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Doppelgänger

Jason Payne

Facing page: Fig. 1: d as a subset of B and A. If B≈A then d B+A.

Unlikely affinities, scary resemblances (B ≈ A). Often we find two objects that would, at first glance, seem entirely unlike one another, strangers in a strange world. Occasionally we are surprised to find them not so different after all. Surprise becomes delight in the case of shy objects, those thought to have little relation to things of even their own category, let alone any other. As it happens, the Albanian bunker and asteroids are two such objects. Side by side comparison reveals a number of similarities (Fig. 1), each crossing the orbit of the other to produce a glimpse of something else, a third thing that seems a double to both. Initial delight turns to fear, however, in cases where resemblance refuses the natural inclination to make sense of them. Sometimes resemblances are not logical correlates that work to strengthen our comprehensive worldview but instead are something other than this, uncanny look-alikes but not much more. In German myth the startling appearance of one’s double is called a doppelgänger and when it appears it is not a good sign. Associated with the dark side of persona, the doppelgänger is something that might be the other side of oneself or it might be something outside: one can never be sure. This uncertainty leads to ambivalence, among the most troubling of emotional states for its vacillating indeterminacy.

In the text that follows two objects are compared, each understood as its own project. On the left is Mathilde (Fig. 2), an asteroid in our solar system that is also the subject of a recent project by Hirsuta for the design of a twin to an existing Albanian bunker. On the right is a bunker from Enver Hoxha’s Projeckti Bunkerizimit (Fig. 3), a defensive infrastructural project built in Albania between 1944 and 1985. These two objects/projects are remarkably similar even in their specifics, though these are beyond the scope of this piece. Instead the comparison here occurs across three general terms meant to capture the salient likenesses of each... ...Big, Black, Blank.

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Above: Fig. 2: Asteroid 253 Mathilde. Photo: NASA/JPL NEAR Shoemaker Spacecraft, June 27, 1997.

Above: Fig. 3: Albanian bunker near Durrës. Photo: Jason Payne, 2013.

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Mathilde is big. How big is big? About 50 kilometers in diameter but that is beside the point. Architects think of big as something different from large scale, the former a term meant to capture the qualitative nature of sizeable things rather than their measurement. Big is, in a sense, an intuitive ineffability, something we know when we see but otherwise not much more. Big is, in fact, scaleless, a resistance to human measurement. Mathilde’s shyness in this regard extends even to those astrophysicists armed with the tools and expertise to dimension her properly, dark and distant as she is, evasive of sure capture. In any case, even if we could see her clearly what would Mathilde’s exact measurement tell us? Given the unstable categorical status of such objects that include everything from small meteors to comets to compound rubble piles to things almost moonlike in size (collectively called planetesimals as catch- all term for hard to define objects smaller than planets,) comparing lengths and widths seems of little value. Better just to say Mathilde is

BIG. [cue http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kd34UjP6Q3Y here]

Gigantic, gigantic, gigantic A big big love (Pixies, Gigantic)

The Albanian bunker is big, at least in number. How big is big? Approximately 750,000 individual objects by best estimates, one bunker for every four Albanian citizens at the time of the project’s abrupt conclusion upon Enver Hoxha’s death in 1985. Big here is not measured in terms of the size of any given bunker (though some were impressively large) but rather in terms of the scope of the project itself. In Albanian it is called Projekti Bunkerizimit—the Bunker Project—a term referring to a project in which tens of thousands of reinforced concrete bunkers were placed throughout the country to protect soldiers and citizens alike from attack by outside forces. A military-industrial project at a grand scale, Projekti Bunkerizimit imagined as its endgame a bunker for every Albanian, each located to allow shelter on very short notice. Coming in three basic sizes—small (QZ, for individuals,) medium (PZ, for small groups,) and large (special structures, for large groups of the most important military and political figures,) each type has its

big and leave it at that, an emotive utterance somehow more accurate than any attempt at exactitude associated with scalar definition. Or if not more accurate then at least more useful in characterizing an object so foreign to human sensory perception as to render our attempts at measure absurd. After all, what does it matter how many feet are in the diameter of an asteroid since there was never any relation between it and the unit of English shoe size in the first place? More to the point and as we will see below, the term big binds nicely with two other qualities, black and blank, to form a compound greater than the sum of its parts and well-suited to capturing the elusive nature of things like bunkers and asteroids as well as whatever projects might be found between the two.

own logic of construction corresponding to scale and deployment.

