded energetically to erase every trace of the Nazi foundations, turning Wilhelm-Strasse into a sort of luxurious strip-mall. "It now looks like everywhere else," Scott writes.
That I would read two books in the space of six weeks where two of the great thinkers in the world of contemporary architecture would propose abstaining from architecture as an act of architecture strikes me as more than coincidence. This is postmodernism in action, advocating non-action. Granted, the impulse is easy to ridicule. But I admire it anyway.