by Raafat Majzoub
In this conversation—excerpted from the Aga Khan Award for Architecture’s upcoming volume, Beyond Ruins: Reimagining Modernism (ArchiTangle, 2024) set to be published this Fall, and focusing on the renovation of the Niemeyer Guest House by East Architecture Studio in Tripoli, Lebanon—Raafat Majzoub invites Costica Bradatan to discuss failure in lieu of architecture’s role as a narrator of civilization and to unpack preservation as a grounding human instinct.
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Raafat Majzoub: I am curious about your perspective on ruins. They seem to be closely connected to failure and humility, topics you engage with in depth in your latest book, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility.[1] Failure in the sense of languages becoming ruins after their utility dies off, buildings becoming ruins for lack of management or maintenance, ideologies becoming ruins for the depletion of stamina.
Costica Bradatan: Ruins seem indeed closely connected to failure and humility, but perhaps in a manner even more dramatic than the one you suggest. The sight of ruins, as you point out, may evoke poor management or even a complete failure of maintenance. It is almost common sense: bringing something into existence is only one half of the process; the other half is keeping it in existence, which makes it, I imagine, a process of continuous creation.
Yet the presence of ruins signals something deeper, more serious, and more devastating: the fundamental precariousness of all things human, the eventual ruination of everything that comes from our labour, the “vanity of it all”. No matter how much care we take of something, how much time and effort we invest in its maintenance, it will eventually “fall into ruin”. Ruins are our destiny.
In this sense, ruins remind us of just how close to nothingness we always are. They are part of this world, and yet they evoke another. They are a border marker – literally, the boundary stone – that separates two realms: existence and non-existence. And in that respect, they are fascinating objects to study. They signify the nothingness in the proximity of which all things human exist, and to which they will return eventually.
RM: And what about humility?
CB: That’s precisely where humility comes in. For this encounter with ruins as harbingers of nothingness brings us “down to earth”. A fitting phrase if we consider that in English (as in other modern European languages) “humility” comes from the Latin humilitas, with its root in humus – “earth” or “ground”. And much is to be learned from this downwards journey of ours: as we are brought down, we are given the chance to wake up, and to see ourselves, and indeed everything else, with new eyes. People – especially architects – tend to praise “the bird’s-eye view” and various “perspectives from above” for what they can reveal. Yet that’s nothing compared to the “perspective from below”, from where you could get access to the intimacy of things, to a level of detail and a richness of insight that no “bird’s-eye view” could ever offer. One of the film directors I love most is Yasujirō Ozu. His stylistic signature is the low-angle static shot: his camera looks at the world not from the perspective of a person standing up, as in the case of most directors, but from that of someone sitting on a tatami mat. That’s the working method and the point of view of humility itself.
My point here is that being as close to the ground as possible, being brought “down to earth”, a feeling that ruins tend to instil in us, can truly make us wiser because it puts us “in our place”. Ruins, then, could be said to “ground” us. Which is why, for all their whiff of nothingness, or maybe precisely because of it, we should preserve them whenever we can.
RM: Could you speak, then, about the concept of preservation? Reading your work, I might assume that it could hint at the failure to imagine the future, but I wonder if we could also think of it as a technology to calibrate it. The two perspectives may also mean the same thing, but I’d love it if you would expand your thoughts on preservation.
CB: Before I do that, Raafat, I think we owe our readers an explanation. I, for one, owe them a confession. The fact is that I have no expertise in architecture. That doesn’t prevent me from being fascinated with it, just as my general ignorance of aerodynamics doesn’t diminish my fascination with flying. And the thought occurred to me that, by inviting someone to contribute to this volume who is such a complete innocent, you showed remarkable audacity, didn’t you? In fact, your audacity was so striking that there was something endearing about it. That’s how I came to think that the only way for me to match your audacious invitation was to do something equally audacious: to accept it. And here I am speaking at length of something I don’t know much about. You can’t top that.
