Ministry of Internally Displaced Persons from the Occupied Territories, Accommodation and Refugees of Georgia

Transcription

Good afternoon. And welcome to the second session of Cambridge Talks, the annual conference organized by PhD students at the Harvard GSD. Through a series of case studies, this afternoon's panel-- The Spaces of Institutions, explores the relationship between institutional and physical structures, interrogating the ways in which fixed spaces can also fix behaviors. The key question before us-- how is institutional power manifested in the built environment. I'd like to offer a first cut into this question by talking briefly about New York City in the postwar period. Anyone who knows me well knows that I can't go for long without bringing up Robert Moses. And this book, my favorite book of all time-- The Power Broker. Indeed, the book has informed the media campaign for the conference. Images from the 1964 and 1965 World's Fair in New York City-- which was organized principally by Robert Moses-- have provided the backdrop to our posters, our website, and our program. The Power Broker has been praised as one of the greatest of all American biographies, and as such has been dismissed by many in the Academy as perpetuating a great man view of history-- as you can see in this famous photograph-- a narrative of urban transformation too dominated by one man's actions. But I think that's a simplistic analysis. To me, this book is not a biography of a man, but rather a biography of an institution. The book reflects on the creative capacity of men to construct and in turn transform institutions, and for institutions in turn to construct and transform men and the spaces they inhabit. The idealistic Robert Moses of the first half of the book-- about the first 500 pages-- is a man engaged in institutional learning, soaking up the organizational logics of city and state government. The infamous power broker Moses of the second half of the book-- the man you see here-- is a man who has been reshaped by his own creations, forced into a frenzy of urban construction and destruction in order to sustain his power base. The institution in question-- the city of New York. Not the single institution per se, but a complex tapestry of interconnected public and private organizations co-producing the city. I read The Power Broker last summer while working at the New York City Department of City Planning-- represented here as a tiny cog in the stupendous machine of city government. Perhaps selfishly, one of the things that struck me most about the book was how in one of the most famous books about city planning, the actual Department of City Planning was only mentioned once in passing. I'd like to think that the work I was doing last year had slightly more impact, but I think it's safe to say that 50 years ago, Moses staked out his institutional territory in such a way that he essentially bypassed the nominal planning department, instead manipulating a bewildering array of boards, commissions, authorities, and agencies, each with their own particular legal charter, organizational hierarchy, and financial capacity. Under Moses, the chasm between de facto and de jure institutions widened considerably. And most important for our concerns here today, these institutions also had their own particular spatial imprint, particular powers of land acquisition and disposition, particular regulations to which they were or were not subject, and particular methods of landscape, infrastructure, and building design which they sponsored. It is precisely this dielectric between institutional logics and spatial outcomes that concerns us this afternoon. Some questions to guide us as we dive into discussion-- how do institutions assert themselves physically through our buildings, cities, and landscapes? How neatly are institutional parameters inscribed into the built environment? And what is the connection between institutional restructuring, whether from the top down or from the bottom up, and the restructuring of the city's fabric itself? All of our speakers will address these questions in their own way. And it is with great pleasure that I would like to invite the first speaker on our panel this afternoon, Professor Elihu Rubin, to bring us closer to home with the discussion of the redevelopment of downtown Boston in the postwar period. And we actually had a wonderful walking tour with Elihu in the Prudential Center yesterday. Elihu Rubin is assistant professor at Yale School of Architecture. His work bridges the urban disciplines, focusing on the built environments of 19th and 20th century cities, the history and theory of city planning, cultural landscapes, the geography of urban transportation, and the social life of urban space. Professor Rubin is the author of Insuring the City The Prudential Center and the Postwar Urban Landscape-- which I just got photographed by him a few moments ago, very exciting-- which received the Lewis Mumford prize for best book from the Society for American City and Regional Planning History, and the Kenneth Jackson award for Best Book on a North American Topic from the Urban History Association. His talk today is entitled Extra Dividends, Corporate Strategy and Urban Policy at the Prudential Center. Please join me in welcoming Professor Rubin to the podium. [applause] Thank you very much, Adam. Next time you just make sure to put the books on top of each other so people can see how nice they look together in your library. Thank you very much for the invitation. It's been so great to be here. And the hosts have done such a great job making me feel so comfortable here that I'm actually going to start with a revelation. I am an avid collector of insurance company building postcards. And I'm not ashamed to admit it. I've been developing the collection for a while, sometimes by rummaging through old postcard racks, and sometimes ordering them on eBay. So for those of you looking to get into the game, let's not bid each other up too much. I usually buy them for less than it costs to ship them. But this is just a small sampling of my collection of insurance company postcards. And I want to call your attention to one pair of them in particular. Of course, on the left we have Napoleon LeBrun's Metropolitan Life building from 1909, which capped the company's expansion which had been developing over the course of the late 19th century, assembling properties and building buildings. This was the kind of hallmark building there, built in 1909. Now in smaller Albuquerque, New Mexico, which is growing maybe more horizontally at this time, Henry Trost asked to design a building for Occidental Life, built his own building that must have been inspired by Metropolitan Life. They thought, well if we can't have the campanile of Venice, at least we can have the Doge's Palace. But certainly they were looking to associate themselves with the great building project of Metropolitan Life in New York. There are many, many stories that we can tell about American architecture and urbanism through insurance company buildings. In fact, you can't tell the story of American Architectural history without considering the formative role of insurance corporations in building up the city at different times. So let's go on a quick little trajectory through this. In many cities across the United States, including in New York where Equitable Life built this second empire pile in 1867, buildings like this would have anchored the business districts of many medium and large size cities in American cities. The insurance company is absolutely crucial to anchoring the 19th century business district. In Chicago in the late 19th century, it was an insurance company who commissioned what many architectural historians consider to be the first skeleton steel-framed building-- the first company to be able to commission this kind of inventive work. Again, back in New York, not only had MetLife built their collection of buildings over here on the corner facing Madison Square Park, and also their 1909 tower, but then in 1928 they had an even more ambitious project calling Harvey Wiley Corbett off the Rockefeller Center project to build what was scheduled to be a 100-story skyscraper in midtown, what was then essentially the new midtown of New York City. Now after 1929, that kind of project was not particularly feasible, so what we end up with is a 30-story base to a 100-story tower. And you can see that the massing is awkward in exactly that way. It's meant to hold up another 70 stories. But of course there it is. It's still there today. In 1913, the Equitable replaced this building in lower Manhattan, back now to Wall Street, back to the Lower Manhattan business district with this monstrous building of 1913, which is one of the reasons that hastened the 1916 comprehensive zoning law in New York, that people in lower Manhattan thought that this building stole light and air from all of the other buildings. And we had to figure out a way to get these buildings to step back off of the street. In this case it was a kind of monstrosity of the insurance company hastening a broader kind of urban change. But again, it was the insurance company with the wherewithal to build such a building in the first place. In medium-sized cities-- places like Hartford, which of course is a major insurance capital-- Aetna, which had a building very much like this one in the central business district in the 1920s, hired James Gamble Rogers, the brilliant architect of Yale's residential colleges, to build for them a kind of midtown manor out there in the now fringes of the business district, out into a residential area, and worried that the suburban neighbors would chafe at this business building in their midst, Rogers made a great effort to turn into this kind of Georgian manor/church building. Now he either then built essentially a residential college for an insurance company, or he was building insurance company buildings for residential colleges at Yale. You could kind of take your pick on that one. But this flow from the center of the city out to these kinds of midtown sites is taken to its next extreme in the middle of the 1950s when Connecticut General Life Insurance said, forget the central city at all. In fact, forget the confines of the municipality. We're going out to the suburbs to build a completely new landscape for business, a completely new setting for us to do our work in. And it was their answer-- the company's answer-- to the challenge, to the crisis of the industrial city, or the deindustrializing city, of the middle of the 20th century to abandon it entirely, and to no longer deal with the kinds of crises that were attendant to it at that time. And it proved to be a major kind of a prompt for Prudential and other kinds of companies to think about how to deal with the American city in the 1950s, this being one of the suburban solutions to it. So when I came upon this postcard-- the one on the left, which is on the cover of the book-- which I was able to persuade-- actually she didn't require any persuading-- but Roger [inaudible] widow, to allow me to use it on the cover of the book as long as he was acknowledged, which of course he is, because it's such a wonderful photograph that he used for his Yankee Color Corporation Postcard Company. I knew that we had something here in the middle of several different traditions in American architecture and urbanism. On the one hand, the prestigious tower-- the tradition of the prestigious tower-- marking the civic ambitions of the corporation that had built it, but also a prestigious tower for the motor age that was just as accessible to highways and parking lots and plazas as a midtown, or even in fact a kind of suburban location. This was the kind of deal that Prudential was able to strike when it built the Prudential Center here in Boston, the story I want to get into. I want to focus then on this kind of inscription-- the literal inscription of power-- that Prudential insisted upon for the parental center in Boston, and for all of the other regional home offices of which the Prudential Center in Boston was one of them. And I'll get a little bit more into that story in and of itself, that this idea of the tower and the estate well-marked, literally inscribed by the name of the company, was part of the company's policy toward the American city at this time. Not to abandon it, but to invest in the city. We believe in the city, Prudential executives said. But they didn't believe in the city as it had developed over the course of the late 19th and first half of the 20th century. What they believed in was a new image of the city that they had the wherewithal to begin to create. So again, why the Pru as the kind of focal point for this project? Well, there were many kind of ways that I wanted to spin off of the central axis of the Pru, of which I'll just focus really on one today-- the extra dividends part. But the transition of the city based along railroads and transit to the city based around automobiles. The Prudential Center--and here's the site of it now, where the former rail yards of the Boston Albany Railroad Company, Prudential would come to fill those shoes. With respect to the new Motor City, the Prudential Center is linked inextricably with the urban extension of the Massachusetts Turnpike, not only physically in an engineering perspective-- here's the kind of loop that would go into the parking garages underneath the Prudential Center-- but also politically and financially. The two projects were linked for Boston politicians. There were many objections to the building of the urban extension of the Massachusetts Turnpike. But it became a sacred cow by virtue of its connection with the Prudential Center, which nobody in Boston at that time felt that they could afford to lose as an important investment. And it was also linked financially in the sense that ultimately, when Bill Callahan, the chairman of the Turnpike Authority, had trouble marketing his turnpike bonds after 1956, when the federal government is now giving cities $0.90 on the dollar to build highways, why should we be building turnpikes? Prudential stepped in-- and here's Fred Smith of Prudential-- to buy almost 30% of the bonds themselves. So Prudential ends up financing the highway that runs precisely to their door. And here's Fred Smith placing the tower on top of the turnpike. It was an opportunity to talk about the politics of urban redevelopment in Boston, symbolized in this image from 1957, when Carol Shanks, the president of Prudential, comes to Boston, stands next to Mayor Heinz in front of the television cameras with these extravagant visions of the investment that they proposed for the city. Nothing of this scale or style or type had ever been proposed for Boston. It knocked the socks off of all of these leaders who are immediately completely under the spell of this corporation, now willing to do just about anything it would take to secure their investment. I wanted also to talk about architectural culture in the mid 20th century. So these characters-- Charles Luck and William Pereira-- the architecture team that designed the Prudential center, that were the controlling architects for the project, along with a local firm, Hoyle, Doran, and Berry, and came to work on the project. I'll talk a little bit more about them. And also in this project to talk about urban design at mid century, and the kind of failures or errant visions of urban design at that time, but also how the Prudential has been able to be resilient in so many ways, and bouncing back from its poor initial design-- which I'll talk a little bit more about here in one of those plazas, to become what it is today, which is a vital piece of Boston's midtown, shopping, office, and residential district. But this part, to talk about the aspirations of the corporation, the strategies of the corporation as it began to touch down in the many cities in the United States in which it did, to see the Prudential Center not just as a Boston artifact-- which of course it is-- but as an artifact of a national corporate policy. It was the Northeastern home office controlling all of this land for the Prudential Insurance Company of America based in Newark, New Jersey. Again, it was big shoes to fill to make this kind of transition from the railroad city, the industrial city, to the city of the motor age and the post-industrial service economy. How should it be? Why should it be that an insurance company-- a life insurance company-- should have the fiscal wherewithal to fill the shoes of the large railroad corporations that had done so much to build up the city of the 19th and early 20th century. Well, it's a story that starts with the beginning of the corporation itself in Newark, New Jersey, where Jon Fairfield Dryden-- a Yale dropout who then worked for Aetna before going off on his own-- saw it as his personal social mission to bring industrial insurance to the working people of the American metropolis. Now mostly through the middle of the 19th century the most common forms of life insurance were ordinary insurance, which was a kind of upper middle estate planning device in which large sums were collected several times a year. The idea of industrial insurance were very small sums collected by agents that would go door-to-door through the working class neighborhoods of the city collecting the $0.03 a week-- that's the name of the corporate biography for Prudential, From $0.03 A Week-- to be able to pay for burial expenses and to have a little bit left over when the industrial working breadwinner passed in an untimely fashion from some terrible industrial accident, or something like that. This was the business model for Prudential. And it was one that John Dryden took very seriously as a social mission, that we might take him at his word that he really believed that American workers deserved this kind of insurance. And that it was the role of private enterprise in American society to provide this kind of security, this kind of Social Security. And of course, later on these people would hate the New Deal, of course, because why should the government be providing what we've already been providing for Americans for all of these many years? It was a very successful business model, because insurance companies by the middle of the 20th century are the most powerful and the wealthiest institutions on the face of the Earth, at least as reported by Fortune magazine in 1967, which said that Prudential, MetLife, and AT&T were the three biggest corporations in the world. Now the model-- the advertising model-- didn't change very much over the years. But I'm going to recite the poem from the 1890s, because I love it so much. "Though death may enter there, though sorrow be your share, it is much indeed when grief must be endured, to think despite the blow, how comforting to know we are insured." It's night. The children are asleep. The mother has just received word that her husband has perished in an accident at the factory. She's distraught, of course. But she slowly unfurls her Prudential life insurance policy as the one form of solace, knowing that her family-- her children-- will be taken care of after the death of the breadwinner. That basic message-- that it is the moral imperative for the male breadwinner-- life insurance wasn't marketed to women at least until the 1970s and '80s, almost never-- that it was the imperative of the male breadwinner to buy life insurance to make sure that little Susan is in safe hands. This was the model that had enriched these companies so much. It became an extremely popular form of family, security, enough to enrich these companies to make them extremely wealthy, and thus giving them huge stores of capital to reinvest across the economy in myriad ways. And that's another conversation we can talk about, about the different forms of life insurance investment. What I'm talking about today is investment in their own offices, of course, which are more than their own offices, especially with the Prudential Center, this kind of mixed use development. And there's over the years lots of state-based regulation as to what insurance companies can invest in, because they're held to higher standards than other forms of banks because they have a social mission, and one that the insurance company's executives internalize and believe. I'd love to debate as well the degree to which we take that sentiment at face value, that they sincerely did believe