THE UNKNOWN TRAGEDY

Enrico Piras

2012

Introduction

The structure of the following story is based on the actual course of the research. It has evolved on a

plot which unravel different tensions and fractures in the narrative, developed through the discovery

and exploration of the landscape and history of Utrecht. The original focus of this research was the

continuous labour of construction and deconstruction that is going on in the city center. My specific

interest is on how the new architectural plans are revisiting the story of the city through the idea of

Re-enactment. This notion, applied to an architectural context, means the reconstruction of sites,

buildings or monuments that have been destroyed or demolished in the past. The city of Utrecht and

especially its centre, has been under a process of revision during the 1950’s and 60’s that led to a

complete restyling of the site’s identity. The actual status of this process is reconsidering the

perspective of the interferences between the dynamics of modernization of the city and the

preservation of its old memory, ruins and architectural identity.

An idea of modernity

“Ruination and modernity go hand in hand: the modern displaces the ancient and marks it as

irredeemably part of the past precisely by construing it as ruined. Ruins are the site of what we have

left behind. But they remain front and center, for modernity occasions a sometimes anxious

reflection on the conditions and effects of progress, on this process of temporal displacement for

which the ruin serves as memento mori.”1

Jon Beasley-Murray

During the last years we went through a strong revision of different ideas of modernity. There is a

whole process of reconsideration of the choices taken in different areas; what I’m interested in are

the changes related to architecture and urban planning and the sudden understanding of some

modern structures as new ruins. It is not easy to define modernity, but trying to give a definition in a

broad sense, we can define it as the tendency to innovation and a positive and purposeful approach

to future and especially progress. Modernity, a historical process which dates from 1500 to 19 th

Century (different dates about its end have been purposed) is marked by the move from feudalism

toward capitalism and is a time of deep rupture with past and traditions. One of the crucial phases of

Modern era was during seventeenth century, when this rupture with the past, this distinction,

became clearer: “The term modern is used to describe a present time that is experienced as a period,

and which possesses certain specific features that distinguish it from previous periods. It was this

sense of the term that began to prevail in the seventeenth century”2. Modern era is characterised by

profound social changes and phenomena as industrialization and urbanization, which created new

needs and situations in the cities settlement. The first processes of modernization in the context of

urban planning are the projects to renew Paris and extend Barcellona in 1850’s. These plans,

respectively by Georges Eugène Haussmann and Ildefons Cerdà “Had the objective to improve the

health of the inhabitants, allow the circulation of new transport means like trams and facilitate

social integration”3. In the Paris plan by Haussmann, the medieval structure of the city is dismantled

and converted in a rational plan of wide boulevards that will extend beyond the old city borders.

Modernity is deeply related to enlightenment and rational thinking, which approach was the

fundament of modern understanding of sciences and also architecture and urban design. The Paris

renewed by Haussmann follows and sets strict rules of construction, like the height of the buildings

and the width of the boulevards needed to improve the health of the inhabitants and prevent

1 Jon Beasley-Murray, Vilcashuamàn, Telling Stories in Ruins, Ruins of Modernity, pg. 2122 Hilde Heynen, Architecture and Modernity: A Critique, Massachussets Insitute of Technology, 19993 Hilde Heynen, Architecture and Modernity: A Critique, Massachussets Insitute of Technology, 1999

epidemics. Modernism, which is a term referring to an artistic movement emerged between the end

of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, is in architecture one of the most important

tendencies, that will transform the idea of city and its planning. Charles Edouard Jeanneret, better

known as Le Corbusier, is one of the key figures of the Modern Movement in architecture. He was

one of the first modern architects to project completely new cities, like the Ville Contemporaine

(1922). His relation with the existing architecture was complicated, he doesn’t recognize a

functional value to the structure of the old cities, that are not fitted for the modern life necessities

and technologies: ”Le Corbusier proposed to dissolve the urban fabric into a continuous park. He

saw the modern city as a system of mechanical infrastructures raised above nature, while the past

was either eradicated or transformed, in an eighteenth-century manner, into ruin fragments in the

park”.4 His complex relationship with history also explains the choice to design cities outside

