Cian Tarrant-Visual Essay

City-Architecture: Patina and Palimpsest

Cian Tarrant

Experiment in absorbtion. Markers were placed on the four legs of stools around a kitchen counter for two meals. The resulting image highlights the traces left on the floor by the stools. The material is a resilient tile, not receptive to the traces of the life that plays out around it.

“I am convinced that a good building must be capable of absorbing the traces of human life, “

Peter Zumthor, a Way of Looking at Things.¹ 

Cities, Collections of individual buildings, constitute the material and static form of human cohabitation, the structure  around which life swirls and eddies. A facet of architecture is in its responsibility for the expression of the city, and by extension the cultures of the many who reside there. It is the concept of a blurred distinction between urban form and architecture, a stance that excites; architecture as the notional language that can span all scales of the city, from dwelling to street, and street to city. 2

The analogy used by Aldo Van Eyck in 1962 to describe the relationship between the isolated building and the city as the collective and the inseperable relationship between their scale.

Architecture must be both aware of itself and concerned with its urban context. It is important that the architecture  not emphasise its concern with one grounding factor at the expense of the other. A building which is so apologetically obsessed with the context which predates it can never aspire to improve on the fabric in which it is embedded. However, to ignore the roots of the placed architecture; striving for some relentlessly ambitious and freestanding notion of architecture as object in the city, is also missing the point. 

David Leatherbarrow poses the question of the stance assumed by the architect; the nostalgic or the apocalyptic, the aware and responsible or the ultimately revisionist. materiality is what Leatherbarrow sees as a dependable scope of reference when faced with this dilemma; that unwavering facet of our cities that lies among their spatial, geometric and dimensional properties; the connotational embodiment of their substance. This materiality can be palpable, heavy, tangible. Or, it can be a material of ephemeral quality, liquid and transversal, of immateriality. Material within the city is a priori, within the building it is material, however, they are indissoluble facets of a city architecture.

In dealing with his theory of materiality in building-city architecture, Leatherbarrow introduces three concepts: “Sedimentation”, “Saturation” and “Surplus”. Sedimentation has to do with receptivity;  absorption of those traces of human life that Zumthor alludes to. A building that is not receptive is expressive, it seeks validation in its own expression, this architecture is object, garrulous and insensitive, peacock architecture which neglects a responsibility and an awareness of place and time. Leatherbarrow states that an architecture conducive to sedimentation accumulates the narrative and constituent of those experiences it beholds.

“Although wear and tear result in subtraction, they also allow for a significant sort of addition. Over time and through use, architectural settings accrue legibility as they chronicle the patterns of life they accommodate. Time does not pass in architecture, it accumulates.” 

_David Leatherbarrow, Architecture oriented Otherwise Pg  82

The concept of material is deeply rooted in time; it is chronotopic.3 Material as chronotope pertains largely to the idea of palimpsest, the layering of time. Palimpsest, in its base form, relates to the act of writing over a manuscript on which writing has already been and rubbed off. It connotes layering and a legibility of words which occupied the page in the past. Palllasmaa muses that the idea central to art is that of time, not as an informer of narrative or futuristic ideals, but as an archaeology of biological and collective memory.4

  Sedimentation in the form of palimpsest is palpable in the architecture of our cities, both physically and within the collective consciousness. At the largest scale sedimentation and palimpsest take the form of traceable patterns shadowed in the urban fabric. At the finest scale sedimentation is visible in the physical material of the spaces we occupy, in the myriad scratches, dents and stains of inhabited space.

In the following pages I aim to uncover what Leatherbarrow refers to as the clarification of relationship between the spaces we create as architecture and the cities in which they take their place, city-architecture as material. The subject of the study is one geographical location, Thomas Street, at three different scales. If we are to fully understand the accumulative layering of space, the idea of strata of events and richness of sedimentation, we must study space at every scale; that of the city, of the street, and of the immediate and intimate scale.. These scales will be scrutinised in terms of the saturation of their material and their immaterial, and ultimately how that material may be inherited and manipulated as an approach to architecture that is receptive rather than solely expressive. 

 At the scale of city I aim to look at a portion of Thomas Street and the Liberties, observing the urban patina and palimpsest of this historical part of dublin. On the street scale the scope of study narrows to a perceptive level, observing the socially historic facades, activity and hapticity of the streetscape. Finally, I aim to study the area of the city at a domestic scale, that of the individual, its physical materiality and the richness that lends.

Aerial View of Thomas St. with the intersection of Meath St. and Thomas St. Highlighed. St. Thomas Court lies just east of this point.

Thomas Street is among the oldest thoroughfares in Dublin. Historically significant was the foundation of the Abbey of St. Thomas  the Martyr in 1177 by King Henry II, from which the street derives its name. The abbey was granted liberty of the city’s jurisdiction, owing its allegiance only to God and the crown it served. It is from this that the area known as The Liberties takes its name. The Abbey is dicernable from Speed’s map of 1610, marked then as ‘St. Thomas Court’ (orange tile).5

Portions of historic maps of dublin, showing the overlays of Palimpsest in the fabric of the. Top: Speed’s medieval map of ‘Dubline’, 1610 showing the position of St. Thomas Court. Bellow: Brooking’s map of 1728 and Rocques map of 1756 showing the shadow of St. Thomas’ Court.