in the social mission of their work and the importance of it. Of course, it's also why they believe they shouldn't be taxed like other kinds of corporations because of that very same mission. Here in the '60s it's a little bit more mod, kind of a Kennedy thing going on there. But there it is. You buy the insurance in order to protect your children. Now at some point in the 1890s, Prudential hit upon the Rock of Gibraltar as their major icon for their corporation. It was a very successful one. It's still one of the most recognizable corporate icons in the world. And here from a scene in the public school-- this is an ad in Life in 1899-- the teacher says, where's the Rock of Gibraltar? The bright boy who reads the papers-- it's in Newark, New Jersey. It is owned by the Prudential Insurance Company. Now of course we know that the Rock of Gibraltar is a limestone promontory up the coast of the Iberian Peninsula. But the kind of integrated sense that Prudential was able to disseminate this image of the Rock of Gibraltar to have this kind of humorous cartoon, that the Rock of Gibraltar should be in Newark, New Jersey. Well, in 1892 Prudential did build a kind of great Rock of Gibraltar right in the middle of downtown Newark when they hired George Post, who had worked on the Equitable building in 1860, and was well-trusted by insurance companies, of course, to design a building that would work for them, put together this incredible kind of French chateau fortress in downtown Newark, an absolutely incredible building. Because what could possibly be more secure than this structure? Prudential wasn't going anywhere. They were completely anchored to the ground there in Newark. And of course, many corporations-- including insurance companies, and MetLife most notably-- would use their architecture and buildings in their advertisements to show the security of the company. You can trust Prudential to buy insurance because they're not going anywhere, and their investments in architecture were one symbol of that. Insurance companies are exceptionally attuned to the symbolic function of architecture, which is another reason why they're so important in the story of American architecture and urbanism. Now when you wanted to double down on the security, you would embed the building in the Rock of Gibraltar. That's for double strength right there in that particular advertisement. Now as the company grows, their original building in New York-- in Newark, excuse me-- needs to be expanded. And soon, by the middle of the 1940s, they own and they control a whole warren of buildings, a kind of urban campus right there in downtown Newark, as they had grown up to become a national company to be marketing life insurance across the United States. And with all the kind of clerical work that that entailed. We won't even get into all of the clerks and secretaries and business machines and emerging business machines that are populating all of these floors. Another interesting conversation. But there was a problem with this bigness. And the problem was it was stifling innovation. It was hard for people at the top to begin to see where emerging talent was popping up. How can we curate good executives of the future. And another issue was that Prudential truly wanted to be a national institution. And they felt a little bit too cloistered there in their fortress-like castle in Newark. So a guy from the operations department goes to Carroll Shanks with an idea of what to do about this problem of bigness and bureaucracy in Newark. Break it up. Take Prudential from its headquarters in Newark and create a series of regional home offices across the United States that would have the authority to market insurance locally, bringing them closer to their clients, and also to make investment decisions locally to help make good investments of circulation of capital in each of these regions. And Fortune magazine reported on this incredibly ambitious building program. So here they are, the regional heads, it's not the most diverse group, but there they are. Each one of them associated with their building, with the regional home office. The administrative decentralization plan connected to the architectural, or physical decentralization. With each of these projects being held up to the role of creating the extra dividends for the company-- to move even more quickly here as I see the sign from Adam here. That each of them would be inscribed with Prudential as an advertisement. They didn't take it for granted that the building itself would be recognized by their corporation. They really wanted to make sure you knew it was a Prudential building. So the first one is in Los Angeles-- Prudential's midtown hedge. They didn't want to be located in downtown Los Angeles. LA-- it still does and had then, a downtown business district. They were one of the first companies to create a business building on Wilshire Boulevard, which of course was already being known by the 1920s as a shopping district. It's designed by Wurdeman and Becket. It's still there. It's actually an exceptionally elegant building in many ways, and a contextual one too. It had a department store-- that's Ohrbach's-- and it had street front commerce, acknowledging the kind of presence of Wilshire Boulevard at that time. And I love this image of it, where you can see the sign going up Wilshire Boulevard. That's Arthur Murray where you learn how to dance. And these are some of the retail establishments from the '20s. In Houston, again they were offered a site downtown. Prudential said no. We don't want anything to do with the downtown business district. We want to build an estate out here about four miles from downtown, near the Rice Institute, designed by the noted regional modernist, Kenneth Franzheim. It's actually a bit of an awkward building in terms of its massing. But it has these kinds of art deco moderne details to it, and the prominent Prudential there too. When Life Magazine visited, they called it a paradise for office girls because of the swimming pool that was there and the tennis courts that were there for the workers. It was kind of formal postwar corporate welfare that they cared about their workers there. To Chicago, which sets us up for Boston now, where Prudential takes on a very ambitious rail yards redevelopment project. They cracked the code to build over the Illinois Central rail yards, negotiating in anonymity with the railroad so that the prices wouldn't be bid up too high, to finally figuring out how to sync the air rights [inaudible] down into the ground, and building it over the rail yard site. They pioneer an entirely new business district. Look at Ed Durell Stone's Standard Oil building. Absolutely incredible. But it's because of Prudential's investment that this whole entire area gets developed as the Illinois Central, with some of the Mies buildings there too. And then of course, the area continues to change with Studio Gang, with Studio Gang's recent tower there. So when they come to Boston in the mid '50s, they're prepared to take on a complex project over rail yards just like this one. And this is the initial image from the 1950s, designed by Pereira and Luckman. And the idea for Prudential, that even though this was done in Boston, they were looking towards the region of Route 128 and all the new emerging investment opportunities there. They had the vision-- the non-parochial vision-- to see the region in a way that downtown business people in Boston hadn't been able to do. At that time there was already another proposal for the site by Gropius Belluschi and others, who had come up with this plan for the Back Bay Center before Prudential was involved. And Gropius and Belluschi go to Newark. We have the notes from Walter Bogner right here at the Low Library. And Gropius and Belluschi come to Prudential and say, you own the site now. Here's our plan. You're ready to go. And Prudential said, no way. We don't want anything to do with you Harvard and MIT egg heads, academic architects with ideas that you're trying to advance. We're going with Luckman because he's a commercial architect we can trust to work with us, and see eye-to-eye businessman to businessman. This is a kind of a classic lead architect and design architect. So in the promotional work, Pereira always wears the smock, like H.H. Richardson would in some of his pictures. And Luckman's always got the shirt sleeves off, and he's looking at a detail that Pereira's pointing out to him. They would split up several years later because Pereira would become fed up with Luckman's kind of crass commercialism. Pereira saw himself, and was actually a very interesting designer, in a way that Luckman was not. And Pereira eventually went off on his own. Luckman-- another story we won't get into-- knew a lot about inscriptions of power, because he had been the president of Lever. He brought Lever from Cambridge to New York. He commissioned Lever House. He takes credit for Lever House. Forget about Bunshaft and SOM. Luckman came up with the idea of a lifting if off the ground and twisting the tower. So Luckman becomes the ideal kind of match for Prudential. But he was no intellectual slouch. OK? He had ideas about cities. You know, Gideon and Gropius might have talked about humanization. Well, Luckman wanted to humanate the city. Which is an indication of the kind of awkward trickle down of high design ideas to prolific commercial architects. He's going to annihilate, or humiliate, the city in one form or another. But what it meant to him were these incredible plazas and open spaces to make the new agora of the Motor City. To give pedestrians a place to walk around, he would write pamphlets like the architect as designer, which would be an idea to consider here. I didn't mean that as a snub. Only that it's such a silly name for a talk. Of course the plazas were an awkward gesture of civic largesse. Weren't they? They never worked. People were being blown into the moats. There was a huge issue with wind coming off the tower. They tried to mitigate it, but they never did. They had ring roads that really separated this from the rest of the city that never functioned the way that it should. And yet there it is, opened in 1965, this kind of incremental project. And Adam, I see your sign. This are just the last couple of slides here. So thank you all for the patience here. There it was opened in '65. And graciously, the neighbor, John Hancock, there in Cram and Ferguson. Ralph Adams Cram's successor firm there. Elegant tower from 1949, '49. Still there. They write a toast to the new Prudential Center-- "Here's looking at you." Well, a few years later they really would one one-up the Prudential and look them right in the eye and mirror the image of the right right back to them, when they hired Pei, Cobb, and Freed to build the new Hancock tower. The point here in closing is to talk a little bit about the legacy of the Prudential Center, that it gave me confidence in other investors in Boston as a leading city in the post-industrial service economy. And back downtown where the old stodgy Boston bankers are, they begin to erect new towers as well. And let's think about it. Boston, in the hierarchy of post-industrial cities, is doing pretty darn well. And in one small part, at least, or one not so small part, to Prudential. Of course, the government is involved as well. The feds here in both of these places too. The Prudential Center today, as we saw again, these images that I worked with students to produce in 2011 and '12 are out of date already, because there's new construction going on at the Prudential Center. This plaza is gone. It's a construction site. They're building another tower there. But the center itself has been resilient. It was so bad it was good. It was so poorly designed initially that it was allowed to change flexibly with the times. That's the argument that I like to make about the design of the Prudential Center. Would it have been as flexible if we had built Gropius and Belluschi's plan? Maybe not. It might have been a modernist landmark. Or it might have been another indication of the shattering of the modernist dream. We might have had to implode the whole thing in order to build something else. But the Pru, its tower still lording over a completely new setting. And now today, this 17-story tower by [inaudible] architects, will complete the center. It is Boston Properties. Of course we can't trust him because they own the site. This project is really the summation of one of America's most successful mixed use projects. The idea that something that was considered such a schlock piece of architecture when it was made can today be viewed so successfully. And now we have Natixis Global Asset Management are coming in, will give them more flexibility. The flexibility of this site over time will prove its legacy even more over time. Not all were so lucky. When M.D. Anderson, the cancer company, comes in and buy-- the cancer hospital, excuse me-- as part of the medical complex there, they can't make this building work for them. So they implode it. And some preservationists say, no, don't. But the building wasn't quite deco enough to be deco, or modern enough to be modern. They didn't know what to do with it. So they imploded it. And the new regime-- the new institutional regime of meds and eds are now reshaping the landscape there. So again, finally in the slide, I just want to ask, will the Pru still be there 50 or 100 years from now? Will it still be a complex of office buildings, residences, stores, and public spaces. What will it look like in the Boston of the future? And how will it feel to the people who live and work there? In the decades and centuries to come, how Pru of the late 20th and early 21st centuries be depicted and remembered? As a symbol of corporate greed or civic largesse? And part of that depends on how the site continues to change over time, and its ability to adapt to the crises of the future. Thank you. [applause] Our next speaker is David Theodore. David is assistant professor at McGill University's School of Architecture, and more importantly, a recent graduate of our program. We are delighted to welcome him back to Cambridge Talks. David's recent scholarship explores the history and theory of computers in hospital organization, construction, and management. He has co-published on the history of medicine and architecture in a variety of journals. David previously was a researcher and studio instructor at McGill, and taught in the Department of Design Art, Concordia University. His talk today is entitled "Emergency: The Institutionalization of Crisis in Modern Hospital Architecture." Please join me in welcoming Professor David Theodore to the podium. [applause] Thanks, Alan. And thank you for the invitation today. So my focus today is on how hospital architecture came to be in permanent crisis. We all know the story of how the modern hospital became a reliable institution for managing crisis-- the emergency of childbirth, the trauma of traffic accidents, capable even of soothing the anxiety of heart attack. But how does that sense of urgency persist in the institution itself? And why did crisis shift from the patient to the construction of hospital buildings? Historians usually come at the issue by explaining the hospital as a social apparatus that governs and conditions a Foucaultian knowledge-power nexus. I want to do something a little bit different. I want to understand how architects produce buildings, not how they produce subjects. I want to explain how hospital architects came to invent buildings capable of responding to medical and social change as a permanent condition of hospital life. It's an ambitious topic, so I will be rather elliptical today. I hope that's OK given today's set up. I have constrained the subject to four categories. In this schema there are four kinds of crises that each made the hospital institutionally and architecturally distinct. Hospital as crisis response. The hospital supply crisis. Accommodating medical crises. And the crisis of obsolescence. So modern hospital architecture developed in response to crises-- two in particular. It began in war and in the ruins of fire. The first crisis-- well-known because of Michel Foucault's histories of medical knowledge-- is the fire at the Hotel-Dieu in Paris in 1772. That's the plan on the left, and painting by Hubert Robert on the right. The energetic debate about planning its replacement Foucault argues, started a new era of hospital life ruled by the panopticon diagram. Foucault was wrong about the importance of the panopticon for the future of hospitals. But he was right about another issue. Planners began to think of the hospital as a node or facility in a health care system that operates at the level of the entire city. So the new hospital was still concerned with the health of the sick poor, but it was now entangled with the health of everyone. These are two schemes from about 1780. Foucault claims that taken together, all of these 18th century hospital design proposals make visible a crucial moment when architecture was torn from social purpose. In other words, new social purposes emerged that depended on ways of organizing urbanism in buildings, but architecture and architects were not required. His general point is that the buildings that house the new institutions of modernity-- schools, prisons, work houses, asylums, hospitals-- were not formed by architects, but by administrators. The second crisis was the Crimean War. It was during this war that British nursing reformer Florence Nightingale first re-imagined hospital life around orderly nursing care. In 1854 she wrote back to Britain about the extremely bad hospital conditions she had to put up with in the military hospitals. Her letter led to a hospital commission for engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. This is one of those incredible Brunel stories. Apparently in six days, he designed the 1,000-bed hospital. And within six months it had been built as a pre-fabricated design in Britain, and sent to the Dardenelles. This is just one of the ward units on screen now. Death rates, Nightingale claimed, went down by 90% in the new hospital, suggesting a way forward for modern hospital architecture. Together these crises inaugurated the pavilion plan hospital. The term denotes a building organized as a series of self-contained, low-rise pavilion separated to achieve good ventilation, and only minimally connected by bridges, pathways, and tunnels. Brunel's military hospital, for instance, had a corridor that was half a mile long. Nightingale's very influential book called Notes on Nursing, first published in 1859, heavily promoted the pavilion plan as the ideal hospital plan. On the left is a hospital Nightingale was involved in-- the Herbert Hospital. That's from a later addition of her book. And on the right is an adoption of the pavilion plan at Oslo's University Hospital, which opened in 2000. So here are the issues that medical historians sometimes claim that the medical rationale for the pavilion plan disappeared with the advent of the germ theory at the end of the 19th century. Nevertheless, the architectural rationale remains operational. The pavilion plan has endured for a century and a half, and is still the basis for up-to-date hospitals today. The modern hospital was invented in the 19th century. And its invention caused a supply crisis. The new institution was popular and in demand. Municipalities competed to build them. In 1873, there were about 175 old style hospitals in the United States. And by 1910, there were over 4,000 new ones. So I repeat, this is an invention. The modern hospital was invented. It was a new building type ruptured from past custodial institutions, just like parking garages for cars were different from stables for horses. This is an example from Montreal that I've worked on quite a bit. But don't be deceived by the style in this case. The new institution was not simply a continuation of the past. Inside, all of the old traditions of care for the sick poor struggled against new ways to cure all classes of people. It was grounded in the professionalization of trained nursing, the rise of surgery and anesthesia. They had bacteriology departments and other diagnostic laboratories. And it supported the advance of technology such as x-ray. And then there's all those other things about the city. It responds to electrification, the proliferation of automobiles, and