The Eiffel Tower

After reading Roland Barthes “The Eiffel Tower.”
Barthes raised some interesting ideas in this essay explaining the nature of monuments, what constitutes a tourist experience, what is expected, and what an architectural object can do in relation to its surroundings.
The Eiffel Tower is an annomily in the Parisian city form. When it was built, it was hotly contested and harshly criticized. However “useless” critics may have once viewed this gigantic tower to be, it now functions on much more poetic terms with the city. It is an icon and symbol greater than its own physical presence. Today, the Eiffel Tower is Paris, it is France.
More interesting than symbols, the visitor experience at a monument is not simply directed by contact with a striking form. Barthes most interesting point is that monuments require an interior. Part of the tourist experience is to be enclosed, to venture into a new environment, and to then emerge. Visiting a monument, a cultural building, a city, or country, for that matter, involves crossing a boundary and entering a new system. Only by being inside architecture can one truly claim to have “been there and done that.”
The interior of monuments, the way the visitor experiences the sequence of events that control their journey, and the balance between the visitor limits and opportunities are the significant areas of architectural interventions. This is the place where space is determined and narrative is described.
Despite my aversion to interior design as a popularized decorative remodeling, I am interested in how the way an internal sequence of events shapes experience. (This experience extends beyond the walls of house, the walls of a city, or the boarders of a country. Architecture is essentially an exercise is drawing poetic boundaries.) What is more challenging, is how this sequence can be transmitted to the exterior of the building, to some enclosure that describes the events within. This is similar to giving a new form to a movie theater. Imagine the American movie theater - one of the most sophisticated and strictly controlled public environments and at the same time informative and highly political - encased is a wrapper that signals the importance of what goes on inside. Imagine seeing “Superman” in a space that is no longer a black box, but a synthetic mix of illusion and reality, urbanism and identity, space and experience. Now, most movie theaters are no spaces (the lights are off, nobody moves).
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Second Thoughts
Walter Benjamin dwells on the interior. In his essay on the development of the 19th Century and his attempts to reclassify history in the relationship of people to new understanding of history as the ever present, Benjamin dedicates an entire section to the interior. It is in the Parisian buduoirs of the nineteenth century that avante garde ideas of the modern world evolved. Impressionism, Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism were all born in this environment. Appollinaire, Breton, ... all wandered the streets. Derrida wrote in Paris in the 1970s. It was universally regarded as the center of the art world in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It is the convergence of the fresh ruins of an imperial power, the dirty cafes, and the overfilled civic institutions that gave birth to the aesthetic revolutions of the early twentieth century.
What Benjamin proposes is that the man of the crowds, the central character in his modern world, not only lives on the streets and in the arcades. The flaneur also has an interior life that is essential to his identity. Perhaps this development is a product of the modern world and industrialization’s seperation of work and home in the city, but the origins are beside the point. The way people function in the city is essentially a duel environment. Home is the nest, the interior. Everything beyond is outside, out, the city. The interior is the individual world that exists within the city, just like the artwork on the gallery wall is an individual world in the museum complex. Interior, boundaries, and the city. The boundary around the interior is the form of a building.
It would be interesting to compare Benjamin’s flanuer and Thoreau’s Wild Walker. Are there parallels or are these essentially different, opposed positions. “Hike up your skirts and go walking” - a note on a custom map at a cottage in southern England. Both are walking in forests. One is in a labyrinth (the city) one is outside civilization (the wild, the woods). Both let their paths be determined. The flaneur is slow paced, and indecissive (the pace of a turtle, passive) the wild walker is indeterminate, yet on a mission (free willed and committed).
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1.8.06
London felt much smaller and quainter after driving back from Cornwall. It took on the air of a precious object.