Building between past and future

I Charm city

In the face of declining economies, cities often turn to urban renewal projects to improve their financial and social prospects. Involving a combination of tactics (including demolishing and renovating buildings, removing and relocating urban populations, and creating financial incentives to promote economic development), such projects are powerful, common and comprehensive attempts to reverse urban fortunes. In strategizing these projects, cities face a decision: preserve a built environment that bears the historical marks of urban decline, or destroy and rebuild the city in a way that submerges these memories. Both possibilities present significant challenges: the former route risks leaving the city little changed in the midst of the physical and political conditions of economic decline; while the latter risks erasing the identity of the city in the name of a physical and historical blank slate.

Between these two possibilities lies a commonly taken middle road: the selective use of historical markers to signify an uninterrupted urban identity in the midst of redevelopment. This strategic deployment of the past establishes a sense of continuity with the city’s history, while supporting efforts to move beyond physical reminders of urban decline. Historical material here takes on a highly politicized role by serving the twin purposes of legitimizing dramatic changes in the built environment by claiming family resemblance to the uniquely historical city, while also helping to market the redeveloped city as a uniquely consumable and desirable object.

As the urban planning literature has established, these ‘image-led regeneration policies’ are often economic success stories; Boston’s Quincy Market, Newcastle upon Tyne’s Grey’s Monument Area and Baltimore’s Inner Harbor are testaments to the power of strategic deployment of historical markers in urban renewal projects. ¹ Renewal projects both increase the likelihood of businesses moving to particular areas and promote general economic growth in their surrounding regions. ² Questions remain, however, as to the depth and breadth of the prosperity and political inclusivity these projects support, as well as to the sustainability of their economic impact through time. ³ Yet, even while these projects are politically and economically contested, they remain a potent tool for reversing the economic fate of declining areas and cementing the public support and legitimacy of political elites. ⁴

Less noted in the literature on urban planning, however, are the political risks associated with such projects’ de-contextualization of urban cultural markers. ⁵ Social psychological and anthropological research suggests that a ‘place-based matrix’ of local historical knowledge undergirds the psychological and logistical grounds of citizenship ⁶ and that architectural features play an important role in preserving cultural identity and social status. ⁷ While all built environments are politically ambiguous and open to multiple readings and uses, ⁸ stable sites and objects infused with historical meaning provide both a physical foothold for recognition and a discursive terrain on which debates over public policy and political oppression play out. ⁹ While the presence of historical markers helps give renewal projects a democratic legitimacy they might otherwise lack, they frequently displace the stable world of historical signs that represents those populations and areas that have come to be associated with urban decline. ¹⁰ As a consequence, image-led renewal’s strategic and selective deployment of history displaces politically potent signs in potentially problematic ways.

This article analyses urban renewal’s deployment of nostalgia, finding such projects both more complex and more normatively problematic than they may appear at first glance. Similar attempts to bridge the gap between urban planning and normative theory have often proven fruitful in the past. ¹¹ This article builds one more such bridge, drawing from the work of Walter Benjamin to suggest a path for planning and constructing a built environment that satisfies both normative and economic standards. To do so, I dissect the systematic use of this nostalgia in a specific instance: the design and construction of Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, Maryland as part of a larger project of urban renewal. By examining the stadium’s significance in rebranding Baltimore and developing commercialized nostalgia, I explore how this method of historical jointure functions in our commercial, cultural and political relationship to the past.

Deferring to David Harvey, Baltimore is a city ‘emblematic of the processes that have molded cities under US capitalism, offering a laboratory sample of contemporary urbanism’. ¹² Baltimore’s story is quite familiar: as manufacturing jobs vanished from the region over the last half of the 20th century, the urban population plummeted as wealthier, generally white, residents fled to the suburbs. Having failed to follow New York, Chicago and Boston in shifting its economic base to the financial and service sectors, Baltimore joined the impoverished ranks of post-industrial Cleveland, Pittsburg and St Louis. The city’s tax base has since eroded to the point that its remaining residents have been caught without access to public resources or opportunity for private gain. ¹³

As with its rust-belt sister cities, Baltimore has sought to redeem its economy by offering subsidies and infrastructure investments to lure corporate wealth to its central business district. This model of development strives to create a contained zone of high-rise office space and a network of tourist attractions capable of rebranding the city. Since the construction of the Charles Center office and residential complex in the mid-1950s, Baltimore has funneled over 400 million dollars of public funding into the construction of convention centers, hotels, sports facilities, museums, festival marketplaces and malls. ¹⁴ The hope is that this investment will flip the narrative of decline and impoverishment through the absolution born of urban spectacle.

