Architects Without Frontiers: War, Reconstruction and Design Responsibility

Architects without frontiers. War, reconstruction and design responsibility.Esther Charlesworth, Architectural Press Elsevier, Oxford and Burlington, 2006

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The promise of this book is profound: to highlight the mono-dimensional physical-focus of architect’s minds and offering a new vision of architects and design professional as 'mobile and collaborative agents' outside traditional sites and constructed environments. In doing so, the author examines practioners’ role in the design and re-assemblage of urban environments ravished by wars and social conflicts resulting in de facto 'divided cities'.

Post-war cities as Beirut, Nicosia and Mostar are analysed as powerful iconic examples of contested spaces in which exogenous reconstruction efforts. The format of the book is attractive. Each of the eight chapters provide key points and bridge to the following one in a progressive and rigorous manner along with powerful graphics and pictures drawn from the author’s studio experiences.

The title of the first chapter 'from line of contention to zone of connection' provide the context in which the narrative of the book is articulated through the representation of different 'green lines' erected in the cities during the conflicts and how these spatialities remain in the mental maps of the residents resulting in sort of 'phantom limbs'. Physical and mental phantoms which enter in the game of urban renewal and reconstruction posing what she call 'infinite dilemmas' of post war reconstruction.

The second chapter explore the long lasting relationship between architecture/architects and war. A retrospective brief review of post-war architecture is provided starting from the Second World War period. This historical analysis undercovers two opposite approaches in reconstruction: the facsimile one focused on rebuilding 'what was there and exactly how it was' and the tabula rasa one focused on top-down radical urban transformations.

Approaches which are still present in contemporary practice. It is interesting to note that the chapter opens and ends by quoting two 'cides'. At the entry point a powerful picture of the 'separation barrier': a steel and concrete snake winds through Qalqiliya and Tulkarem towards Jerusalem: probably the most powerful iconic image of 'contemporary border', representing the profound 'spacio-cidal' Israeli colonial project.

At the final point the concept of 'urbicide' as neologism that was first used by a former mayor of Belgrade, Bogdan Bogdanovic in relation to the deliberate physical destruction and ethnic cleansing of the city of Vukovar in Croatia in 1991-92 by the Serbian forces, able to explain the explicit attempt at killing built forms in modern war as 'place annihilation'.

Crucial here, is what is involved in 'urbicide': the negation of all normal urban existence, both literal—in physical terms—and even more significantly symbolic—in terms of such values as liberty, civility, diversity and co-existence. 'Urbicide', came into existence where the entire city, all its citizens and the symbols of their humanity, civility and diversity, has been under attack by superior armed forces animated by a determination to kill or 'cleanse' those very qualities of civilized city living. Elements which, according to Charlesworth, are fundamental in re-shaping the role of architects and design professionals.

Before entering into the narrative of Beirut, Nicosia and Mostar, the author, in chapter three, proposes six prototypes of architects or as she call 'archetypes' (pathologists, heroes, historicists, colonialists, social reformers and educators) in order to explore their roles, potential and expressed, in post-conflict urban reconstruction.

Charlesworth here, using different approaches and literatures, reframes the principal question of the book evidencing contemporary lacunae in spatial practice, stressing the need for a potentially liberating future for architects out of the normative, rational and conventional realm of 'producing architecture' advocating a peace-building challenge.

The following chapters represent the narrative of the author’s 'nomadic' experience in Beirut, Nicosia and Mostar post-war reconstructions. Charlestsworth here, brilliantly condenses the historical cycle of destruction and reconstruction. Beirut is analysed as a powerful example of 'surgery' top-down reconstruction focused on a sort of 'ruins memorabilia' and grand projects centrally managed by Solidere development projects on the waterfront and the city centre and implemented in complete isolation from the social and economic dimensions of the whole city as 'island mentality'.

Nicosia provides an alternative view to design processes in a divided city. The chapter positively assesses the experience of by-communal pilot projects developed along the buffer zone as coherent elements of the Nicosia’s master plan. Finally, Mostar is analysed as an example of 'reconstruction without reconciliation': an exogenous, physical and symbolic reconstruction process, directly managed by OHR, EU and 'external experts', epitomised by an historic reconstruction of the city centre and the Stari Most.

All three narratives, despite different approaches, show the priority given to repairing the immediate physical damage over the “social and political economic priorities of the post-war aftermath”. Experiences which represent the 'potential' challenge of planning and design practice. A practice which “can close or open up a city physically, fragment or integrate a city socially, submerge and dominate cultural identities or support them in ways that nurture diversity within unity, and built cities that reinforce and harden group identities or seek to transcend them'.

In the following chapters, Charlesworth, explores the manner in which a conceptual shift in architecture and design practice could help to move forward the immediate physical repairing focus toward an holistic developmental approach. This shift is envisaged to be realistic if three principles are being put into practice: political and ethnic collaboration, public consultation and pilot project.

This principles framework conceives built environment in an essentially dialectic set of relationships of complementary phenomena which are concrete, abstract and strategical. The author develops a systemic framework capable of embracing a greater connectedness between the constituent elements and underlining the relevance of a transformative approach which can be pursued in design practice in order to establish bridges and links between competing ethnic communities or they can build boundaries and figurative walls.

Charlesworth, in her 'nomadic' investigation of fragmented cities, has been able to look over the self-defined 'walls of the architectural profession' and practice. The significance of spatiality and 'do it' practice recalls the ethical dilemma of the 'band-aid myth'.

It is a dilemma that operates with the notion that the ills of war and empire can be assuaged by the band-aid of reconstruction. And it is an ethical dilemma which arises when the professionalism of architects and planners is disconnected from the context of action, when architects claim that they have no responsibility for the field of power in which they operate.

Despite an unbalanced articulation of the three case studies, Charlesworth’s words are an interesting contribution in understanding architectural forms and its manifestations with social and ethical concerns. It is of relevance to an international audience interested in critical architectural contemporary discourse.

While further editing would help clarify the ideas in the book and make strongest linkages with other reconstruction experiences, the significance of this volume is in its being a first step towards cracking the monolithic unified idea of physical post-war reconstruction.

With a sort of sans-frontiérisme approach, the concept of 'architects without frontiers', relegated to the book’s end, is probably slightly under conceptualised and has, ironically, been given a boost by the 'borderless world' globalist visions.

Despite this, Charlesworth’s book enables us to cross our own disciplinary borders, transforming this symbolic, physical and conceptual borderland, into a common and shared space. Transition spaces created combining the aesthetic and the socially transformative capacity of design profession and resulting in hybridity and mixing: crucial elements for 'an equitable and sustainable societies'. Camillo BoanoOxford Brookes University – School of Built Environment - Department of Planning Oxford – UK. c.boano@brookes.ac.uk

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