Ephraim Joris :

Comments on the Abandoned Sacred Places workshop in St-Lucas Brussels. An international master class negotiating the po-ethics of reconverting abandoned sacred places.

We were sat in the northeast corner of Brussels, a capital in many ways and a self-proclaimed symbol for multiculturalism. Yet within these aspirations of theatrical political performance lays an urban space that reveals a struggle, resisting questions of openness, integration and coalition. Within this fabric of oppositions we sat for just under two weeks, housed in a former furniture store, refurbished in an attempt to celebrate its emptiness within this city of struggle; emptiness as a canvas, emptiness accommodating a place for ‘The School of Architecture’ also referred to as ‘Sint-Lucas with a c’.

We all grouped around a theme questioning the ‘po-ethics’ of converting abandoned sacred places. A question gaining relevance through a 21st century cultural development where globalised territories such as Brussels provide fertile grounds for religious and cultural heritage systems to nurture demographic segregation. Close-proximity-enclaves, self-motivated in essence, are constantly claiming new territories giving rise to a perpetual flux of instability in which spaces are used and disused across the city.

As we position ourselves around the question, three main camps set up a perimeter of thought circumscribing three ideological proposals; (1) approaching the question through non-hierarchical, trans-clerical concepts to generate new urban impulses and new socio-spatial connections, (2) approaching the question through the re-installation of singular ideologies with a focus on dynamic interrelationships, or (3) approaching the question through the concept of emptiness as a possible tool to celebrate that-what-is-not.

With the aim to design space and to engage with this difficult pursue of answering the question of considering the ‘po-ethics’ of converting abandoned sacred places we sit comfortably within the emptiness of the former furniture store. When the first attempts ignite to engage with the question, it is soon revealed that the urge to think towards a singular answer is implicitly impossible. Through wading the murky waters of different opinions and diverse cultural codes the question is gradually unravelled. Days go by where we talk. We talk amongst each other. We talk as part of discussion groups. We talk before morning and keep on talking after dinner, when we walk to our hotel rooms. We present PowerPoint presentations illustrating the ‘digs’ screening excavation grounds where ideas have been revealed; layer for layer, forming a landscape of pits where we find our objects-of thought, one after the other.

And then anxiety sets in. Here we are, when we leave the school we walk the streets, visiting abandoned and not-so-abandoned sacred places. As we walk, we meander in and out our own disciplines. With each conversation new nuances are made. But still that anxiety, the urge to structure, remains. That urge to clearly delineate. Through the power of that singular line, through that ‘trajectory force’ from the wrist, we draw. We draw not only the demarcations of our abstract spatial proposals; we also draw the demarcations of our own professional territories.

In ‘The Production of Spaces’, Henri Lefebvre describes how our western industrialised world overwhelms us with concepts of objectifying abstraction. In such a way that even sensory aspects of our everyday life are dealt with (and thus represented) in terms of quantifiable commodities and categories. He writes how this stands at the basis of a professional authority (such as us; spatial designers) to describe and engage with abstract space privileging the element of ‘conceived space’ and repress the element of experienced space or ‘perceived space’. Through this observation he distinguishes two different types (or what he calls fields) of spaces; physical space (that what is conceived through thinking, abstracting, measuring, categorising, etc) and mental space (that what is perceived through experience; smell, touch, moving, etc.) complementing a third field what he describes a social space; a space that can only be lived, a space that is a combination of physical space and experienced space.
As anxiety sets in we indeed seem overwhelmed by the need to work through concepts of objectifying abstraction. As we discuss the concepts of converting abandoned sacred places we feel the growing pressure to start translating our objects-of thought into quantifiable categories and thus focus on a process of categorising to clearly demarcate our spatial proposals. Is this not why we are here? To design, to draw and model physical spaces…spaces that we can measure?

Yes we are (to a certain extend). But more then ever we also need to question our strategies where we privilege the element of ‘conceived space’. We are here not just to design. We are here to think about the design of abandoned sacred places. Places that are routed in a cultural and socio-political history. Places that are inseparable form what Henri Lefebvre describes as mental space, a space that is ultimately perceived and not merely conceived. So as we question the powers of that ‘trajectory force’ we ought to develop an understanding that we need to question our role within a professional authority overwhelming us with concepts of objectifying abstraction and as a result of questioning our role also question the tools by which we perform as critical designers.

We eventually start drawing. We eventually start making models; all to describe spatial proposals encapsulating the ideas developed through our dialectic sessions. Soon we understand that our hunger for debate did not end when we concluded the discussion groups yet remains strong even when we draw and model our ideas. We see how the drawing is not only used to describe an objective proposition yet used more to visualise implicitly unstable ideas. Here drawing is not merely the representation of a projected reality (as it often is in spatial practice as opposed to contemporary art practice for example). Drawing takes on forms of ‘visual thinking’ (Rudolph Arnheim and Robert H McKim) to engage with the mapping of different ideas providing conduits for conceptual transgression. As we move from the preconception of drawing to be a classical tool for observation and description and move towards an understanding that we can or even ought to use the drawing as part of a dialectic strategy to look beyond phenomenological space and engage with what Henri Lefebvre describes as mental space.

When Daniel Tollady, Liisa Poime, Lien Velghe and Tahnee van Steenbrugge design their project ‘de-form/re-form’, they do exactly that. They engage with two types of spaces in their de-form/re-form project. They look at an abandoned church in terms of a physical reality, i.e. a spatial product. In this physical state they observe the church as abandoned and empty.
Yet at the same time they also look at the church as a ‘produced space’; a space that is experienced and more specifically experienced by the immediate community living around the empty building. As such the church is observed as not abandoned at all yet fully acknowledged as empty. In this way the group succeeds in an analysis of both the conceived and perceived space in and around the church, describing the coalition between physical and the mental space. As a result of this analysis the group successfully develops a proposal that aims to transforms both physical and mental space to engage with what Henri Lefebvre describes as social space (a space that is lived).

With their design the group proposes to change the composition of the church by disassembling the clock tower and let the current community re-install the tower horizontally, penetrating the interior of the empty church. With this proposal they rightly define the clock tower to be a social symbol. They acknowledge the tower to be part of a cultural code previously locating a close-nit community around its base. As the community eroded the clock tower gradually lost it’s meaning. The disassembly of the clock tower materialises this observation of an eroding community describing the clock tower as an empty symbol. The horizontal installation of this empty symbol, penetrating an empty space, does re-install symbolic meaning particular to the current community and thus negotiates both physical and mental space in the design and description of a new social space. De-from/re-from certainly approaches the question concerning the po-ethics of reconverting abandoned sacred places through the concept of emptiness, in this case by annotating that-what-is-not hence re-installing symbolic relevance.

With the development of this type of work we meander between the use of the drawing/model as classical representational tool in line with architectural professional codes describing quantifiable space and using the drawing/model more as a perceptive tool in order to examine performative, sensory aspects of our everyday life. Objective observations towards the physical and technological are complemented with more sensual/subjective observations towards the sensorial to enable a critical dialogue between that which might be categorized as scientific or ‘object-driven’ and that which might be developed through experience, coincidence and error.
This dual performance of the drawing/model does seem to set up a platform for designing space beyond the phenomenological and negotiate space as part of a complex system of perception and conception to eventually design towards social space; a space that can only be lived.