To get to your question now: we want to “preserve” something, no matter how ruinous its current state, because it gives us a certain sense of “grounding”. Restoring an old building and giving it a new lifeline is like lowering an anchor into the past: it keeps us in place, settled, rooted. We do that all the time, no matter the costs and the technical difficulties, no matter how inconvenient the whole thing may be. We do it because that’s where life is: in the past. And we always tend to stick to life.
RM: Hah! Well, thank you for humouring me . . . but what do you mean by “life is in the past”?
CB: Of course, life is in the past – where else? Just take a walk in a new neighbourhood, around some recent development (there are plenty of them these days). There is, you must admit, something unmistakably lifeless that comes from all that novelty, something shallow and uninviting, and we don’t want to spend more time there than we have to. No matter how faux-antique those buildings are made to look, how “classical” their styles, we know that life is elsewhere. Life – real, authentic, “lived life” – is where the old buildings, the old churches and mosques and temples, the ancient piazzas are. That’s why, when we visit Athens or Rome, Istanbul or Cairo, Beijing or Kyoto, we always feel attracted to their ancient quarters, no matter how ruinous, primitive, or precarious they may look, and we rarely go to visit the new developments. You will say that there is nothing much to see in the new neighbourhoods, that all look the same. And that’s precisely the point. We are spontaneously attracted to the humanity stored in the old stones. Not merely because they are old (there are rocks in nature that are even older, but we don’t feel any particular attraction to them), but because human history – long stretches of it – happened in their presence, and they not just mirrored our existence along centuries, but somehow absorbed it. We know instinctively that, for all their ruinous appearance, there is more potency in them than we can find in the latest edifices.
RM: Isn’t this a bit paradoxical?
CB: It certainly is. Indeed, this must be one of the most beautiful paradoxes we are dealing with here: ruins are harbingers of nothingness, and yet they are brimming with life and potential. In that respect, they express, accurately, something essential about the human condition: as human beings, we occupy a place on the edge of existence, one foot already dangling over the abyss. We, too, are nothing much, yet brimming with life at the same time.
RM: In your conversation with Robert Zaretsky, about George Steiner’s The Idea of Europe,[2] you ask, “What kind of thing is Europe if we can find part of it in the Himalayas?” Here, you were reflecting on the city of Shimla, India: “The architecture is there, and so are the theater and the art galleries.” As this book focuses on the renovation of a building in an abandoned modernist fair by a Brazilian architect in Lebanon as part of its post-independence, nation-building strategy that never really launched, it makes me wonder about your thoughts on how public artefacts – buildings, for example – create and enforce collective mythologies, and what happens ontologically when these artefacts fail.
CB: Everything we accomplish, as I noted earlier, once it has run its course, “falls into ruins”. All things human end in failure. But then there is a class of things – like the Rachid Karami International Fair, projected by Oscar Niemeyer – that begin with failure, things that fail to launch, as you put it. Philosophically, I find the situation fascinating. It is as though they refuse to come into existence. In the book you mentioned earlier, In Praise of Failure, in the chapter where I discuss E. M. Cioran, I touch on a Romanian phrase that he was very fond of: n-a fost să fie. It translates, roughly, as “it wasn’t (meant) to be”, but the way in which the phrase is normally used in Romanian suggests something forbidding, predestinarian, “set in stone”. When something nu e să fie, then no matter what you do, no matter how hard you try and how many times, you just cannot bring it into existence. One cannot change destiny. Certain things (a European city in the Himalayas, for example) just aren’t meant to be, and their failure to launch probably tells us an important story about the limits of what we can – and especially what we cannot – do. Oscar Niemeyer’s project to build a futurist fair in Tripoli, for all intents and purposes, seemed to be one of those things as well. It never quite launched. The burning question now is: What is this restauration project doing here? Is this a resurrection from the dead of Niemeyer’s project or something else? Are you just trying to finish a building or to challenge destiny?
RM: There’s something spiritual in your answer here. It may be interesting to speak about secular spirituality within the conceptualization of the mortality of buildings within a city. Abandoned buildings, although possibly charged with traumatic events, usually stimulate the imagination because they are devoid of function. I would be curious to have your thoughts on that.
