Make it Real: Architecture as Enactment

If we trace architecture’s history, we can see that this radical re-enactment is a fundamental mode of its development. We might begin a historical survey of architecture’s re-enactments with the Egyptian column, which was carved from stone to represent a tree trunk or a bundle of reeds. Right here, in a foundational moment, we see re-enactment as the primary architectural idea. The primitive tree-column returns just as it is being technologically superseded. The original gesture of the tree-column is radically altered through its re-enactment in stone, through its revival as a kind of ritualised symbol that celebrates its own origins.

The representation of history is, of course, highly politicised. As Churchill tells us, history is written by the victors. He suggests that history is at least part fiction, and that its writing is a spoil of war. In its own way, architecture is also a spoil of war, arising out of ideological, aesthetic, economic as well as military conflicts. But in contrast to written history, architecture’s victorious narrative manifests itself as reality. It not only represents and illustrates this fictional history but physically embodies it, playing it out through substance, space and programme.

The effect of this endless repetition is to create a sensation of inevitability, of naturalising even the most radical of intentions

In its freewheeling rewriting of the past, architecture uses history as a slingshot into the future. It endlessly re-stages itself, self-consciously folding its own past into its future, rewriting its own myth into its very fabric.

The danger is that it’s just talk. Then again, the danger is that it’s not. I believe you can speak things into existence.

Jay-Z, Decoded, 2010