Which Story About Architecture Do We Want to Tell?
I am not a historian; I studied architecture. But I still enjoy thinking about history. One question that constantly occupies my thoughts – architects tend to look forward, not backward – is what a future history might be. I ask myself: What history of architecture will one day be told about our time? Let us imagine a being from the future looking back at us. Which buildings, projects, and lines of tradition would it consider helpful in understanding us? And what judgment would it pass on us?
Anthropocene
My central point of reference is the Anthropocene. “Anthropocene” is a scientific term from geochronology that has since entered other disciplines and public discourse. The term was first used in 2000. At the time, it expressed the – initially highly controversial – idea that humans had become the dominant force shaping the Earth system, and that the present era should therefore be distinguished from previous geological epochs. This sharp division of epochs remains debated within geochronology, but the term has nonetheless come to symbolize the fact that humans are transforming the planet while destroying the conditions of life for many species – perhaps even for themselves.
In Tel Aviv, however, the Anthropocene means something different. It is more closely connected to war, destruction, fear of one’s own death, and questions of guilt and responsibility.
Categorizations
Many geologists place the beginning of the Anthropocene in the 1950s, because from that point on human intervention in the Earth system can be traced worldwide through sedimentary evidence – a primary object of geological research. Indicators include, among others, levels of carbon dioxide, ozone, and methane, as well as the emergence of soot particles from industrial production, new inorganic compounds (such as plastics), and radioactive contamination.
Scientists outside geology also find this temporal definition meaningful because it correlates with other phenomena – from energy consumption and rapid economic growth to the global destructive potential of nuclear weapons.
If the Anthropocene were used as the basis for a new categorical structure of architectural history, architecture could be organized by the extent to which the functions it serves contribute to CO₂ emissions. This would include power plants, refineries, cement factories, cattle farms, shopping centers, and waste incineration facilities – building typologies that have so far not been extensively discussed within architectural history. These will be the monuments of the future.
Building on this conceptual model, Sabrina Cegla and I initiated a dialogue process in Tel Aviv and Yafo with 29 local architects, seeking, through the lens of their individual biographies, to identify local examples of the “Heritage of the Future.” Through these conversations, several categories emerged: Culture versus Nature, Infrastructure, National versus Pre-national History, and Nightmares of War.
Human Waste versus Bat Waste
The exhibition brings together many spatial situations that deeply moved me. I played with children in a parking garage, got lost in the Central Bus Station, collected trash on the beach, and spent nights at the cement factory, the shopping mall, and a former cemetery. I visited places where traces of former Arab villages can still be seen, saw houses in Tel Aviv destroyed by rockets, and heard explosions in Gaza. All the examples shown in the exhibition demonstrate that we must continually rewrite architectural history.
A seemingly insignificant phenomenon condenses the complex conflicts that make Tel Aviv and Yafo so symptomatic of our time. I am referring to the black stains that have appeared for some time on the white façades of Tel Aviv’s Bauhaus buildings – stains that everyone in the city has long since grown accustomed to.
They come from bats. But this is not a story about cohabitation, about humans and animals living together in the city – although that is also a crucial issue. Rather, it is a story about the remnants of British colonialism and, at the same time, a product of neoliberal globalization.
When the Scottish planner Patrick Geddes helped shape modern Tel Aviv in the early 20th century, ficus trees were introduced to the city. The species planted along many of the city’s streets from the 1930s onward was the Indian laurel fig (Ficus microcarpa), providing shade and becoming part of the city’s urban landscape.
For decades, these trees flowered without producing fruit. Only in recent years did globalization – perhaps via a ship carrying unknown fruit from an unknown place; no one knows exactly – bring to Israel the specific fig wasp that pollinates this species, Eupristina verticillata. The trees subsequently began producing fruit.
These fruits became a feast for the city’s bats. To reduce their weight while in flight, the bats suck out only the sweet juice from the figs and spit out the fibrous pulp and seeds. As a result, organic bat waste is deposited directly onto the surrounding building façades.
The modernist, protected white surfaces are now covered with dark splashes, and modern technology is now deployed against them. Small devices that emit ultrasonic sounds – inaudible to humans but detectable by bats – are intended to keep them away.
But perhaps this is the wrong strategy. Instead of constantly attempting to fix problems superficially, we need to, as the Indian postcolonial theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak puts it, “unlearn” our habits. Only by unlearning can we become open to learning from other – for example, non-Western or non-human – models of action, and ultimately develop new forms of dwelling, building, and relating to the world.
When the being from the future looks back at our era, it will not only see clean façades, but also infrastructures of violence. It will encounter an architecture inseparable from social inequality, destruction, and its own waste products. We should not read these architectural remnants as failures within the system, but as the system itself.
The architectural-theoretical question is not how we keep the white walls clean, but whether we are willing to recognize the dirty stains on the façades as monuments to our failures – and to include them in an unvarnished history of architecture.
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