By the next draught of maps by Brooking (1728) and Rocque (1756), the Abbey is gone, only apparent in the palimpsest of the city, the plot of land contained between Hanbury lane, South Earl St. And what is still called Thomas Court. This sedimentation in the fabric of the city is still evident today. The shadow of the original monastery is most evident in the excellent record drawn by Rocque in 1756. A recent discovery of the medieval foundations of the monastery give us some indication of the temporal layering or palimpsest of this particular part of the city.

The Difference between Brookings map of 1728 and Rocque’s of 1756 show the explosion within the built fabric of the city in a 28 year time period. It is important note that despite this rapid growth, the form of the medieval street persevered. The typical medieval street broadened on the approach to important buildings and narrowed after. This is still evident on Thomas St. , particularly in front of St. Catherine’s church. This seems to have been one of the constants on the street, as the material of the architecture layered and morphed over the passing of time to either side of the street.

The physical palimpsest of the city visible by overlaying maps may lead us to many conclusions about the physical grain, the movement and the historical development of the city. However, the metaphor for architectural palimpsest does not end there. Gordon Matta-Clark, between 1971 and 1974, was fascinated by the notion of unoccupiable but ownable space. Unoccupiable, because of their dimension, location or their awkward nature, these spaces were a product of architectural layering and a palimpsest which neglected and rejected them as valid. Matta-Clark purchased these leftover pockets of space in Queens; alleyways and curbsides, for $25 a piece, as a comment on the arbitrary nature of property bracketing and pricing. Matta-Clark called his installation “Fake Estates: Reality Properties”.6

In a similar vein, Nicholas de Monchaux, an assistant professor of architecture and urban design at the University of California, Berkeley, along with students have set up a project called ‘Local Code’.7

Neglected by Palimpsest:192 potential sites for intervention in the Local Code project (Image obtained from nytimes.com)

. In 1971 Matta-Clark would have been forced to spend countless hours poring over newspaper advertisements on microfiches to find the 15 properties he used for the installation. Using GIS (Geographical Information Systems) it takes seconds to map 1,600 residual spaces in the fabric of the city of San Fransisco. The scope of GIS as a tool for visualising and making spatial the varying levels of palimpsestic data in the city environment is being realised by ‘Local Code’. 

All of this data, from crime rates to medical needs, heat island effects to sewage lines,adds infinite facets to the notion of social and ecological sedimentation in the fabric of the city.  Monchaux and his students are using this technology to form an architecture which answers the city material at both micro and macro level simultaneously. Local Code suggests site specific interventions which target urban issues such as heat island effect and storm-water retention, while  reanimating and linking spaces which are currently neglected, impoverished of inhabitation. Monchaux’s proposal will afford these spaces the opportunity of being receptive, material, both city and architecture.

The sedimentation over time that effects the material quality of the street is very much a product of social and cultural traditions which have become embedded in the palimpsest of the street with the layering of time. One such outlasting tradition is that of the street vendor on Thomas and Meath St. Where there once was an architecture that accommodated this particular facet of the city in the Iveagh Markets, the Cornmarket and the Glib Market, there is now a presence of temporary stalls and unsheltered street vendors that sell their wares daily on the street. Though their set up is transient, the street vendors’ presence is a constant in the life of Thomas Street. 

Though these traditions weather the passing of time, the inherited streetscape, with its collage of edwardian, art deco and neo-classical style shopfronts, has been eroded by the vacation and demolition of plots. The streetscape of Thomas street, despite its diverse multitude of industrial, educational and commercial institutions, is dwindling.  As part of their report on rejuvenating the street frontage of Thomas Street, Dublin’s Civic Trust proposes the reconstruction of some of these facades to their original state.8 Their proposals, based on historic photographs, aim to reinstate the exact facades of the original buildings, many of which have been altered through the centuries by human hands.

“These people say “material” but they mean “work”. Human labour, technical skill and artistry. For granite demands much work to wrest it from the mountains, much work to bring it to the designation, work to give it the correct form and to endow it with a pleasing appearance by cutting and polishing. Our hearts beat with reverential awe at the sight of the polished granite wall. Awe for the material? No, awe for the human work.”

_Adolf Loos,  “Building Materials” from Spoken into the Void

Dublin Civic Trust’s argument for the reconstruction and conservation of the original facades falls down in the face of Leatherbarrow’s progressive and forward thinking notion of material city-architecture for the future. In Building Materials, Loos warns against the ‘demoralization’ and the ‘self-degradation’ of imitation.9 Rather than imitating the past grandeur of Thomas street’s shopfronts it may be more apt to celebrate the sedimentation of human fancies on the shop fronts; the coloured tiles, the painted timber of facades, the garish signage. it may be more appropriate to allow these physical features to becomes more deeply embedded in the material of the streetscape. If nothing else, these interventions serve as a chronicle of past trends, an injection of colour and a physical testament to Thomas Street’s eclectic inhabitants, the traces of the human life that has embedded itself in the material of the streetscape.