This renewal effort has been largely concentrated around the city’s central business district (an area consisting of Baltimore’s financial district, Inner Harbor and Camden Yards). By strictly defining a small section of the city for renewal, this bubble combines easy automotive access for suburban, white-collar workers with a sense of security born of isolation from the crumbling infrastructure and impoverished population that define much of the surrounding area. As a result, the central business district has been successfully disarticulated from the social, economic and political inheritances of Baltimore, promoting a sense among those from outside the city that this area’s prosperity can stand in for the prosperity of the city as a whole.

A key aspect of this veiling process has been the repossession and incorporation of elements of Baltimore’s history into the revitalized body of the city. The cobbled streets of Fells Point, the exposed steel girders at Harborplace Market, and the B&O Warehouse monolith at Oriole Park at Camden Yards conspire to create the sense that the consumer’s experience of these places is the experience of the real Baltimore. These historical signifiers, long indicators of post-industrial ruin, are now integral elements in nearly all new development, recycling the signifiers of an ongoing poverty as integral elements of the city’s consumer spectacle.

This article aims to comprehend the work that this historical, architectural and cultural vernacular does in joining past and future. The process of jointure we find in Baltimore’s redevelopment projects is indicative of an ongoing trend where commodities are used to evoke elements of a mythical history as a means to provoke and frame consumption. Corporate consumer spaces often make use of this technique; think, for example, of the quasi-local artifacts on the walls of Applebee’s, the recreated diner aesthetic at Johnny Rocket’s, or the evocation of the Alamo in the façade of Taco Bell franchises. The strategic deployment of kitsch by these ‘placeless’ global corporations helps connect them to local consumer practices and identities.

Broader city-wide efforts to draw selectively from history are no less common but have received less critical attention. While commercial nostalgia generally uses local design elements to establish a material anchor in a community through a carefully composed historical aesthetic, urban regeneration projects instead strive to limit the proliferation of historical markers in order to establish a coherent urban ‘visual identity’. ¹⁵ This visual identity can be crucial to cities’ ability to market themselves as consumable objects, displacing complex histories and ongoing processes of oppression with an unambiguous and easily consumed whole. As an alternative to a more complex engagement with the past, this nostalgia industry turns upon the materials of history to construct a future consisting of things as they are believed or wished to have been. ¹⁶

My project in this article is to dissect the broader political importance of the use of nostalgia in the design and construction of Baltimore’s Oriole Park at Camden Yards. While many studies on the political role of consumer space start from the example of shopping centers and malls, I focus on this stadium for several reasons. First, stadiums often play a more central role in questions of urban identity than other consumer spaces. Baltimore’s investment in remaining a ‘major league town’ made Camden Yards’ design central to conversations about the city’s self-perception. As one researcher put it, professional sport stadiums generate a unique ‘psychic income’ for cities that is crucial to their social and political life. ¹⁷ Second, unlike many consumer spaces in Baltimore, Camden Yards was (and continues to be) funded in large part through bonds and tax breaks provided at the expense of the city’s residents. ¹⁸ This public support is a feature of many such projects and opens them up to normative questions of representation in a way that other consumer spaces are not. Third, in spite of their bearing on questions of identity, democracy and urban planning, stadiums have not been given much attention by political and social critics. Thus, considering the significance of Camden Yards in Baltimore’s urban planning process can help expand the developing literature on the interaction of spatial forms and politics.

In order to do so, I will proceed as follows. The second section of this article recounts the process by which the current design of Camden Yards came about, as framed by the understanding of cultural production and succession found in Walter Benjamin’s ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century’. Section III builds from this exegesis of Camden Yards to provide the grounding for a theory of historical-urban experience, informed by Benjamin’s materialist historiography. To do so, I explore Benjamin’s idea of ‘porous’ spaces – spaces that are shot through with diverse times and memories in ways that avoid making definitive historical statements. Section IV then surveys the prospects for a porous architecture, considering how different spaces and architectural methods balance the needs of memory and functionality. I then conclude with a reflection on the historical and material criteria for a porous architecture of memory that I have developed in this article.