finally, an important one, which is the adoption of modern business management methods. The crisis in the supply of new hospitals across the West repeated itself after World War II. Using the hospital was normalized. It was no longer geared to the sick poor. So all those entrenched patterns of philanthropic benevolence gave way. Access to hospital services was now thought to be necessary in the same way that access to schools or to running water was necessary. So suddenly, large sectors of the population were seen to be underserved by existing hospitals. The health of nations was at risk. So state-sponsored programs under a massive planning and construction of new hospitals and renovations, again like this example from Montreal. Parenthetically, note that this is what hospitals look like when the hospital consultant, not the architect, designs them. These are typical US examples designed around 1966 in this boom of hospitals. These ones are funded by the Hill-Burton program. And the consultant for these hospitals sort of famously said that "The dynamism of the organization is far more important than the facade behind which it operates." He had very little use for architects. So in medicine the crisis is a temporal event, a duration of time in the course of a disease. A medical crisis is temporary. It is quickly followed by recovery or by death. Until the advent of the modern hospital, medical crisis was a domestic experience lived out in private. But after the invention of the modern hospital, medical crisis was moved from the home into the new institution. The extent of the shift from home to institution is best demonstrated by childbirth. My statistics here are from Canada. In 1926, less than one out of five births took place in the hospital. By 1960 it was almost all births in the hospital. But maternity was not the only crisis that moved to the hospital. This is an early ambulance at the Royal Bank of Montreal on the left. And an advertisement showing off the new surgical pavilion from 1956 on the right. Surgery moved from home to hospital in the same kind of decisive shift as childbirth. After 1945 especially, the availability of antibiotics dramatically lowered the danger of post-operative infection. So people started to go to the hospital for surgery before it was actually safe to do so. After 1945, when it was safe, that kind of cemented the move. And finally, there's the automobile and the ambulance. Medical care for accident victims of all kinds was an important addition to the urban health care system. Instead of rushing help to the accident victim, the victim was now rushed to the hospital. This was new. A special reception area developed in the hospital in conjunction with clinics and services for patients who needed medical care, but did not need to stay overnight. The emergency room is thus a key hospital service with distinct architectural characteristics that institutionalized this idea of medical crisis in the hospital. So the crisis of obsolescence is in a way a summary of these other kinds of crises I've been going through. But it adds one more crucial element. Obsolescence itself is a temporal and not a spatial concept. It is an anxiety about the passage of time. So obsolescence is therefore a special kind of crisis in which the patient never recovers. There's only one outcome. In hospitals, obsolescence could be brought on by many causes. The simplest one is age. That's the sentiment in this headline on the right. "We're practicing 20th-Century medicine in 19th-Century facilities." So it's as if age alone is an indicator of whether or not the architecture is good or bad, whether it's appropriate or not. But obsolescence is not the same as senescence. The operative metaphor comes from technology and not from biology. An old hospital cannot be revived. An old hospital should not be replaced by one of the same kind, only a younger one. It has to be replaced with an up-to-date one. In other words, the optics of obsolescence conceives hospitals as technologies that grow useless not because they grow old, but because they grow outdated. There is an unavoidable moment in time when hospital building inevitably passes from usefulness to obsolescence. This technology of obsolescence is at play here in an unbuilt proposal to replace the images of which I've been showing throughout the presentation. The crisis of obsolescence thus transforms hospitals into a kind of technology. But what kind of technology? Toasters, for instance, use the same technology today as 100 years ago. All toasters are up-to-date. They grow old, but the technology does not grow outdated. Laptops, on the other hand, become outdated pretty quickly. And cars are somewhere in between. So what about hospitals? Do they age like toasters, or like laptops? The answer in postwar Anglo America was that hospitals were indeed like laptops. A corrigible technology that needed constant, continual, unending modification. From a medical point of view, obsolescence was straightforward. Medicine was advancing at a tremendous rate. And it seemed to follow naturally that medical buildings should advance too. But here's my claim. Postwar hospital architects actually solved the obsolescence problem for hospital architecture. They invented design devices to deal differentially with the kinds of chains hospital undergoes. Technological creep, or new cultural practices, labor changes such as unionization and professionalization of medical workers, and so on. Some of these devices were modifications of old ideas, old ideas about flexibility, and clear spans, and movable partitions, and standardized user spaces. And a particular favorite was the modularized service spaces. But there were some new ones. And I'll briefly mention three of them. So this is a photo. Model on the bottom in a plan of Northwick Park Hospital in London. It opened around 1970. The architects were involved in city planning at the time, notably planning the new town of Milton Keynes. They argued that a hospital should be organized like a village. In effect, it's an updated pavilion plan, but made in a way that allows for different parts of the hospital to grow at different speeds and according to different needs. Since there is no overall composition to the design, the appearance of the building would not be ruined by additions, or demolitions, or renovations, or just about anything they could think of. Tied into the village concept was the notion of a Main Street. At this hospital it was on two levels. One for services and supplies, and one for walking, which is the photo on the right. That's the black line down the center is the main street. The arrows and dots on the left indicate ways that individual pavilions could be added to the main street without interfering with the functioning of the overall hospital. In other words, it's a kind of working version of the plug-in architecture that other British architects were experimenting with on paper. This system allowed for innovations in project management, too. Individual buildings could be designed and funded autonomously. This was crucial when architects had to design a hospital not knowing what the final program would be, and not knowing when, or even if, certain departments could be financed. A third device was the provision of interstitial space. This is Woodhull Medical Center in Brooklyn, which I've never seen in real life actually. And Children's Hospital in Washington on the right. In both cases the buildings were fast tracked. The internal arrangements were only worked out during construction. This was seen to be an advantage of the device. You could build a building without knowing what the building exactly would be for. The apotheosis of interstitial space was McMaster University Health Sciences Center, which opened in 1972 in Hamilton, near Toronto. Here the building plan could not only be changed easily during construction, but the idea was that even after the building was finished, the plan could be changed. Banham called this the quintessential mega structure hospital. And there was a course a backlash to these ideas. Reformers today insist that a hospital is not a technology and should not look like a machine. For example, they have attempted to soften the hospital's technological appearance with atriums. So one of these atriums onscreen is the University Hospital in Edmonton, Mackenzie Health Sciences Centre. And the other is the West Edmonton Mall just down the road, which for a while was known as the biggest shopping mall in the world. You can decide which is which. So what I want to end with is an emphasis on this idea that architects successfully resolved the crisis. And yet that success did not stop crisis thinking. Administrators still believe that the health care system is in crisis, and that health care architecture must be in crisis with it. I mentioned before that Foucault saw the modern hospital as a turning point for the planning and functioning of the city. He argued that because of that turn, architecture became unimportant. The new authorities for how buildings should be organized were the administrators of institutions-- the prison warden, the school director, the doctors. That is why he thought the panopticon could be made visible as the underlying diagram for all of these institutions. Architecture made no difference to the new modern order. But instead of any panopticon, what needs to be made visible in hospital architecture is the institutionalization of crisis thinking. So it's permanent crisis. Permanent crisis is an oxymoron. How do we resolve this? Well, one way is to note that crisis claims are claims for power, claim for importance, a claim for funding, a claim for the limelight. Especially here, a claim for medicine that society can be directly improved by putting resources into health care. These are the demands of the movement of power and powerful institutions. And where it is true that architecture offers no resistance to these claims, it is untrue that it offers no solutions to the underlying problems. That's it. Thanks. [applause] Time? Brilliant. Thank you. Thank you very much. We will take a short five-minute break. Afterwards we will hear from Jesus Escobar and Brian Goldstein. The coffee has been replenished. The table by the entrance. See you in a few minutes. Thank you. Thank you very much. Our next speaker is Jesus Escobar. Professor Escobar teaches in the art history department at Northwestern University, offering courses and publishing scholarship on the art, architecture, and urbanism of early modern Spain, Italy, and the Spanish world. His book, The Plaza Mayor and the Shaping of Baroque Madrid, explores the interchange of architecture and politics in the evolution of Madrid from a secondary city of Castile to the seat of a global empire. The book won the Eleanor Tufts award from the American Society for Hispanic Historical Studies. Professor Escobar's talk this afternoon is entitled "Spaces of Justice at the Spanish Hapsburg Court." Please join me in welcoming Professor Escobar to the podium. [applause] Thank you, Adam. And thank you also to Marianne and to Justin for the invitation to be here. I may be the only speaker today who teaches at an institution without a school of architecture. And yet I learned the history of architecture in places that did have them. And the dialogue was so important. And it's just really wonderful to be here and with you all today. In the opening sequence of Pedro Almodovar's 1997 film Live Flesh, a bus passes before one of the most striking buildings to survive from 17th century Madrid, the Palacio de Santa Cruz. At left I show you a still from the film's production, and at right, the palace as it looks today. I will save you details of the wonderful and erotic plot, however. The sequence is set after curfew in the winter of 1970. And for Almodovar, the Palacio de Santa Cruz-- a building transformed in the 1940s into a ministry of Foreign Affairs-- symbolizes the repressive environment of Spain under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Like another famous Hapsburg monument, the Escorial, this building inspired 20th century design for government headquarters in Madrid, and came to be equated with Franco's regime. The association of Hapsburg architecture with fascism has cast a long shadow that complicates the historical interpretation of a monument like this one, which was, and is, about power. Erected from 1629 to 1643 under the Spanish Hapsburg King Philip IV, the Palacio de Santa Cruz served multiple functions related to the administration of justice, and was commonly known as the Carcel de Corte, or court prison. It was a monument produced by one of the most powerful institutions of the early modern era-- the court of the Spanish Hapsburg monarchy. For 17th century residents and visitors to Madrid, this court composed of a complex network of political organizations and headed by a royal family existed as both a physical place and a mental idea. Buildings like the court prison thus can be interpreted as institutional in ways that are both representational and abstract, as I hope to illustrate today. Now before turning to my case study analysis of this building of the court, I'd like to begin with a few words about the domain of the Spanish Hapsburgs, and then briefly survey ways in which government functioned in Madrid, with special attention to the Council of Castile-- the legislative body that commissioned the court prison. Whether experienced inside its corridors, or from the Plaza de la Provincia, the public space that fronted it, the court prison communicated a sense of order that was consistent with a royal building dedicated to the pursuit of justice, perhaps the most sacred promise an early modern King could make to his people. In the end, we might see that anachronisms aside, Almodovar was not so far off the mark in his evocation of this building as an inscription of power on the streets of Madrid. Now in the year 1600, the Spanish Hapsburgs ruled over territories on four continents, from Seville to Brabant, and from Naples to Peru. John Elliot, the preeminent historian of early modern Spain, has labeled this conglomeration of kingdoms, duchys, and newly conquered lands a composite monarchy. This was a political network. And I like the word tapestry that Adam used earlier. This was a political network united through a single concept, that of loyalty to the Crown. Its reach can be envisioned using the conventions of a modern political map in which color-- in this case orange, as you see on the left-- distinguishes it from the rest of the world. However, in the early modern world of images and objects, visualizations of the monarchy often relied on abstractions whose interpretation required knowledge of complex iconographies, nomenclatures, and historical narratives. One such abstraction can be seen on the ceiling of the Hall of Rounds in Madrid's Buen Retiro Palace, seen today as it survives at right. In this ceremonial space, 24 escutcheons arranged in a hierarchical order stand in for the entities that were understood to constitute the Spanish Hapsburg realm. Spain governed its composite monarchy via a network of local councils and distant viceroys that was linked ultimately to the King. Councils dedicated to war, state, and finance based in Madrid were critical. Equally so were bodies devoted to territorial rule, such as the councils of Aragon, Flanders, or Italy. Given the economic and demographic dominance of Castile among the monarchies reigns, the Council of Castile-- sometimes simply called the Royal Council-- ranked as the chief legislative body of the monarchy. Its institutions, including as we will see, the body of magistrates who oversaw the workings of the court prison, commanded respect. Castile was also host to the monarchies' capital city. In 1561, Philip II, the Spanish Hapsburg King who ruled from 1556 to 1598, brought a formerly itinerant court to reside permanently in Madrid. Without a cathedral like the more renowned Castilian cities of Burgos or Grenada, Madrid ranked only as a town in legal parliaments. The pen and ink drawing you see here at right allows you to appreciate its appearance around 1560, run by medieval walls with an imposing castle in the left of the drawing, then being transformed into a modern palace. With the arrival of the court, Madrid was called town and the court, an honorific in one sense, but also a curse given the resulting conflict between civic and royal government that characterized life in the capital. The town and court evolved rapidly, a fact attested to in diaries as well as literature, where we can read about people who get lost in Madrid, or can't trace a common path from one day to the next in an ever-changing city. By 1600, Madrid occupied three times its early 16th century limits. And its population hovered around 100,000-- a nearly tenfold increase. In 1601, the King Philip III moved the court to Volatility in a failed experiment that resulted in the court's definitive relocation to Madrid five years later, and a new wave of construction. Growth in Madrid subsided around 1540 when the royal cosmographer Pedro Teixeira began a survey for the spectacular wall map published in 1656 that you see here on the screen. Measuring 6 feet high and 9 feet wide, the map proclaims Madrid a royal city and the seat of a powerful monarch. Although Philip IV, to whom Teixeira dedicated his city portrait, was fashioned a planet King to reflect the extent of his domain, the monarchy by the middle of the 17th century was in decline. Buildings in the capital suggested otherwise. The royal palace stood as the court's preeminent architectural monument. Built over time on the remains of an Islamic citadel, the palace underwent a thorough transformation beginning in 1609 that led to the aspect captured in this view from 1704. The highly ordered facade and plaza displayed in this engraving were two of the greatest architectural achievements of the Hapsburg era. Yet they were both lost to fire in 1734, and subsequent rebuilding. A few period drawings survived to help us imagine interiors of the lost Hapsburg palace. Two of these were plans made in 1626 by the royal architect Juan Gomez de Mora with an accompanying written report, now in the Vatican library. The plan of the main story at right has received considerable scholarly attention. One study from 1986 walks us through its main halls alongside ambassadors and foreign rulers. While a 2012 analysis illustrates ways in which the changing decoration of showcase interiors of this building could serve political ends. Now visits of high ranking dignitaries to ceremonial palace chambers were of course not inconsequential to the government of Spain. However, the day-to-day government of the monarchy handled by councils, took place on the palace's ground floor, in lesser spaces. And notably, Gomez de Mora's drawing of the ground floor seen at left has been far less studied. Many of Spain's chief royal councils met and carried out business in the North sector of the Queens courtyard, which is redrawn at right. I should mention too, since we just hear a great talk from David, this plan around two courtyards derives from hospital traditions in the Middle Ages, and then into the early modern period as well. So the queen's courtyard is here at right. The Patio de la Reina. And the drawing here is a redrawing of that sector. Now ambassador's reports, plays, and novels too, cite the liveliness of the Queens courtyard, wherein litigants, lawyers, and judges assembled, and book and print sellers sold their wares from the arcades. The prominence of the council of Castile that I mentioned earlier is reflected spatially in the portion of the ground plan you see at right. Rooms 91 to 94 were allotted to the council, which also controlled three public tribunals located at the top, or the panhandle of this plan. We note first an appeals court labeled 96. The sala de justicia, or civil court, labeled 97. And the criminal courtroom, which like the others, includes furniture details. The latter two tribunals of the civil and criminal courtrooms were presided over by five council of Castile judges, called the magistrates of the royal household and court. These magistrates were charged with provisioning, policing, and maintaining the court city, and the five-leg radius called its provincia, or its province. In treatises and other writings, the magistrates describe themselves as prefects of Madrid. It was this role