The discussion about streetscape inevitably leads to the intimate and closed scale material of the space enclosing the person, the haptic peripheral of materials combined with their overarching aura in the context of the city. Juhani Pallasmaa compares the haptic city and the city of the eye. With sedimentation and an imbued warmth of history comes the haptic city, the city of the eye alienates the body from the city, it leaves us voyeuristic spectators, there is no longer any mystery, shadow or depth. It could be said that the part  of the city that is Thomas Street does not fall under the heading of the city of the eye. 10

“Thus, I confront the city with my body: my legs measure the length of the arcade and the width of the square…my body weight meets the mass of a door, and my hand grasps the door pull, polished to a sheen by countless generations, as I enter the dark void behind. The city and the body  supplement and mutually define eachother.”  

_Juhani Pallasmaa,  “City Sense, The City as Perceived, Remembered and Imagined”, from Encounters.

To Pallasmaa, our sight, within the haptic city, touches the physical material of the city; the hardness, weight, tactility, and temperature of surfaces. In the haptic city these materials are not bereft of sedimentation, they have long ago overcome their pre occupancy poverty, they are patinated, scratched, dull or polished with use. These materials are to be celebrated. They offer us a sense of comfort, of calm and of familiarity. 

Junichiro Tanizaki speaks of the soothing and comfort found in objects worn by time and many hands. Beauty and deep calm lie in the darkness of lacquer, aged wood, and tin crockery; 11

“Yet for better or for worse we do love things that bear the marks of grime, soot, and weather, and we love the colors and the sheen that call to mind the past that made them. Living in these old houses among these old objects is in some mysterious way a source of peace and repose.”

Junichiro Tanizaki, From “In Praise of Shadows”

Experiment in absorbtion. Markers were placed on the four legs of stools around a kitchen counter for two meals. The resulting image highlights the traces left on the floor by the stools. The material is a resilient tile, not receptive to the traces of the life that plays out around it.

What Tanizaki is alluding to here relates to an aspect of japanese philosophical culture, sabi, which is very much concerned with rusticity and patina, homeliness and humbleness. Sabi is imperfection, fragility, impermanence, irregularity, unprtentiousness, things modest and humble, anonymity and things unconventional.12 Leonard Koren lists discoloration, rust, tarnish, stain, warping, shrinking, shriveling and cracking as characteristics of sabi. Sabi is nicked, chipped, bruised, scarred, dented, and peeling. Sabi is an existential construct which faces up to mortality yet

also frees us from things substantial, it ignores material hierarchies of symmetry, regularity, simplicity, balance and sobriety.

Walking down Thomas Street, with its layered shopfronts, or in the streets behind the primary thoroughfare with their palimpsest of pebbledash over brickwork and even layering of historical and new signage, one gets an overriding feeling of Sabi, the hapticity and intimacy of material. What comes close to Richard Sennett’s notion of  anthropomorphosis, the investment of human qualities in material things, pervades every corner here.13

Pallasmaa argues for the existentialism that is prevalent in the notion Sabi, and the importance of rootedness which paradoxically, reflects to us our own mortality. He argues that contemporary society is neglecting to contemplate the depth of time, that the concept of time is weakening in our comprehension. Pallasmaa emphasises the mental need to experience a rootedness in the continuity and context of time,therefore, the celebration of the mortality of Sabi, of patina, of sedimentation, is of huge importance, in the spaces in which we dwell and their reflection and symbology in the architecture of the city. 

It is spaces in the city like Thomas Street where we find the most opportunity for a city-architecture which is material, the haptic city. An architecture which resides here must be responsible, tactful and aware of our surroundings. Only through that can it become an exemplar of city architecture.

1.Zumthor, “A Way of Looking at things” (1988), in Thinking Architecture, 32.

2.This is an idea explored by David Leatherbarrow in Architecture Oriented Otherwise, Chapter Three: Materials matter.

3.The chronotope is a term coined by the Russian literary scholar M.M Bakhtin, it relates mainly to the temporal and spatial influences and relationships in literature. In greek, the term translates directly as “Space-time” and has been used in relation to architecture.

4.Juhani Pallasmaa, Lived Space, Embodied Experience and Sensory Thought (1999), from Encounters

5.Historical data obtained from Thomas Street-D8, A Stufy of the Past, A Vision for the Future by Emmeline Henderson

6.”Fake Estates: Reality Properties”, Gordon Matta-Clark, accessed on www.guggenheim.org

7.“Local Code”, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/03/space-its-still-a-frontier/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&ref=opinion&_r=1

8.’Thomas Street, Improving the Public Face of an Historic City Centre Street,’ A Report for Dublin City Council

9.Adolf Loos, Spoken into the Void, collected essays 1897-1900, Building Materials, August 28 1898.

10. Juhani Pallasmaa, City Sense, The City as Perceived, Remembered and Imagined, from Encounters.

11. Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows.

12. Leonard Koren, Wabi-Sabi For Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers

13. Richard Sennett, The Craftsman