Life
Building on a
Vision: An Anatomy
of Defensive
Architectural
Paradigms
Rouzbeh Akhbari
and David Schnitman
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In discourses of urbanism, death is
identified as a threat, a terrain to be
avoided; while life is understood as
a landscape to be further manufactured, mobilized, and utilized. This
supposed dichotomy between spaces
of death and life has led to the generation of clearly demarcated built
environments. Within modernist and
colonial processes of place-making,
these categories are delineated by
border zones, whose construction relies increasingly on defensive architectural paradigms. Defensive architecture is the construction of built
forms such as walls, turnstiles or
bollards, which aim to postpone or
suspend the inevitable arrival of the
ultimate threat: death. In the continuation of a colonial agenda referred
to as “the War on Terror” built forms
common to distant militarized zones
return to the homeland as tools for
spatial management. The construction of these objects is informed by
specific visual paradigms. In what
follows, we aim to unpack the role
of linear, aerial, and temporal perspectives in the conception of urban
defensive strategies. We challenge the
death/life binary by proposing speculative design projects that function
in the interstitial spaces of Toronto’s
fortified architecture. These intermediary spatial interventions exist as
satirical props for a performative decolonial practice that insists on re-examing the city beyond a paranoiac
mechanism for the living.
In order to unpack how different visual paradigms inform defensive architectures, we will begin with
the convention of linear perspective.
Established in the early Renaissance,
linear perspective as a tool of representation involves the convergence of
horizontal and vertical planes on the
horizon in reference to a vanishing
point. This individualized perspective “makes the single eye the centre
of the visible world,” addressing a single spectator who is in one place at
one time.1 This form of vision is useful for determining one’s surroundings in relation to the horizon line and
allows one to visualize threats within
the limits of their vision. Historically,
watchtowers and other edifices for
identifying threats on the horizon depended on a layered reinforcement of
their perimeters through walls and
other barriers. In 1871, during the
Paris Commune, this method of spatial layering as a means of defence
was mobilized in a makeshift manner
by the communards throughout city
streets as barricades. Subsequently,
these informal barricades were appropriated and cemented as permanent structures surrounding secured
buildings, often in the form of carbomb obstacles, barbed-wire fences, and motorized gates. We propose
an addition to the barriers that have
militarized our urban landscape: a
chair, specifically constructed for the
gap between the car-bomb barriers in front of the American General
Consulate in Toronto. Designed to accommodate up to four individuals,
participants can sit and engage in dialogue as they monitor their field of vision for encroaching enemies.
Let us now turn our gaze
downward and consider how, in the
1 John Berger,
Ways of Seeing (New
York: Penguin, 1972),
16.
Not Life
Building on a Vision: An Anatomy of Defensive Architectural Paradigms
Life
Rouzbeh Akhbari, Periculum Inspectoris, 2016. Steel, CDV Geiger Counter. 40 by 210 by 20 cm.
Photo by Rouzbeh Akhbari.
Rouzbeh Akhbari, E Pluribus Unum, 2015. Ebonized Ash, 45 by 155 by 55 cm. Photo by Niloufar Nelly Goodarzi.
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Scapegoat: Architecture, Landscape, Political Economy
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aesthetic arena, linear perspective has
been supplanted by a god’s-eye-view
from above. In her essay In Free Fall:
A Thought Experiment on Vertical
Perspective, Hito Steyerl remarks
that the god’s-eye-view made ubiquitous through mapping software is
“a proxy perspective that projects
delusions of stability, safety, and extreme mastery onto a backdrop of expanded 3D sovereignty.”2 Beginning
in World War One, airplane photography, initially used to comprehend
an enemy’s state of affairs, facilitated
the expansion of an aerial perspective by uniting technologies of transportation and communication for
the purposes of warfare.3 Today, aerial reconnaissance has shed much of
its “lag time” and live video surveillance is often conducted remotely by
unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones.
