The ‘after’ narrative of New London Bridge centres around Robert McCulloch an American chainsaw magnate and entrepreneur who paid $2,460,000 for the nineteenth-century structure which he planned to move and reconstruct
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12.3 G. Yates (attributed), ‘The Building of London Bridge’, watercolour, undated |
in Lake Havasu City, Arizona. The bridge had originally cost around £500,000 to build and the committee that oversaw its construction could not have foreseen what a good long-term financial investment the bridge would be for the Corporation in terms of its re-sale value. McCulloch and some of his business associates planned to develop the area into a tourist resort using the bridge as its main attraction. The bridge, or at least the bridge’s constituent parts, were shipped by boat 10,000 miles to Long Beach, California. From there, it was taken by road to Lake Havasu City. It had been discovered, while dismantling the bridge, that there were code numbers marked on each stone when it was originally built. This system must have been used by Rennie to identify the cut slabs of granite as they left the Dartmoor quarry. This memory trace of the bridge’s original construction guided McCulloch’s team when London Bridge was re-assembled several thousand miles away under the supervision of Robert Beresford, a civil engineer from Britain who had a copy of the original plans drawn by John Rennie as his blueprint for reconstruction. The techniques of construction used on the bridge were similar to those originally employed as sand mounds beneath each arch were carefully formed to the profile of the original bridge arches, serving the same function as the original wooden moulds (Figure 12.3). This ensured that the reconstruction was accurate and meant the bridge was structurally sound. When work was completed the sand was removed and a one-mile channel was dredged and water was diverted from Lake Havasu, under the bridge, then back into the
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12.4 London Bridge, Lake Havasu City Arizona |
lake. As a result London Bridge retains a piece of road that stretches over water. The site of London Bridge had been moved 180 yards to the west when it was rebuilt in the early nineteenth century. This same structure is now located several thousand miles further west. It still functions as a bridge carrying pedestrians and vehicles, but now over a channel from a lake fed by the Colorado River (Figure 12.4).
The rituals surrounded the rebuilding and re-opening of the bridge in Lake Havasu City mirror the rituals around its original inauguration more than a century earlier. On 23 September 1968, the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Gilbert Inglefield, was invited by McCulloch to lay the corner stone. The bridge’s reconstruction was completed and dedicated on 10 October 1971. Lake Havasu City grew as a holiday centre with many buying the new holiday homes being built by McCulloch and his cronies. Commercial success and the boosting of the economic infrastructure were as much a part of the bridge’s new life as its old one. A ‘London Village’ was built around the bridge to complete the touristic experience. Indeed, there is even a London Bridge Resort Hotel which has a full scale replica of the Mayor of London’s Golden State Coach in its foyer and whose licence to crenellate may have been
granted sometime in the early 1970s – perhaps the latest known example of this feudal architectural tradition.10 The website for Lake Havasu City shows how London Bridge has been appropriated into its new cultural milieu.11 Of the many images on the web-pages, few are of the bridge. Instead, we see a vision of the American dream – blue skies, the big outdoors and the near obligatory bikini-clad all-American girl, wearing a cowboy hat. The site offers a brief history of the bridge from its Roman beginnings, although little is made of the fact that the nineteenth-century structure was replaced, which averts the issue that London Bridge in London still exists. The memory trace of Old London Bridge made this functionalist nineteenth-century engineer-designed piece of road that crossed water a valuable antique or monument. London Bridge’s function as one of the sights of Europe lent itself well to its Arizona descendent as many flocked to see what has become one of Arizona’s best and most popular tourist attractions. This aspect of London Bridge relates to Nora’s idea of a reversal that takes place between the dominant and the dominated within the context of a lieu de memoire. The ‘imposed’ British symbolic meaning is here subjugated in favour of the ‘constructed’ symbol of an Arizona tourist attraction.
