The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (42 page)

There is still one section of the Wall on Bernauerstrasse. Back in 1989 it was decided to cordon off a piece from the bulldozers and the chisels just in case someone, somewhere, at some point in the future, might want to know what it was like. Nothing happened for years, until in 1995 a competition was held to solicit proposals for this fragment that had somehow managed to survive the end of history.

There were no winners, which pleased the locals. They didn’t want anything to happen. They had been imprisoned behind the Wall and had torn it down; they couldn’t see the point in trying to preserve it now. Eventually, though, the contract was awarded to one of the runners-up in the competition, a West Berlin firm by the name of Kolhoff and Kolhoff, and exactly nine years after the Wall had come down its memorial was completed.

The memorial is precise in every detail. There is the post-and-slab construction of the hinterland wall. There is the void of No Man’s Land, with its raked sand, its crooked concrete path, and its lights on their tall curved stalks. There is the proud outer face of Grenzmauer 75, standing there calmly, aggravating no one, resisting fascism. But this is just a wall, an exhibit in a minor suburban museum. At either end it is book-ended by gigantic sheets of steel, their polished surfaces reflecting the concrete back and forth to an infinity that no longer exists.

There are monuments to the Wall all over Berlin now, as people struggle to remember what it had all been like not so very long ago.
The oldest of these attractions was established just two days after the Wall was built, in a flat on the western side of Bernauerstrasse. (It was moved a couple of months later to Checkpoint Charlie.) Its owner, the enterprising Rainer Hildebrandt, used to help people escape over the Wall, and then used their stories as exhibits in his museum.

In 2004, his even more enterprising widow, Alexandra, tried to rebuild the Wall. In a vacant lot across the road from their museum, about thirty feet away from where the actual Wall had stood, she cobbled together some 450 feet of wall from broken chunks she’d picked up here and there. But her no-man’s-land belonged to someone else, and soon this second wall, too, was brought down.

Checkpoint Charlie is now one of the chief sights of Berlin. Students dress up as border guards, American or Russian, and pose for photographs with tourists. The little shed the Americans had used as a guardhouse has been reconstructed, and so has the famous sign that warns “You are now leaving the American sector” in English, French, Russian, and German. The original placard was stolen in 1989 and now hangs over a sofa somewhere in the United States.

Behind the Ostbahnhof station, a section of the Wall that graffiti artists flocked to in 1989 is now known as the East Side Gallery. Conservators are hard at work on the murals. They have begun the painstaking task of restoring the flaking paint, as if the crumbling concrete bore a priceless cycle of Renaissance frescoes.

There are remembrances of the Wall farther afield as well. In Sweden there is a collection of hand-crafted models of the Wall made by a woman who calls herself Eija Riitta Berliner-Mauer. She married the Wall, she says, back in 1979, in a small ceremony at Gross Ziethenerstrasse. Now she laments his demise by writing him love poetry. She reconstructs him again and again in balsa wood on her living room floor, as her cat jumps from East to West on the carpet.

Once upon a time, it was dangerous even to look at the Wall, but now it has been made safe by all the prophylaxis of the curated exhibit. The glass case, the tasteful lighting, the souvenir shop, and the audio guide sanitize the squalor and the cruelty and the sheer strangeness of what actually happened. And because it is safe now, the Wall is not readily forgotten. There is even a word for the longing that the former
inhabitants of Ostdeutschland, the erstwhile socialist workers of the East, experience for their vanished paradise. They call it
Ostalgie
.

U
TE DOESN’T SUFFER
from
Ostalgie
very much. When she was a child, she says, she was forced to go on endless history trips to museums and memorials—to gaze at the piles of hair and teeth in concentration camps, to see the war graves of Russian soldiers and the empty ground above Hitler’s bunker, to look at the bridge from which the communist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg had been thrown. She couldn’t bear it then, and she can’t bear it now. It all seems so intrusive. People’s teeth and hair, their dead bodies, the places where they died should be private to them, she thinks; and so should their lives. The Wall has joined all the other abominations in the whole “lest we forget” parade, the circus of German horrors with which Ute’s generation was punished for the sins of their fathers.

