THE MAKING OF PLACE by JOHN DIXON HUNT

Author:JOHN DIXON HUNT
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: REAKTION BOOKS

108 Ground plan by Kathryn Gustafson and Neil Porter for the Garden of Forgiveness (Hadiqat Al-Samah), Beirut, 2000–2006.

Battlefield sites are about envisaging the lie of the land, and the armies that manoeuvred over them, but not (usually) about the manipulation of the landform by modern designers. Much literature, on-site guidance and museums can help us to recover them; but of course what we want to see is the place of encounter ‘as it was’. We can read about the Battle of Waterloo in Stendhal or Byron, and there is an account of how the battleground looked in W. G. Sebald’s narrative of his visit there, though it required ‘a falsification of history’.18 The Waterloo Panorama is ‘housed in an immense domed rotunda’ (‘a circus-like structure’), where the immense painting views the whole scene ‘in every direction’ (‘it is like being at the centre of events’). Across a cluster of life-size wax figures of horses, wounded and dying soldiers and hussars, all dressed in ‘splendid uniforms … to all appearances authentic’, Sebald gazed at a vast (110 x 12 yds) mural, painted in 1915. Yet this ‘representation’ barely touched his memory of the death of ‘fifty thousand soldiers and ten thousand horses’, and neither could he know where they were buried, for all he sees is ‘silent brown soil’; nor did a recording on the battle in the Rotunda, given in Flemish, help Sebald recover any true vision of what was after all a momentous encounter between the British and the French. It was only when he closed his eyes and saw the action through the imagination of the hero of Stendhal’s novel The Charterhouse of Parma, ‘wandering the battlefield’, that it seemed to come alive in his imagination.19

Flanders Fields was the Great War battleground where so many soldiers lost their lives across a wretched, shifting no-man’s-land. Their deaths cannot always be individually remembered, since so many were unrecorded or their bodies not recovered; but the site of so much tragedy and bloodshed has called for some memorial, not least because it is still scar tissue that hurts 100 years later. The territory of Flanders Fields itself has been recorded movingly in poems, novels and films that begin to bear witness to that horror for those who fought there, as well as in memorials elsewhere, like the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, where liminal courtyards conduct visitors into the inner shrine and a thin line of green granite marks the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month (Armistice Day).20 But the Flanders landscape itself still needs to offer comfort to those touched by the miseries of this war and, more generally, to those scarred by other twentieth-century wars. For people living today not born before the 1914–18 conflict (increasingly a minority), the duration of that sorrow may not last unless the landscape itself is made to bear witness for lost lives and for those who once lived and farmed there.

The Portuguese firm PROAP, who have made something of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.