>> My name is Gerry Adler, I'm a Professor of Architecture at the University of Kent.

>> This talk concerns the architecture of memorials. I will look at a specific example in Paris where the memorial has a close relationship to the river.

>> In doing so I will reflect on the phenomenology of riverine architecture in cities by analysing this cryptic monument to France's Second World War deportees.

>> Designed by the architect Georges-Henri Pingusson, and carved out from the banks of the Seine in the early 1960s. The memorial to the deported comprises an external sunken courtyard leading to a labyrinth of cave-like spaces that tunnel beneath the eastern tip of the Ile de la Cité, behind the cathedral of Notre Dame.

>> In his book, The Invention of Paris, Eric Hazan talks of most riverine cities as having a partiality for one bank or the other, whereas Paris has had an equilibrium between the left and right banks since the dawn of time.

>> This is unusual as most riverine cities have either had a dual foundation, Buda and Pest in the Hungarian capital's name alludes to this, or they have developed fundamentally different left and right banks; the fleshpots of Southwark compared with the mercantile industry of the City of London.

>> In Paris, the Seine is sufficiently narrow to enable the city to be read and experienced as a whole. Indeed the banks of the Seine have throughout the 20th century provided the stereotypical images of 'Gay Paree', along whose tree-lined quais young lovers stroll.

>> Hazan counters the cliched pretty-as-a-postcard image of the Seine in Paris and shows us its dark side: the locus of massacres (St. Bartholomew's day in 1572), of Communards shot on the bridges in 1848, and finally, in 1961, the many Algerians whose beaten-up bodies were unceremoniously dumped in the river by the police on Maurice Papon's watch.

>> Riverine has echoes in English of the sign you sometimes see on streets in France: 'sauf aux riverains'. English 'riverine - relating or pertaining to a river - is cognate with French 'riverain' and carries a romantic connotation and poetic dimension missing from the French word, which is purely descriptive. It simply means those who live by the river, and hence by extension, the locals.

>> This makes 'sauf aux riverains' mean only accessible to locals, in other words, don't even try driving your four-wheel drive down this narrow lane to the river or, perish the thought, park there.

>> When you see the sign it means a rather inaccessible route given to locals to the narrow passageways leading down to the river, and seeks to bar outsiders from getting too close to the water.

>> Now in towns, most buildings like to keep a healthy distance between themselves and the flowing water, asides that is from those parts that have a necessarily intimate relationship with the water such as landing-stages and warehouses.

>> The general principle therefore obtains that urbanised rivers become embellished with high embankments, raising houses and gardens well above the water line and out of harm's way. We see this most clearly in those cities with well-developed riverside terraces, such as in Dresden with its Brühlsche Terrassen high above the Elbe. In London with its Adelphi development of the late 18th century and generally by the banks of the Seine in Paris, where the streets end abruptly in a precipitous canyon into which the river appears to be sunk, to be reached by narrow stone steps access through chinks in the rows of closely packed bookstalls lining either bank.

>> This led to the development of a modern urban riverside cross-section taken perpendicular to the river of an upper ledge restrained by a retaining wall embankment, with a lower ledge beneath. The natural lie of the land shelving down to the river's edge is tidied up, a move which often went hand in hand with other urban improvements such as the provision of surface water drainage, sewers, gas lighting and later underground metropolitan railways.

>> Its social and commercial effects were to change the nature of cities fundamentally, bringing leisured people close to the water but remaining high above it while banishing industrial and commercial uses which had hitherto formed a barrier separating the river from the urban hinterland of the streets.

>> The construction of these plateaus from the late 18th century onwards comprise a literal stratification of riverine cities, placing the city streets well above the level of the river, while at the same time opening up the river to visitors from within the city.

>> It also meant a figurative stratification, an early move in the zoning of the city, that formed such an important part of much 19th and 20th century urban development.

>> The relationship between place monument and memory is a complex one and works in different ways. Let's examine some examples the Ile de la Cité with NotreDame at its centre might stand for a notion of France. One which went deeper than royal associations, here we think of the Louvre or Versailles, or Republican virtues (the Place de la République, or the Bastille).