II History without guilt

Much of 20th-century architecture was marked by a modernist dismissal of historical design elements as purposeless sentiment and ornament. ¹⁹ Gaining its clearest expression in Le Corbusier’s ‘Charter of Athens’, modernism sought to remove unnecessary traditional and memorial elements from design to allow buildings and cities to ‘fulfill their destiny, which is to satisfy the primordial biological and psychological need of their inhabitants’. ²⁰ Spare and economical, the design system of the modernists aimed to create the ideal ‘machine for living in’, ²¹ capable of bringing efficiency and enlightenment to the built environment. The goal of the modernists was by abandoning historical referents, to design buildings that were freed from conservatism and the burden of past tragedies.

While these designs were often less disastrous that many recent treatments have suggested, modernist architecture frequently proved politically unpopular and alienating to its occupants. ²² The psychic and social toll of these de-historicized designs has thus led, in recent decades, to a return to historically referential architecture. ²³ One common tactic for infusing a design with a sense of historical meaning has been the embrace of material forms that provoke sensations of nostalgia in their occupants. Generally understood as a longing for things as they were in an idealized past, nostalgia manifests in a distinct form under modern capitalism. Walter Benjamin’s ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century’ offers a succinct summary of nostalgia’s role in cultural production:

To the form of every new means of production…there correspond images in the collective consciousness in which the new and old are intermingled. These images are wish-images, and in them the collective seeks not only to transfigure, but also to transcend, the immaturity of the social product and the deficiencies of the social order of production. In these wish-images there also emerges a vigorous aspiration to break with what is outdated – which means, however, with the most recent past. These tendencies turn the image-fantasy, which gains its initial stimulus from the new, back upon the primal past. ²⁴

This past is essentially Romantic, desired because it is believed to carry an authenticity that fails to inhere in more recent cultural forms. Desire for such a past is carried through in the etymology of the word ‘nostalgia’, which has roots in the Greek algos, meaning ‘painful’, and nostos, meaning a ‘longing for home’. ²⁵ Thus, in Svetlana Boym’s framing, ‘[nostalgia] is a yearning for a different time – the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress.’ ²⁶ Similarly, as Edward S. Casey describes it, ‘The past at issue in nostalgia is the past of a world that was never itself given in any discrete present moment.’ ²⁷ To be nostalgic is thus to reject the linear experience of time and reach out for a place in history that feels like both an ideal origin and a total realization of the promise of the present.

This particular form of longing is what distinguishes nostalgia from other built forms of memorialization. Where memorials aim to cement a narrative of discrete past events for posterity in what Casey calls a ‘stabilitas loci, a place for further and future remembering’, ²⁸ nostalgic designs instead allude to an affective experience of a dreamed origin; memorials remind us of a moment that ought to be considered formative of the present and influential in the future, while nostalgia promotes a broader Romantic striving for times and places felt to be more authentic and real. ²⁹ Nostalgia is thus a sort of pathological double of modern alienation, mediation and melancholy – a counter-intuitive historicism powered by an ever-growing storm of progress.

While most contemporary accounts tend to focus on its reactionary elements, Benjamin recognized a certain libratory potential in historical postures like nostalgia. For Benjamin, overcoming political oppression involves breaking through progressive historical narratives that frame the present as the telos, or natural end, of history. In his assessment, such a teleological view of history will fail to see that oppressions are not inevitable. In the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Benjamin develops an alternative to this historicism: a ‘historical materialism’ that instead focuses attention on moments of rupture and the resonance between struggles in the distant past and the present. As he explains: ‘History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now.’ ³⁰ These networks of emergent connections between temporally distant events (what Benjamin refers as ‘constellations’) can catalyse revolutionary political movements into exploding the ‘continuum of history’, establishing a sense of connection with forgotten people and oppressions. ³¹

Experiences similar to nostalgia can fuel this kind of historical awareness. In longing for lost times, one is propelled toward an immediate connection to the past. Yet, while Benjamin’s historical materialism draws out constellations connecting past and ongoing oppressions in order to broaden our sense of ethical and political possibility, nostalgia risks turning us back toward a reified and comforting image of the past. Where the historical materialist reaches through material objects for moments that have dropped out of historical consciousness, nostalgic longing instead strives to concretize ‘the past of a world that was never itself given in any discrete present moment’. ³² It is a longing, in short, for a place in the world that fulfills the lost promise of everything that came after – for a primordial moment of possibility that makes the present feel more comfortable, not a past that calls for and inspires redemption.