as protectors that they would promote in the iconographic program for a new courthouse that broke ground in September 1629. And that is our court prison. The court prison, home to the magistrates of the royal household and court, was located in one of the busiest quarters of Madrid. It arose just east of the bustling Plaza Mayor, and north of an intersection one 17th century historian labeled the kidney of Madrid, given the crush of pedestrian and coach traffic there. The building was designed by Cristobal de Aguilera, a fountain engineer and architect. Aguilera's earlier work at Madrid construction sites make him expert in what can be called an institutional court style that combined brick, stone, iron, and slate. As a detail from Teixeira's map at left indicates, the plan of the court prison seen from the south echoed the royal palace with spaces arranged around two courtyards. Likewise, the painting at right records an elevation also inspired by the palace, though more highly adorned with sculpture. In the painting, the doors to the courthouse are open, a detail that fosters an institutional message about the accessibility of justice in Madrid. The ground floor of the court prison, which included the royal [inaudible], a space I'll talk more about in the building's principal tribunal, was especially open to the public. Magistrates and scribes worked in more restricted spaces on the building's upper level, which also included a tall chapel that can be seen in light brush strokes just behind the frontispiece at right, and more prominently in Teixeira's map. Now owing to a dramatic change in street grade, the building accommodated a prison at basement level that held upwards of 200 inmates. You can see the rear of the prison yard also in the detail of the map at left. The lower level also included an infirmary, an apothecary, and an apartment for a resident doctor and his family. Now unfortunately, period plans of the court prison do not survive. And to date, scholars interested in this building have reproduced a ground floor diagram first published in 1908 Otto Schubert in a pioneering study of Baroque architecture in Spain. Schubert's plan, which you see at left, is useful as a record of the building in his day. But it includes many inaccuracies. And these are inaccuracies that I'm determining from reading the historical documentation. Now my interest in the workings of government within early modern public buildings has demanded new images. And at right I'm showing you one of these works in progress-- a plan of the ground floor around 1643. The drawing is based on evidence culled from the 17th century construction archive, drawings and reports for the reform of the building in the 1930s and 1940s, and the written sources ranging from court records, institutional histories, and literature. I am a micro historian at heart, and a product of the 1990s. Among the spaces on the ground floor alone, one has to account for a courtroom, if not more than one. An archive, and an office suite used by a warden, and a sizable police force located in the lower right, as it turns out. What emerges is a multifunctional building used by people of all social strata. Now one of my principal objectives in preparing new plans of this building is to recover the experience of moving through it. From the Plaza de Provincia, one entered a wide vestibule, which you can see the plan at the bottom at left, and also as it looks today at right. Two lateral doors offered access to the courtyards. And a central door, set off with a stone arch, provided direct access to a monumental staircase. And there's the staircase at the right. Now the most dignified of guests would have been deposited at the vestibule stair by coach before proceeding further inside and then up the stair. The original disposition of offices around the courtyards was altered following a pretty devastating fire in 1791, and then again in 20th century reforms. Yet a careful reading of documents helps us recover the uses of some of these spaces. The courtyard at left in the plan-- I'm showing you a photograph of one of its elevations at the right-- was known as the Patio de Provincia, and included a number spaces dedicated to civil matters. It is not clear if a standalone civil court existed in this courtyard, or whether civil trials were held in the audiencia located in the so-called prisoners courtyard, at right. And here you see it indicated with an arrow. Also known as the sala del crimen, or criminal court, the audiencia occupied three bays along the Western edge of the building. My proposed layout of the courtroom derives from an engraving, which you see at right, included in the history of the council of Castile, published in 1764. Below a banner declaring, "No fraud is safe working in any place," the engraver depicts royal magistrates seated around a table with a baldachin suspended above the senior most judge. Now I should note that the room as depicted here is much too spare. There were tapestries and wall hangings, as well as paintings commissioned for this tribunal. This room and others too of the ground floor, also had cabinets and desks filled with papers. And I think it's significant that one person on the building's payroll was the [inaudible], the person who procured paper for the workings of this building. Now in 1632, on the occasion of the audiencia's inauguration, the ranking magistrate was given the new title of Governor. Bestowed by the King, this honorific reaffirmed the authority of the Council of Castile among court institutions in Madrid. And for our purposes, I think, and given the themes of the symposium, the new title also speaks to the role of architecture in giving shape to politics and governance. Just outside the audiencia, a holding cell was built into the corridor in 1639, with easy access to staircases leading to the prison below, and also to the warden's office as it turns out. Though recorded in construction documents, the cell has gone unmentioned in the history of this building until now. It is a minor detail perhaps, but one that allows us to imagine the bodies of prisoners, as well as magistrates experiencing the building's corridors and halls. I can offer today only a few words about the main floor of the court prison. Reconstructing this level is challenging owing to the 1791 fire, as well as institutional changes within the Council of Castile. For instance, the number of magistrates increased from 5 in 1629, to 12 by the end of the 17th century. Each of these judges required office space in addition to workspace for his attendant chamber scribe. The choice offices where those that fronted the Plaza de Provincia, including a suite to the left of center along the bottom of the plan, which I propose was used by the Governor. This area right here. I didn't label it for this presentation. You see a lot of blanks there because there's still a lot that's not fully known. Another singular, if overlooked upper story space, was the chapel that I noted earlier. This two-story, richly adorned interior was situated at the top of the main staircase. Its dome, another surprisingly overlooked feature of the building, could be seen from both courtyards and the prison yard, as well. Now as I've mentioned earlier, in elevation and plan, Madrid's court prison echoed the royal palace. I would like to suggest the building also established a model for Council of Castile architecture in faraway places. One example can be found at the Royal Palace in Mexico City, seen in the background of the painting at right that depicts the palace in partial ruins following a political uprising in 1692. The residents of the Viceroy, located to the north, or left, in the painting, survived the riot largely intact. The majority of offices and arcades in the building's Northeast corner, where the Plaza Mayor met the Calle de la Provincia, and note the name of the street, had burned. There are no contemporary plans of the Mexico City building, but a written description penned after the uprising offers a detailed list of damaged spaces that included the whole of the prison, the guard room, the sala del crimen, the chief scribe's office, and the chamber of the Royal Audiencia with all of its adornments. These rooms correspond to spaces in Madrid's court prison, and suggest that commonalities of governance in the Spanish Hapsburg monarchy, established by institutions such as the Council of Castile, gave rise to shared architectural plans. Now there's much more research to do on this topic. And indeed, there are differences between Lima and say, Palermo, but this line of investigation seems to be very promising. Now to conclude, I'd like to return to the court prison facade and focus our attention on its three-story frontispiece. Here we come to terms with messages about the authority of the court that are much more direct than those implied in the regular geometry of the plan that might not match up to one's actual movement through space. At the ground level of this monumental portal, three doors lead to the vestibule, with plaques over the outer two, promising royal beneficence to all who enter. Above, gilded iron grills front two large windows. And between them, a gilded balustrade adorns an open window. The Spanish Hapsburg arms carved in marble fill the third tier. And five larger than life size sculptures complete the composition. Allegories of fortitude and justice are perched above the outermost columns of the frontispiece to the left and right of the royal arms. Prudence and temperance stand at the ends of the pediment. While the Archangel Michael alights at its apex with gilded wings and a raised sword. Both the royal arms and the cardinal virtues represent the King, who is both absent in this building's balcony, and present via complex symbols. Likewise, the guardian angel stands in for the Monarch. In Spanish Hapsburg political theory, the King was the ultimate source of earthly justice. But this was a gift granted by the grace of God. As a representative of divine justice thus, the archangel occupies a liminal space between the secular and sacred realms. His presence at this courthouse ennobles the institution at work within. Although the original sculpture was damaged and replaced in the 18th century, the Archangel Michael has commanded the Plaza de Provincia since the 1630s. The figure's quasi-magical appearance suited his role as divine protector. A duty we have seen corresponds to the pretensions of the magistrates who worked in this building. Standing in this public space, a 17th century beholder of the court prison would have appreciated its ordered exterior as a sign of the court's authority radiating outward from the royal palace to the streets and plazas of the capital. Both inviting and terrifying, the facade spoke to the world promise of justice, and the power of the court as the institution charged with its administration. Thank you. [applause] Thank you very much, Professor Escobar. Our final speaker in this afternoon's panel is Brian Goldstein. Brian is a historian of the North American Built Environment, and an assistant professor in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of New Mexico. Brian's research and teaching focus on the history of architecture and urbanism, especially in the United States in the 20th century. Specifically, he examines the intersection of social movements, political ideology, and the built environment, the spatial implications of race and class, debates over design expertise, the history of architectural and planning education, and the history of urban policy. He received his PhD from this very program in 2013. And I actually remember attending his defense as a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed first year PhD student. I was very impressed. And more recently, Brian has been giving me wonderful advice on my own New York-based dissertation project. Brian's talk this afternoon is entitled "Urban Homesteading and the Promise and Perils of Institutional Crisis." Please join me in welcoming Professor Goldstein to the podium. [applause] Thank you, Adam, Marianne, and Justin for having me. And all of you for your attention. That might be the first time I've ever been called Professor Goldstein. In New Mexico, you don't call people by Professor Goldstein. So I'm just Brian to my students. But here I am. In the August 1973 number of Supergirl, the title heroine finds herself in the middle of a gang war between two rivals-- the Flaming Serpents and the Hustlers. The Flaming Serpents aim to reclaim their turf from the Hustlers. But the Hustlers have gone straight. "I know you once led the greatest street gang of them all," Supergirl tells Rick, the Hustler's leader. "What once? I still do," Rick replies. "Only now, the Hustlers are working for our people, doing good instead of wrecking." Moments later, transformed back into her alter ego, Linda Danvers, Supergirl sees the change for herself. Rick takes her to an abandoned tenement with hardhat-wearing gang members, repainting brick, patching concrete, and framing new walls. "The city condemned it. We said, no. Don't knock it down. Let the Hustlers rebuild it," Rick explains to Supergirl. And she marvels, "What a change for a street gang." Supergirl could not believe her eyes, for this tale of gang members who had taken up tools, not weapons, soon took form in the real world, not far from the midtown office of DC Comics. In East Harlem, the reformed criminals and addicts of the Renegades youth gang were facing the impending ruin of their neighborhood. Their homes were falling to pieces, not with the force of bulldozers that had reshaped the city in the name of urban renewal in the 1950s and '60s, but at the hands of property owners who were abandoning New York real estate en masse in the 1970s. The Renegades asked, "What do you do when your landlord who has the legal responsibility for maintaining and managing your apartment has abandoned your building and cannot be located to make repairs? What do you do when the city, which has the moral obligation to assist tenants when landlords walk out, claims it cannot help?" As the tide of abandonment continued to rise, the Renegades regarded an undeniable crisis as instead an opportunity. They said, you can own your own home and finally be rid of the rats, the landlords, the leaks, and the city. We can rebuild our community ourselves. Now that they were busy renovating a six-story tenement on East 119th Street-- which is the image you see here-- with the guidance of construction professionals, but with their own sweat and labor as equity, they had become early evangelists for a cause that would soon revive homes throughout New York City. Today I'll use the case of Harlem to explore the spatial practices of those like the fictional Hustlers and the real Renegades who adopted techniques of self-help in response to New York's crisis of housing abandonment in the 1970s. Due to a range of global and local factors, absentee landlords fled from rental property. When they stopped paying taxes, the city government became the owner of that property. They became the owner of thousands of buildings. And a lot of them were still occupied. But across the city, a grassroots response emerged. Low-income tenants took this opportunity to redevelop buildings themselves. This was a practice called urban homesteading, especially low-income urban homesteading. And in the process they sought to claim much-needed affordable, decent housing, of jobs, and the more abstract ideal, which was very present in the 1960s, of community control, community level control, participatory democracy. City officials who had little capacity to manage the properties that they suddenly owned were glad to accommodate these approaches. They gave homesteaders property, financial assistance, bureaucratic sanction. As self-help housing increased in scale, it became more and more intricately tied to the city government that it had once sought to escape. Officials changed policies to bring the strategies into the fold. So following the theme of this panel, spaces of institutions, this story I would argue, exemplifies a case where space not only bore the mark of bureaucratic arrangements, but where bureaucracy also came to bear the mark of a novel approach to space. But-- and if any of you know me, you know that I like the story of irony-- as the homesteaders found, interacting with and relying upon these institutions created vulnerabilities for a strategy that had emerged with the promise of self-reliance. In the end, as I'll show you, increasing dependence on an opportunistic, often fickle bureaucracy came to undermine the promise that homesteading had held at its sort of highest of a radical movement of the poor. So just for background, you may have heard of the abandonment in your neighborhoods, or not. So the trigger for those events was an epidemic of property abandonment that New York had never seen anything like. And there were a number of local, national, international events that converged in the '70s to bring this about. It flooded the city with what were called in rem buildings. And in rem was the legal title for buildings that became public property because the owner wasn't paying taxes. In this decade, in the '70s, landlords abandoned as many as 40,000 housing units a year. And by April 1978, the city controlled 8,000 buildings with 90,000 tenants, and estimated that by about a year later, it would be the keeper of 20,000 buildings with a quarter million tenants. So the city was suddenly the largest landlord in the world. Figures are imprecise for all the reasons you'd imagine. These are the kinds of things that records are hard to sort of collect, even as they're happening. But one estimate guessed that the city owned more than 65% of Harlem's property by the early 1980s. And about 30% of that was public housing. The remaining 35% was abandoned buildings. And this trend was due in part to population shifts in American cities. The residents of neighborhoods like Harlem were becoming increasingly poorer. And that meant that they couldn't afford a substantial rent even as they were paying quite a lot of their income for housing. Rising maintenance and operations costs were also a huge problem in the mid '70s. This was the era of the world oil crisis. So all of that heating oil was becoming more and more expensive. And a lot of New York's buildings were just kind of reaching the end of what seemed like their life cycle, at least as long as they weren't being maintained. So 2/3 of New York's housing by 1978 was over 50 years of age. In 1973, the federal government instituted a housing moratorium, linked to the story of Nixon that we heard earlier. And that meant that there were fewer resources to help tenants with rent payment, and there were fewer resources also to help cities or building owners with rehab. And then lastly, the city changed its in rem laws-- the laws that it used to take property after nonpayment of taxes-- in '76. They changed it so that they took control of property after one year of tax arrears instead of three. The idea was that this would force landlords to sort of take responsibility for their property. But what it actually did was just create a flood of landlords who said enough already, and just left. And so a lot of these buildings were milked before they were left behind. That means that sort of all rent was taken. None was put back into the buildings. And then the landlords sort of skipped town. Or they had already skipped town. And they stopped taking any sort of ownership at all. So this was a crisis borne of the negligence and the self-interest of absentee landlords. But it held a lot of potential for those who were left behind. Remember, a lot of these were occupied buildings. As the Renegades promised at the time, quote, "You can rebuild your block, your homes, and your lives." Unquote. In 1974, they proposed a low-income homesteading program that would address the lack of jobs and affordable housing that was sweeping New York's poorest neighborhoods, not just Harlem. In a year they envisioned 90 people could learn construction skills while rehabbing abandoned buildings in East Harlem, the lower East side, Brownsville Brooklyn. These advocates hoped not only to provide for the material needs of residents, but also for this abstract idea of control, something that New York's poorer residents had never really had. They'd never had control over their own built environment. They