The Walker

by Matthew Beaumont

  ‘Do not trust houses,’ the French-Egyptian poet Edmond Jabès once remarked; ‘they are not always hospitable.’35 The gaze of buildings is hostile, armed. My concrete interest here is in those buildings that, because and not in spite of the fact that they half-conceal, half-reveal their alien stare, exhibit with peculiar clarity the spectral logic I have invoked. Specifically, I mean buildings that are, as I characterize them, visored.

  The word ‘visor’ seems to me to be a useful term for thinking about the appearance of buildings in part because it is closely related to the word ‘façade’. Just as the latter is derived from the French face, the former is etymologically related to the French visage – both signifying the face. But where the word ‘façade’ connotes a building’s openness to the world on which it looks (the street or garden or whatever), the word ‘visor’ connotes its closedness, its defensiveness.

  Lefebvre observes that the façade has often been viewed ‘as a face or countenance perceived as expressive, and turned not towards an ideal spectator but towards the particular viewer’; but he also points out that, to the extent that it is the basis for an ‘organic analogy’ – or, it might be added, an organicist ideology – there is something ‘fraudulent’ about it. The façade ‘implies a front and a back – what is shown and what is not shown – and thus constitutes a seeming extension into social space of an asymmetry which arose rather late in the evolution of living organisms as a response to the needs of attack and defence’.36

  The façade is armoured; it is part of the struggle through which buildings force us to surrender to them. Zaera Polo comments in ‘The Politics of the Envelope’ that ‘the power of architecture is not just iconographic but also organizational.’37 I would add, more specifically and more pointedly, that the power of the façade is not just iconographic and organizational, but also territorial, martial. If the façade is a face, it is a visored face.

  In English, according to the OED, the Anglo-Norman word ‘visor’, which came into use in the fourteenth century, signifies ‘the front part of a helmet, covering the face but provided with holes or openings to admit of seeing and breathing, and capable of being raised and lowered’. To put it metaphorically, it is a form of facial fortification; and its design, which features apertures, slits and even a sort of portcullis, is indeed not unlike the front elevation of a castle.

  For obvious reasons, in the Middle Ages the word visor also came to mean ‘a mask to conceal the face’; a vizard. And by the sixteenth century it was being used figuratively to signify, on the one hand, ‘a face or countenance, an outward aspect or appearance’; and, on the other, a disguise, ‘an outward appearance or show under which something different is hid’. In these two senses it was cognate with the word façade, which also means both an outward appearance and an artful deceit.

  How, then, do we defamiliarize our relationship to the buildings we encounter in an everyday urban context? How do we both analyse and estrange the political logic of architecture? More precisely, how do we restore a political dimension to our relationship to the city in such a way that we do justice to those who, perhaps because they are homeless or jobless, experience the built environment as a site of exclusion? To those who experience it as a labyrinth; a labyrinth, on the one hand, in which they feel trapped, and, on the other, from which they feel expelled? In response to these questions, we might start by deliberately displacing the term ‘façade’ from our architectural vocabulary and replacing it with the term ‘visor’. It is imperative to unmask the façade. And to expose it as a visor.

  Žižek, in his reflections on architecture, notes that the ‘basic issue’ he is addressing can be condensed in this question: ‘How does an ideological edifice (real architectural edifices included) deal with social antagonisms?’38 It is surely in this sense, among others, that ‘the fate of capitalist society is not at all extraneous to architectural design’, as Manfredo Tafuri formulated it in Architecture and Utopia.39 In so far as ideology is inscribed in the façade of an architectural edifice – and the façade is a privileged site in this regard – it makes sense to think of all buildings as having visors.

