Book Review Architectural Imitations: Reproductions and ...

Book Review Architectural Imitations:
Randolph Starn
Reproductions and Pastiches in
Cover of Architectural Imitations East and West
edited by Wim Denslagen and
Niels Gutschow Edited by Wim Denslagen and Niels Gutschow
Maastricht: Shaker Publishing BV, 2005

Imitation has a mixed press. Tradition depends on it; so does
plagiarism. One way or another, we are beholden to it through
our DNA and the languages we speak. The first historic preser-
vation argument in the West divided along these lines. Was the
ship that Theseus sailed back from killing the Cretan minotaur
formally the same when the Athenians replaced decaying tim-
bers? Or was it different, a far cry from the original but neces-
sary to the ship’s material survival? Evidently the Greeks never
solved their conundrum to anyone’s recorded satisfaction. The
modern solution probably never occurred to them: let’s build a
new ship.

It’s hard to imagine the ancient or the modern arguments
making it safely into port these days. We seem to be as disillu-
sioned about preserving things as about creating a brave new
world. “Heritage” has long since become an easy target, an
advertising gimmick, or a bad joke. Thirty years after the Venice
Charter of 1964 enjoined the conservation of historic monu-
ments and sites “in the full richness of their authenticity,” many
conferees in an international meeting on preservation criticized
the Charter as a cover for capitalism, Western imperialism, reac-
tionary politics, bad faith, and false consciousness. By that time
the “test of authenticity” had stretched from historic monu-
ments and sites to “districts” and landscapes, from high to ver-
nacular culture, from a distant to an instant past, from the West
to the rest of the world. Once a movement, preservation had
become a bureaucratic institution on a national and an interna-
tional scale, a sure sign that it was also an industry intent on
breaching rules and regulations.1 Add the long agony of High
Modernism in architecture and the arts and we end up with the
postmodernist mantra “in the beginning was the copy,” with the
coda “and in the end, too.”

The story of this double dissolution is by now so familiar as
to look practically overdetermined. Preservation, so the formula
goes, was modernization’s codependent and modernism’s
shadow.2 This is very schematic of course. But the literature on
preservation has a weakness for programmatic generalizations.
Critics charge Heritage Inflation while inflating and conflating
in turn a gallery of real and imagined nostalgia enthusiasts,
conservative ideologues, elitist aesthetes, cultural marketeers,
and meddling bureaucrats.3 It doesn’t help when preservation
activists look more menacing than they are, partly to compen-

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sate for being outgunned by the real movers and shakers who
get things built. It doesn’t help, either, that most of the critics
are not preservation professionals. At its best the working liter-
ature of historic preservation entails a practical but not unprin-
cipled calculus of values and choices. Preservation purists
attract more attention, but as I have argued elsewhere, profes-
sional pragmatism is the basso continuo beneath their showy
coloratura. Alois Riegl and Camillo Boito were key figures in for-
mulating a nuanced theory and practice early in the twentieth
century, but their tradition is still alive in the ongoing revisions
of the Venice Charter.4

But what happens with an ever more insistent chorus pro-
claiming authenticity a false god? What if we start with imitation
trumping preservation in principle as well as practice? The
important collection of essays edited by Wim Denslagen and
Niels Gutschow raises questions like these from the title. The fif-
teen entries in the table of contents all refer to historic buildings
or styles, but the terms “preservation” or “conservation” are
conspicuously absent.5

Denslagen’s introduction is a spirited manifesto. He is quite
single-minded in censuring the Romantic legacy—particularly
its cult of originality and towering condescension—that, as he
sees it, blinkered Modernism and its shadowy other,
Preservation. By now there is more dirge than wake-up call in
this exposé. Denslagen’s introductory survey is more interest-
ing, a quick but discerning preview of themes that his fellow
contributors examine in different contexts and in detail. To
begin with, he claims that replicas are the closest but usually
the least contested imitations, at least in architectural practice,
because everybody knows they are not “real” architecture. He
goes on to distinguish between replication and more or less lit-
eral reconstruction in traditional or regional styles. In the wake
of natural calamities, willful destruction, and war, he is sympa-
thetic to the consolations of reproducing what was lost or
adapting reconstruction to its look and feel. He gives only quali-
fied approval to the “critical” or “creative” mix of old and new in
historic settings, as theorized and practiced since the 1970s;
going a step further, he objects to what he takes to be snobbish
dismissals of new-old construction of whole villages and
cityscapes, “shameless expression of nostalgic sentiments”
though they may be.6 “If architectural imitations are part of our
world, we should not ignore them in our research, but try to find
out their societal functions and decide which imitations are
worthwhile and which are senseless or just boring.”7