wanted to become their own landlords, to become owners of cooperative buildings. And this was the same time that there was a low income co-op movement kind of emerging from the grass roots. If these ideals were rhetorically seductive, they were also grounded in efforts that were merging throughout New York City and in Harlem. The Renegades were making progress on their East 119th Street rehab project, with some working as paid trainees. In April '76, United Harlem Growth-- which was a community organization led by David Robinson, who is Jackie Robinson's son-- and 14 families, purchased five abandoned brownstones on Harlem's 136th Street. And they also launched a job training program that was designed to apprentice 37 workers in trades as they rehabbed these brownstones into co-ops. And then nearby, which is the image you see here, the members of the Mosque of the Islamic Brotherhood were in the midst of their own rehab project into adjoining tenements at St. Nicholas Avenue and West 113th Street. And this was an effort through which 15 men who were members of the Mosque were learning electrical, plumbing, and construction skills, building 14 apartments, a daycare center, a health food store, and also the Mosque itself, a project that was supposed to be, and indeed was completed by the beginning of 1979. And these projects, as you can see in these photos of the members of the Mosque, were very pragmatic. They were very pragmatic affairs. Tenant laborers weren't occupied with the restoration of crown moldings or mantle pieces, the things that brownstoners were doing at the same time. Instead, they were worried about making buildings fit for habitation at the lowest possible cost. This meant frequently replacing boilers, repainting, or in gut rehab projects like this one, refitting aging buildings as cheaply as possible. Tenants took on demolition, structural beam replacement, roof removal. They cleverly procured building materials. They frequently reused items from their own buildings. They liked to takes studs from existing walls and repurpose them in reconfigured walls. Often they gathered materials from buildings elsewhere in the city. A kind of great example of that was a group that purchased bathroom fixtures, doors, lightings, carpets, and furniture from an art deco hotel in the Upper East Side that was being renovated, and put all that back to use in their own low-income homesteading project. But despite this pragmatism, sweat equity also prompted an extremely personal engagement with the act of restoration. It enabled residents to reflect themselves in the spaces that they would occupy. This is where this question of control comes in. This was certainly seen in the Mosque of the Islamic Brotherhood, which you can see had intricate tile work in interior spaces in the Mosque itself, on the right. Also, Moorish arches surrounding doors. So a reminder of the people who were living here, and the fact that they could tailor make the house for themselves. Cheryl Edmonds, who was a homesteader, who rehabbed a tenement on the border of Harlem, best suggested the connection between self-building-- in her case of windows-- and her own subjectivity. Here's Edmonds-- "You need an upper and lower sash a pulley, and chain, wood for the sides, top, and bottom, a sill, molding behind and in front of the frame. I measured and sawed and hammered and screwed. And when I was done, I had six windows that actually opened and closed. Crookedly, to be sure, but they opened and closed. I felt invincible." Even as homesteading enabled these feelings of autonomy and self-determination, the fact was that it remained fundamentally reliant on the public sector. The city government owned these buildings after the landlords not paying their taxes. And low-income homesteaders couldn't cover all labor and material costs with sweat equity. There was just sort of a practical limit that sweat equity ran against. But with officials scrambling to keep up with the pace of abandonment, and in need of any measure that could stem the onslaught, homesteaders found that the municipal government was happy to make room for these efforts. And that first this took the form of sympathetic bureaucrats who arranged the transfer of abandoned real estate to some groups like the Renegades. They also pushed agencies to reduce red tape. People were rehabbing abandoned buildings, and the electrical inspector was worrying about the size of the switch box, or whether the electrician who was helping was licensed in New Jersey and New York. Clearly very counterproductive when the house is otherwise abandoned. So some bureaucrats helped sort of smooth those edges. Likewise, they helped tenants assemble a patchwork quilt of policies to enable their work. And this is an image from an advocacy group at the time, that gives you the idea of this as a kind of process. A step-by-step process. As one advocate noted, homesteaders quote, "Piggybacked every gimmick in the world. Begin with the sale of a building for $1. Add municipal loans at below market interest rates for long terms. Grant full exemption from payment of real estate taxes for eight to 10 years. Utilize as much sweat equity as possible. Dovetail these savings with job training and an adequate technical assistance program." Unquote. And that gives you the idea of this as a kind of assemblage, a patchwork. So homesteaders used city loan programs, federal loan programs, the federal community development block grant program, the Federal Comprehensive Employment Training Act, which covered a lot of the labor costs of these projects. And the successes of early projects convinced officials of their viability. With this influx of in rem buildings in the late '70s, the city government increasingly institutionalized these alternative development strategies. In '78, soon after the start of Edward Koch's term as mayor, and with the pace of foreclosures quickening, the city endorsed the efforts of neighborhood developers by shifting management of abandoned residential buildings from the Department of Real Property to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development. And this was more than a simple bureaucratic change, it was a symbol that officials agreed that abandoned buildings represented a housing resource, not a fiscal resource. So housing preservation and development instead of real property. Under this agency the city created the Division of Alternative Management Programs, my very favorite bureaucratic acronym. DAMP. DAMP was a unit that supported low-income homesteading, property management by community groups, and conversion of buildings into low-income co-ops. This assistant commissioner of this new division was a kind of homesteading advocate. He had worked with the Renegades. He had worked with technical assistance non-profits. The city also responded positively to activists. Please that it stopped auctioning these abandoned buildings. This was a common disposal method. It allowed the city to offload buildings quickly. But frequently those just ended up back in the hands of slum lords who would usually just abandon them again. The city stopped these auctions in late '78. And the increase of occupied apartments under DAMP and these alternative management programs validated activist's stance. In July of '78, about 1,600 properties were in alternative management. By a year later, 8,000 were there. And that was 20% of the city's occupied in rem units. The '76 election of President Jimmy Carter brought further new support, this time from the federal level. He under HUD-- the Department of Housing and Urban Development-- he launched a urban homesteading demonstration project. He also toured a homesteading project in his famous visit to the South Bronx in '76. This brought in a whole wave of financial support for these efforts. So by the end of the decade, a strategy that had become with the determined efforts of desperate tenants had moved into the political and architectural mainstream. But dependence on the support exposed the flank of a movement whose ambitions were based on the goal of self-help. Homesteading had emerged specifically as an outgrowth of the institutional failures that had produced all these thousands of abandoned buildings. But alignment with those institutions created new vulnerabilities. And we can't answer the counterfactual, could homesteaders have taken any other path? Was true self-reliance ever possible? This is often a problem with radical movements. This is especially a question for low-income tenants who just didn't have a lot of resources in the first place, except their own ingenuity and their labor. What we do know is that these institutions were very fickle. And dependence on a bureaucracy that was fickle undermined their hopes for a broad movement of the poor. And the consequences of this were complicated. But just in conclusion I want to point to a couple examples of evidence of the outcomes of their relationship. And the first of these came from Mayor Koch himself, and concerns his own vision for the city's abandoned buildings. Koch had been willing to open the door to alternative development approaches. But this proved to be exceptional, not typical. In fact, Koch, from the beginning of his term in office, largely placed his faith in the middle class resettlement of low-income neighborhoods, not low-income self-help. What became widely known as gentrification was just getting started in Harlem in the late '70s. As a Times headline of the time reported, "Middle class blacks return to Harlem." A little premature, but these sort of steps were being taken. And Koch had a particular vision of this kind of demographic change as intrinsic to the life of the city. He touted what he presumed as the ameliorative effects of middle class resettlement, especially acting in the private market. As he said in '82, "My position is that some middle class neighborhoods go up economically, and some neighborhoods go down." He argued that displacement was just a fact of life. So Koch saw abandonment as a chance to see the middle class return to New York's poorest neighborhoods, including Harlem. In '81 he announced that the city would sell 13 abandoned Harlem brownstones, which were the most desirable of its real estate, using a lottery. For Harlemites who had seen fleeing landlords as an opportunity for community control, this was very unwelcome news. And in time-- and I don't have time to get into it-- the consequences of the lottery were actually a lot more mixed. About half of the winners were already Harlemites. But the fact of the lottery, and especially the many sales of abandoned buildings that followed the lottery, demonstrated that as long as homesteaders depended on outsiders, they were vulnerable to the vision that those outsiders had for their land. And more often than not, that vision favored middle class brownstoners, not low-income homesteaders. A second liability of homesteaders' reliance on institutions was financial. Low-income homesteaders were already limited in scale in the early '80s by a lot of the same factors that had brought abandonment in the first place. They found wild inflation a paralyzing factor. They also faced the rising fuel costs that the landlords had faced. Minimum rents that were necessary to cover costs in 1980 had doubled from their level since '73, in just seven years. And the patchwork nature of funding that I described also were some difficulties. There were a lot of people to answer to. There was a lot of time just spent filling out paperwork. And that took time away from construction. There was also a movement towards more austere municipal and federal budgets, which worsened these challenges. New York City itself was coming out of its worst fiscal crisis ever. And so it offered loans, but few subsidies. And the subsidies were what people really needed to make these projects work. The inauguration of President Reagan was much more devastating. He brought unprecedented cuts in funding to American cities. He removed restrictions that committed community development block grants to low-income communities, which sort of removed a major funding source. And he got rid of a lot of the programs that these neighborhood developers depended on. He got rid of the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, for example, which had funded a lot of their labor. So sweat equity became a pursuit that low-income tenants just couldn't afford. As Luqman Abdul Shahid of the Mosque of the Islamic Brotherhood explained, quote, "We find ourselves tightening a belt that has already been squeezed." By early 1980, the Renegades had not paid their property taxes for months. They couldn't keep their tenement running and pay the city's bills. But I don't want to conclude on a wholly negative note. Despite all the limitations that accompanied this seeming inescapability of bureaucracy, the efforts of homesteaders weren't in vain. The city, in the end, retained their methods as one minor approach, even as it generally cast its lot with the private real estate market, which has always been dominant in New York City. But DAMP, our well-named agency, persisted into the '80s. And it had a portfolio with about a third of occupied city-owned buildings by late '81. And central Harlem claimed about 1,500 units in alternative housing programs by 1982. So by no means, most of Harlem's real estate, but also enough homes for thousands of people. On St. Nicholas Avenue, the Mosque of the Islamic Brotherhood provided the greatest success story of the low-income homesteading movement. Members moved into their new residential and spiritual home in 1979. And they had incurred a $30,000 cost overrun due to inflation. But they sort of kept at it. They managed to succeed despite that. They were current on their mortgage payments and their taxes. A lot of the tenants were employed, many through the construction trades that they had learned, others in the businesses that the Mosque built on site. The city unfortunately took possession of the Renegades tenement in a tax foreclosure in 1985. The building sat for a long time. But 17 years later, the city sold the building to the Youth Action Program, which is one of many rehab programs that came out of the 1970s in the aftermath of the Renegades wake, in which some of you may know as the National Nonprofit Youth Build USA, which I believe is actually headquartered in Davis Square. So there was a success story out of this. So the legacy of self-help provided tenant-controlled, affordable housing that persisted long past its origin. The residents of these homes settled for something a lot more modest than the aspirations that had initially motivated them. Multiple failures had brought crisis. And the grassroots response to that crisis had brought bureaucratic change. But the bureaucracy did push back. And that demonstrates the devil's bargain that often comes with this kind of work. Homesteaders struck it probably inevitably. But the result was that some Harlemites found the decent housing and the autonomy that they sought on a small scale. That was certainly the case for the Mosque. But Harlem itself remained very much up for grabs, and frequently at the mercy of outsiders. Thank you. [applause] Thank you very much, Brian. It is with great pleasure that I would like to introduce our moderator for this second panel, Jana Cephas. Jana is a lecturer in urban planning and design at the Harvard GSD. And her research focuses on the relationships between urban landscapes and emergent subjectivities. Her scholarship fuses critical theory, cultural history, and science and technology studies to reveal the social implications of spatial practices, especially as they relate to the intersections of technology, the body, and the social stratification of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Please join me in welcoming Jana and all of our presenters to the table for our panel discussion. Thank you. [applause] Thank you. So this is an interesting array of work to look at and to listen to today. And I'd like to actually start off the discussion first by maybe tracing some broad themes across the four presentations that we saw. And I think through those themes I'll have some questions for the presenters themselves. And then we can use that as a starting off point for a broader discussion with the rest of the audience. So the panel is called Spaces of Institution. And I think really clearly the sort of linkages between the shape of institutions and the shape of spaces that they occupy, or may impact, whether that's the form of the spaces themselves through architecture and urban planning, or through the images of the spaces and the way that they're represented. But there are a couple key themes that I think I started to recognize that begins to link the projects and the way that they may take on this topic of space of institutions. First off, I think all four in many ways were projects of visibility that this relationship between institutional power and form is about making visible some set of practices somehow. I think this is very much evident with the Prudential Tower, obviously. It simply being a tower in the landscape. And also the place of the court in the city, right? About making visible aspects of institutional power. They're also all projects of legibility, as well. So it's not just enough for institutional power to be visible, but for it to be understood in very specific ways by a consuming public. So there's a certain kind of discernment that goes along for us here today, specifically through, I think, architecture and urban form, that becomes very important for communicating specific ideals to a broader consumptive public. And then finally, they're all projects that are dealing with credibility. Maybe most importantly, right? How are these institutions going to gain the buy-in that they need, again, from a broader public outside of themselves so that they can even exist. Right? I mean, everyone needs to recognize the court as a court for the court to continue to function within society. Or I think in the case of your paper, Brian. It's kind of an inversion of that, right? There's a dissolution of some credibility. But perhaps a new one starts to rise up in place through the homesteaders. And then with the hospital, I think in some ways, we can think about the ever-changing aspects of it as a way of continuing to build credibility around the medical profession, so that people continue to put their trust in this institution, the trust of their own bodies. And so with those themes in mind, I had some questions I just wanted to sort of pose generally to the panelists. Not just give them all at once. The first, dealing with your presentation, Elihu, concerns what you described as the way that the insurance company is-- there's the literal inscription on the building. But the company itself is a kind of inscription in the city of a certain set of ideals. And so when you started talking about this inscription, it occurred to me, well, is that what all architecture does in some ways? I mean, isn't it all a certain kind of inscription? Or maybe that's what all institutions do. So I thought that I'd like to hear more about what is the specific ways that the insurance company might do some inscription that's distinct perhaps, from other forms of institutions, or the way that we can begin to perhaps define institution as that which inscribes through architecture. I'm not really sure. But I thought there could be more said on that. I think particularly because when you show the Prudential, and the inscription of the name of the organization across the top there, it immediately brought to mind the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society building in 1929. Right? The inscription across the top of the building. And also maybe even older history, going back a couple of centuries to the inscriptions that we see across the top of buildings. So I'm wondering what is it that is specific either to the insurance company, or to the idea of the institution as a whole, that links to this idea of inscription. And kind of related to that, we have the way in which the institution inscribes within its architecture. And David, in some ways I thought that your discussion of crisis was a kind of inscription within the architecture of this idea of crisis. And I was wondering if you saw that as a sort of broad contemporary characteristic of institutions, or if it's specifically within the architecture