Europe, moving his plans to the empty spaces of the third world, more than to the crowded

European cities with which he also had to deal. He developed a utopian plan for the reconstruction

of Paris that shows clearly the separation between modern and pre-modern: ”When Le Corbusier

developed his Plan Voisin in 1925 for the reconstruction of Paris, he intended to replace the chaos

of modern urban life with more rationalized systems of leisure, dwelling, work and circulation. In

his city human thinking, living, work and enjoyment would be uplifted, Platonized.”5

This clash with the past and a difficult relation with history are typical aspects of modern

movements, even if modernity embodies in itself contrasting tension between a return to tradition

and a will for progress: “Modernity is constantly in conflict with tradition, elevating the struggle for

change to the status of purveyor of meaning par excellence”6. Modernity is a phase which is

consciously different from the pre-modern era, but during its development also a return to the past

was considered, as an example in the totalitarian architecture of the 1930’s which refers to Greek

and Roman classique architectural models. After World War II destructions, the idea by architects

and urban planners from the Modern Movement like Le Corbusier and CIAM, found space to

develop in the urgent need for reconstruction. Especially during this period, from the 1950’s to the

end of the 70’s, the world experienced a new concrete definition of the idea of city: “Architecture

and planning had to match, even more than in the past, with technological development of

production and the bureaucratic organization of social life, two of the main carriers of

modernization in its last phase”7. The post-war possibilities for reconstruction and the development

of new technologies created the right environment for this urban revolution. Le Corbusier was one

of the founders of the CIAM: the International Congresses of Modern Architecture. This

4 Anthony Vidler, Air War and Architecture, Ruins of Modernity, Julia Hell and Andreas Schonle Editors, 20105 Daniel Herwitz, The Monument in Ruins, Ruins of Modernity, Julia Hell and Andreas Schonle Editors,20106 Hilde Heynen, Architecture and Modernity: A Critique, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 19997 Hilde Heynen, Architecture and Modernity: A Critique, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1999

international movement founded in 1928 by some of the most prominent architects of the world,

was one of the production cores of the post-war architecture and urban planning. On his third

congress the CIAM: “Addressed modern architectural expression, standardization, hygiene,

urbanism, primary school education and governments and the modern architecture as fundamental

topics for discussion by congress”8 The group represented a huge influence in the reconstruction of

the European cities and spread also in the USA, bringing the planning principles of the Modern

Movement. The group was dismantled in 1958 because of the diverging ideas inside it; a lot of its

project were realized in the reconstructed European cities, and in new cities in the U.S., without the

functionality that their creator wished, and are now under a strong revision. This global aspect of

the movement helped also the exportation of architectural models from a part to another of the

world. This phenomenon explains what happened in Europe, where the first commercial shopping

centre started to be designed on models coming from the U.S.A., like in Utrecht. Here modernity is

represented by a whole process of restyling of the city started in the 1950’s, with the creation of

new neighbourhoods outside the city center and the Hoog Catharijne (HC), the biggest commercial

center in The Netherlands, built between 1964 and 1973. This complex building is the main

representation of architectural innovation that has ever been realized in Utrecht. “The first mile-

stone was reached in 1970 with the opening of a pedestrian bridge over the railway tracks. The

functionalist architecture and the conspicuous use of concrete provoked mixed reactions”.9 It is

situated at the border of the historical centre and for its realization an entire 19 th century’s

neighbourhood has been demolished. This huge building is at the same time the biggest trains

station and commercial centre in Holland. Its history is complex and still debated, because of the

nature of the intervention. Concrete, steel and glass, typical modernistic materials had never been

used in that quantity before in Utrecht, and a new idea of city was designed around it: a city open to

cars and on-wheel transports, surrounded by highways and parkings. Before and during the

construction of the HC new neighbourhoods were built in Utrecht, the city was expanding over the

old borders and at the time were developed the projects for these neighbourhoods, like