  It seems especially appropriate, though, in the context of a contemporary metropolis like London, where – as Maria Kaika and Korinna Thielen confirm – a ‘new generation of private shrines’, in the shape of corporate buildings that compete with older civic monuments, ‘stand like self-assured and self-sufficient fortresses, neither needing nor desiring to engage with public space’. ‘Despite making a loud public statement,’ they continue, these buildings ‘nevertheless look inwards and more often than not even try to “protect” themselves from the public realm, by blocking access to the public, or by making access excessively expensive.’40

  It only needs to be added that the business of protecting themselves from the public domain, as outlined by Kaika and Thielen, involves these private buildings in a look outwards as well as inwards; but one that is, as I see it, visored. It entails seeing, in an intrusive sense, without being seen to do so.

  In class society, all buildings, but especially corporate or state-sponsored buildings, are effectively in a state of siege, however innocent or hospitable they purport to be – not only in relation to the environment but to people. Zaera Polo, discussing ‘an increase in the complexity of the faciality of buildings’, argues that power, corporate capitalist power for example, however abstracted it has become, is still necessarily inscribed in buildings: ‘the building envelope will still be required to fulfill a complex set of performances, as the primary regulator between public and private, inside and outside.’41

  The façades of all buildings are engaged in the irreducibly political business of negotiating social antagonisms; that is to say, of reinforcing them as well as neutralizing or attempting to resolve them. In the contemporary metropolis, so-called iconic buildings, in spite of their implicit claims to transcend the politics of the urban environment, are profoundly and problematically invested in the reordering of urban space along these lines.42 Their infantilizing nicknames – the Cheese-Grater, the Gherkin, the Walkie Talkie, etc. – serve to domesticate them, and to render them semi-comic, so obscuring this investment in the production and politics of space.

  Every building must be able at the same time both to admit and to reject those that approach it; to attract and repel. Every building must be able to assimilate some people and to intimidate and dissimilate others. To give a simple example, numerous buildings, including many hotels and shops, will either overtly or covertly embrace the economically and socially privileged and block access to the under-privileged. All buildings, through their form as well as their social function, privilege one sort of person over another. The façade of every building ‘interpellates’ the individual subjects that encounter it, hailing some and ignoring or deterring others.43 Policing them. This, again, is the implication of Rhys’s description, in Good Morning, Midnight, of the attitude of buildings to the poor and precarious: ‘They know as well as the policeman on the corner, and don’t you worry …’

  All buildings watch us without being seen to do so. The underpaid private security guards that patrol so many buildings both in the daytime and the night, as well as the CCTV cameras with which their façades bristle, are in this respect only emblems of the hidden logic of all contemporary urban architecture.

  Every building is visored. But, if every façade is a visor, some buildings exhibit this fact with particular clarity. I am thinking of visored buildings in a concrete as well as an abstract sense, an explicit as well as an implicit one.

  Visored buildings are those structures that, almost spitefully refusing the paradigm of transparency central to modernist architecture, angle their gaze at us through shutters or slats that make it impossible for us to see into their interior. In this way, through windows that are not windows, they objectify the subject, forcing him or her to internalize a sense of being observed, watched; to live with a feeling of not being at home.

  Of
course, there is always a rationale for these designs, often an admirably benign one, based on the materials and aesthetics of these buildings, and on the local climatic and cultural conditions. In hot countries, for instance, slatted or screened façades can of course be efficient mechanisms for controlling heat and light. But I am interested, from a phenomenological point of view, in the politics encrypted in these exteriors and their surrounding spaces. For the concrete appurtenances or attributes of the architectural visor exemplify what Paul Jones has described as ‘the role of architecture in providing the material symbols connected to capital accumulation’.44

  I am interested, then, in the uncanny effects of the visor. Let me briefly give some examples. Perhaps the grandest and most monumental of them is the Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens, by the French practice Architecture Studio, a vast, rather impressive rectangular block that veils its exterior with marble bands. More open, more porous in relation to its immediate urban surroundings, is the façade of concrete blocks and slatted metal blinds which comprises the elevation of the 906 School in Sabadell, outside Barcelona, designed by H Arquitectes. Less interesting, and far more aggressive in its use of the visor effect, as seems appropriate for a building with an explicitly commercial as opposed to educational function, is the headquarters of Banca Sella in Biella, Italy, which uses the terracotta colour of the slats to mitigate its intrusive, high-rise intervention in the local area.