of hospitals that we see this turn to kind of a permanent state of crisis. It to me kind of recalled Giorgio Agamben's discussion of the permanent state of exception. This idea that the state of exception is that which exists outside of the law. And it's a temporary period that we need in order to sort of resolve some kind of situation so that we can go back to the norm. But that, as Agamben argues, were increasingly in this permanent state of exception. And your discussion of the institutionalization of crisis in the hospital began to recall that to me. So I began to wonder, is this institutionalization of crisis, or this move towards a certain kind of permanent state of exception, something that we can again, begin to associate with the idea of institution. And so the institution itself is both traditional in many ways. It has a history. It's sort of fixed in place. But it's also in this constant change. I think all of the projects showed that in many ways. And so I wonder how we can begin to think about the institution as institutionalizing ways of understanding architecture and the city, and the constant change that's going along with that. Jesus, you described at the very end of your presentation, when you were looking at the facade of the building and describing the different formal elements and what they began to symbolize and refer to, you noted that the King is both present and absent there, right? And so this idea about the absent presence of the institution, it's kind of communicating a whole set of ideas, whether that's through symbols of certain forms. But it's also absent from it at the same time. And so I was hoping that you could maybe talk a little bit more about the way this absent presence perhaps persists through other aspects of the building beyond the facade. Or is it really just in that location that we begin to see that. And so then finally, just a few thoughts on your presentation, Brian, which I think is very different from the rest of the three. Primarily because the previous three are dealing with institutions that I think we can all very readily and easily identify. And they all fit our understanding of what an institution might be. Although as soon as I say that, I ask myself, how do I define an institution? What do we even mean by institution? Because I think in the case of your paper, Brian, the institution that's kind of in the background is the city of New York, it's housing department, and all the failures that were evident during this period of time. But then I began to wonder, with the kinds of practices that these homesteaders are engaging in, are they beginning to institutionalize new ways of understanding the urban realm, of relating to not just vacancy, but to housing, and space in the city. It's perhaps a leap to think of the homesteaders as an institution. But I'm wondering what your thoughts are on thinking of them as taking certain actions or practices that are forms of institutionalization in a way. I think particularly with the ending of your narrative, the way that all of their hard work kind of gets away from them in a sense, because the city starts to take notice, and comes back in as an institutional power. So I think with your paper in particular, I was interested in this relationship between these sort of formalized, kind of clearly identified hierarchical institutions, and then the people, so to speak. But what are the ways that the people can either be seen as participating in institutionalizing practices, and perhaps if it's not too crazy to think about it in this way, even becoming forms of institutions themselves. So I'll just open it to the panelists for your thoughts on that. Then we can turn to the audience for further questions. Great. Well thank you. I'll jump in first. Thank you for those thoughts. And I think your idea about visibility, legibility, and credibility is very well taken, and I think very provocative for us to begin to play with. Along with playing with this concept of inscription. I thought about inscription. It's partly working with the metaphor that the city is a text. It's a text that we read for power relationships. We read for patronage in one form or another. And it's an important technique. And it's an important method I think, for all of us in the work that we do. But when we read the built environment as a text, it can often naturalize power relationships, because there they are. The building is there. It must belong there in one form or another. Over time, the kind of placidity in some sense of the built environment can cover up the fact that every building is-- every presence of the building also implies an absence of something else, and the contest of something that allowed it to be there in the first place. And I was thinking of inscription, I'm glad that we can talk about it critically, because it's not the only way to think about the built environment as a kind of text. And what are the opportunities and pitfalls of thinking about it that way. The reason why the inscription on Prudential is so important is because, again, not just of visibility, but of legibility. They didn't assume that people looking at that building would be able to associate it with one corporation or another. And they wanted to make it absolutely legible who was behind that kind of building. And it does go back to an older tradition in some sense. And I'm thinking of the 19th century city, which would be papered with text everywhere. You'd look at buildings, there'd be text absolutely everywhere, all over the building. You'd be overcome with signage and words everywhere that you turn. And that, over the course of the 20th century, and I think especially with modernist architecture, that begins to wane. PSF is one of those interesting kind of hinge points of different traditions. And Prudential was being retrograde, in some sense, by insisting on it. And there were those at the time, including people like Hugh Stubbins. He wrote an Op Ed in The Globe, he said, please don't put your name on there. Because it's so trashy. Like, have some class. Just make a nice building. And Prudential's completely uninterested in that, because of your point. It's not just visibility, but it's also legibility. And then finally credibility. The credibility in this case comes from the wherewithal of having made it in the first place, that the presence itself was a form of credibility. But I'm curious how others too, and then people have their own questions to respond to our thinking about inscription as a metaphor. And then in my case, with the Pru, more than a metaphor. There it is. It's the literal inscription pinned on their physical spatial inscription in that sense. I'll jump. I don't think it's a very good metaphor inscription. I don't think that anything was inscribed on the Prudential. I think it was written on. There's a big difference. The metaphor is hiding what's actually going on. It's just advertising. I don't think it's a power play structural thing that goes on by putting your name on a building. If that's true, then if I put my name on any building, suddenly I'm powerful. It just doesn't quite work that way. No, but it's a literal inscription in that sense. The metaphor is an analytic for thinking about the built environment. Well, literal inscription would be cutting, which is the Roman city, not the modern city. And if you cut into a building, what exactly are you doing to it? That doesn't necessarily mean writing. So the metaphor is really-- I don't know. It doesn't seem that strong to me. I don't know if I'm gonna weigh in on that particular debate. But Jana, I really appreciate your questions. And I won't entirely answer yours. Although I do think you point to an interesting contradiction, which is that whether it's capitalism or the way real estate operates, or just sort of the circumstances of power tied to income and race in the United States. Certain people can't create their own institutions. So even if you're trying to use something like abandonment to create a movement of the poor, they were necessarily always and already tied into the state, because of the way the law works. The state was the owner of the property. So I got the sense this is a case where I think the heartfelt motivations were considerably more radical than most other actors who participated in community development. This is a movement [inaudible] squatting, which I didn't have time to talk about today. And had some of the same people. But it's also an interesting moment when there were actually radical new left activists who were in city government. You know, young interns and others who were sort of like, sure. Take the system down from inside. But the fact remained that they were systemic actors. And so I don't know if it's the inevitability that I called into question, whether they had to sort of play this game, or whether in the end they compromised some of their principles for exigency, which is often something that does happen. The other thing you said that's so interesting to me, because you see it all the time still-- the Agamben quote. But the idea that manufactured crisis is such an operative mode in society. And it's funny. In our case, historians of many things, including actors who shape the built environment. I was struck by one commonality, which is how all of our actors to some varying extent used crisis as the justification. Architects have done this for a long time. But the urban crisis of course, was also one of the motivations for the kinds of projects Elihu was talking about. My actors I think, saw crisis as something that they viewed as a positive opportunity for themselves, instead of for the insurance companies. But it's so frequent that the justification for action, which is extravagant, is some level of crisis state, or as you said, exceptionality. It's really striking across the cases. It actually makes me wonder whether it's a condition of modernity, or-- I don't know how else to sort of frame it-- where we need or rely on crisis in order to Institute any kind of change. Right? I mean, does crisis become this necessary justification for particularly having a radical change? I mean, not radical in the political sense, but a significant substantial change. Are we able to think through significant serious change without resorting to the idea of crisis. The thing about hospitals, what I'm interested in, is because I think we can learn from them how to negotiate in a society that is in permanent crisis. They learned how to do it 100 years ago. So now that everything is like that, we're always in permanent crisis, no matter what it is-- education, blah, blah, blah. We can learn from hospitals about how to deal with it. It's not a negative. I don't assume it to be a bad thing to be able to call on crisis and then act, and know how to negotiate like that. I'd like to respond to that wonderful question about the absent presence of the King. There is a topos of the invisible monarch that accompanies the study of early modern Spain. The court in Spain. And it's one that's undergone a lot of revision lately. And its importance to does this work in the history of architecture, but also others. I'm seeing that the King was present a lot more than we think. And the Queen would go out. And then she would appear on balconies during the prominent festivals. They weren't quite as hidden as we've imagine the Hapsburgs to be in the past. But I always turn to one of my favorite political theorists of the era, is Diego de Saavedra Fajardo, whose book of 1640 is one of the great political treatises of the century. And he says at one point, the King should be seen, but only up to a certain point. This can't be a routine presence. So there's this importance of distance. And that's of interest for monuments, and from buildings to fountains and the like. And the King is always there with the arms. And those arms are incredibly important. The fountains of Madrid are gone. They're 34 monumental fountains. Monumental, not Bernini fountains, but monumental fountains. In that map that I showed you, they're all gone. So you don't see them. And you see a variation of one or two. But they would have had the arms on them. And we have contracts for the arms being placed on those kinds of monuments on the greeneries, and all the public buildings in the city. So the King is present in that way, if you will. And it's not just in Madrid. Palermo's one of the best examples. You walk around that city. And because it has survived in its devastated state, and been largely untouched, you see the monuments still there. Especially during the last reign of Charles II, and the region of Queen Mariana. You see a number of [inaudible] inscriptions-- stone inscriptions-- that have been gathered and placed in the town hall that were all taken from public spaces in the city. And so there's something we're missing now when we walk through this old Madrid. Madrid also heavily destroyed during the Spanish Civil War. And so there are all kinds of reasons for the loss of these memories of the presence of the King. But I like your question about what about elsewhere in that building. Not just in the facade. This is where I think it gets very interesting. I think I've tried to argue the plan is one place where we see the palace reborn, if you will. Idealized even. If you look at the palace more carefully, the way the staircase works, et cetera, this is an idealized version of that plan. And that's sort of interesting, where you can start from scratch rather than taking an old building built by accretion. So that's one place. But there are also in the very ways that the judges were seated in their courtroom, this is a reflection of the way the King administered justice in spaces within the palace. And Catherine Fisher Taylor, who has written wonderful material about the 19th century courts, is also just published in 2013. I almost was gonna show her diagram today. A reconstruction of early modern courtrooms in the way judges faced those defendants and others. And it's very similar to the plan that Gomez de Mora produced in 1626. So we're seeing great similarities. These things just don't change. The way a court is laid out in this period doesn't change. And Catherine Fisher Taylor does a great job of taking it forward and showing you the changes that come in the Revolution in France. But what I so appreciate is that she went back earlier, where we don't have plans often, and we don't know enough to understand how things worked. And she's starting to find patterns. So I would say even in the spatial disposition of a room, the King is somewhat present. And then on the literal level, there was a statue of Philip IV, made for this building, that's gone. And so that would have been placed also, in a very prominent place. Questions? Hi. To continue, this is for Jesus. It's fascinating the way I think in these reconstructions that you're doing, and it sounds like in some of the newer scholarship, architectural evidence can be mobilized to explain something that maybe the political histories don't or insufficiently do. I suppose this is the question really, that when you follow this template around, is that what you're doing now? Are you working on the Mexico City example? Mexico City and Lima will be in this. The current book project is on Madrid. But there is a long-term project that's actually with a colleague in Latin American architectural history, where we are trying to bring the viceregal spaces and-- That's what I was going to ask. About the vice-regal. What's happening in the vice royalties, and in the other kind of let's say, more indirect forms of governmental rule. Vis-a-vis either the presence, absence, dynamic you just described, and or the sort of mechanics of the space. In other words, does doing this change something? Change something about how we might think about what's happening in Madrid, or is this a sort of-- of anything coming back, basically is what I'm asking. Is some traits, like when and if you do reconstruct patiently, what you can find in Mexico City and Lima, and everywhere else, do you expect-- or have you found anything coming back to Madrid in the practices or in the spatial sort of organization of this particular form of rule? Excellent question. And one of the things I did in my first book really dealt with the urban question, was to try to see the ideas coming back to Madrid from the planning of cities in the Americas. And I got into trouble for that with the Spaniards. A number of them took me to task on this. But I think it's become a more accepted stance now, that this is obvious. That this would happen. And maybe I'm a Latino from the US, and I see it in a different way. But it seems like it's obvious now. And is it going to work the same way with government? I'm not so sure, because the law is behind it. And it's the law and these institutional doctrines that are based on law that doesn't change. That's the one constant that one sees. I remember recently speaking about the map I showed you. I think Mark, you were there, maybe. And Erica, you were there. And Nasir asked me about justice. And where does that come from? Is it coming from the Islamic past in Spain? Could you say that that's part of it? And to a degree you can say that. Yes. But it's ultimately coming from a Roman law. And there's this long legal tradition that's at work. And so it's going to be hard I think, to see spaces in Mexico City somehow informing what happens then in Madrid. But I'm open to it. I'm completely open to it. [inaudible] Thanks. Thank you for your very interesting presentations. Brian, I wanted to address this to you, if I could. I'm trying to situate the homesteaders in a parallel movement of public space. And in particular, one thinks about a hierarchy going from squatters to homesteaders, up the line finally to Donald Trump. All right, so that's our hierarchy that we have. Or whoever else you want to put on the top of the list. Now we have in the public space world, of course, at the top of the list, designed public spaces with all the attachments thereof, and embellishments. But we have in recent years, labels of tactical urbanism, guerrilla urbanism, temporary urbanism, insurgent urbanism, all this stuff which is a sort of very catch as catch can movement that strikes me as to some degree parallel, if you will, to the homesteaders. And yet, with the homesteaders, the object that they are dealing with-- the architecture, if you will-- is a much more permanent, fixed, embedded kind of object in a system that necessarily becomes institutionalized financially, in terms of the types of repairs. If you're really going to provide good housing for people, it's not going to be like a little park let, that's a parking space in a street. One could imagine that. But that's not what they did. They imagined a larger project with more permanence. And I wonder if you could address that connection, and whether that not necessarily led to a failure, but led to simply a more difficult road to hoe. I think that scope is certainly-- it has to part of the conversation. As I said, sweat equity. The kind of-- theoretically the historical traces of sweat equity that I find are that that term originated in this movement, and a particular guy who was involved. Who knows? But obviously, an organization like Habitat for Humanity takes that forward. Sweat equity's not enough. You need the lumber, and you need somebody to pay the person to bring the lumber, and those folks who are building the house, if they're not university students, they need some compensation. Because that's income. They need to eat on, and everything else. So yes. Scope is definitely a thing. I like the idea of this continuum with squatting on the left-- not political left-- but on the left of my particular continuum, and Trump Tower, or something, on the right. If I was to do that for public space-- and you're certainly the public space person more than I am. I think I would put mass demonstrations as the equivalent of squatting. And I would put maybe beings or happenings or something, as the equivalent of homesteading. Something slightly more permanent, but not totally ephemeral. Or maybe something even a little more than that. But I think tactical urbanism, or place-making, or everyday urbanism, or whatever you want to call it-- I think it would be further along. And Margaret would kill me if I said this, but-- or maybe she wouldn't. But I think there's something much more capitalistic about