TAPONAMIENTOS EN LA RED DE ALCANTARILLADO

This appraisal must have satisfied Kreeger. Huxtable was a significant critic, and had launched severe attacks on other architectural plans for Lower Manhattan. However, the voices of the general public equalled with their derision the strength of Huxtable’s commendation. Alexander Raynes wrote to Jewish Currents, recounting his ‘shock’ after his visit to MoMA. Raynes had asked a museum official “‘You really believe that these six frozen masses of glass will tell the story of the genocide and tortures committed by the Nazis? Those who will visit this tiny Ohel [the chapel] - will they get the full meaning of the inhuman suffering and resistance in those days?”’ Arguing that ‘nothing would be better’ than Kahn’s proposal, Raynes feared that ‘History, no doubt, will blame all of us for this sickening s i t u a t i o n . H i s sentiments were mirrored in a letter sent to New York’s Mayor Lindsay by the Independent Jewish Senior Citizens of the Berkeley Area: ‘Should the present glass model be erected as a monument to the Six Million Nazi victims it will be to the everlasting shame of the City of New York. It will be a gross insult to American Jewry. It will slander the memory of the dead. Posterity will not believe such callousness possible so soon after the holocaust. You will not, we trust, permit this to happen.

History did not blame Alexander Raynes, posterity did not have to consider callousness: between 1968 and 1974, the plans for the memorial disintegrated. Kahn continued to search for ways of reducing these costs, for instance, reluctantly introducing steel frames to hold up the glass piers. Meanwhile, criticism of his plans continued. A letter from Jesse Reichek extended the complaints about Kahn’s desire to make the memorial non­ accusing, and demanded on behalf of ‘the 6 million Jews, 9 million Pakistani refugees, 25 million blacks in Rhodesia, 30 million blacks in South Africa, the millions of American Indians, millions of American black slaves, millions of Vietnamese, millions bombed in Dresden, Regensburg, etc., half a million killed in two days in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the twelve thousand arrested in Washington in two days’ that Kahn’s memorial ‘be

See in particular ‘Singing the Downtown Blues’ in Ada Louise Huxtable’s collection. Will They Ever

Finish Bruckner Boulevard? (New York, 1972)

Alexander Raynes, ‘Monument to 6,000,000’ in Letters Page, Jewish Currents (April 1969) pp. 38-41 Art Commission Files, City Hall, New York. Letter to Mayor Lindsay, 22 May 1969

a c c u s i n g . T h i s letter dramatically indicates the manner in which the Holocaust became a compelling focus of memory in order to address contemporary crises. It is interesting that this pressure was brought to bear on Kahn. While other people were pressuring him to incorporate a Jewish symbol - a menorah - into the roof of the chapel, Kahn was being asked to ‘instruct us as to the meaning of the inhumane’, to tackle the entire history of global violence.

Kahn’s death terminated the project conclusively, but its collapse by then was complete. The reasons include the aftermath of the six day war, which deflected funds towards Zionist causes, and the lack of structural unity in the Committee, whose member bodies could barely co-ordinate the payment of Kahn’s $18,000 expenses in 1971, let alone raise further funds for construction.^^^ The most important reason, though, was surely that the irresolution that we have seen existed from the beginning could be mined by those outside the Committee (and the Art Committee). Complaints like Raynes’, with their demands of narrative content and simple symbolism, had, after all, much in common with the concerns of Abraham Duker. Since opposition from without could echo that from within, the proposal seems to have been destined to live its existence in the drawings, models, photographs, and texts now stored in archives in New York and Philadelphia, rather than as glass blocks by the Hudson. It is to these various texts 1 now return, in order to consider how Kahn’s proposal made meaning as a memorial.

LIK 36 File B. Letter to Kahn, 1 February 1972

In the cases o f Louis’s and Newman’s series, as we have seen. Holocaust memory was also intertwined with contemporary concerns, whether related to McCarthyism, Hiroshima, or Vietnam.

^^°Material regarding these payments is in the American Jewish Committee files in their archives in New York. In coordination with David Kreeger, the AJC Executive Vice President Bertram Gold spearheaded the drive to collect promise monies from the various organisations that had made up the Committee. There are also some letters in LIK36.

4. Re-reading the Memorial

The changes that the Committee sought to impose after Kahn presented his initial proposal actually help to highlight its characteristics, and, from my viewpoint, those aspects which made it most interesting. In this section, I will be attempting to make sense of Kahn’s initial proposal of nine solid blocks of glass as a memorial - how it might have constituted a space where the activity of remembrance could take place, indeed what kind of an activity it structured as ‘memorial’. Kahn’s proposal - as is now clear - was quite different to what was thought of as a memorial at the time, and yet - no matter how Kahn was forced to change it - his initial design for him constituted a response to the task set. Momentarily, at least, this was what the Memorial to the Six Million Jewish Martyrs should be. Though we should remember that they were strategic, we can ask how this was so by starting with his statements about the proposal.