  Figure 1: Grimshaw, UCL Roberts Building, London

  Photo: Matthew Beaumont

  In London, the same terracotta effect is used for the slatted front extension to the University College London Engineering Building, which I pass on foot every morning in order to enter my office on Torrington Place in Bloomsbury. It is designed by Grimshaw, whose website used to boast that this ‘distinctive outward-looking façade’ is their response to a brief which prioritized the need for ‘a striking public face for the university’.

  The façade is ‘outward-looking’, though, only in the sense that a visor, surmounted by a grille, is outward-looking. It creates the impression of closedness rather than openness. The effect is of a private rather than public face for what Grimshaw describes as ‘the university’s renowned Centre for Enterprise and Management in Industry’. Here, the language of ‘faciality’, in Zaera Polo’s terms, seems especially hypocritical. It is indeed noticeable that, like both this university facility and the Onassis Cultural Centre, several of the buildings that deploy these visored façades occupy the borderland between private and public architecture.

  Figure 2: Rogers Stirk Harbour, World Conservations and Exhibitions Centre, London

  Photo: Matthew Beaumont

  At the opposite end of Malet Street from the UCL Engineering Building, to take another example, the discreet new extension to the British Museum is visible. Designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners, the World Conservations and Exhibitions Centre, as it is named, has been slid like the flat side of a blade between two wings of the original building.

  There, with cool, clinical precision, it plunges twenty metres below ground. From the back of the British Museum, where it is sited, only one of its four modular pavilions is visible, and the effect of its silver-grey façade – which Rowan Moore evocatively characterizes in terms of ‘slats of milky cast glass and pale stone’45 – is oddly secretive for a public building. Perhaps this is no accident. Richard Rogers’s partner Graham Stirk, who built the ‘luxury residential fortresses’ of One Hyde Park, Neo Bankside and Riverlight in Nine Elms, led the design for the British Museum extension, and it ‘shares these projects’ ruthless efficiency and slick finish’, as Oliver Wainwright astutely commented in a piece for the Guardian when it was unveiled in 2014.46

  In short, this is a private-sector aesthetic, consonant with the ascendancy in London of a culture dominated by the super-rich, one that is inclined to conceal and sequester its accumulated wealth, whether this consists in financial or cultural capital. In place of the aesthetic of transparency with which modernist architecture signalled its ostensible commitment to a democratic politics, buildings like the British Museum extension, in spite of their provenance in the public sector, institute an aesthetic of opacity consistent with a metropolis in which real power, even in a parliamentary context, is increasingly undemocratic in its structures, increasingly subordinate to the private sector.

  City Hall, the distinctive building which houses the Greater London Authority, on the South Bank of the Thames, is in some respects even more exemplary in this respect. For, in spite of the fact that it is the official headquarters of a publicly elected body, namely the London Assembly, this building and the land on which it stands are privately owned. In 2013, its original owners, More London, sold a thirteen-acre stretch of the South Bank to a Kuwaiti property company called St Martins in an enormously lucrative, and secretive, deal.

  Today, St Martins rents the land to the city’s mayor and the various businesses that occupy the surrounding office blocks. More London Estates Management, which continues to coordinate and control this ‘privately owned public space’ (POPS), has not only installed an extensive CCTV and security personnel system but banned numerous vital urban activities, including begging, busking, demonstrating, loitering and skateboarding. All kinds of pedestrian activity, in other words, that fail or refuse to conform to the regime of briskness, busy-ness, and business.