tactical urbanism that is in the other organizations I look at, like community development corporations, I see it too. I see a bureaucratization and a turn towards expertise in these groups, consistently. Which is often much more in the service of capitalism, or in the service of a much less radical idea. And it's the same with place-making, you know, that the local coffee shop in Albuquerque that turns a park into a parklet. But it's also, of course, an advertisement for themselves. It's a sort of slacker activism, in a way. Not to say that parklets aren't great. But it's a different way of changing the world then maybe demanding real public space. So I don't quite know where I would fit whatever matches the homesteaders. But I think the tactical urbanism train is probably a little further along that continuum. And that's some of its problems too. And that's some of the problems with the way that affordable housing is provided. That it's not just about giving materials and labor, compensation for labor to low-income people, and letting them figure out how to rebuild their houses now. It's an industry. It's financed by low-income housing tax credit, and banks, and intermediaries, and very fancy foundations. And that train left the station into something much more formalized, I'd say. I had a kind of crusty architectural history question. That has to do with I guess since Pevsner, architectural historians have traditionally talked about institutions manifesting themselves in architecture as typologies. So with the rise of the museum, you have the rise of the gallery. With the rise of the library, you have reading room spaces, et cetera, et cetera. At least in early modern history, that has been challenged as historians have shown that, for instance, certain building types like the open loggia on the ground floor with the long hall in the top, that could have been an aristocratic palace. It could've been a civil court. It could've been a guildhall, et cetera. That there is no kind of necessary correspondence between an institution and a kind of codified physical form. I was wondering whether in that case across all of these talks, whether typology as just a category of analysis, how useful is it? How flexible are these architectural types? And is there a kind of necessary relationship between institution and form? Yes. We know you have more to say. I'd like to think that one is starting to emerge. But there's been so little attention to these government buildings that I can't say that yet. But I think yes. There will be typological similarities, at least within this Spanish Habsburg monarchy, with great variation. I mean, the courtrooms I did mention, they look a little different in Sicily than they do in Flanders, and then what you see in Madrid. But there are similarities. I think it's a yes. When I was first asked to participate in this symposium, I was asked to talk about religious architecture, because that's sort of another project that I'm finally thinking about stepping into the religious realm. And I've kind of avoided it in part, because that's what we expect from the Spanish world, is the church. And the church is an important institution. And there you see typologies, but with great variations as well. But I think it's important to look at the secular realm. And to look at this public realm of architecture where I think typologies will emerge. Well, I'm just going to act quickly to that, because I want you to speak, David. I mean, in a way you showed us the type, the hospital and sort of the emergence of that type. But the sort of rapid changes that it goes through as there's this search for finding some kind of idealization, which a lot of typologies go through. So in relation to the question, it sounds like there's not necessarily this fixed relationship of course, between the building form itself and the kind of program and use that's being associated with it. But would you still think about the hospital form as being a type, nevertheless? I do think about it as a type. But the innovation that Foucault tried to make, that you could see several different types through one diagram, I think is key. In my case, it just happens that the hospital split off from the diagram that Foucault-- like, we don't think of hospitals and prisons the same way today. Everybody wants to go to the hospital. Nobody wants to go to prison. I mean, that's not quite true, either. Which part? Well, in the US they want everybody to go to prison. That's not quite the same thing. But so in the Foucault type again, you might think in a high-surveillance prison we'd want somebody surveilled. And we want discipline. And we want them contained. And that's a bad thing. But in a hospital you want to be watched. You want to be disciplined. You want to be made better. So the diagram is not working at all towards the same ends. It's kind of positive if your ill and you go to the hospital. It's negative if you go to the prison. I mean, prisons and hospitals could still interchangeably be used for each other. I don't think it-- it makes a type of building, but it's probably stronger to think that what the diagrams that are behind them. If you want to do the kind of work that you just mentioned, it's not a building type, it's a social diagram, or apparatus, or something that you should be looking for. So that way it's office buildings and insurance buildings and banks and so on, all kind of need the same type. But it's not a type actually. It's related to the activity and the goals. I had a quick followup on that, David, because I work on refugee camps. So obviously, there's always the question of the technology of care and the technology of containment. So I would like to hear your thoughts on that, and maybe just elaborate a little bit on what you were saying. I was really interested when you described the turning point where the hospital begins. It's when aid or care stops to be rushed to the victim, but it's when the victim gets rushed to the institution somehow. And with humanitarian institutions, they're still rushed to the victims in some way. They're being deployed to the field in an effort to contain the crisis in the field. So it's kind of a common, but I would love to hear your thoughts on that. Just two quick things. One is a question of scale, I guess. The refugee problem is usually at a much larger scale. The emergency one is about cities. So it's a bit like the fire department. It's no good having a four-hour fire rating if the fire department is six hours away. So the fire code system involves about cities. It's a system a built around the city. And same with the hospital. It's no use having an emergency room if the person dies before they get there. So that's why you needed more hospitals, right? Because you had to have everybody within reach of a hospital. The refugee one is a bit different, though. Isn't the Syrian refugee establishments in Turkey are not-- they're bringing the people to the camp, not the other way around, right? They're actually taking people and bringing them to where they have the services available. It's not that they're just going right where they are and building something there. But the camps are created solely for the purpose of the refugees in place-- and that's talking about just the camps. And I'm not saying that that's the only infrastructure for delivering that type of protection. I think it's a problem of what to do. And the military hospitals, if they shipped to the Dardanelles 150 years ago are the same. We don't have a solution to that-- that particular problem of war. But certainly the architecture of it comes out of trying to respond to it. [applause] I thought I'd start, and I'm going to start in a kind of kaleidoscope way, because it's a lot to think through. I think both of us are-- our heads are popping off. But I'm going to just start with the pleasure that we had listening to Reinhold last night. Of course, you began in some sense with Foucault. And it took me back to my own graduate school days at Berkeley. Unlike Mark, I wasn't marked, or inscribed by a need to write modernism again. But I was at Berkeley at a moment when we were taking a lot of courses in the history department. And I had also been brought up in a culture-- French, inevitably, you can yawn-- where modern doesn't begin in the second half of the 20th century at all. It begins in the 17th century. And still to this day, when you talk about the modern age, it's the 17th century. And it's in fact where Foucault places the beginning of the modern. Or modernity, if you will. And I was thinking about that. Because of course, Reinhold used-- beautifully, I thought-- the apparatus. It was a highly crafted and rhetorically beautiful sort of quartet. But I was also thinking about what was my Foucault? What was the one that was imposed on me, or that I inherited from my own upbringing and being at Berkeley and taking history courses, and coming into contact with people like Lynn Hunt. And I was on a Fulbright. I was very lucky with Minos, who was aligned also with Pierre Nora, the Realms of Memory. And Minos, of course, writing definitively about the French Revolution. Now there was a crisis. So I thought about this, or I was thinking about this. And the wonderful thing is why does Foucault put the beginning of the modern in the 17th century? And he does this in a very complicated, but subtle way. He begins by dropping the name of a book. A book which was published by some Jansenist philosophers by the names of Arnauld and Nicole, a book called Logic, or the Art of Thinking, published in 1683. And this is not because I went to Chicago. I know that, Mark, you did. But what this whole book was about in some sense is the birth of linguistics, or the birth of discourse itself. And it is more to a single Latin phrase that as fundamental to Catholicism-- I'm not Catholic, but I certainly read about this through Foucault, and Nicole and Arnauld, which is what you say when you raise the host. And its hoc est corpus meum. This is my body. And the astonishing thing, and what Foucault seized on, like Louis [? mihan ?], like Michel de Sautaux, like a whole generation of post-structuralists who were in fact focused on the Baroque. We tend to forget that today in America. What that phrase was was a perfect analogous, or found perfect homology with another pronouncement that staged the birth of the modern institution. The state is me. Right? Louis the XIV's great statement. The state is me. I am the state. Where does he get it? He gets it from this sort of inaugural moment of the Eucharist. Hoc est culpus meum. This is my body. And for Foucault, for Louis [? mihan ?], for Michel de Sautaux, and countless others, this was the beginning of a new semiotics, a new method of signifying the world, which was not early modern. Which did not involve a signifier, a conjunction, and a signified, but rather collapsed the signifier and the signified together, and gave birth to representation. And I'm thinking of Michael's critique yesterday about where is the sort of realm of representation in all of this. And it's astonishing, because of course what happens from this, what was generated from that, those four little words, was not only absolutism and its authority, but was also the bureaucracy that was generated by that statement that needed to function and actually act as purveyor belt of its own representation. And I can't help but think with all the talks that we've had, with your talk yesterday, with even the students' talks yesterday, that that's another form of the modern that is deeply tied to the topic of this conference, and to the idea of the institution. It's sort of both representational and discursive lineaments. And I just wanted to start with that, Reinhold. Because I think that that was in some sense the kind of generator of my own historical project. Interesting. OK. So where do we go? This is the question. Very interesting. Well, to begin also in this kind of autobiographical mode, I must say that for me this particular Foucault of discipline and punish, and which is the later phase. It's after the [inaudible] is a return. It's like going home in a way. Because it was under that that I suppose I could say was formed in some ways. In different ways. And actually a couple of weeks ago, I-- well, Daria was there. We were at a conference in San Diego, organized by John [inaudible] Julia Maxim. Joanna Maxim about housing, called Housing Question. And I gave a talk there. And it seemed to me important to re-read angles with everybody concerned today. I mean, since we ended with housing, we can pick it up again. But it to me it was an opportunity to try to maybe articulate something that I felt was latent in my own education. Actually, first as an architect, in which, bizarrely enough, when I was studying architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the 1980s-- this was before and during the theory days, but in a very different way. I was reading Jacques Donzelot. I could kind of reconstruct how and why, but it was who was basically-- Donzelot is a French urban sociologist who wrote a very important book that came out two years after Discipline and Punish. So '77 written in '75, called The Policing Of Families. And it does many of the same things that Foucault does with the prison, but through the institution of social work and psychology, or the psy sciences, as they are both called. And it seemed to me that there was not just an opportunity, but a kind of urgent necessity to speak like Foucault a little bit. You know, a strategic necessity to put two and two together an order to ask-- if we were going to reopen the question of housing as I think we must, then in that sense it's from the present rather than from some sort of question to do with historiography. Then we must do it differently. Or we must perhaps put things together that are in some sense antithetical, or at least don't belong together. So these two, Engels and [inaudible] and plus Foucault, historically don't belong together. Because of basically what we call theory is in some sense a response to Marxism. Whether it's critical theory and its revisions of the Marxist paradigm, or French theory and its various iterations, and/or upper [inaudible] in Italy. And so on. All these formations that are literature in one way. The other is footnotes or cites. So vis-a-vis representation. In that milieu, representation's like a bad word. It's everything but representation. It's production, as I just said. Power produces. So there is a split within Foucault, basically, in which in the early books he's concerned with the emergence and of course, in our historical terms we could speak about my [inaudible]. We could speak about symbolism. We could speak about all the usual-- and so the question I suppose-- the way I would sort of try to turn that question over. So both historically, if one were re-periodize, as I think you're reminding us we also must continue to do, one way to think about these two axes in that sense-- the axis of production that is emphasized in this later phase of Foucault, and the historical development of representation. But it's persistence as a critical-- within the Kantian tradition, within critical theory, within Marxism ideology critique, and so on, as a necessary critical sort of-- a locus of critique which I'm not ready to abandon like a good Foucaultian would in that sense. And yet, I guess this is maybe what we share here. Ready and due to historicize differently. And so that would be one of the questions. So how to historicize writing differently. And I'll just add one more thing, because I did say it last night. And so actually in that sense, for me, the triangle that this articulates-- it's not sort of finished, let's say, or complete, but it's a sketch-- is the third point of the triangle is media theory, or media history. The figure is [inaudible], whose work, very Foucaultian work, his first major translated volume, this other work, and so on and so forth. This is another one of these kind of transatlantic exchanges that's ongoing and incomplete. But discourse networks, 1800, 1900, works on this question. What's the difference? What happens in 1800, circa 1800, such that what is then called modern in the enlightenment sense is recognizable. And then what happens circa 1900 such that another kind of what we would still call modern, but differently, is recognizable. Whether or not periodizations are appropriate or accurate. He's mostly speaking about Germany and his great [inaudible]. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the problem is in the process of being rewritten, and how exactly we rewrite it. We could call it the problem of modernity, maybe. But that I think that we share, and is of great interest to me. I could also say I'm probably going backwards, starting in the postwar period, having written about postmodernism, and now going all the way back to at least the late part of the 18th century. We'll see how that goes. I noticed. With great joy, actually. I noticed with great joy. But you know, it also makes me think of the first time I was forced to encounter institutional realities as part of my work. And this was through the archive, as much as I came equipped. When I was a Berkeley, it was kind of an extraordinary moment, because of course, we had Tim Clark, along with Baxandall-- Michael Baxandall-- who was extraordinarily formative, at least for me. Along with Svetlana and others. But the reason I say this is that I was brought in, I suppose, into a kind of Marxist purview on the production of culture with someone who was attempting to bring together in a very robust way the realm of representation in the production of society. You know, those two were intertwined for him. They were not an axis. They were kind of constantly sort of meandering around and through each other. And at that point too, and it's been interesting to hear this throughout the talks, actually, this return to various notions of crisis. For him it was the French Revolution. And I as a new graduate student, I was going to read everything I could about the Revolution. And I got very interested actually in moments of iconoclasm. And in moments of public destruction of buildings. And I was very seduced by the idea of the crisis and the break. And I remember slowly learning of course, that all of this, or much of this, was completely state-sponsored, and highly orchestrated. And even down to the balustrades. And in the archives you find how high you put a fence so that people can still see the taking down of an equestrian monument, but not get too near so that you're not actually interfering. And what that says about the fear of the public realm. But somehow it's right to seeing things, right to seeing the symbolic apparatus of the past come down. And the one that really got me was the destruction of Saint-Denis in 1793, and realizing that of course, this was a state-sponsored project. And it suddenly started to occur to me, was it really so important by 1793? What was the status of that site? And I had just read Tocqueville. And Tocqueville is someone who actually took away the notion of crisis, and wrote essentially an institutional history of the dismantling of the old regime before the French Revolution. And the revolution was kind of a culmination of that destruction-- slow destruction, slow dismantling-- of the Church, of monastic orders, of aristocratic property. And I got fascinated with this. And I started to think, what was happening to Saint-Denis. And I went into the archives. It was hard, because suddenly I was thrust into the world of de-Christianization. And I had no idea. I did not have the background to deal with this kind of thorny set of institutions. And I quickly learned about the Gallican Church, about papal orders, the expulsion of the Jesuits. And then of course, the French Revolution is going to come around and sort of take over the public education system from the Jesuits, which is kind of interesting. Here at a public education in France. And realized of course, that what happened was that the lay clergy, those who were dealing with the public, were enlisted by the Crown to look into the affairs of the monastic orders, and systematically started to secularize the monasteries. And this happened, and was on the verge of happening to Saint-Denis. In other words, the Saint-Denis that was the burial site of kings before the French Revolution had actually been demolished as a symbolic