>> Across the river from Notre Dame on the right bank was the open space known as Place de Grève. And here the word Grève, describing the gravelly bank shelving down to the river, took on the meaning of the popular revolts staged there, such that it's come to mean strike in modern French. Thus the Place de Grève came to represent the idea of a principled stand against authority - the strike.

>> This is a special type of memorial, one where a particular place or structure had been the site of a significant event and therefore becomes the natural location for any subsequent reenactment or commemoration. This chimes in with the view of the French urban theorist Françoise Choay who has argued for the close association of place and memory.

>> However, when it comes to representing the values of the 'nation' or 'fraternity' - quintessential abstractions - it is harder to allocate any specific locations for such monuments.

>> Think of Trafalgar Square in London: what is its relationship to the place in southern Spain off whose coast Nelson won his celebrated victory?

>> As we shall see Georges-Henri Pingusson's memorial does not fit neatly into any of these categories. When it came to the immediate post-war period of the late 1940s the French were prolific in their efforts to remember the war; the question was, what should the State choose to commemorate?

>> This was not so simple a question as first seems apparent. France was split after the invasion, between the north and east which was occupied by the Germans, and the south and west which was nominally independent ('Vichy' France) but actually a vassal of Germany

>> It's well known that the founding story of the post-war French settlement in the form of the Fourth Republic was predicated on General de Gaulle's 'myth' of the Resistance, in which an exaggerated prominence was accorded to those actively promoting rebellion against their German masters (or surrogate Vichy puppets). 

>> In this version of history the heroes of the resistance were accorded far greater presence than those French citizens who were seen as having been degraded by being deported to work and eventually die in the East.

>> Symptomatic of this is the fact that a full nine years would elapse after the liberation in 1944 and the decision to erect a memorial in a prominent Paris location to those many who had deported to the east.

>> It is telling that this memorial is hidden from view, and that casual visitors to Paris are completely unaware of its existence, as if the city was shying away from confronting this aspect of its past and looking it straight in the eye.

>> Well Pingusson began his long teaching career in 1948 at l'École des beaux-arts, his teachings from 73 and 74 were collected and published as the book Space and Architecture, and provide a fascinating portrait of the concerns of an architect working in a continuing humanist tradition in French architectural education, despite the upheavals of 1968 with a blend of abstract geometrical studies of space contrasted with more feminine and logical tactics there is a place that is how one actually feels and experiencing spaces all refracted through his deep knowledge and love of the architecture of Paris.

>> The final chapter or lesson in the book is entitled Poetics of Architectural Space, where Pingusson makes an impassioned plea for a poetics of building or better a poetics which elevates building into architecture in the same way that the proper selection of a word and its position relative to other words forms a rhythm and texture that render prose poetic. He is at one with his compatriot the philosopher Gaston Bachelard in seeing something culturally significant in specific spaces and constructions that allow associations to be fashioned between people's remembered and embodied experience of these places and other emotions and memories at one remove from these places.

>> Pingusson cites the poet Pierre Emmanuel's injunction to quote 'dream upon a word in order to stimulate the powers of association' end quote. He then invites us to savour the word staircase - escalier - going so far as to suggest that we become it. I quote; 'Take this word staircase, linger over it and examine it in all its aspects, a ladder, a staging post, a climb. Go up as far as the landing from where you set off again towards the top taste the word and the object which it brings to life like a divine potion for the spirit. Live this staircase, feel these marble treads hard and cold raising you in silence above your former level or hear the wooden steps creak in your attic or Garrett staircase. Become your staircase. See what it symbolises. By the power of this word you will make it exist, you'll make exist what does not exist.

>> Words become flesh if one contemplates them with love. For an intelligent dreamer, to dream about things is to become aware of things.' End quote.

>> Now this elemental and phenomenological approach to architectural invention and imagination has affinities with a significant contemporary strand of building practice. But first let us return to the memorial.