Kanaleneiland, a popular housing project built between 1957 and 1971, which will be partially

demolished in three years from now. This project, which caused admiration at the beginning,

revealed to be a failure in the 70’s, when there was no money to restore the already deteriorated

structures and the neighbourhood starting its decline, which did not stop yet. The new

neighbourhoods, Kanaleneiland and Overvecht, show typical modernist approach to construction

and social-life design, purposes which are now definitely perceived as not fitting or facilitating life

anymore. At the time the city started to need a new plan for viability and a larger train station, and

8 Eric Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism 1928-1960, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2000 9 Hans Butter, HC On the Move, Expodium Edition on Art and Urbanism

this is part of the changes that lead to the projects for the HC. A symbol of these changes is the 700

m long highway which came instead of the Singel (which is a canal circling the old city) and passes

under HC. What distinguishes Utrecht from other similar phenomena of modernization in other

Dutch cities like Eindhoven of Rotterdam, is the fact that the city has always considered itself as a

monument. The city center’s medieval identity was preserved with strict regulations, while

accepting all other kinds of process and construction rules. A significant example of this attempt of

keeping the center’s identity preserved, is the rule that until recently prevented the construction of

buildings taller than the Dome Tower, the tallest building in the city. This rule has now been

modified in the recent High Rise Vision plan and in the last years taller building have been aloud.

This tendency to consider the city as an open-air monument, with its medieval core, makes the

process of modernization that happened in the 60’s and 70’s even more controversial, but explains

the actual return to the previous aspect of the city. Not only a complete neighbourhood and various

historical buildings were demolished, but was also drained an artificial canal excavated in the XII

century, which story was the input for my research. HC was, since the beginning of its construction,

is cause of strong reactions between the citizens; its rising changed the city’s identity and didn’t

give back an appropriate model of architecture to the city; during its evolution the plans were

changed several times because of the reactions created in the population and the debates that never

stopped about it.

The HC in a postcard from 1975

It is now, 40 years later, that we face a new page in this story. The HC was never fully developed

and functional for the city and a referendum in 2002 was held by the City Council, to ask to the

Utrecht citizens if they would have preferred a further development of the station in its original

direction or a green and more preservative direction. The latter won, and this new plan will be

finished in 2030 with the name of New Hoog Catharijne: “Over the coming decade Hoog

Catharijne and its vicinity will be fundamentally altered. Water will be returned to the

Catharijnesingel, the Jaarbeurs terrain will gain a casino and a mega-cinema, and on the Vredenburg

a Music Palace will replace Herzberger’s music center, and still more stores and offices will be

built”.10 It’s already an extraordinary fact that a city has a yard in its own core that is going on from

1964 to 2030 building, demolishing and rebuilding the same structure, but this continuous labour of

construction and deconstruction is also the core of an even more modern process which includes

demolition and re-enactment as common practices in the city development. The presence of

unsatisfying aspects in the architecture is needed to show the necessity for new constructions, which

are actually looking backwards to restore a nostalgic dimension. This restoration is part of our new

modernity, which tends to look back and reconsider the past as a stable ground to look forward, the

opposite of what modernism did, considering the past and its culture as something to deconstruct

completely. “The ruin of the twenty-first century is either detritus or restored age. In the latter case,

real age has been eliminated by a reverse face lifting, whereby the new is made to look old. Repro

and retro fashions make it increasingly hard to recognize the genuinely old. It’s an attack of the

present on the rest of time.”11 This paradoxical process brings in debates about the idea of

authenticity and memory, which we’ll deepen forward into the text. I’d like to consider the Hoog

Catharijne, in its actual situation of demolition of the old parts and exposition of the temporarily

demolished parts, as a nostalgic and beautiful ruin in the city which shows, as all ruins do, the

change of times. Its presence suggests the absence of a multitude of sites lost , from the drained

canal, to all those buildings and traces substituted by its monumental presence. But, does this ruin

evoke nostalgia for the past or shame over it?

