OBELISK

[ inverse monument ]

Internal conflict determines the identity of a city as surely as its more commonly-considered morphological and aesthetic characteristics. Such conflict is often the very frictional paste that grafts the importance of a city onto the collective psychogeographical map.

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the identity of Paris has fallen under scrutiny, and its precarious position between calcified, stratified museum-city and cosmopolitan capital of global significance balances on how it chooses to define the relationship between ‘European West’ and ‘Muslim East’ within the layers of its own fabric.

This vertical University seeks to both give form to the schism that divides and assuage this division, honoring the same tradition of scholarship that precipitated the advent of the Renaissance; a tradition pre-dating the ravages of colonialism and the subsequent and enduring wounds of postcolonialism, it is the basis of an institution that would serve students electing to remove themselves from old-world insularity (whether that of the 16th Arrondissement bourgeoisie or the traditional familial expectations of the non-integrated banlieue). Through syncretic aspiration and digitally-synthesized architectural production, a reassertion of the synthesized influences that created the cultural forms for which the City of Lights is so revered are used to critique the status of that greatness and propose its architectural expression anew. The tower is both fortress and sanctuary, scar and reminder of the contingencies of the present.

Following a study of the centrality of this history of racial and religious conflict to the present state of Parisian identity politics, and inspired by Bataille’s ‘The Obelisk’, a series of diagrammatic dissections were performed involving the overlay of a cruciform intersection onto the initial massing, into which a series of physical stresses were introduced with structural optimization software, symbolically representative of those emotionally embedded in the city.

Through recursion and iterative re-interpretation of the resultant forms, and the inclusion of material identities common to the architectures of both Christian and Muslim heritage (for example, stained glass, a tile patterning based on legendary Damascus steel, iconic gilding), the project intends to reexamine the transmission of knowledge dating to at least the Crusades in the establishment of a European identity that was never, in fact, European, but rather an emergent culmination of mathematic arts and building technology dating back a millennium.