Troy, Jerico, China, Hadrian, Berlin, plus of course Colditz and Shawshank; real and mythical, but conceptually and functionally closing the circle, ran around seven times. The beauty of the Berlin Wall lies in it's 20th Century procurement strategy; built in just one night (but with meticulous planning); first with humans, then with fence, then with prefabricated concrete pieces that culminate in that particular cross-section; angled at the foot to be able to stand without foundation, and topped with a semi circular capping to obscure it's thinness (and presumably counter the grappling iron). It was faced on the one side with the graffiti of freedom, and one the other by the killing zone, and brought down, in just one night, not just by a hoard of people, but by a media that had chivvied away at it for years, so now you might piss against in a Las Vegas casino.
Of course there was not just one wall, but a whole fence along the boundary with old Eastern Europe; fascinating (just as with Hadrian's) for where it marched in to the sea. The edges of walls are the problem; the going round and the going over and the going under, but this is something architecture enjoys sometimes for it's own sake, think Le Corbusier at Jaoul, where walls are clear planes, and where he specified that a different bricklayer should be used every three courses to provide added rusticity (stick that up your phenomenological pipe and smoke it). But historically we have been brought in to merely glamourise holes.
When is a wall a wall? I suspect Trump's wall will not be, it will be an object of myth and consternation, and as the USA reverts to being one big farmstead, we might recall Robert Frost's poem. If you don't know the poem it's called 'Mending a Wall'.
No comments:
Post a Comment