Architecture, sites, And Spaces

Architecture, sites, andspaces are integral concepts to constructions of identity and identification. They are active, powerful, and pervasive, yet often their effect is not noticed on a conscious level but rather is one of subconscious perception, and it is this very effect that renders these elements so effective. A popular example suffices. Anyone who has seen the television seriesLaw & Order or who has lived in a major metropolitan American city [Page 33]has been repeatedly exposed to the neoclassical architecture of a court building. Although one may not consciouslyread these buildings, their identities are clear and present, acting upon the American cultural psyche. Monolithic columns, symmetrical expanses of space and architecture, an imposing triangular pediment: These are the structures of power and authority, where one comes to judge and be judged, symbols of the strength of the city and the American justice system. We recognize this effect often without realizing the how or the why, or even that it happens.

Likewise, seemingly empty spaces have important identities in the cityscape, as the story of Richard Serra'sTilted Arc eloquently reveals. Commissioned by the Arts-in-Architecture Program of the U.S. General Services Administration, the arc was installed in the Federal Plaza of New York City in 1981. The work was a wall of steel, a curve 120 feet long and 12 feet high, that bisected the expanse of the Federal Plaza, forcing those who work in nearby buildings to wind their way around it. While installed in the plaza,Tilted Arc gave the viewer a heightened sense of his or her identity in relation to the plaza, as well as in relation to the work itself: It made an individual perceive the entirety of the environment through the navigation of the bifurcated space. One might say that the work was too successful: As multiple newspaper and journal articles report, the New Yorkers who used the plaza on a daily basis rebelled against the work. Angry at the destruction of their space of contemplation and unrestricted passage in a tightly woven and overdeveloped city, many New Yorkers called for the work to be removed. Judge Edward Re, regional administrator for the General Services Administration, led a campaign to remove the work, in order to recreate the identity of the plaza as a site of space. In turn, Serra responded that the dismantling ofTilted Arc would destroy its identity as a site-specific work. In 1989, the work was cut into thirds and removed to a scrap-metal yard. Arguably, many of the city's workers took the space of the plaza for granted until it was disturbed and its identity as a space in which they exist and on which they depend was thrown into sharp relief.

Built structures, empty spaces, and the sites in which they interact both reflect and create individual and collective identities, existing in a potent nexus of community, patron, designer, and social mores and dynamics of power. It is no surprise that many influential modern and contemporary figures have occupied themselves with issues of space and place, of architecture and structures. To name only some of the major figures: Gloria Anzaldúa, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Gaston Bachelard, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Homi K. Bhabha, Svetlana Boym, Judith Butler, Néstor García Canclini, Hélène Cixous, Beatrice Colomina, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Michel Foucault, Coco Fusco, Diane Fuss, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Jürgen Habermas, G. W. F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, bell hooks, Luce Irigaray, Frederic Jameson, Julia Kristeva, Henri LeFebvre, Lucy Lippard, Audre Lorde, Jean-François Lyotard, Mary McLeod, Edward Soja, Gayatri Spivak, and Virginia Woolf. For these thinkers, such concepts both form the central arguments of their works and inform the intellectual underpinnings that drive and support them.

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