>> Approach his most significant staircase and see where it leads. When you approach the entrance to the memorial, you see the staircase in front of you, strangely narrow for one that leads to a publicly accessible monument, and you know that's what it is because of a discrete sign at the entrance. And down you go, equally hemmed in by the flanking walls with their carefully bush-hammered surfaces of seamlessly poured concrete and so the aggregates from all six corners of France and we must remember that  l'Hexagone ('the Hexagon') is a word the French used themselves to denote France by referring to its shape as seen on a map, and these are revealed.b We know this by reading our monograph on Pingusson. We arrived at the sunken courtyard, hemmed in by the sheer walls of concrete. Ahead a vaguely geometrical iron trellis, a fixed portcullis, screening an implied water gate, sunken yet again, so that the Seine laps at its edge.

>> Well the courtyard is indeed empty but obtruding into it behind you is a pair of massive concrete walls jutting out free of the ground beneath from what one takes to be a tall retaining wall.

>> Overcoming your misgivings you enter between them squeezing yourself through the slot of space as if you were an ear wheat about to be crushed between the mill stones.

>> These seem all the more threatening with their grid of raised disks, a Braille message perhaps, saying 'to your death'. The more or less irregular hexagon of the courtyard is now replaced by the regular form of a crypt, its rough and concrete walls replete with cuneiform like inscriptions scratched onto them. Verses by Robert Desnos, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre amongst others.

>> On axis with the entrance slot, burying into the soil of the island, a long gallery extends, its entrance barred by iron gates. This time a dry water gate barring the way for us mortals to the underworld, but not always dry. At high tide the Seine intrudes. The monument then is receptive to the nature of the river allowing its waters ingress.

>> In this way the structure acts as an index of the level of the river and on the dark walls of the gallery burns a grid of two hundred thousand tiny lights, representing the number of French who died in the deportations. The memorial appears as a precise but nonetheless primeval structure. One is reminded of Pingusson's developing portfolio of work for the Catholic Church in France in the 1950s, particularly in Lorraine and his search for an appropriate mood and character for sacred spaces. This has long been an interest of his, while he'd been a contributor the influential journal Sacred Art,since the 1930s.

>> Well the late 1950s and 60s witnessed an upsurge in architectural writing that sought to escape the narrow confines of any discipline. This ranged from the practical and objective scientific, via the anthropological, to the downright mystical.

>> Mircea Eliade's writings for instance, in particular The sacred and the profane from 1957, sought to rediscover enduring qualities of atavistic behaviours and rights, and argued for their spatial analogues. The implication is that 'scientific' man suppresses these Urforms at his peril.

>> Quote: 'It is quite likely that the defences of inhabited places and of cities were originally magical defences. These defences, ditches, labyrinths ramparts etc were intended to prevent the invasion of demons and of souls of the dead rather than any human attack.' End quote.

>> Eliade contends that these ancient atavistic memories persist. He said, 'Something of the traditional conception of the world survives in its comportment despite its not always being conscious of this immemorial heritage.' End quote.

>> Indeed the typology of the labyrinth, along with elements of defensive and military architecture, is one deployed by Pingusson to great effect in the layout of this monument. Here, but cryptically, the hidden galleries tracing the life in the South gallery and death in the North gallery of the deportee, in the level above that of the sunken courtyard, buried within the depth of the curtain wall of a monument. In this way the monument has three levels of cryptic space; the sunken courtyard, the passageways leading from it, and finally the galleries located above this lower level in the thickness of the river wall. Experiencing Pingusson's memorial, one is struck by its invisibility in the city. One has to delve and dig in order to find it.

>> Of course, once one has discovered it and descended it is splendid and moving. But it simply does not figure in the city. Of course there are other examples of absences in memorial architecture, the most impressive example of which is arguably Peter Eisenman's memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, close to the Brandenburg Gate.