Nevertheless, the purchase of London Bridge caused much ribald amusement in Britain. It was seen as emblematic of the apocryphal American tourist in Europe who bought whatever was presented as cultural or antique at whatever price because he or she knew no better. The story still persists today that McCulloch thought he was getting Tower Bridge – in itself a late nineteenth-century pastiche of the medieval form of the Tower of London.
I don’t know if McCulloch looked before he bought, I suspect he did. I also suspect that part of the snobbery about his purchase was the absence of an obvious aesthetic – he was not purchasing something that looked nice or had an especially famous designer. McCulloch was buying a symbolic space. It was the bridge’s history, its demolished predecessor and its symbolic function as a lieu de memoire that made it desirable.12
Returning to Nora, McCulloch’s purchase also tells us something about ourselves – the preoccupation with memory history and the invention of traditions. Seen in this light McCulloch was operating along similar lines to the European Grand Tourists of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries whose purchases were often random, expensive and informed only by the wish to accumulate culture. McCulloch was amassing artefacts in an attempt to appropriate culture and tradition. The touristic appreciation of antiquity was replaced by a similar veneration for the ‘essence’ of London. In other words, just as the artefacts of antiquity had been appropriated to augment the status of British culture in the late eighteenth century, that culture was, in turn, being reappropriated.
London Bridge in its old, nineteenth-century format, now in Arizona, and its mid-twentieth-century manifestation in present-day London, provides a complex example of a lieu de memoire. And I wonder here if I push the mirror analogy a little further we might begin to see more clearly what is going on.
I want to return here to Michel Foucault’s discussion of the idea of a heterotopia as I find his use of a mirror analogy complementary to Nora’s concept of ‘distorting mirrors’.13 Foucault’s analysis of the spaces that act as heterotopias relies on their sustained ambiguity in relationship to other sites. A site, according to Foucault, is defined by a cluster of relations it has – in other words, it is characterized by the things to which it relates rather than by its own intrinsic qualities. But certain sites have the property of being related to other sites ‘in such a way as to suspect, neutralize or invert the set of relationships they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect’. In this way, places exist in society which are something like counter sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which real sites that can be found within a culture are simultaneously represented contested and inverted. And it is at this point that the analogy of the mirror used by Foucault helps to demonstrate the ambiguous relationship between utopia and heterotopia.
I believe that between utopias and heterotopias there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror. … I see myself in the mirror where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, where I am not. . . but in so far as the mirror does exist in reality… it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. … It makes the place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real. . . and absolutely unreal. . . .14
The mirror relationship is, indeed, distorted here. London Bridge is reflecting itself – mirroring the image of where it used to be and how it operates as a lieu de memoire in relation to that site. In this way, London Bridge has an ambiguous relationship with itself.
The mirror analogy also suggests an absence of temporal linearity and acknowledges the potential for flux and change. As a result, Foucault’s concept of a heterotopia can allow for the passage of time as society can make a heterotopia function in a different fashion as its history unfolds.15 This returns me to Nora’s ‘imposed’ and ‘constructed’ symbols. London Bridge operates as the former in its original London context and works as the latter in its role as a signifier of the American dream. And these symbols work simultaneously – the bridge has a double existence as a barometer of the culture that produced it that enables historians to examine the nineteenth-century metropolis while its current space-time location offers the possibility of interrogating American national memory, which is independent of the bridge’s earlier history. This earlier history survives not just by fiat of the historian but also in the third version of London Bridge that occupies the same site as the nineteenth-century version in London. London Bridge is, then, a lieu de memoire that operates on parallel tracks.