10 Hans Butter, HC On the Move, Expodium Edition on Art and Urbanism11 Andreas Huyssen, Authentic Ruins, Products of Modernity, Ruins of Modernity, Julia Hell and Andreas Schonle. Editors

Catharijnesingel

In Memory of the Eventual Victims of the Unknown Disaster

My interest in the story of the CatharijneSingel, one of the old canals in Utrecht’s city center, began

few months ago, when my attention was focused on the approaches of modernity regarding

architecture and urban planning, looking at the tension to future and positive progress that is

actually being criticized and reconsidered. The Catharijnesingel has a curious story related to some

changes that took place back in 1971 and others that will happen in the next future from now. It’s

also difficult to begin this story, because of the chaotic structure of the dynamics, that we could look

at in a linear, or better, circular way of understanding. A classical tragedy (a narrative structure that

properly fits this story) usually begins with a description of the main characters and a brief sketch of

the situation, but in this case it’s complicated to be sure about the nature of the protagonist, whether

it’s the canal, the other buildings that disappeared with it, or maybe the Hoog Catharijne, the

commercial centre constructed in the 1970’s. But let’s start from 1958: in the projects for the

planning of Utrecht’s new city centre was developed a complete restyling of the city, several

proposals were made about using the centre as the meeting point for the main highways in the

Netherlands and taking the roads as close as possible to the city. A first plan was commissioned to

Max Erich Feuchtinger, a German expert of mobility which purposed to drain the

Stadsbuitengracht, the canal that surrounds the city and transform it into an highway circling the

city – typical idea of a modern city built from the perspective of infinite mobility, more specifically

that of the car.

Presentation of the Feuchtinger’s plan, 1958, Utrecht City Archive

This plan was not totally approved and scared the public opinion for its temerity, but it was

modified in 1962 by the architect J.A. Kuiper, in a plan which perfectly matched the needs of the

Bredero, the company that was at the time planning the commercial shopping center Hoog

Catharijne. It was then decided that part of the CatharijneSingel, tha canal that passes through the

central station and the historical part of the city center, was to be drained and converted into a

sunken expressway –a symbolic solution instead; 700 m highway is not real modernism, functional

and effective but just a symbol of it. And this is actually what happened, the transformation of the

place started in 1970, going through the following two years the 19th century neighbourhood around

the station was demolished and offices and apartments began to rise.

The Catharijnesingel in 1964, Utrecht City Archive

During the yard in the river, in the zone called Vredenburg, the main parts of the ruins of a castle

from 16th century were brought to light. The Vredenburg castle has a peculiar story. It was built by

Charles V and lasted only 50 years. As the legend says it was demolished by the citizens of Utrecht

guided by Trijn van Leemput, a legendary figure of the war versus Spain (the War of the Eight

Years). This episode can be considered as the starting point of this story of demolitions and

reconstructions of Utrecht. After the discovery of the old castle ruins, an archaeological dig started,

revealing the whole foundations of the castle, which were saved and shown in a special

construction. The ruins will be in 2018 part of the New Hoog Catharijne, as part of the new green

surroundings of the station area. Slowly over the years HC ‘ate’ the last old buildings in its area,

exchanging them for typical high modernity flats.

