Monday, June 11, 2012

The Dark Side


In the Northern Italian town of Bassano di Grappa, there is a beautiful bridge of Palladio’s design, Ponte degli Alpini. On one side, an old vertical house contains a nice-looking tavern, which I chose for a late-afternoon drink. I was surprised to find out that the tavern had a small museum on two levels below the drinking floor, entrance free of charge. A bit hesitantly, I descended several flights of narrow steps into the Museo degli Alpini – and into another world.

The Alpini, or the Alpine brigades, were the elite regiments of the Italian Army, specially trained to fight in the mountain terrain.  They were formed in 1870s, at the outset of the Italy’s unification to protect the country’s northern mountainous borders. But the first big warfare for the Alpine brigades came with the beginning of World War I.  The action became known as the “War of Snow and Ice”, with most of the front lines running through the highest peaks and glaciers of the Alps. It was estimated that 12,000 Alpines, one out of every three enlisted, had died in the course of this campaign.

The lowest floor of the museum was, in fact, devoted to the years of WWI. One would need W.G.Sebald to describe the impact of objects on display, things that often defied description.  I’ll cite only a few examples, from memory:
-Gas masks (chemical warfare was a common tactic), including gas masks for horses, mules, and also for dogs; 
-Small cages for canaries, which would signal presence of the gas;
-Devilish devices for installing barbed wire in field, which looked like huge corkscrews (since one could not hammer the posts in without attracting enemy’s attention);
-The opposite set of devices for cutting barbed wire of the enemy;
-Outfits for fighting in extreme cold and snow, such as enormous overboots with six-inch wooden soles, or anti-ice glasses with opaque metal lenses, with only tiniest holes provided for vision;
-Horrendous spikes and hooks that attached to boots, for non-slipping on the glaciers;
-Horseshoes with similar spikes;
-Medical equipment of all kinds, such as metal wire stabilizers for legs, arms, and head, and also a wire face mask, which could hold a cotton swab soaked in analgesics;
-And so on.

It is hard to imagine that someone conceived and made these kinds of objects for people to use. The very notion of morality gets suspended. How many lives have been saved by these terrifying gismos? How many people were killed because of them? In narrow sense, many objects demonstrate technical and functional elegance, yet the very fact of their superior functionality calls for a larger question: why would people want to do this to each other?

It is no wonder that these kinds of objects, their power notwithstanding, are never included in any design anthology, never shown in a design exhibition.  Architecture and design are too often presented as a life-affirming, optimistic enterprise. We try not to think about the dark side. Until we stop to admire a Palladio’s bridge, and stumble into memories of the War of Snow and Ice.


1 Comments:
Blogger RWordplay said...

A wonderful and important entry with more than a few intriguing questions. Who would admit to designing and manufacturing the instruments and tools use describe here? Perhaps Dr. Guillotin on one end of the spectrum the idealist, or Dr. Mengele, the sadist, on the other. Members of a priesthood of death who served their their dark gods.

The peripheral instruments of war do deserve more attention, if for no other reason than they serve their purpose, quietly and as you state, "with technical and functional elegance."

As to why people "do this to each other? Well, my friend, the ultimate answer is impossible to ascertain. One can guess with confident that no sooner did men/women discover that flesh was weak, in every sense of the word, devises were improvised, devised and continually improved with the intent of of creating the perfect means to inflict pain and death. It is no accident that it was Freud who said, "The first civilized man was the one to hurl an insult instead of a stone." (If this is not the actual quote, it captures its intent.)

Apropos of diabolical design, I'll offer this description from an old THE NEW YORKER ARTICLE:
“... the fact [is] that the death camp at Auschwitz was built on a provisional basis. ‘Unlike most monuments in the world, Auschwitz was never intended to last,’ Bohdan Rymaszewski, of the Warsaw Culture Ministry, says. ‘The Germans built the camp with the intention of exterminating an entire race and then destroying all the evidence of this deed. Everything was poorly made—the barracks, the crematoriums, the paper used for documents. It was difficult to preserve something that was made to vanish.’”

Quite terrible. All too human.

June 11, 2012 at 6:37 PM  

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