Used by militaries to remotely survey
“dangerous individuals” and zones
of conflict, armed drones combine legal and lethal protocols of judgement
that result in well-known atrocious
consequences.4
At the same time, the proliferation of drones bought for consumer
electronic purposes will likely have
architectural ramifications that affect the morphology of the city. The
prevalence of commercial drones will
inevitably demand specialized infrastructure for safe operation and storage. We anticipate this infrastructure
will function similar to architectural
multipliers such as residential garages or bicycle racks. Inspired by
similar forms of defensive architecture, we propose the design of a drone
landing pad that disguises itself as an
innocuous garden planter. In dense
urban environments, efficient drone
operation will depend on its seamless
integration in the urban milieu. The
dual function of these pads as planters might allow them to adorn the
grounds of civic institutions, rooftop
gardens in financial districts, and privately owned public spaces.
Now, as an experiment let us
close our eyes and imagine the threats
that are beyond the threshold of human sensory experience. These include radioactive materials, toxic
chemicals, viruses, and other forms
of “delayed destruction that [are] dispersed across time and space, attritional [forms of] violence that [are]
typically not viewed as violence at
all.”5 With advancements in biological, chemical, and radioactive
warfare, the practice of defensive architecture now accounts for “violence
that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and
accretive.”6 This epistemological shift
is largely concerned with complicating spatial representation by engaging with the temporal cartographies
of slow violence. For example, in the
event of a nuclear disaster or an environmental catastrophe, one’s bearings are lost and orientation with
2 Hito Steyerl, “In
Free Fall: A Thought
Experiment on Vertical
Perspective,” e-flux,
April 2011.
3 Allan Sekula,
“The Instrumental
Image: Steichen at
War,” in Photography
Against the Grain:
Essays and Photo Works
1973–1983 (Halifax:
Press of the Nova Scotia
College of Art and
Design, 1984), 33–51.
4 Letta Tayler, “A
Wedding That Became
a Funeral: US Drone
Attack on Marriage
Procession in Yemen,”
Human Rights Watch,
2 February 2014,
https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/02/19/wedding-became-funeral/
us-drone-attack-marriage-procession-yemen.
5 Rob Nixon,
Slow Violence and the
Environmentalism
of the Poor (Harvard
University Press,
2013), 2.
6 Ibid.
Not Life
Building on a Vision: An Anatomy of Defensive Architectural Paradigms
Life
Rouzbeh Akhbari, E Pluribus Unum, 2015. Ebonized Ash, 45 by 155 by 55 cm.
Photo by Niloufar Nelly Goodarzi.
Rouzbeh Akhbari, Periculum Inspectoris, 2016. Steel, CDV Geiger Counter. 40 by 210 by 20 cm.
Photo by Rouzbeh Akhbari.
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91
conventional navigational devices becomes impossible. This issue was addressed at the zenith of the Cold War.
At the time, the heightened probability of a nuclear missile exchange between the US and the Soviet Union led
civil defense companies to re-imagine wayfinding in post-apocalyptic
landscapes. In the 1970s their efforts
culminated in the commercial mass
production of household “survival
kits” complete with procedural manuals, dosimeters, geiger counters, and
iodine pills.7
There are parallels between the
devastation caused by a nuclear missile exchange and nuclear fallout from
sites such as the Pickering Nuclear
Generating Station. As recently as
2015, 200,000 Toronto households
received potassium iodide pills, aka
RadBlock, in order to reduce the risk
of thyroid cancer in the event of nuclear fallout.8 Considering the demands for new forms of wayfinding
across terrains shrouded by radioactive iodine gas, we propose to implement geiger counters situated at
regular intervals on the city’s public
walkways. This proposed public device is a CDV geiger counter that sits
on a structure similar to a payphone
stand, thus allowing passers-by to
check radiation levels on various city
blocks and navigate accordingly.
7 Defense Civil
Preparedness Agency,
“Radiological Defense
Preparedness,” CPG
2-6.1, April 1978.
8 Daniel Otis, “East
End Given Iodine Pills
as Nuclear Disaster
Precaution,” Toronto
Star, 10 November 2015,
https://www.thestar.
com/news/gta/2015/
11/10/east-end-giveniodine-pills-as-nucleardisaster-precaution.
html.
Not Life