structure. The two bodies of the King. That that was a myth gone in the wind. And so when the revolutionaries destroyed in a moment of crisis Saint-Denis, they actually reinstated its symbolic stature. And this was fascinating to me, because it was an institutional history that was wrapped in image-making and in destruction of images, and in iconoclasm, and the rights of state, in ways that I had never thought possible. And I think inevitably-- I'm here rehearsing Michael's questions to all of you-- how have we come to a point where somehow the visible and stable have been so divided. From my own background, or well perhaps what was suggested yesterday, or is there a new generation that's doing that. I'm even thinking-- and then I'll stop-- about aggregate, which is sort of the next generation of architectural historians who do amazing work. And [inaudible] Alexander is one of my former students. And Timothy is over at MIT doing extraordinary things. But one of the things that strikes me In that manner of proceeding are the kind of static diagrams of bureaucracies that get drawn when we know that bureaucracies are constantly in motion. And I just wonder how that kind of graphic imaginary has replaced, or sort of displaced, another kind of visible. Well, I suppose I have to implicate myself in having reproduced organization charts and that sort of thing. No. It's not a bad thing. It's not a bad thing. It's not a bad thing. No. But you're right. OK. Just to sort out a couple of the issues. On this let's say, asynchronous or polysynchronous historicities, you know, they're not reducible to just narratives of the revolutionary moment and its aftermath, and so on. I think nevertheless at some level, it remains necessary to-- speaking of thinkable and sayable-- to imagine, maybe here I'm with Tim Cook, that imagine a break. Now you know, whether in fact-- in actual lived history that break is more modulated, let's say, than even in the most paradigmatic instances. Like the French Revolution, this is probably going to be something that historians are going to fight over for many more decades. I just hope that they don't only spend their time fighting over the French Revolution. So there are unexplored breaks, under-explored breaks, like the Haitian one for example, that articulates with this one, but also articulates with what's going on in the new United States at the time, and some of the things we were talking about yesterday, vis-a-vis the political economy of the South, and so on. On the mythological point you were just making, it seems to me that one of the things that we can do to speak in this idiom, if we choose and accept the idiom, these kind of post-Foucaultian idiom, is to draw different diagrams. And in other words, OK, let's not fetishize this or that, including that one that is pretty much inherited from Kuhn anyways, of the paradigm shift. Or the epistemic break, code for Revolution, maybe. Or maybe not. In a moment in which Marxism itself is having some troubles in the '70s. Or in the '60s. In a sense the responsibility, the imperative, to remain modern in that strong sense, by being able to think change, like real change, like structural change. It seems to me more than ever, because if there's a job that the corporate university is doing very well, and not just in and of itself and on its own, but hooked up with all the other assemblages and all the rest of it, it is to prevent that. To make change unspeakable and unthinkable. To make real structural change unthinkable. And I think that's where many of the folks who speak about-- again, in the spirit of discourse analysis, that what a discourse or discursive formation is, let's say you call it the regime of representation, is not just that their specific relation between signifiers and signifies, but also that relation does epistemic work that is also the work of power. Yes. I agree. And whether it's vested interests-- the church, or whatever-- and or imminent ones. And I think in our current conjunction we see all of these working together in rather challenging ways. But to be able to recognize that we are working under discursive conditions in which the question of-- let's say, esoteric in a sense, historicographical questions we were just discussing before are anomalous, because they have been slowly eased off the table, because we just don't talk about that anymore. But that's the problem, right, is the perception that these have become esoteric. This brings us back, I think, to Mark's talk this morning, and the kind of role of history theory, and indoctoral programs. And also the sense of architecture maybe in particular-- wrongly accused-- but maybe in particular very presentist, or has been, and what that says. Or the sort of impoverishing, I think, in many places of what history is. A kind of dumb chronology. A kind of mute chronology. Which it certainly isn't. It's full of recursions and strangeness. And maybe this is a time when both of us, and certainly you spent a great many, many years heading the doctoral program at Columbia, to think or rethink the place of history theory. Yes. And pedagogy. Yes. It's interesting. Again, a whole conference could be-- One of the things-- again, this is a little bit anecdotal, but it is actually related to the very first point you made. I meant to say autobiographically, that my dissertation adviser was George [inaudible] who was and remains-- he's a historian of the French Enlightenment basically in an indirect way. Everything George does is indirect. Pretty much. Most of his actual work was in the 19th century. In fact, when I first started at Princeton, I thought I was going to do something in the 19th century. And maybe that's what I'm finally doing is the dissertation that I didn't do. But anyway, in fact, in this very room. OK. I was telling somebody, and we talked about this before. But there was a conference here. I forget what the conference itself was called. It was round 1997, '98, on postwar modernism. Because suddenly there was some idea that everybody was doing postwar modernism. And the various lab rats were brought here. Because that's what we discovered. This was a test. Then presentations were given. And then from that there was a smaller conference that was held up at the CCA. It wasn't really a conference, more like a workshop, that did not yet have the name Anxious Modernisms, but that's what it was. And we then realized-- those of us who wound up in this-- that there was a project. The project was to codify the historiography of postwar modernism. Quite narrowly construed, I must say, in relation to what at that point had been canonized as the high period of this high modernism of the 20s and 30s. OK. One could go on forever about the consequences of that. The main consequence was marked in the title of that book, which was anxiety. Anxious Modernisms was about-- because the rest of it didn't make any sense. The attempt at codification failed. And I think fortunately. But really it's within that kind of a context-- writing on the history of computing and so on-- that I began personally thinking that we really needed to think-- I'm speaking in some sympathy with Mark's point-- in longer terms. Because the culture industry, especially American academia, had become such-- and probably still is such, it's very noticeable in PhD programs-- that everybody's assigned a decade. And they're meant to be working on that decade. And at some point that was what kind of had happened, or seem to have happened, that enough people had been working on the '50s and '60s, that we could now have a big conference about and publish books. And so I feel at this point somewhat guilty about this-- or at least take some responsibility-- that was never the intention, like I said. The intention was 19th century. But you know, it became much the process of the certification machine, the job machine, the conference machine, the publication machine, all kind of lined up in this decade. And of course, geographically quite delimited way of working, and a way of thinking. So it's very much time in PhD programs, as well as at large, that we return to the big questions. And so for years at Columbia, some people will come and then they ask-- and during the process of applying and so on, I try to make it a point if somebody says, well what do you-- because we had a lot of people doing post-war, that no, this is not a program in postwar modernism. Is if there is an object of study, it's modernity. Now what that is, what that could mean, what the time frame is, was negotiable, and I think, remains negotiable. And ought to be at least negotiable. Ought to be. It's fascinating, because I think of the experiences that I've had-- to go back to one of your points last night co-teaching seminars, and I'm going to look right at Mark. We co-taught twice, I think. About 3 times. One was at MIT. One was a seminar called Rethinking Public Space, which was very well attended, of course. And then the other one was Beaux-arts in America. And Beaux-arts in America was-- I should have taken it. Well, nobody took it. That was the problem. I think we got three people, or two people. And the reason we had done that was because Mark, for years knew about a cache of unbelievable drawings at MIT, of course. And we had all the curricular stuff. And we had it all. And nobody was interested. Too early. It was a little too early. It was fascinating. We ended up having a lovely conversation between ourselves. If it had been taught at the GSD, they would have cancelled it. But not at MIT. Which is another issue that I don't want to go into. It was kind of extraordinary, and fuddy duddy, because we spent most of our time in the museum. And we were looking at these things and trying to figure them out. And it was in some ways one of the very best experiences I ever had. Even though we only had two students. Correct. Correct. That's exactly why. Of course. I know, I know. Absolutely. 100%. Well, you know, and even as I'm saying what I-- at least I just said in reaction to what earlier you said, about let's say, the scope and the project of PhD research in architecture schools, which by the way, ought not to be seen in and of itself on its own. I think obviously this whole conference is addressed to that question. But at Columbia our program-- as I think yours is too-- it participates in the faculty of Arts and Sciences. It's in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. So it sort of lives in the architecture school, but it's intellectually in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. It's very much hooked up with the other humanities and qualitative social science graduate cohorts. And often there are all kinds. There's a lot of exchange. And it's something that we really ought to nurture. Not easy to do all the time, because of various departmental regime's requirements. The challenge always of getting enough coursework in the discipline in one way or the other, and connecting-- Not to mention-- We have to get past this. Not to mention the sort of-- to talk about the corporate university-- the more corporate parts, as in professional schools, as opposed to faculties of Arts and Sciences, which is something that we struggle with here. Which is-- well, there are go. I can't tell you. That's for later. But yes. But it's very important because there's a contingency to the fact that we're-- I was going to say artificiality, but that would give the wrong signal. Historical contingency to the fact that we're having this kind of conversation in a professional school. It's a great thing, because architecture schools are still the only professional schools in the United States that require history and theory-- history classes as part of the professional curriculum. By virtue of certification and all of that. The Columbia Law School, for example, is very strong in history and indeed in theory. But those students don't have a PhD program. And they're not required to take survey courses, even, in the history of law. So I think there are-- and the story of the beaux-arts is very, very interesting from that point view, because the architecture is often-- law usually comes first. In some universities in the States it's medical school. At Penn, for example, it's very early. But the architecture school is not exceptional. There's a bit of a myth that professional schools are exceptional either because we come from out of these academies which are like gentlemen's clubs. And there's a sort of internal discourse that needs to be defended, protected, and we speak in code, and all that nonsense. No. This is actually something very typical. This is something that Kant recognized in his own language and context in the late 18th century, in this sort of relation of different forms of knowledge to the sovereign. I'm referring to the idea of the conflict of the faculties, which is in any faculty meeting that I've ever been in. And doesn't matter what department, or whether-- something like that is at work. OK. Basically I have to explain, I suppose. According to Kant, there are two faculties-- it's not according to him. It was his effectively true in the German university system. The higher and lower. And counterintuitively maybe, to us, the higher faculties are the professional schools, because they are in closer proximity to the sovereign. In other words, they work directly for Frederick the Great. And they report. And those are specifically law and theology. And then philosophy, which is what we call the humanities, or even the arts and sciences, is the lower faculty. And Kant plays this game in which it seems like he's deferring. And well, we just philosophize what he is of course suggesting is a strategic reversal, and particularly [inaudible] reads this in this way. So I don't think that that necessarily-- and especially again, when you look at the curriculum at UVA, when it was founded, which one would imagine given Jefferson's commitment to at least the French enlightenment, would most loyally reflect something of this. It doesn't really. Actually, it's very heterogeneous. The big problem there was where to put the anatomy theater. Because it would have to be off to the side. But anyway, the relation between different forms of knowledge is a structural one, but it's imminent. In other words, it's not just that you can isolate instrumental knowledge in the professional schools and reflective knowledge in the philosophy department, or whatever. This problem permeates not just academic life, but life with the production of knowledge generally. But it does manifest differently in different places. And it seems to me that that's-- and there is also some tricky reversals, where what looks like reflective knowledge turns out to be-- this is very Adornian in a sense-- but what it turns out to be the cutting edge, or the leading edge of the next cycle. Turn in the dielectric. If you want to read it in that way. Well, this brings us back to the question of revolution. There is I think, one of the most formidable footnotes-- you can correct me if I'm wrong-- Kant ever wrote in The Metaphysics of Morals where he jettisons his language. And turns to the execution of the King in France, and neatly in one fell swoop discredits revolution radically, because the sovereign has been removed. Hierarchy, the faculty's undone. And this is cast for him-- it's an astonishing line-- as the modern original sin of history. And so this in some ways just brings it all back to questions of hierarchies of power, institutions, and figurative or not, sovereigns. Yeah. PhD programs are like sanctuaries in this way. And they need to be-- as was discussed earlier-- they need to be better supported. They also need to be acknowledged as the sites in which these kinds of questions are asked and reproduced and articulated, and so on. So the relationship, not just of let's say, master planning, or other forms of governmental practice and so on that are cultivated in architecture schools, to power, but also philosophy of power. And it usually makes for a more interesting discussion or a seminar. It sure does. But it's also more accurate. It's more historically rich to enable that. And then when you connect that with the fact that history is required-- we could ask in what sense is it required? What's the job of the historian? Is it to reproduce reflective knowledge? Is there some enlightened aftermath here that we're sitting here, rather than in the philosophy department or whatever, because somebody wrote a law, or something like a law, in an enlightened way, that there must be reflective knowledge taught in architecture schools? I mean, I actually doubt that. I do too. I mean, obviously we both do. But obviously too, we want to think of this as a collective enterprise. And there's a battleground of ideas. And we will figure it out, as long as it's not jettisoned. That's the issue. I mean, the global question. I wanted to get back to this. This is another one of these-- I mean, at Columbia, you should hear it. I mean, every other word, global. If I told you all the institutions with the word global in it, then I've crisscrossed. But it's not since it's an empty signifier. One could ask for what does the global stand? What does the global serve? What is the sovereign that commands this thing that we call global? There be many answers. But there is I think, maybe Mark you were alluding to this a little bit. But there's a call-- there's a call to responsibility here. There's a sense of this is what we're here to do is to work on these kinds of questions. Not just to in a sense either dismiss them cynically or ignore them, or avoid them. So I have to say, I think sometimes these kind of empty words, like postmodernism is another one, are useful in this way. They're useful because what we know about them is not what they signify or what they could signify, or even how to fix these things, or how to locate them. But that they do signify. They do a certain amount of work. They do the work of power, in fact. Well, they're containers. Which is exactly in some ways the point that [inaudible] and-- Yeah. I was gonna say that. Oh sorry. I stole your line. Go for it. No, no, no. I was just going to allude to that. But you helped me. Because they could be that model represented-- but since we're next door, or in the vicinity of William James, we can also speak of language doing other things. And let's say that to say global is to perform a speech act of some kind, to act in the world of discourse, but also of power and of politics, in ways to which we must remain accountable. So yes, there ought to be ways of thinking globality other than through capital. And there are. And that, it seems to me, is our collective responsibility, whether we're speaking of 16th century, 17th century Spain, or the late 20th century, early 21st century in the United States. These questions are epistemological questions. They're not necessarily metaphysical or ontological questions. They are the questions of how we know. And how we know. I mean, I have to say I'm not sure that global is the same as big. There's a kind of historically and global is about like sipping tea and drinking wine. We were speaking about the public sphere at lunch. In the public sphere known as Monticello, in which the wine would appear-- French wine-- in through the mechanism of the dumb waiter, so that the enslaved person down in the basement would not witness the conversation. So in the enlightened public sphere of Monticello. So that kind of intimacy has in some sense always been-- if we could say always, or long been-- part of the history, at least, of this thing that we call global. And so that's one answer to me to the challenge of always having in some sense to have a map of the world when we do that. Yes, of course. And to situate. The world is a small place, anyway. This is a very small planet. But also to learn to think differently about those intimacies that do the work of the global. I think I'll just finish this up, because we're well after 5:00. Just with a table of contents, because I'm sort of obsessed with your list. I remember years ago, it was a decade ago, or something. There was a PhD student at Berkeley. She was working with Svetlana Alpers on Dutch painting. And what she did was essentially make a list of the objects. And she tracked them all over the world. So with that nod to Mark, I want to thank you all so much for being here. And thank you, Reinhold. That was great. [applause]