This cultural complex of nostalgic longing is embedded in the earliest responses to the design of Camden Yards. In summarizing the reaction to the release of the stadium’s plan, Daniel Rosenweig notes that ‘Even before the first brick was laid Camden Yards was promoted as an antidote to the immediate (commonly described as “inauthentic”) past of the previous few decades’. ³³ In the New York Times, Paul Goldberger framed the park as ‘Wiping out in a single gesture 50 years of wretched stadium design, and of restoring the joyous possibility that a ball park might actually enhance the experience of watching the game of baseball’. ³⁴ In restoring the joyous possibilities of the primordial experience of the game and transcending the inauthenticity of recent stadium design, Camden Yards was to allow the modern fan an opportunity to break with many undesirable aspects of the lived past.

What, then, was Baltimore’s particular lamentable inheritance? In the case of the Camden Yards project, it took the shape of Memorial Stadium. One of a generation of multi-purpose, late-modern stadiums, Memorial Stadium was criticized as a ‘gaudy monument to function over form’, striving merely to place as many people as possible in a simple space at the lowest possible cost. ³⁵ As with other multi-purpose stadiums, Memorial Stadium’s oft-criticized functionalism had been its major selling point at the time it was built. The multi-purpose stadium was celebrated for overcoming the hazards of early-20th-century stadium design (obstructed views, inadequate rest rooms, poor access for private automobiles and lack of rational pedestrian byways within the park) while simultaneously keeping facility costs (and, thus, ticket prices) at a minimum.

Yet, as the multi-purpose design spread, these benefits came to be seen as coming at the cost of the experience of the game. To a culture that celebrated baseball as one of its defining spiritual forces, multi-purpose stadiums were insufficiently respectful to the pure experience of the game. Instead, these concrete doughnuts fell into the classification that John Chase identifies as ‘second-order consumerist buildings’. ³⁶ In the same architectural classification as the corporate office park, these buildings are treated as ‘styled containers’ that ‘lack distinguishing characteristics…because the plan must present the fewest obstacles to any possible interior alterations’. ³⁷ One day a baseball stadium, the next a football stadium and the day after that the home of the X Games, this species of urban bowl was everything and nothing – an ideal form of the mass consumer experience, ready to take in any and all possible content with little modification.

Such was the form of nearly every stadium built from the 1950s through 1990 and, early on, was to be the design of Camden Yards. The first design proposal drawn up by Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum (the firm that went on to design Camden Yards, hereafter referred to as HOK) detailed a multi-use, concrete bowl set amid sprawling parking lots, making no use of the architectural vernacular that surrounded the stadium’s new site. ³⁸ After reviewing the submission, the Maryland Stadium Authority promptly rejected this design, clarifying that it was ‘looking to have a modern stadium, yet retain the warmth and intimacy of an old-fashioned ballpark’. ³⁹ What the city sought was not a mere venue, but a crucible of collective memory, where the past glories of sport and city could be combined in a single, easily consumed experience. ⁴⁰ Baltimore wanted a stadium that would carry on its transformation of the central business district into what Chase classifies as first-order consumerist space; the stadium would not only be the site of consumption, but a part of the experience of consumption itself.

Told to reject more recent architectural forms, HOK quickly set about ‘cannibalizing the past’. ⁴¹ Adopting an urban pastoral brick and steel aesthetic, they harmonized the internal and external structure of the stadium with the city’s ongoing revitalization efforts. By building itself into the existing urban grid, allowing the Baltimore skyline to loom over the left-field wall, and incorporating the enormous B&O Warehouse into right field, Camden Yards was at once a palimpsest and reflection of the city itself. HOK’s design also travelled beyond the boundaries of Baltimore to assemble a dissonant pastiche of the iconic elements of classic ballparks, seizing the ivy-covered fences of Wrigley Field, the imposing wall behind the right-field stands of Fenway Park, and the wrought iron section headings of New York’s Polo Grounds. ⁴² The whole of baseball’s mythic past is conjured in the stadium, presenting an updated, commodified version of the golden age of American urbanism which ‘resonates in memory as a great mixing bowl, a rarefied place before gated communities, exurban starter castles, and extremes of economic polarization’. ⁴³