With the re-opening of Albania in 1985 after four decades of impenetrable solitude (its dark mystery rivaled only by North Korea) the world was baffled to discover a project of such magnitude, equal parts engineering efficiency and absurd rationale. An exercise in the kind of steroidal production that sometimes results from megalomanic delusion, Projekti Bunkerizimit can be compared to other compulsive projects of physical and social engineering found through history, different only perhaps in its obscurity and, ultimately, its utter uselessness. For as it turns out, Albania never had any enemies to begin with, inconsequential as it was in terms of resources and location.

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Mathilde is black. Specifically, its albedo measures as low as virtually any known object or material, reflecting only three percent of the Sun’s light. Twice as dark as charcoal, Mathilde’s elevational aspect is nearly that of space itself, making it extraordinarily difficult to see and photograph. Ambivalent, it would seem, to the traditional and dichotomous relationships of object to field, mass to volume, body to context. As it slowly rotates it presents a continually changing figure and its outer profile appears to slip away into the dark of space, making edges difficult to discern. A study in black, Mathilde presents real problems of representation for astrophysicists and architects alike since each is more accustomed to objects with more pronounced optics. The definition of an object indifferent to legibility suggests that standard, disciplinary means of representation be questioned and may very well require the development of new methods of visualization.

BLACK. [cue http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAzKbtIVdl0 here]

I’ve never seen you when you’re smiling It really gets under my skin (Catherine Wheel, Black Metallic)

The Albanian bunker is black. Not in literal coloration for in this sense it is the gray of untreated concrete, the material of which every one is made. Rather, its blackness comes of its unknowability, one that parallels Albania’s larger identity under Hoxha’s rule.

On this, a very brief history: In 1944 Enver Hoxha (b. Gjirokastër, 1908) assumed control of Albania, acting as First Secretary of the Party of Labour of Albania and Commander-in- Chief of its military until his death in 1985. His early tenure, coinciding as it did with the global reorganization of forces after World War II, brought Albania into alignment with various other communist powers in the region under the umbrella of the Soviet Union. His later rule, especially after the death of Stalin and Krushchev’s ensuing revisions to original Marxist-Leninist principles, found Hoxha at odds with the larger community of communist countries in which interpretations of the communist project were seen, in his view,

In the context of imagining what the doppelgänger of an Albanian bunker might look like our office could not help but emulate the black beauty of Mathilde (Fig. 4). Like a black igloo, the project begins with an attempt to capture the reluctant Mathilde through a reduction of the formal complexity of the original object just shy of losing its compelling strangeness. This is done digitally, taking a model fit tightly to measurements taken from the NEAR mission and reducing the number of points, lines, and planes. Stopping short of the moment where fundamental distinguishing features of Mathilde are lost, we then rationalize the object for material fabrication. The entire form is black, through and through. Unlike form in any other color, black resists even the most ardent attempt at objectification by the subject... or at least shrugs it off. In this way, Mathilde’s estrangement from our intrusive impulse for colonization through measurement remains intact.

to be softening. Maintaining Albania’s hardline position against the shifting seas of communist doctrine, Hoxha found himself increasingly alone in a dangerous world. Tensions came to a head in 1961 when Hoxha proclaimed Albania’s independence, leading to his country’s exclusion from the Warsaw Pact. Then Albania went dark.

A similar darkness imbues the bunkers themselves, as objects, turning their literal gray to figurative black. This is the darkening of growing inscrutability borne of a functional pointlessness evident even at the project’s inception that grows stronger with time. An instrument without purpose is a building with no meaning, one turned away from correlation to us. If indifference had a color it would be black. Were Hoxha to have carried his project one step further, to the level of material finish, he surely would have colored their concrete black.

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Mathilde is blank. What is meant by this? An elusive term that describes an elusive quality to be sure.1 To some degree blankness comes of the combination of bigness and blackness. Objects that are difficult to measure and hard to see are, in these terms at least, blank. In this way blankness could be understood as emergent property (b x b = b2) but it exists in its own right as well, a quality unto itself rooted not as much in the visible/sensible properties of an object (how we see it) as in those more conceptual (how we think of it.)