The Vredenburg Castle’s ruins in 1975, Utrecht City Archive

But a big change in the story of the place is happening again, a new plan for the central station area

was approved in 2004 and the CatharijneSingel will be converted again in a canal. What does it

mean for the city? The first ambitions of the municipal authorities in the 60’s were much wider than

the final product, if we can talk of a final product seen the never completed state of the HC. During

the construction and soon after its delivery, there were so many adjustments being made that the

original intentions of the shopping centre were never realised. This unfinished condition, due to the

lack of functionality and continuous need for restoration lasted more than 30 years and what it

expresses now are clashing ideas of modernity and approaches to the city. While constructed on the

old structure, the New Hoog Catharijne is going to display a different tendency toward the city. On

a modernistic plan is going to be implanted a traditional landscape, a modernistic act in reverse that

doesn’t seems to really modify the old HC, but just update it without making its role and image

more clear. In an essay called Authentic Ruins, Products of Modernity, Andreas Huyssen points out

the global tendency to remakes and re-enactments of which the new station area is part by saying: “

We live in the age of preservation, restoration, and authentic remakes, all of which cancel out the

idea of the authentic”12. We have an unclear structure of the narrative: the timeline of the events

seems definitely clear, but not all of the reasons of the transformations of the site. To look clearer

into this research we need a perspective, a structure, something that could guide us in the

understanding of what seems an intricate and not always reasonable story. So, an attempt was that

of putting the steps of this story into the classical structure of a drama: exposition, rising action,

climax, falling action, revelation13. Looking for a clearer structure of this drama, we can look at the

new Catharijnesingel as a monument, a memorial for an unknown tragedy that caused the previous

cancellation of the canal. This kind of remake is what is called Architectural Re-enactment, and

refers to a theory developed by Marita Sturken. This explains how modern memorials and

monuments often resemble, in their structural design, the shape of the drama that they

commemorate. This author questions how modern forms of re-enactments deal with memory, its

erasure and reproduction: “Re-enactment is a form of catharsis in which historical moments achieve

a kind of narrative closure through their replaying. It is not a given, however, whether re-enactment

constitutes an erasure and smoothing over the past or whether it can be an active engagement with

the past.”14 This tendency to restoration, re-enactment and preservation is conditioned by a

necessity of stable origins, differently from modernism, that was looking towards future and

redefining constantly its times identity. Huyssen in Authentic Ruins, Products of Modernity asks:

“What is the relation of an imaginary of ruins to the obsession with urban preservation, remakes,

and retro fashion, all of which seem to express a fear or denial of the ruination by time?”15.

Preservation and remake as strategies to enhance stable identity and memory, allow us to

understand this new-old products as sort of monuments. This sight gave suddenly a different shape

and sense to the whole story of the singel, only a trauma could explain the removal of the canal and

the complete disappearance of the other historical buildings. There were other important sites

involved in the demolition of the old station area, like the Jugendstil building called “De Utrecht”,

projected by the architect J. Verheul, one of the most popular sites of the city for its architecture and

interiors. “De Utrecht” is now subject of a dispute, because the citizens want it to be reconstructed

near its original position. The site’s former aspect looks like a really typical postcard place, the

water, the bridge and some boats here and there. The plans for the New Hoog Catharijne depict a

similiar place, the new canal as a very bucolic place into the modern city surrounded by the

Vredenburg Castle ruins. The official website of the project talks about a place where to convey

people and give new value to the Vredenburg Castle’s ruins. The transformation of an highway in

12 Andreas Huyssen, Authentic Ruins, Products of Modernity, Ruins of Modernity, Julia Hell and Andreas Schonle. Editors13 Gustav Freytag, Die Technik des Dramas, 186314 Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories, University of California Press, 199715 Andreas Huyssen, Authentic Ruins, Products of Modernity, Ruins of Modernity, Julia Hell and Andreas Schonle Editors, 2010

the middle of the city in such a pastoral view is not a new process is just a typical modernistic

process in reverse, an attempt to restyle the urban landscape, but in a direction that shows how the

HC purpose failed in connecting the building with the people.