Through this artful montage of local landmarks and baseball’s ideal past, HOK’s stadium poses as an organic outgrowth of the history of Baltimore and the origins of the sport. While Benjamin sees that such juxtapositions can draw together styles and histories in a way that calls attention to the constructedness of our relationship to the past, Camden Yards sidesteps this libratory potential by combining these elements into a single, definitive statement; it is idealization that denies its partiality. As a single space that works at ‘redefining the image of the city to residents and external audiences alike’, the stadium submerges the city’s fractured economic and social reality behind its iron and brick façade. ⁴⁴ Images of Camden Yards (together with the rest of the redeveloped central business district) play a huge part in materials that draw tourists and outside investment to the city. These marketing tools use the power of memory and longing as a mask, obscuring difficult realities in order to frame Baltimore as America’s great Renaissance city. ⁴⁵

But as the city’s leadership claims victory and funnels an additional $14 million per year in subsidies into the stadium, ⁴⁶ the conditions in Baltimore outside of the central business district continue to degenerate. In the 13 years following the stadium’s completion, the great Baltimore Renaissance saw the city’s population fall by 11%, the crime rate spike and the percentage of residents living in poverty climb by 4.6%. ⁴⁷ At the stadium, both attendance and ticket prices climbed while the fans became generally whiter, wealthier and more suburban. ⁴⁸ In spite of these facts, Baltimore’s redeveloped business district and the phantasmagoria of the Inner Harbor conspire with Camden Yards to show that Baltimore is ‘an American success story’ – a phrase from the city’s promotional materials that, appropriately weighted, may be true. ⁴⁹

America’s urban success stories are increasingly those places that present a preserved, restored, improved, distilled past to a ready legion of historical consumers. Following the great suburban shift of the 1950s and 1960s, this standard developed out of a national counter-flight that sought to recapture America’s sense of place. Culminating in the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the preservationists sought to ‘ensure future generations a genuine opportunity to appreciate and enjoy the rich heritage of our nation’. ⁵⁰ In the 4 decades since it became law, the Preservation Act has helped to create over 2,300 historic downtown preservation societies, which combined possess over 1 million homes, churches, businesses and abandoned buildings. ⁵¹

These buildings and historic downtowns form a tourist-oriented network of consumable history, presenting America’s ‘rich heritage’ in a manner that literally pushes the less marketable aspects of past and present (typically, impoverished and minority populations) to the margins. The characteristic landmark – say, a preserved mansion – is commemorated as the home of a wealthy baron or heiress, rather than as the building that spent decades subdivided into multiple apartments catering to low-income members of the community. ⁵² Just as the built environment enforces the politics of late capitalism, in this way politics comes also to help direct the built forms of the city. The ‘real’ history preserved in these places and communities is typically white and bourgeois – a reflection of the tourists whose dollars are sought when communities create these preserved districts. As the entropic forces of inequality and exploitation increase in their power, the politics of preservation have led to the materialization of narratives that give historical voice to a single politically powerful narrative thread.

Camden Yards is a further iteration of this process: where past and present conspire against a Romantic historical narrative, political and economic elites must work to write one onto the body of the city. Flipping the script by force, the iron and brick of the stadium’s façade turn the abandoned factories and crumbling row houses seen from Interstate 95 and the 695 beltway into quaint traces of a lost and redeemed heritage. Commemorative plaques around the park note the site where Babe Ruth briefly lived and point to the Oriole’s past glories, ⁵³ while no mention is made of the slave quarters that stood under first base or the 10 men killed on the site by the Maryland militia during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. ⁵⁴ Rather than an attempt to turn back to history in order to redeem suffering or recapture lost histories, this historical montage is, as one writer put it, ‘the attack of the present on the rest of time’. ⁵⁵ In annihilating the traces of past injustices, this method of joining past and present denies the disquieting, silencing the appeals of those that suffered.