This appeal to research sounds like an academic version of
calling for a congressional investigation—too little and too late.
It certainly is too late to reverse the mimetic tide. Architectural
Imitations encompasses a breathtaking range of sites and struc-

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tures. China and Japan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, and Southeast
Asia are represented; so too are Moscow, Berlin, Beruit, and
Sarajevo, Poland, the Ukraine, and Colombia. Denslagen begins
with an overview for Western Europe in which he fills out his
brief against “the blind alley of Modernism”8; Vincent Van
Rossem rounds off the volume with a chapter on “the lure of the
past” in the Netherlands. As remarkable as the range, the
essays are detailed and searching. Collectively and by the piece
this is no small contribution to understanding real-world ideas
and practices.

If there is not much finger-wagging disapproval, there is not
much out-and-out cheerleading, either. Critics have sometimes
countered building conservation’s Eurocentrism with the exam-
ple of the ritually rebuilt wooden temples of Japan. They do not
cite telephone booths with brackets and finials made to look
like stupas, not to mention a booming Japanese industry in
Dutch windmills and European castles. Wim Denslagen’s co-edi-
tor Niels Gutschow hardly flinches—“copies are a worldwide
phenomenon”9—and goes on to point out that the pastiche of
the most famous Japanese tourist sites such as the Chukodo of
Kiyomuzu Temple in Kyoto is closer to the norm than the scrupu-
lous reconstruction of the temple of Ise. Gutschow’s conclusion
is deliberately low-key: “The proximity of progressive and nos-
talgic expressions of culture seems not to be a major problem in
Japan.”10

A. G. Krishna Menon opens the next essay with the observa-
tion that in India architectural imitation is “more the rule than
the exception.”11 True, the “contentious principles of the Venice
Charter continue to be legal tender in India” under the aegis of
the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI).12 However, Krishna
Menon makes the case for the productive double function of
“inventive mimesis,” creative copying that fosters continuity
while also creating new architectures. Taken together, the
hybrid mix of ASI regulations, “Punjabi Baroque,” the pseudo-
historical Chhattarpur Temple complex, and adaptive reuse of
the ruins of the fortress-palace at Neemerana outside Delhi defy
exclusive judgments of value.

Does this mean that anything goes? Gutschow, Krishna
Menon, and their fellow authors do not seem to believe they are
licensing rudderless relativism, fake history, or a sell-out. Their
differences are legion, but they would probably agree that those
differences and the play of interests in each instance are more
important than doctrinal consistency. Choices have to be made,
and the consensus seems to be that the best we can do is to try
to understand what the stakes are with some measure of critical
distance. No doubt there are more heroic postures—there are
certainly more destructive ones—but even this modest position
is easier to propound than to do anything about.

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Doing takes the form dossiers on selected projects, with
considerable authorial kibitzing on the side. No fewer than eight
papers deal with sites devastated by war and revolution.
Fastidious complaints about reconstruction—that it is a mere
shadow of the real thing, a failure of nerve, a turn from the
future—are bound to seem callous in such circumstances. The
papers do not indulge in smug critiques of this sort, but they do
make distinctions. No one still complains about the hyperreal
medievalism of the Cloth Hall at Ypres; reconstructed practically
from scratch after 1918 over the protests of doctrinaire preserva-
tionists and modernist architects, it salved a wound and has
long since acquired its own “new” patina. The politics of
rebuilding churches and erecting pseudo-historical independ-
ence monuments in the Ukraine, however poignant, are harder
to take in stride. The 2002 advertising calendar for made-to-
order historic churches in Bohdan Tscherkes’ essay and his
interviews with the architects of some of these projects are
dispiriting. “At last I was able to comply with all their desires,”
says architect Aleksandr Komorovskijin on knuckling under to
official and popular pressures for a “traditional” monument in
Kiev.13