>> But perhaps more directly analogous and one that Pingusson would have known is the monument to the innocent Romans murdered by the Germans as a reprisal for an attack on them carried out by partisans. The architects Giuseppe Perugini, Mario Fiorentino and Nello Aprile decided to raise a simple slab over the position the bodies lay in, their remains having first been buried in simple graves.

>> This mausoleum at the Fosse Ardeatine outside Rome from 1949 appears to be a giant dolmen. Actually it's monolithic appearance belies a more normal rational concrete rib structure and exerts just like the Parisian memorial a powerfully simple experiential attraction.

>> The boldness of Pingusson's initial decision to sink the monument is laudable in that it runs counter to the tendency of French architecture to the monumental. In the sense of raising a great obelisk or statue and placing it as a landmark in a prominent urban position.

>> In this reading it is the femininity of the monument it's being an Earthbound concavity that is its most powerful feature, recalling the great Austrian architect Adolf Loos's account of finding a simple earth mound in a forest clearing and declaring 'this is architecture'.

>> It also recalls the chapter Solids and Cavities in Architecture in Steen Eiler Rasmussen's book 'Experiencing architecture', from 1959, published just a few years before the completion of the monument. And here Rasmussen offers that, quote,  'It is not enough to see architecture, you must experience it, you must dwell in the rooms, feel how they close about you, observe how you are naturally led from one to the other.' End quote.

>> The architecture of the void and of the absence brings us back to 'sauf aux riverains'. Pingusson's work invites us non-locals to break the injunction about getting close to the river and down we go, only to find ourselves at once below ground level, even with the river, a most disconcerting and discomforting feeling. We imagined ourselves to be intruders into the earth of the island down by the river's edge where we are not normally supposed to venture, and intruders in the sense of being 'not at home' amongst the French. In other words precisely where the French Jews and other undesirables found themselves in the early 1940s before being rounded up and bussed off to the holding camp at Drancy.

>> Pingusson's memorial has the power to evoke aspects of the history of the wartime deportations for those who did not participate in them and indeed to provoke memories of the dwindling numbers of those remaining today, who as survivors have the capacity if not always the desire to remember. Does Memorial embody memories?

>> For Robert Bevan, author of The destruction of memory, the built environment, quote; 'Is merely a prompt, a corporeal reminder of the events involved in its construction, use and destruction.' End quote. Here, Bevan is referring to structures that having suffered the depredations of war have become memorials.

>> In the case of French memories of the occupation, the most striking example perhaps is the ruins of the village of Oradour-sur-Glane. The famous 'martyr village' destroyed by the German army as collective punishment for the actions of the local resistance. Here where 642 villages were killed and the entire village burnt down.

>> His view is that places and structures do not function as Jungian symbols in ways similar to the collective memory of the Italian architect Aldo Rossi's historic city they are rather, although he does not say as much, Freudian places of memory and as such are not linked to any particular topos. This makes sense if one regards Pingusson's memorial as being particularly effective despite its not being located at a place associated with the deportations, unlike for example, the memorial at Drancy. This is the principal distinction between Fosse Ardeatine memorial and Pingusson's.

>> The former has great poignancy by virtue of the great horizontal lid being read as a tombstone over the actual graves of the murdered, while in Paris the memorial, though equally moving as a sequence of spaces and set of materials, is not the actual place of any specific events associated with the deportations.

>> However, what it loses in its abstraction it gains in its prime location at the heart of Paris. Rather like the grave of the Unknown Soldier beneath the Arc de Triomphe at the end of the Champs-Élysées, the story sadly does not end here.

>> The year after the monument's completion, the Seine witnessed its darkest day since the occupation, as dozens of Algerians were unceremoniously dumped in the river, having been either murdered or severely mishandled by the police, an action sanctioned by the notorious police chief Maurice Papon, who would face his trial and be convicted as a war criminal decades later.

>> The river has a lot to answer for and whether it is recent historical events, as I have pointed out, or more distant realms of human consciousness experienced today as myth, the power and menace of riverine places continue unabated.

>> Well, thank you for being such a good audience and do visit the monument when you are next in Paris. Thank you.