These phenomena serve to make very real the narrative implications of Michael Kammen’s claim that ‘Nostalgia…is essentially history without guilt’. ⁵⁶ The very historicism that grants Oriole Park at Camden Yards and the Inner Harbor its legitimacy and perceived authenticity elides the city’s complex past and difficult present. The definitive quality of the nostalgic cultural marker allows image-led regeneration projects to claim to represent the city. The wish-images of a primordial past – the factories, iron façades and brick paths of a distant and more prosperous time – are simultaneously idealized depictions of the complex history they speak for, and transfigurations and transcendences of the recent past. As Benjamin helps us see, the perception of this area as historically redeemed and culturally rich emerges from its totalizing denial of recent history.

III Thinking homelessness

In spite of the violence done by such deliberate, selective crafting of collective memory, I am not arguing that the ideal successor to Memorial Stadium would have been a network of commemorations and ruins, somehow serving to conjure up the whole of Baltimore’s historical inheritance in one location (a memorial stadium). Building an objective, encyclopedic historical architecture is impossible; subjective and affective political content inheres in all built relationships to the past. As Françoise Choay describes memorial architecture: ‘It is not simply a question of informing, of calling to mind a neutral bit of information, but rather of stirring up, through the emotions, a living memory.’ ⁵⁷ Rather than reflecting historical truth or documenting the smooth procession of historical epochs, architectural forms must be understood as always and inevitably partial.

In accepting that there is no method of total history – no architectural codex that could be laid out over the city to unlock all of Baltimore’s past and present – how can one build? When every exposed girder, every red brick and every claim of recovery has the potential to serve as part of an elaborate mask over the face of the city’s economic, social and political reality, what materials remain for building a bridge from the past to the future?

One answer to these questions is found in Walter Benjamin’s urban histories, which seek to explore how the past and the present are simultaneously embodied and denied in the constructed topography of the city. Just as he claims that every new means of production carries within itself wish-images of the past, so too does Benjamin argue that every product reifies and limits our ability to actually access this past. The solidification of the past in a physical form, according to Benjamin, was a phenomenon that provided access to history by presenting it in a discrete, readable format, while also distancing us from it by denying the unbounded, infinite nature of the past through the discrete form’s very definition and solidity. Thus, Benjamin’s blend of historical materialism and mysticism gave him a set of tools capable of catching hold of the elements of time embedded in the forms of the present.

Believing that a redeemed society could come about only by grasping and confronting the past as embedded in the material object, Benjamin became particularly intrigued by objects that existed fully in the tension of the temporal and the physical – items possessing a quality he described as ‘porosity’. ⁵⁸ This porosity can be best understood by surveying the phenomena to which he frequently returned in his writings: high fashion, the figure of the collector, reproduction technologies, ruins, catacombs and Grandville’s surrealist caricatures. These objects all combine physical form with a distinct and jarring temporal element when read closely. By presenting the tension between physical and non-physical, the past and the present, Benjamin believed that these objects could unlock in the viewer a ‘weak messianic power’, capable at least of indicating our inability to represent or know our complete history. ⁵⁹

The object that Benjamin’s writings most frequently turn to in seeking this porosity is the body of the city. Much of his life was spent absorbed in the urban experience, wandering about and researching the city in search of the intersections and interpenetrations of past and present. It was in these places where the spatial and the temporal united that Benjamin’s ‘thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions’, providing ‘a revolutionary chance in the fight for an oppressed past’. ⁶⁰ It was his observation of such tensions that provoked Benjamin happily to observe of the city of Naples that ‘The stamp of the definitive is avoided. No situation appears intended forever, no figure asserts its “thus and not otherwise”’. ⁶¹ In Naples, street corners seamlessly melded dilapidation and construction, memory and physicality, possibility and solidity into a single space. This city was shot-through with history; nothing made a claim to a false solidity, everything was haunted.

It is in the light of this ghostliness that I believe we can better see the troubling performance of Camden Yards. Building on the previous argument that the stadium’s architecture veils Baltimore’s historical inheritance, we find that the employment of an architectural vernacular that repossesses and exorcizes the symbols of post-industrial decay denies the porosity of the urban space. Set beside the rest of Baltimore’s central business district redevelopment, the stadium is the ultimate stamp of the definitive; it succeeds at claiming both the whole of the past and the fractured present of Baltimore, using nostalgic design to supplant the present with an all-embracing fantasy.