The new Catharijnesingel, a perspective of the river in 2018 proposed by Corio

The change is also in the economical contest of course, because the green surroundings and the new

appealing canal are a way to gather people and new commercial activities. A typical Modernistic

idea is that of the layered building, which standing up from the ground on pillars, is disconnected

from a direct contact with the streets. In the case of the Hoog Catharijne the street level is occupied

by bus stops and parkings. Its surroundings are just a desolated view that doesn’t offer anything to

the citizens except for transports. Moving from an economical to an historical plan can we consider

the new canal as a memorial? What is it exactly remembering us? And here should be the last part

of our architectural drama, a revelation or a catastrophe. The trauma, that is as evident as it is silent,

is the failure of the modernization of the city, with the HC as symbol of this process. This process of

removal, restoration and cancellation of places and memories has always to do with changes of

times, but in this case the decision to get back to the initial plan states the decisions took in the ’70 s

as a mistake. Modernity has purposed a model for the city that is now under a severe critique and

revision, but at the same time the goal is to transform an economical inactive area, the expressway

and the station’s ground floor in a touristic appealing and economically exploitable area through

means of green and ruins. This new modernity is moving forward and backward at the same time:

the city is still investing in transport means (the station will be enlarged), but is also acting a sort of

archaeology. The first construction process in the 70’s lead to the discovery of the castle ruins,

while the new process is giving them a role into the city, as an attraction in a park, a fact that

remember Le Corbusier’s approach that was mentioned earlier. Huyssen’s thought about remakes in

the last years face the problem of the historical, authentic sense of this remakes: “Its (authenticity)

popularity today can be found in retro authenticity, authentic remakes, and authenticity consulting,

all phenomena which implicitly though unknowingly deny what they claim to be.”16 There are

dynamics of interaction between these characters, which are related to each other’s construction or

demolition; I’ve imagined the disappearing of the old station neighbourhood as a tragedy and the

river as the tragic hero of this story. While the HC was modified and adjusted during time, and the

city identity was not completely compromised by it, the river was sacrificed. Is this sacrifice going

to be commemorated by this new politics for the station area? It looks more like the river is just the

pretext to exploit the cultural tourism of ruins of our times, while contributing to enlarge the Hoog

Catharijne in an even more tangled structure. The HC may be understood as the symptom, not the

cause of this unknown tragedy, which embodies the failure of modernity in regard to some of its

purposes. This doesn’t mean that the HC is in itself a complete failure, but aspects like its never

completed parts and continuously rearranged ambitions acted as symptoms of decay, making out of

it the core of a (maybe) different idea of development.

16 Andreas Huyssen, Authentic Ruins, Products of Modernity, Ruins of Modernity, Julia Hell and Andreas Schonle Editors

Architectural Re-enactments

“One of the most surprising cultural and political phenomena of recent years has been the

emergence of memory as a key cultural and political concern in Western societies, a turning toward

the past that stands in stark contrast to the privileging of the future so characteristic of the earlier

decades of twentieth-century modernity”17

In recent years a neo-conservative trend arose in parallel to what has been defined Memory Fever.

This concept (developed by the German culture historian Andreas Huyssen) refers to the tendency

for increasing memories of everything: phenomena like musealization and conservative trends

which re-launched Nostalgia and retro-fashion in urban planning as a trend in recent times. There is,

however, a tendency which changed the temporal and ethical dimension of recent-built monuments

and had been explored and developed by theoreticians as Marita Sturken, that defined a new social

dimension of memorials and monuments. But what are this new monuments pointing at? Already in

the 1960’s Robert Smithson affirms:” Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old

monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future”.18 To consider, as I’m trying

to do, the new Catharijnesingel as an architectural re-enactment means to look at its new

construction as a memorial for the former, original canal and the process that led to its demolition.