Not surprisingly, the essays on rebuilding Beirut’s Central
District and on reconstruction controversies in Berlin rehearse a
particularly elaborate and sophisticated repertory of argu-
ments; hardly less surprisingly, both papers trail off in a kind of
agonized indecision. Marjana Lozanovska keys her piece to the
huge Solidere Consortium Beirut development plan of 1992 and
the intense discussion and revision to which it has given rise
since then. “All critics,” she writes, “dream of finding ways for
architecture and urbanism to intervene in the historical cycle of
violence”; she goes on: “the most rigorous among them per-
ceive that reconstructive practice is no guarantee of this.”14
Lozanovska concludes that Beirut has become “a glamorous
setting for corporate global city in a local historical guise,” then
backtracks to leave the future open: “[r]econstruction is an
incremental process, and its possible realities are not always
those that are revealed in the plan.”15

Brian Ladd focuses on the Schlossdebatte since 1990 over
whether to rebuild the Hohenzollern royal palace damaged by
bombing in World War II and blown up by the east German
Communists in 1950. The post-Wall jumble of empty space, the
Communist “People’s Palace,” showily new construction, and
older and newer restoration and reconstruction at this symboli-
cally overloaded center of the city are an architectural bonanza
and a political nightmare. Ladd drives home hard questions that
are worth quoting at length:

Is it defensible to choose an imaginary historical conti-

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the contributors: once you have declared modernism dead and
endorsed or at least acknowledged the legitimacy of imitations
of many kinds, where do you draw the line?

Historical time, the impresario of such conundrums in the
first place, suggests a kind of response. The case of Poland is
clear and especially revealing on the historicity of “new archi-
tectural pasts” because there have been so many of them.
Krzystov Bieda traces a procession of different versions: nostal-
gic eclecticism in Cracow around the turn of the twentieth centu-
ry; reconstructive literalism after 1945 in Warsaw and Kaliscz;
Socialist Beaux Arts for Workers in the Nowa Huta development
near Cracow in the 1950s and 1960s; Po-Mo/Retro or “Creative
Reconstruction,” watering down or sending up Baltic historic
architecture, in the war-damaged and neglected city centers at
Elbing and Stettin. In the still-volatile case of Sarajevo Nadia
Capuzzo points to the changing status of historical styles: the
restored Austrian secessionist-style Central Post Office that
once stood for Habsburg domination has come to be seen as a
symbol of the city because the building was targeted as such by
the besieging Serbs in 1992.

The term “globalization” doesn’t appear conspicuously or,
so far as I can tell, at all in Architectural Imitations, perhaps
because the authors are too genuinely global to be dazzled by
the latest fits-all terminology. In any case, the shock of market
penetration, state development, new technologies, nation
building, and resistance to these same forces is clearly, if hardly
for the first time, overwhelming preservation proprieties in the
so-called developing world. Marc Dujardin is understandably
“uneasy” over the eclectic copying and forced production of an
architecture meant to construct a national identity as well as
buildings in Bhutan, but he marvels at its “unexpectedly fast
pace and ease” and the “intricate play of instruction and prac-
tice.”18 The Maoist insurgency, recent scandals, and royalist
counter-revolution in Nepal put Niels Gutschow’s benign
account of an adaptive “new tradition” in a lurid light. But this is
not out of keeping with his main point, which is that history has
unpredictable outcomes and unintended consequences. As it
happened, the mass production of moulded “traditional” bricks
became “the smallest common denominator” of a hybrid ver-
nacular that “embraces many idioms.”19 Finally, official heritage
laws in Colombia have for many years looked to international
conservation guidelines opposed to reconstruction at the same
time that national monuments were being rebuilt. Olga Pizano
relates how this contradiction and the destruction incurred in
the ongoing civil war have forced debate into the public arena
and prompted the recognition that “cultural heritage [is] in a
state of continuous recreation,” where there is “always a con-
tradictory element….”20

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