Kahn gives prominence to the function of light in his proposal. Light would allow the monument to transmit to the viewer a sense of life and hope. ‘The Monument will get its mood from the endless changes of the light of day and of n i g h t . . . A b r a h a m Duker, we might recall, proposed that Kahn build a structure that symbolised candles - sources of flickering light. Kahn was instead proposing not a symbol of light, but a material through which light play would be physically sensed. Light play, Kahn hoped, would meet the requirement that the monument express ‘hope for a better future’: by dramatising changing light, a sense of hope would be transmitted. We might question the traditional foundations of Kahn’s statements - traditions then being questioned by 1960s artists such as Dan F l a v i n . K a h n links light to metaphysical, rather than just to its physical properties, equating changing light with the idea of hope and life, and their continuity

LIK36 File D. Kahn’s press release, 3 May 1968

Though Flavin might have contested metaphysical associations with light, there is still debate around whether to associate light with physical or metaphysical qualities, a debate recently staged in texts recording the reception o f Rachel Whiteread’s Watertower. Some descriptions uncannily echo Kahn’s description o f his project. Jeffrey Deitch stated that ‘The most extraordinary aspect o f it is how it changes; it is different at every moment, in every light condition, every time o f day.’ Molly Nesbit writes that ‘In its clarity it accepts the sky’s every mood’. See Louise Neri (ed.). Looking Up- Rachel Whiteread’s Water

after the Holocaust. With the intention that his memorial produce a cathartic experience, light is treated as it is in the Judeo-Christian tradition, from God’s understanding of light as 'good’, to Jesus’ transfiguration.

Rather than investigating Kahn’s Memorial simply through these traditional equations between light and hope, we can move away from the rhetoric with which he addressed the proposal, and consider the Memorial through various other discursive frameworks.^^"^ Oddly enough, the best place to start might precisely be with an earlier text by Kahn - his essay ‘Monumentality.’ This essay was vvritten for a 1944 symposium chaired by Paul Zucker. In the texts around Kahn’s Holocaust commission, the word ‘monument’ and ‘memorial’ are interchangeable. One of the notable features of the 1944 symposium was how far separated were the concepts of monumentality and memorial. Monumentality was deemed to be an architectural quality connected to civic glory. Siegfried Giedion urged that ‘The people want buildings representing their social, ceremonial and community life. They want buildings to be more than a ftmctional fulfilment. They seek the expression of their aspirations for monumentality, for joy and e x c i t e m e n t . S u c h emphasis on ‘joy’ is at odds with the kind of monument we are discussing, but a further problem is that of the connection of memory and monumental structures. The participants in the symposium were far more comfortable thinking about the memory of the future than the memory of the past: a monumental building was not one which recalled the past, but one which would enable someone in a later generation to recall the time that it had been built.

In ‘Monumentality’, Kahn was similarly unconcerned with the connection of monumentality and memory, preferring to think about its temporal significance outside of linearity. Monumentality was timeless: ‘a spiritual quality inherent in a structure which

Kahn did not want to use light as a symbol o f mourning. Yarzeit candles are lit by Jews on the anniversaries o f family deaths, and their use has been manipulated in Holocaust memorials, such as Moshe Safdie’s ‘Children’s Memorial’ (1987) at Yad Vashem. Safdie worked in Kahn’s office in the early 1960s. Christian Boltanski is also interested in this use of candles.

This approach has been guided the helpful dictionary section o f Adrian Forty’s recent Words and

Buildings-A Vocabulary o f M odem Architecture (London, 2000).

Siegfied Giedion, ‘The Need for a New Monumentality’ in Paul Zucker (ed.). New Architecture and

conveys the feeling of its e t e r n i t y W i t h less emphasis on glory, he concurred with the fellow participants that monumentality should serve civic needs (‘the school, the community or culture centre’), but was more specific on how it was to be achieved. New materials (‘steel, the lighter metals, concrete, glass, laminated woods, asbestos, rubber, and plastics’) should be employed, and modem needs respected. ‘Stmctural perfection’ must be sought in order to achieve ‘impressiveness, clarity of form and logical scale.’ There was a particular emphasis placed on the enclosure of vertical space: Kahn argued that the monumental building made use of roofing structures such as ‘the Roman vault, the dome, the arch’, creating a sense of generosity that could also be ‘emotionally stirring’. Most idiosyncratic was his contention that monumentality required attendance to ‘the meaning of a wall, a post, a beam, a roof and a window and their interrelation in space.’ This kind of statement expresses a conception of essences, as if these fundamental ingredients of architecture have implicit ideal relationships.

Within this discursive context, the proposed Memorial begins to appear not so much the confirmation of, as the antithesis of monumentality. Essential meanings and relationships of the very tools of architecture (walls, roofs, etc), were not articulated in the proposal. On the contrary, these relationships break down. The column-like piers did not support roofs: this lack of vertical enclosure was another anti-monumental feature. These piers might be conceived as walls, but they did not divide space. They were not windows, but nor were the gaps between them. What begins to cohere in the absence of Kahnian monumentality is the sense of its dissolution: not so much the idea of deconstructed architecture, or of a ruin, as an idea of constructedlessness. This is to argue that one of the significations of the proposal was that it questioned the very possibility of architectural monumentality. Kahn seems to have indicated that the Holocaust posed problems to his very idea of monumentality, and to have encapsulated this insight in the actual design. Anthony Vidler, writing about Rem Koolhaus’ 1989 competition entry for the French National Library, has asked whether its use of transparency suggests ‘A crisis of

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