“Re-enactments erase the erasure”19 Says Sturken; memorials and monuments in the last decades

faced a new wave, there is a new, different need for remembering, and the concept of architectural

re-enactment deals exactly with this need and its social and political meaning. “The monument,

which after its nineteenth century excesses in poor aesthetics and shamelessly legitimizing politics,

had fallen on hard times in modernism (despite Gropius or Tatlin) is experiencing a revival of sorts,

clearly benefiting from the intensity of our memorial culture”.20 Reconstruction is an act of memory

that implies to recognize the previous importance of a site or a building for the city’s history and, as

we saw, is part of the new urban plans for Utrecht. Is there anything modern in this idea of

nostalgia? Svetlana Boym, Harvard professor and Slavist who written The Futures of Nostalgia

indicates how this concept matches with modern tendencies: “[...] Nostalgia is not what it used to

be, either. Its object is forever elusive. In my understanding, nostalgia is not merely anti-modern but

coeval with the modern project itself. Like modernity, nostalgia has a utopian element, but it is no

longer directed toward the future. Sometimes it is not directed toward the past either, but rather

17 Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia, Duke University Press, 200018 Robert Smithson, Entropy and the New Monuments in Robert Smithson:The Collected Writings, edited by Jack Flam, University of California Press, 199619 Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories, University of California Press, 199720 Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories, Marking Time in a Cultuure of Amnesia, Routledge Editor, 1995

sideways”.21 This ambiguous positioning of nostalgia between different temporal levels is one of the

key-arguments of the idea of architectural re-enactment. This idea deals specifically with the U.S.A.

politics of memory and is definitely a kind of historical revision applied to architecture. Politics of

memory address the role of politics in shaping collective memory and how remembrances can differ

markedly from the objective truth of the events as they happened. The influence of politics on

memory is seen in the way history is written and passed on . Marita Sturken, who developed this

theory is, in her own words: “Trying to explore how contemporary memorials and monuments, in

recent history, are becoming explicit forms of re-enactment of the events they’re called to

represent”22. A re-enactment in this case is the recreation of an historical event, that actualize our

perception of it and its influence on the present. This new memorials and monuments are flattening

time and our mnemonic representation through means of repetition. This kind of repetition is not

much different from what happens with television and other new media, for instance, but in a

structural, physical way: “Memorials do not teach well about history, since their role is to remember

those who died rather than to understand why they died”23. The accuse that is moved towards this

structures is that they create an emotional impact that leads more to a form of amnesia caused by

repetition, than to a non-filtered remembering of the events and in some cases the national

responsibilities for the tragedy. Moving the subject of my tragedy to an architectural plan, I saw the

reconstruction of Catharijnesingel and the return to a fake pre-modern situation of the city center as

a way to not think and reflect upon the mistakes in the planning of the HC, but as a smoke-curtain

which causes amnesia about the story of the place and, more important, keeps developing in the

same direction as before. The description brought up by Sturken is clearly a political distortion of

remembrance, that can be more or less ideological. In Utrecht’s situation, which is relatively

ideological, the lap of time between 1973 and 2018 will be erased with an overwriting that will mix

memory from different times and economical needs; is this an attack of the present on past and

future at the same time?

21 Svetlana Boym, Ruins of the Avant-Garde, Ruins of Modernity, Julia Hella and Andreas Schonle Editors 201022 Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories, University of California Press, 199723 Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories, University of California Press, 1997

As we imagine this Drama, this architectural drama, we can move through the lines of a mute

dialogue between disappearing charachters. The Catharijnesingel and the Glass House, the

disappearing neighbourhood murmuring and crumbling in the background. The singel is the main,

monumental character, it is 4 km long, quiet, peaceful and undisturbed flowing around the big stage

of the city. Its water surrounded by grass and a small wooden path as a boat pier, its population of

boats and its two bridges, laying along the waters. The Glass House is a small precious building,

young and elegant. A business center for an insurance company populated by office plants, wooden

desks and metallic closets filled with documents. Its signboard spelling “De Utrecht” on the front,

refined and accurately standing between the windows and the rooftop. Imagine now how the

monotonous routine of our characters, shaped by the daily occupation of hosting people’s activities,

