Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-11T07:10:44.788Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Architecture as event space: Violence, securitisation, and resistance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2019

Michael J. Shapiro
Michael J. Shapiro*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Hawai'i, Manoa
*
*Corresponding author. Email: shapiro@hawaii.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Central to the conception of this article is the architectural theorist Bernard Tschumi's dictum, ‘There is no architecture without action, no architecture without events, no architecture without program … no architecture without violence.’ Shaped as well by Eyal Weizman's conception of ‘forensic architecture’, the focus of the investigation is on Israel's architecture of security and on the corresponding Palestinian architecture of resistance. Emphasising an encounter of cartographies that reveals the way Palestinians make life livable in response to the architectural violence they face, the analysis continues with reference to Yari Sharif's analysis of architectures of resistance and with a reading of a feature film, Hany Abu-Assad's Omar (2013) in which the Separation Wall between Israel and Palestine is one of the film's primary agent/protagonists. The article surveys popular culture texts, focused on crime and espionage to analyse a range of security practices and breaches that amplify the analysis with attention to security issues in individual households, multiple-person dwelling arrangements, architectural locations throughout cities, and buildings housing governmental security agencies. That trajectory of architectural sites lends a micropolitical analysis to the macropolitical level of governmental policy and modes of resistance to it.

Keywords

Politics of AestheticsArchitectureEvent SpacesSecurity
Type
Research Article
Information
European Journal of International Security , Volume 4 , Issue 3 , October 2019 , pp. 366 - 385
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 For his expression ‘abutment of dissimilars’, see Jacques Rancière, ‘The Politics of Aesthetics’, available at: {https://www.stroom.nl/media/Ranciere_The%20Distribution%20of%20The%20Sensible_Politics%20of%20Aesthetics.pdf}.

2 Foucault, Michel, The Birth of Biopolitics, trans. Burchell, G. (New York: Palgrave, 2008), p. 3Google Scholar. The method that Foucault describes in those lectures forms much of the rationale for the approach in my recent monograph on war crimes: Shapiro, Michael J., War Crimes, Atrocity, and Justice (Cambridge: Polity, 2015)Google Scholar.

3 Spivak, Gayatri, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), p. 324Google Scholar.

4 Ibid., p. 317.

5 Rancière, Jacques, ‘Fictions of time’, in Hellyer, Grace and Murphet, Julian (eds), Rancière and Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), p. 26Google Scholar.

6 Hertz, Neil, ‘A reading of Longinus’, in The End of the Line: Essays in Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York, Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 1Google Scholar.

7 Ibid., pp. 1–2.

8 Ibid., p. 8.

9 See Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project, trans. Eiland, H. and McLaughlin, K. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 460Google Scholar.

10 The concept of the aesthetic subject is developed and implemented in among other places Shapiro, Michael J., Studies in Trans-Disciplinary Method (London: Routledge, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 See Godfrey, Mark and Whitney, Zoe (eds), Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (London: D.A.P., 2017), p. 210Google Scholar.

12 Tschumi, Bernard, ‘Violence and architecture’, in Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), p. 121Google Scholar.

13 Ibid., p. 122.

14 Ibid., p. 123.

15 Ross, Richard, Architecture of Authority (New York: Aperture, 2007), p. 140Google Scholar.

16 Hays, Michael, ‘Crack’, Assemblage, 20 (April 1993), p. 42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Tschumi, “Violence and architecture’, p. 124.

18 See Ted Gregory, ‘The Black Panther Raid and the death of Fred Hampton’, The Chicago Tribune, available at: {http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/chi-chicagodays-pantherraid-story-story.html}.

19 See the interview, ‘Eyal Weizman on global politics and forensic architecture’, Theory Talks # 69 (21 December 2015), available at: {http://www.theory-talks.org/2015/03/theory-talk-69.html}.

20 Weizman, Eyal, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (New York: Zone Books, 2017), p. 51Google Scholar.

21 Even the ‘FBI firearms examiner who showed real integrity … proved the Panthers fired, at most, one shot at the police – compared to the police, who raided Hampton's apartment and shot at the Panthers ninety-nine times.’ Reported by Jeffrey Hass, ‘The assassination of Fred Hampton by the FBI and Chicago police, forty years later’, Monthly Review, available at: {https://monthlyreview.org/2009/12/01/the-assassination-of-fred-hampton-by-the-fbi-and-chicago-police-forty-years-later/}.

22 Ibid.

23 I am quoting from Yaneva, Albena, Five Ways to Make Architecture Political (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), p. 32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 See, for example, Leyda, Julia, ‘Home on the range: Space, nation, and mobility in John Ford's The Searchers’, The Japanese Journal of American Studies, 13 (2002), pp. 83–106Google Scholar.

25 The quotation is from Umberto Eco's reading of the film Casablanca: ‘Casablanca: Cult movies and intertextual collage’, SubStance, 14:2 (1985), p. 5Google Scholar.

26 The first is the opening shot from inside the Edwards home, where Martha looks out at the prairie; the second is shot from inside the small hut where Martha lies after having been raped and killed by Comanches, and the third is from inside a cave where Ethan Edwards and his nephew are seeking refuge from a Comanche war party.

27 I am borrowing the expression from Beatriz Colomina's figuring of the optics of domestic architecture, ‘The spilt wall: Domestic voyeurism’, in Colomina, Beatriz (ed.), Sexuality and Space (New York: Princeton Architecture Press, 1992), p. 113Google Scholar.