CB: I find abandoned buildings fascinating. They are obvious sites of failure – devastating failure, sometimes – living reminders that something hasn’t worked out as planned. And yet there is something open and indefinite, even inviting and creative, about them. Even though they failed as something, if not because of that, they can now be turned into nearly anything. There is sometimes almost no relationship between the purpose for which the building was originally designed and its new function, for which it’s been redesigned. I happened to stay recently in a hotel in Łódź – one of the most imaginative hotels I’ve ever stayed in – that used to be a textile factory, and a rather oppressive one at that. It would have been so much easier to tear down those bloody walls and to build a brand-new hotel instead. And yet, again, people wanted to stick to the “lived life” stored in those old industrial structures. For some reason, they wanted to prolong its story – or, indeed, to “re-cycle” it. For stories, too, get recycled all the time.
RM: What happens to meaning when stories get recycled?
CB: I guess the meaning gets rejuvenated.
RM: This being said, what does it really mean to say that a building has failed, if it has not been taught or designed to die? In that sense, architecture’s denial of time/reality is an interesting provocation. I think you speak about this in the epilogue of In Praise of Failure, where you talk about people that accept that life may not have an overall meaning, and yet they don’t kill themselves because they feel like their stories haven’t run their course.
CB: I was talking there about how important stories and storytelling are in our lives. We need a story to wake up in the morning and we need a story to go through the day. We need stories for everything we do. Indeed, we need stories more than we need food – it’s stories that keep us alive, more than anything else. You are now suggesting that the same applies to buildings: we can’t really tear down a building while its story is still unfolding. The hotel where I stayed in Łódź is just another chapter in the story of the old textile factory that somehow refuses to come to an end. I like that. But keep in mind: it’s always us who are in charge of these stories – they are our stories, not the buildings’. By repurposing an abandoned building, by redesigning an old structure, we only show how much we need stories and how dependent on storytelling we are – not as individuals this time, but as communities. Architecture is always a collective story.
RM: In the present volume, we identify the Niemeyer Guest House renovation as a scaffold, rather than as a static renovation. This metaphor allows us to explore the complexity of authorship and transience in recent heritage renovation projects. The “void” you describe in “Born Again in a Second Language”,[3] where the author writes in a language that is not her mother tongue (you say: “It is as though, for a moment, as she passes through the void – the narrow crack between languages, where there are no words to hold on to and nothing can be named – the self of the writer is not any more”), is reminiscent of this scaffold. It also illustrates the platform that abandoned buildings provide in imagining beyond the single authorship of the architect. Could you reflect on that comparison and elaborate on what we learn about collective stories, connected identities, and shared characters from such authorship?
CB: I appreciate the Buddhist undertones of your question: the implication that the self is a dubious thing, if it exists at all. In the essay from which you quoted, I was talking about one and the same person, who, by changing languages, adopts different selves, each language with its own self, as it were. As a result, the very idea of self is undermined. In the case you mention, however, for all the similarities you notice, the situation is slightly different: the same project passes through different phases and regimes of authorship, changing hands and selves as it goes – those who commissioned the project, Oscar Niemeyer himself (the original designer), the renovators, the carpenters, the community within which this occurs, the place (Tripoli) where all this happens, and to some event even Brazil, from where the original architect came. There is an obvious sense of fluidity in all this. Not only because modernity is “liquid”, as someone said, but above all because architecture, by its nature, is fluid.
RM: Some would argue that architecture can be the opposite of fluidity.
CB: Yes, they would argue. But Hagia Sophia is an example I’d use to illustrate what I mean. It has been an Orthodox cathedral, a Catholic one (during the Fourth Crusade), a mosque, a museum, then a mosque again (while still serving as a museum), a masterpiece of public art, and a major tourist attraction. It was designed by two Greek geometers, commissioned by a Roman Christian emperor, repurposed (as a mosque) by an Ottoman Sultan, repurposed again (as a museum) by a Turkish secular leader (Atatürk), then repurposed yet again (as a mosque-cum-museum) by another Turkish leader, though one not exactly secular (Erdoğan). Different communities have woven their collective life around this building: Byzantine and Ottoman, Christian and Muslim, religious and secular, traditional and modern. Within its walls, at different times, Greek was spoken, and so was Latin, Venetian, Arabic, and Turkish – Ottoman and then modern Turkish. Now, in the age of global tourism, Hagia Sophia speaks the language of Babel itself, while still serving as a mosque. Can you think of anything more fluid?