Conclusions
London Bridge, Foucault and Nora prompted me to think further about the displaced spaces of architecture. The practice of removing objects from their original location to another is not new. European capital cities are littered with the loot that resulted from the bellicose and colonizing agendas of western society. For instance, the Egyptian obelisks that stand in London, Rome and Paris show how easily monuments can be re-appropriated. The difference here is that the monument is not replaced in its original location. I want to stay with the concept of ‘distorting mirrors’ and use it as a means of exploring attempts in the US to create a national memory (in Nora’s words) through the appropriation of architectural forms and spaces. The geo-political location of the US provides a challenge to the neatly packaged concept of a lieu de memoire. In many of the examples discussed in this volume the memory trace becomes, or is part of, national history. But here we find memory without history. And the reflection or appropriation of objects and forms that are from without, rather than within, national memory. Yet this is still part of the colonizing aspect of lieux de memoire that Nora is at pains to identify. London Bridge is a rare example of an original building being re-sited as part of a colonizing process of cultural appropriation. And we have already seen how the purchase of London Bridge and its re-siting in Arizona in the 1960s raises important questions about the idea and functions of a lieu de memoire – not least whose memory is refracted and experienced? I want now to explore briefly two different examples of ‘distorting mirrors’ that expand my discussion and offer some conclusions to the arguments made in the essays in this volume. The question of re-appropriation and mimicry of architectural form and urban space is evident in Las Vegas. Although much has been written about Las Vegas in relation to postmodernist architectural theory and cultural analysis especially in relationship to the aesthetic – but the spaces and the experience of the city remain largely unexplored.16 An analysis of the experience of the spaces of Las Vegas may prompt some new conclusions about it. Second, I think about a completely fabricated fictitious space – Disneyland – that nevertheless encapsulates so much of the American national memory.
Much of the debate about Las Vegas has concentrated on it as an emblem of the postmodern condition. Scholars such as Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard see postmodernism as insincere, as the decline of both originality and authenticity.17 They argue that mass-produced and distributed culture renders the idea of originality obsolete and unachievable. Furthermore, the culture industry, which exists only to generate money, has commodified culture to such an extent that it is impossible to conceive of culture as anything other than a commodity. But Baudrillard does not focus much attention specifically on Las Vegas. He makes a passing reference to it in America,18 where he describes Las Vegas as a hologram; he also likens it to a mirage in the desert. The use of words like ‘hologram’ and ‘mirage’ implies an appearance of reality without any material existence, but Las Vegas is real, it is a city, the buildings that have caught the attention of postmodern theorists and architects exist – they are spaces in which people work, relax, gamble – in other words these spaces are experienced. If we think about architecture as experience surely we need to take these spaces very seriously as, not least, they are very successful.
In the context of Las Vegas, I want to think further about form; specifically, what kind of spatial experience form has to offer. It is already clear that I do not wish to follow the well-trodden path of showing how far Las Vegas is a simulacrum or an example of hyperreality. I have no doubt that these are valid ways of thinking about Las Vegas, but the essays in this book have demonstrated that shifting meanings and historical perspectives afford many buildings an air of hyperreality. Moreover, the re-use and reappropriation of form is hardly unique to Las Vegas. Cultural appropriation is centuries old. For instance, the Pantheon, as one of the essays in this volume has demonstrated, is one of the most replicated buildings in western culture – it has been transformed, for instance, into designs for houses, garden ornaments, public buildings (although not to my knowledge a gambling casino).19 In this way to write off Las Vegas as something that is simply touristic – the product of an absence of history – obscures what Las Vegas has to tell us about history and memory. After all, the idea of borrowed form contradicts the mirage or hologram as the forms reflect an original that exists somewhere.
It is not my purpose here to examine the architecture of Las Vegas in detail. But one or two brief examples will adequately highlight the point I am making. I want first to think about Luxor, the pyramidal-shaped hotel and casino with darkened glass skin and a copy of the sphinx at its entrance. (I know there are no pyramids at Luxor in Egypt, and that Luxor and its elegant Winter Palace Hotel, just north of the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes, are constructs of the late nineteenth-century fashion for escorted tours to warmer climates in winter.) Nevertheless, the Luxor Hotel Las Vegas, offers the spatial experience of a pyramid while providing entertainment and diversions for its visitors. Alongside this the casinos that represent cities – Paris; New York, New York; and the Venetian offer the ‘essence’ of these places through the replication of key monuments – for instance, the Eiffel Tower; the Statue of Liberty; and the Grand Canal and Doge’s Palace.