28 Shapiro, Michael J., ‘The new violent cartography’, in Carver, Terrell and Chambers, Samuel A. (eds), Michael J. Shapiro: Discourse, Culture, Violence (London: Routledge 2012), p. 181Google Scholar.

29 Baricco, Alessandro, City, trans. Goldstein, Ann (London: Penguin, 2002), pp. 158–9Google Scholar.

30 Xiaolong, Qiu, When Red is Black (New York: Soho, 2004)Google Scholar.

31 See Giedion, Sigfried, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Concrete (Los Angeles, CA: The Getty Center for the History of Art, 1995)Google Scholar.

32 The quotations are from Mertins, Detlief, ‘The enticing and threatening face of prehistory: Walter Benjamin and the utopia of glass’, Assemblage, 29 (April 1996), p. 8Google Scholar.

33 Xiaolong, When Red is Black, p. 125.

34 Ibid., p. 23.

35 Ibid., p. 154.

36 Ibid., p. 23.

37 Ibid., p. 37.

38 Manaugh, Geoff, A Burglar's Guide to the City (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2016), p. 9Google Scholar.

39 Ibid., p. 10.

40 Ibid., p. 90.

41 The quotation is from Jakobsen, Janet R., ‘Queer is? Queer does? Normativity and the problem of resistance’, GLQ, 4:4 (1998), p. 526CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 The quotations are from Marissa R. Campos, ‘Queering Architecture: Appropriating Space and Process’, available at: {https://etd.ohiolink.edu/pg_10?0::NO:10:P10_ACCESSION_NUM:ucin1397466885}.

43 The quotation is from Bronfen, Elizabeth, ‘Femme fatale – negotiations of tragic desire’, New Literary History, 35:1 (winter 2004), p. 104CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 Shapiro, Michael J., Neo-noir and urban domesticity: the Wachowski brothers’ Bound’, in Shapiro, Michael J., The Time of the City (New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space, trans. Smith, Donald Nicholson (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1991), pp. 92–3Google Scholar.

46 Conrad Hilton, quoted in Wharton, Annabel Jane, Building the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 8Google Scholar.

47 See Fregonese, Sara and Ramadan, Adam, ‘Hotel geopolitics: a research agenda’, Geopolitics, 20:4 (August 2015), p. 794CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 Ibid., pp. 802, 794.

49 The quotation is from McDowell, Linda, Batnitzky, Adina, and Dyer, Sarah, ‘Division, segmentation, and interpellation: the embodied labors of migrant workers in a Greater London hotel’, Economic Geography, 83:1 (January 2007), p. 3Google Scholar.

50 Kracauer, Siegfried, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 181Google Scholar.

51 Shapiro, Michael J., ‘The sublime today: Re-partitioning the global sensible’, Millennium, 34:3 (August 2006), p. 678Google Scholar.

52 The quotation is from my reading of the novel in an earlier investigation: Shapiro, Michael J., For Moral Ambiguity: National Culture and the Politics of the Family (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. 76Google Scholar.

53 Gores, Joe, 32 Cadillacs (New York: The Mysterious Press, 1992), p. 34Google Scholar.

54 Shapiro, For Moral Ambiguity, p. 76.

55 The quotation is from Bois, Yve-Alain, ‘Introduction’ to Eisenstein, Sergei M., ‘Montage and architecture’, trans. Glenny, M., Assemblage, 10 (1989), p. 117Google Scholar.

56 Ibid.

57 Eisenstein, ‘Montage and architecture’, p. 6.

58 David Denby, ‘Which is the best le Carré novel’, The New Yorker, available at: {http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/best-le-carre-novel}.

59 See, for example, ‘The effect of film on Bernard Tschumi’, in Architects and Artisans, available at: {http://architectsandartisans.com/2012/11/the-effect-of-film-on-bernard-tschumi/}.

60 Burch, Noël, Theory of Film Practice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61 Ibid.

62 Monk, Daniel Bertand, An Aesthetic Occupation: The Immediacy of Architecture and the Palestine Conflict (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63 See Weizman, Eyal, Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation (New York: Verso, 2007), p. 7Google Scholar.

64 Ibid., p. 185.

65 Ibid., p. 256.

66 Sharif, Yara, Architecture of Resistance: Cultivating Moments of Possibility Within the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict (London: Routledge, 2017), p. 194CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 Ibid., p. 13.

68 Ibid., p. 41.

69 Ibid., p. 48.

70 Ibid., p. 30.

71 Ibid., p. 59.

72 See de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

73 Sharif, Architecture of Resistance, p. 67.

74 DeLillo, Don, Point Omega (New York: Scribner, 2010), p. 44Google Scholar.

75 See Mendes, Ana Cristina, ‘Walled in/walled out in the West Bank: Performing separation walls in Hany Abu-Assad's Omar’, Transnational Cinema, 6:2 (August 2015), p. 129Google Scholar.

76 The quotations are from Tawil-Souri, Helga, ‘Cinema as the space to transgress: Palestine's territorial trap’, Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 7:2 (2014), p. 172CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

77 Weizman, Eyal, The Least of All Possible Evils (London: Verso, 2011), p. 108Google Scholar.

78 Ibid., p. 111.

79 See the report by Michael Kimmelman on a forensic architecture exhibit, ‘Forensics helps widen architecture's mission’, The New York Times, available at: {https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/06/arts/design/forensic-architecture-human-rights.html}.