RM: It’s interesting that you bring up Babel as a byproduct of preservation practices. It makes me think of this fluidity rather as an ocean of crashing waves. Babel was a punishment for humans challenging their finite destiny, which you’ve touched upon earlier, by destroying their ability to communicate. Would you like to reflect on this further in the context of translation at a collective and identitarian level?
CB: It’s hard to overstate the importance of Babel as one of our foundational myths. The story is about one of the best things that ever happened to us. Before the mythical event, we only spoke one language, which must have made communication easy, smooth, and boring to death. Like two computers talking to each other. Have you seen anything more atrociously monotonous? This kills the soul. Then God decided to “confuse the language of the whole world” (Genesis 11:9). As a result, a wide variety of local tongues appeared, and, along with them, a host of other necessary things: translators and translations, lexicons and dictionaries, interpreters and interpretations, hermeneuts and hermeneutics, schools of foreign languages and of foreign cultures, anthropology and ethnography, linguistics and semiotics, professional spies and schools of spying, writing in codes, code makers and code breakers. You must admit, because of an architectural failure, the world became, all of a sudden, a much more interesting place.
Indeed, in the wake of this crisis, something novel and refreshing emerged: a mode of expression that was all about nuance and irony and subversion, which betrayed a mode of thinking that was sceptical, provisional, and above all humble. That’s, in fact, how the humanities were born: in the aftermath of Babel. Before that we didn’t need them. Communication between humans is never simple, and we need the humanities precisely to make it even more complex, more nuanced, more fecund. This may be the thing that will save us in the long run, for the human mind thrives not on computer-like monotony, but on ambiguity and equivocation, on double entendre and sophistry – on the blunders and embarrassments, the errors and misunderstandings, we continuously fall prey to, and then the painful efforts we make to correct them.
The collapse of Babel, then, was truly a blessing. That’s why I take the multiplication of languages that the myth talks about as the prize with which God rewarded humans for their daring, and not at all as a form of punishment.
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[1] Costica Bradatan, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2023).
[2] Costica Bradatan and Robert Zaretsky, “The Idea of Europe”, Los Angeles Review of Books, 12 August 2015, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-idea-of-europe/.
[3] Costica Bradatan, “Born Again in a Second Language”, Opinionator, 4 August 2013, archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/born-again-in-a-second-language/.
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Raafat Majzoub is an architect, artist, writer and educator based between Boston and Beirut. He is the editor-in-chief of the Dongola Architecture Series, and co-editor of Beyond Ruins (ArchiTangle, 2024) and Design to Live (MIT Press, 2021). He is the co-founder of award-winning The Outpost magazine and creative director of The Khan: The Arab Association for Prototyping Cultural Practices. In 2024, he received the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture research fellowship at MIT, and will be lecturing at the institute’s Program in Art, Culture and Technology where he is also an alumnus. Majzoub has previously lectured at the American University of Beirut, MISK Art Institute, Ashkal Alwan, among others, and has published and exhibited his art internationally. Website: raafatmajzoub.
Costica Bradatan is Paul Whitfield Horn Distinguished Professor of Humanities in the Honors College at Texas Tech University, USA, and an Honorary Research Professor of Philosophy at University of Queensland, Australia. He has also held faculty appointments at Cornell University, Miami University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and University of Notre Dame, as well as at universities in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Bradatan is the author and editor of more than a dozen books, among which Dying for Ideas. The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers (2015, 2018) and In Praise of Failure. Four Lessons in Humility (2023). He also writes book reviews, essays, and op-ed pieces for such publications as the New York Times, Washington Post, Times Literary Supplement, Literary Review, Aeon, and Commonweal.
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