To be blank is to be free of association or, in other cases, fraught with multiple, incommensurate associations. The face of Michael Myers is a good example. A white mask crudely formed to make vague the underlying human features of its wearer, the disguise (which is not a disguise at all in the end but rather a new identity unto itself ) blanks out whatever humanity Myers might possess through dulling: eyes become mere outlines, nose flattens

The Albanian bunker is blank. An act of speculative realism of the most absurd variety, Hoxha’s bunker project served no purpose other than to exorcise the demons of an agitated mind, loosing them upon the landscape as mute sentinels to nothing. When a form is so highly specialized to serve a single purpose and that purpose turns up missing and its creator winds up dead, what then do you have? Perhaps nothing, in the way that glacial erratics are, for most people, nothing. Or maybe just something else. After all, Hoxha’s project was something quite different in his own mind than in those of his subjects and this latter definition of the project grew in collective strength with each decade. Only in the narrowest of terms was it ever really Hoxha’s project exclusively, its dark vitality showing an alarming appetite for autonomy, a refusal of its own parentage. Bastard by choice, the architectural equivalent of Michael Myers. Loosed upon the geophysical landscape like rockfall, its seizure of the collective, cultural imagination was all but inevitable. Hoxha’s

BLANK. [cue http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peXvYXdN0Mk here]

You’ve fooled them, haven’t you Michael? But not me. (Dr. Loomis to Michael Myers, Halloween)

somewhat askew, mouth hangs expressionless. All of this more or less white which in this case is the same as black for the apparent lack of detail. Low fidelity. This is why Michael Myers specifically, and blankness generally, frightens us so much: our inability to see what is there, even in the face of its immediacy.

To be clear, blankness is not the absence of affect, not at all. To the contrary, blankened forms often convey very strong valence—usually repulsive rather than attractive—striking the viewer with a powerful sense of aversion. With a shyness that is criminally vulgar blank forms turn away from us, indifferent.

death, then, had no consequence for the life of the project and in fact gave it powerful new energy. Political suppression reversed overnight toward intellectual expression and with this new definitions and directions for the project emerge.

Post-Hoxha projections for a new Projekti Bunkerizimit vacillate between erasure and adaptive re-use. Both impulses miss the point. Blankness renders each project not much more than meddlesome attempts at control through interpretation. Neither beautiful nor sublime and not picturesque either, the bunker’s blankness defines an aesthetic category all its own. For lack of any better term: the bunkeresque.

Following pages: Fig. 4: Hirsuta: Low Albedo (2012).1. Here I must thank Jeffrey Kipnis for putting this term in my head in the first place. While his thoughts on “blankness” and mine are not the same (see his “Towards A New Architecture,” in AD: Folding in Architecture, ed. Greg Lynn et al. (London: Wiley-Academy Editions, 1993), 57-65.) the very idea that “blankness” could be of architectural relevance likely would not have occured to me had it not been for his essay.

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Uuq ununquadium

114

[289]

Uub ununbium 112

[277]

Uuu ununumium 111

[272]

Tl thallium 81

[204.38]

Hg mercury 80

[200.59]

Au gold 79

[196.97]

Pb lead 82

[207.2]

Bi bismuth 83

[208.98]

Pt platinum 78

[195.08]

Uun ununnilium 110

[271]

Po polonium 84

[209]

In indium 49

[114.82]

Cd cadmium 48

[112.41]

Ag silver 47

[107.87]

Sn tin 50

[118.71]

Sb antimony 51

[121.76]

Pd palladium 46

[106.42]

Te tellurium 52

[127.60]

Bbb mathilde 113

[283]

Ga gallium 31

[69.723]

Zn zinc 30

[65.39]

Cu copper 29

[63.546]

Ge germanium 32

[72.61]

As arsenic 33

[74.922]

Ni palladium 46

[58.693]

Se selenium 34

[78.96]

Al aluminum 13

[26.982]

Si silicon 14

[28.086]

P phosphorus 15

[30.974]

S sulfur 16

[32.065]