Here, again, Nora’s study of the construction of French national memory is helpful in understanding this kind of eclecticism. The essay by Jean-Paul Demoule, ‘Lascaux’, prompts the section that discusses major sites as symbols of the nation. His essay opens thus:
[T]he series of royal and imperial monuments. . . that runs through Paris from the Louvre to La Defense. . . . One finds starting from the center of the royal palace, an Egyptian-inspired glass pyramid designed by a Chinese architect (1988); a pastiche of Septimus Severus’s triumphal arch in Rome commemorating the German victories of a Corsican emperor (1808); an authentic thirteenth – century bc Egyptian obelisk given to a restored French king by a Turkish pasha and placed in the center of a square flanked to the north and south by Greco-Roman temples, one of which ultimately became a Catholic church (1842), the other a meeting place for the people’s deputies (1807); a second triumphal arch, a grandiloquent enlargement of the first (1806-1836), commissioned by the same emperor to commemorate the same victories but completed by a constitutional monarch and ever since the primary site for commemorating the accomplishments of France’s military; and finally, concluding the series for now, a third arch (1989), a still larger magnification in concrete and marble designed as an ‘International Communications Center’ but actually used as office space by various private firms and hard-pressed government ministries.20
This ‘triumphal axis’ of ‘ostentatious bric-a-brac’ (terms that could be used equally to describe Las Vegas) formed the route of the 200th anniversary of Bastille day (in itself an invented tradition of French national memory). This seminal event was, then, given a spatial location between two ‘imposed’ symbols that have, at best, an ambiguous relationship to national memory and history.
I am intrigued by the different responses to the Louvre pyramid in Paris and the one in Las Vegas. No one laughs at the pyramid in the Louvre, although some French critics dislike the fact it is not designed by a French
architect. Indeed, much of Demoule’s argument is about the absence of indigenous French artefacts from symbols of national memory. Yet Pei’s extension to the Louvre Gallery is hailed as a success not least in terms of museum design – an essential engine of the relationship between memory and history. But why does Luxor cause such amusement?
This points to a disjuncture between the well-established architectural practice cultural appropriation of form for an ideological end and our
interpretation of Las Vegas. The best-known example of this is the Roman adoption of the Greek orders – but their technical knowledge meant the orders no longer need have a structural function, so they became a decorative system. And if we follow the idea of pastiche through this trajectory to its inevitable conclusion the only pure architecture in western culture is that of the Greeks. The cumulative effect of the essays in this volume is to show that both forms and spaces are continually re-appropriated and invested with new meaning and this cannot just be written off as pastiche. Las Vegas is, then, like any other architectural style; it is borrowed re-appropriated and experienced. There is no doubt that it demonstrates a fascination with spectacle and consumerism – but the cultural monuments of Paris, New York and Luxor are also colonized in the same way as the Greek orders were to add cultural legitimacy to the roman Colosseum.
In London Bridge we see a parallel activity to the passion for the
looting and collecting in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The Benjaminian aura of London Bridge is not lost as it is its own original.
12.5
The Christmas
Parade,
Disneyland,
Los Angeles. Dancing reindeer accompany Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella and many other fairytale characters
In Las Vegas we see a process of assimilation of form that can be likened to the classical tradition in European architectural practice. And both of these examples can be explored fully through Nora and Foucault’s ideas of distorting mirrors in relation to the colonizer and the colonized. I want to end with an image of Disneyland – a fictitious but very real space (Figure 12.5). It is the archetypal American town. Visitors ‘live’ there for the day following Disney’s rules. The fairytales that are enacted on ‘Main Street’ during the Disney parade are, of course, from Europe. But if we are truly seeking the creation of a national memory in the US perhaps this is where we should look. It is America colonizing itself.