was suddenly broke by the construction of the Hoog Catharijne. At first, when the murmurs started

to circulate in the Glass House offices, and people discussed about it sitting on a bench on the river,

it should have seemed impossible. The day of the publication of the plan by Feuchtinger, in 1958,

who imagined the draining of the singel, almost twenty years before, the rain filled up the canal so

much that it invaded the streets and the nearby houses, as an attempt to claim attention. This time

things were different, it was not only about filling the singel with tar, but all the neighbourhood near

the train station was going to be demolished to make room for a new commercial center and train

station. Along the singel, in front of the Glass House flow the processions of citizens that claim

respect for the city’s old identity and symbols, in vain. A river reflects on its surface all that happens

around, and like a film roll on a not-working camera it registers in inaccessible ways. What if we try

to unfold this film of water, what can we imagine about the river last months? 1972 was not a rainy

year, the canal level stable through the winter cold and the spring’s wind. During the summer the

first operations about the draining began, creating wooden platforms near the pier to locate the

pumps. Divers fumbling on the canal’s bottom, checking the condition of the old river-bed. The

boats disappeared and walk path was closed, the area isolated and slowly drained. As an act of

violence, day after day new small dams were built to recover the findings from the muddy bottom

of the canal, which disclosed every sort of things, that disappeared without being registered or

photographed. It became a common hobby for some people, especially old men, to walk along the

drained parts of the river to look for ceramic fragments from ancient times. The slow draining of the

river was the counterpart of the quick and immediate demolition of the Glass House, in 1974. This

building, which story was much shorter than the canal’s one, was not perceived as an historical

representative part of the city, because of its recent construction and private role in the city. The

interior’s design of the building was dismantled and all the different pieces, the most refined,

disappeared and were never found again. It was dismantled with scrapers and its banner, as we can

imagine, was the first thing to collapse. Than the windows crashed, in front of the people who was

standing behind the hurdles, attending at the spectacle.De Utrecht was perceived as a missing

monument only after twenty years from its demolition, when it was numbered along the missing

monuments from Utrecht, like the main nave from the dome, which was never completely finished

and destroyed in a storm in 1674. There was a petition signed after the referendum in 2002 to

rebuild the Glass house, in a different location and without a precise function in the first purpose, if

not that to be a monument for the city. Its re-enactment is much less complex that one of the river,

but it’s part of the same politics of restoration. The Catharijnesingel won’t be alone in its new life,

along it new buildings are rising, a new music palace, and especially the newly recovered ruins of

the Vredenburg Castle, which will dialogue with the canal in a pastoral view placed in between of

the city center and the Hoog Catharijne. It looked like the draining of the canal generated the

appearance of this new site in the city. All of our characters are now, looking forward, going to be

there to represent their previous demolition, the canal dialoguing with the ruins, and connecting

them with the new glass house. In 1973, the (at the time) Princess Beatrix attended the opening of

the Hoog Catharijne, celebrating the modernity of it and the changes it meant for Utrecht. Let’s

move forward to 2018, at the day of the new opening of the restored river and a small park with the

ruins. Red, white and blue stripes hanging from the balustrade of the canal, a slow, noisy procession

of boats waiting behind a newly knotted ribbon to cut. The Queen, Beatrix, waiting, sweating in the

july sun, on the main boat. The ribbon is cutted and the procession of boats starts, sailing the canal.

They cross the central station and stand admired in front of the ruins, the ancient so beautifully

connected to the new music palace and the green surroundings of the river, filled with people

standing and waving small flags. On the background the gray and brown old part of the Hoog

Catharijne, now completely discarded as the new old. The visit ends at the jugendstil building, “De

Utrecht”. The Queen skeptically admires this small building. She remembers that 45 years before

she came there, exactly there, to admire how an old neighbourhood had been transformed in the first

commercial centre of the country. It looks now that something is wrong, but what exactly?