  Moreover, City Hall itself, which was opened in 2002, exhibits the characteristic logic of visored architecture. Designed by Foster and Partners, which claims on its website, without irony, that City Hall expresses ‘the transparency and accessibility of the democratic process’, the building resembles nothing so much as an armoured helmet. If its aesthetic has something of the Space Age about it, because it evokes an astronaut’s helmet, it also has something of the Middle Ages about it, for its form recalls, for example, the rounded skull of a visored bascinet from the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries. Like these helmets, it secretes an invisible and almost existentially disquieting gaze. City Hall thus hides in plain sight its hostility to the transparency and accessibility both of public space and the democratic process.

  What is the phenomenological effect of these visored buildings? It is, I think, to feel unsettled by the presence of an alien gaze. Here, we can return to Derrida’s discussion of ‘hauntology’, and in particular the metaphor he devises for his reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (c.1602) – the metaphor of the visor.

  In the opening pages of Specters of Marx, Derrida explores the disconcerting effect that Hamlet’s late father’s spectral presence has, at the start of the play, on Horatio, Marcellus and the protagonist himself. It will be remembered that in the first scene of the play the ghost of old Hamlet assumes a ‘warlike form’ (I, i, 45). He is a ‘portentous figure’ that ‘comes armèd through [the] watch’ (I, i, 108–9). ‘A figure like your father, / Armèd at point exactly, cap-a-pe,’ Horatio tells Hamlet in the third scene of the play, has been stalking the battlements, wearing its beaver, the lower part of the helmet’s face guard, raised (I, iii, 199–200). It is this image that Derrida (relying on a French translation by the late Yves Bonnefoy) reconfigures as a visor.

  Derrida’s interpretation of the gaze of the armed apparition – which he identifies, interestingly, as a Thing – is uncanny: ‘This Thing meanwhile looks at us and sees us not see it even when it is there. A spectral asymmetry interrupts here all specularity.’ ‘We will call this the visor effect,’ he states: ‘we do not see who looks at us.’47

  This ‘visor effect’, he further explains, evokes a protective helmet into which ‘slits are cut’ so as to permit Hamlet’s father ‘to see without being seen’:

  For the helmet effect, it suffices that a visor be possible and that one play with it. Even when it is raised, in fact, its possibility continues to signify that someone, beneath the armor, can safely see without being seen or without being identified. Even when it is raised, the visor remains, an available resource and structure, solid
and stable as armor, the armor that covers the body from head to foot, the armor of which it is a part and to which it is attached. This is what distinguishes a visor from the mask with which, nevertheless, it shares this incomparable power, perhaps the supreme insignia of power: the power to see without being seen.48

  The visor effect is what makes us ‘feel ourselves seen by a look which it will always be impossible to cross’. ‘This spectral someone other looks at us,’ Derrida concludes, italicizing his reference to the other in order to reinforce its uncanny associations; ‘we feel ourselves being looked at by it.’49

  This sense of uncanniness, of feeling ourselves seen by a look that it is impossible to cross, to counteract or cancel out, not least because it cannot be directly returned or reciprocated, embodied as it is in the building-as-Thing, this sense of uncanniness is structural to the phenomenological effect of the visored buildings I have identified. For them, the visor functions, in Derrida’s language, as ‘an available resource and structure, solid and stable as armor,’ which instigates, and in an everyday context ceaselessly enacts, the supreme form of power, ‘the power to see without being seen’.

  In this respect, visored buildings paradoxically display precisely the relations of power that secretly obtain in all buildings, which can be characterized in terms of what Derrida calls ‘a spectral asymmetry’ that interrupts ‘all specularity’. In arming their gaze, and thus ensuring that it cannot be returned, mirrored, reflected back, they reveal that every façade inscribes an aggressive, offensive orientation to those that inhabit its immediate environment, especially when they are on foot. ‘The mask does not hide the face, it is the face,’ Deleuze and Guattari write in their discussion of ‘faciality’.50 The visor does not hide the face, it is the face; but it encodes the gaze.