Erasure

Erasure

In a time when preservation has become either a fetish or a bureaucratic exercise, and truth itself has lost traction, we will explore rumour, myth, and fiction as critical design tools. We treat memory not as a fixed archive, but as a contested ecology in crisis. Our aim is to invent new circuits of desire that allow places to matter again.

Heritage preservation is there to protect and care for our culture with material facts. However, the culture which is preserved constructs myths and imaginaries that not only protect the ancient. It can also attack newer artefacts and places that contaminate the image. Heritage can create and destroy contexts to suit political ends; it can leverage policy and technical data far beyond those that are significant for the preservation of historic settings in order to serve contemporary values.

Since the 1970’s, the ISOS (Federal Inventory of Swiss Heritage Sites) has conducted extensive surveys across Switzerland, defining the ‘Ortsbild’, the image of a place, by evaluating the built environment, from elements of outstanding quality to those considered disruptive. Following the master thesis developed by Héloïse Dussault-Cloutier and Daniel Epprecht, we shall explore the policies of erasure that aim to remove from the urban context structures and spaces that are deemed to harm the prevailing image of an historic ideal.

But who decides? And what interests do these judgements serve? Context here is not a pre-existing fact in which culture is sedimented through time into natural and constructed environments. It is an idea evolving in real time that curates what is included and what is excluded. Context is about power and exchange just as much as it is about a collective expression of prevailing conditions that enable us to fit in.

History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past.

Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past

John Berger, Ways of Seeing

When Jacques Tati was refused permission to film in the arrivals hall of Orly Airport and in a number of office complexes, he decided together with the architect and art director Eugène Roman, to conceive and build his own city on the outskirts of Paris. Between 1964 and 1965 an ensemble of streets and façades gradually took form – Tativille. Two buildings were built and a series of movable houses and fragments that could be rearranged to create the illusion of a continuous metropolis in the viewpoint of the camera. A city in his films, that fabricated landscape or the actual image of the modern city.

Eight years later in Switzerland, a similar concern with the image of places emerged in a different context. The young architect Sibylle Heusser was commissioned to undertake an inventory of Switzerland’s most valuable townscapes – the Ortsbilder. With her team she travelled across the country, not simply cataloguing buildings but observing how the character of each place arose from the interplay between what was built and what was left unbuilt. Here, as in Tati’s film-set, perception was at the core: The Ortsbild was understood not as a collection of buildings but as an experience, a composition of views and spaces. Over the following decades, some 6’000 places were studied, and around 1’200 of them were included in the Federal Inventory of Switzerland’s Sites Worthy of Protection of National Importance (ISOS) and Ortsbildschutz. This body of work became a fundamental instrument for heritage and planning authorities to identify and protect cultural values.

If we follow John Berger’s Ways of Seeing and acknowledge that there is no purely objective way of looking, that every image is filtered through a particular perspective, and that images in turn shape our understanding of place, our values, and our beliefs, then perhaps we should question the intentions or agendas behind the notion of the Ortsbild. What criteria define the value of these images, and what determines their preservation? Like Tati’s Tativille, ISOS reminds us that the Ortsbild is not a neutral representation but a constructed imagination of place and identity at a certain time.

At the beginning of the semester we will return to the texts of ISOS II, such as the WISOS and ISOS Ortsbildaufnahmen, using it as both a guide and a provocation for developing the updated version: ISOS III. We will read the document carefully, study a specific Ortsbild, and walk through the places it seeks and misses to describe. In doing so, we will allow new observations and encounters to reshape the text, so that it becomes not only a record but also an invitation to survey the city.

To survey is to construct an archive. It is not a neutral act of recording, but a continuous negotiation over what is preserved and what is omitted, what belongs in the frame and what is dismissed as disturbance, what is deemed valuable and what is not. Every survey reflects political judgments and personal inclinations, and it becomes the foundation for all subsequent action. In the realm of preservation the document increasingly precedes the monument. The collected surveys and archival materials will be brought together in a film that articulates multiple temporalities extending beyond a linear narrative structure. Using the methods of ISOS as a starting framework, we will develop our own narrative – seeking out the hidden mythologies of Zurich, tracing rumours and legends that lie beyond the official image.

From this body of work we will begin to imagine ways of transforming our chosen sites, strategies that do not erase what is already there but weave new layers into the existing allowing it to change. The aim is to let multiple voices and stories coexist, so that the city can be read as the mutating place of its inhabitants rather than a fixed image.

A Master Thesis Semester in collaboration with

Chair Maarten Delbeke