Ute takes her granddaughter out walking in the evening. “I’ll show you where I saw my sister over the Wall,” she says. “It’s not far.” They wander in the old No Man’s Land for hours, but for the life of her Ute can’t find the place. She looks around, takes a drag on her cigarette, and utters a throaty laugh. “Scheisse!” She can’t remember.

In Which History Is So, Like, Over

V
ENICE TO
M
ACAO
Image created by Ludovico De Luigi, Venetian
painter of impossible views
.

Turn away from the Parthenon and you’ll encounter countless souvenir stands selling marble statuettes of gods and satyrs and, of course, the Parthenon itself. The temple swims in snow domes, adorns tea towels, and crowns countless paperweights and ashtrays.

Nearly all the other buildings whose secret lives have been recounted in this book have suffered the same fate. The Berlin Wall was once the edge of the world, but since the “end of history” it has become a quarry of souvenir chips and scraps. Ayasofya is now a museum, Gloucester Cathedral serves as Hogwarts in the film versions of
Harry Potter
, and the Alhambra is such a popular attraction that visits to it must be booked three months in advance. Venice, meanwhile, has become a museum of itself, maintained more for the delectation of tourists than for the use of the people who live there.

Buildings that our barbarian ancestors ruined, stole, and appropriated, that our medieval forebears transformed through repetitive rituals, that our Renaissance progenitors translated into classical languages, that our more modern predecessors imitated and restored are now displayed as historical exhibits, to be viewed with the impassivity of Thomas Cole’s architect reclining on his isolated column.
The Architect’s Dream
itself, which was painted to hang in an architect’s studio, is now safely housed in the climatically controlled conditions of a museum.

It has been argued that the prototype of the contemporary city is the expo and the theme park. Nowhere is this clearer than in Las Vegas, a city of spectacles, whose chief reason for existence is the provision of amusements for the jaded visitor. Ironically, Vegas is filled
with attractions modeled on European cities that have themselves become tourist traps. Cruise the Vegas Strip today and you will find a Bellagio, a Monaco, a Paris, and a Venice as packed with vacationers as the originals. It is
The Architect’s Dream
made real—or as real as can be fabricated out of fiberglass in the middle of a desert.

Vegas is an extreme case, a mirage, a desert oasis. But now, in a further irony, it is itself being imitated for the pleasure of tourists. The Vegas brand of Venice has just arrived in China, where centuries ago Marco Polo stood before Kublai Khan and described the unlikely city from which he had come. Translated through centuries and transported across continents, this Venice is nothing like the robber republic that Marco Polo described. It’s a place for a relaxing weekend, nothing else. After the end of history, we take a break, sip a coffee, and take our snaps of monuments that used to change with history—and used to change it, too. They don’t seem to, anymore.

I
T IS TWELVE YEARS
after the end of history. A Western merchant stands before an Eastern potentate in the Hall of Purple Lights in the Zhongnanhai Palace in Beijing. The brightly lacquered columns and glazed tiles of the old pleasure pavilion still evoke hours of imperial leisure. Dragons and lions disport themselves among the architecture, and outside the Grand Liquid Sea wrinkles and slides in the listless summer air.

Sheldon G. Adelson, self-made billionaire, the third-richest man in the United States, turns to his CEO and chuckles. “A very regal-looking environment.” The lights go down, the projector fires up, and Adelson gets ready to make the presentation of his life. He’s trying to get permission to build a Vegas casino made in the image of Venice on the Cotai Strip in Macao. Just like everyone else, he wants to get into China, real bad. “It’ll be like getting the brass ring,” he says.

Qian Qichen, a vice premier of the People’s Republic of China, is not, perhaps, the most attentive of audiences. He can’t understand much of what Adelson is saying, and the air-conditioning is making him drowsy. Besides, he has already decided what’s going to happen. The pixels of Adelson’s presentation swim before his eyes, and he gives himself up to dreaming of a time when another merchant of the West stood before an oriental potentate in Beijing. It could be a scene by Italo Calvino.

Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the Emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his. In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered . . . It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum
of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our sceptre, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing. Only in Marco Polo’s accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termite’s gnawing.

Qian Qichen allows himself to suppose for a moment that he is Kublai Khan and that Sheldon G. Adelson is constructing
Invisible Cities
for him in PowerPoint. As photographs and artists’ impressions follow one another, a fruity voice-over tells the stories of Venice and of Vegas.