This stamp distinguishes the relationship with the past built into Camden Yards from the libratory potential that Benjamin saw in other material techniques for drawing in and on history. For Benjamin, the ethical task of history is to break through its continuum and reveal sufferings and oppressions that have been lost; as he put it, the historian ought to strive to ‘[fan] the spark of hope in the past’ because otherwise ‘even the dead will not be safe from the enemy’. ⁶² Contemporary consumerist nostalgia as we find it built into Camden Yards instead kills both the dead and the living. It does the former by writing over the material traces of past conflicts and injustice, creating instead a mythical historical narrative that silences complexity and suffering. It does the latter by perpetuating anti-black violence, both drawing financial and social support from under-served communities and constructing an urban narrative that does not acknowledge, and cannot accommodate, racism and structural injustice as ongoing cultural and material inheritances.

By instead mining Benjamin’s concept of porosity – and accepting that historical architecture can and ought to strive to represent the unrepresentability of the past – we find a useful resource for building an architecture of memory that strives to redeem past and present suffering. By presenting the necessary impossibility of total historical reference, a porous architecture can minimize violence to the past and present by firmly rooting itself in history’s plenitude. Neither a fetishization of ruins nor a claim to total historical rupture, the ideal of porosity suggests that we ought to seek a method of design and construction that knows and shows that to build is to choose and to forget, to mention and to silence.

IV Building without

Where, then, can we find practical resources for developing an architecture of porosity? In this section, I explore one possible resource for responding to this question: the deconstructivist architectural movement. Deconstructivism is a label has been applied to, and rejected by, many influential designers over the last two decades (Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid and Coop Himmelblau have all grudgingly found themselves under its umbrella). ⁶³ Distinct from the literary/theoretical project of Derrida’s deconstruction, the ambition of deconstructivism is not to shake foundations and undercut sources of stability (a given is that deconstructivists design buildings that are, at least theoretically, buildable) but instead to demonstrate the instabilities inherent to all acts of design and construction. To demonstrate these possibilities, the choices that inhere in building are brought into the occupant’s mind through a design that ‘displays the structure instead of destroying it’, using design to unconceal the constructedness of the building. ⁶⁴ The hope for such a design is for the occupant to walk into a space and be struck by the experiences of construction and occupation. ⁶⁵

The ambition to bring structure to mind without undermining it is brought about through an allusion to and subversion of known built forms. By gesturing toward one’s expectations of a space and subverting them, the most successful deconstructivist designs make occupants aware of both their unconscious standards of form and the ever-present possibility that these expectations can be subverted. The archetypal form that precedes and is incorporated into deconstructivist design functions in much the same manner as the Derridean archetext: both the deconstructionists and the deconstructivists use this originary frame to draw on and in accepted meanings in order to most effectively challenge accepted design norms. Just as Derrida’s hauntological rewriting always casts a wary eye on the ghosts of Hamlet and Marx, so too a hypothetical deconstructivist baseball stadium would fail without a critical posture to the material reference points of past stadiums and urban histories.

In this way, deconstructivism suggests the possibility of an architecture that cites the past while eschewing a nostalgic stamp of the definitive. By striving to point to their own partiality, deconstructivist designs can prompt occupants to critically examine materialized narratives and forms without assuming that the built environment is either a neutral social background or a Romantic representation of historical truth. Of course, translating the ambitions of deconstructivist designs into a porous architecture of memory operative at the scale of the stadium would be challenging. For one, the size and expense of stadiums make it difficult to embrace such a challenging design philosophy. A space of consumption as disorienting and alien as a deconstructivist stadium would serve only to distance the consumer from the commodities it packages and embodies. Further, in recent years, deconstructivist designs and designers have been appropriated by a consumer culture more interested in the ‘starchitects’ and cultural cachet of these designs than their critical potency. While deconstructivst designs once stood in opposition to consumer space, they have been increasingly and neatly accommodated into our commercial design vernacular.

Nonetheless, deconstructivism’s ambitions and designs suggest the possibility of a porous architecture that presents history without romanticism or finality. ⁶⁶ In this way, it provides the framework for a practicable alternative to architecture that provokes nostalgia and a whitewashed view of both past and present. While questions of scale and commercial appropriation suggest how difficult it would be to sustain deconstructivism on the scale of a stadium like Camden Yards, it remains a potential resource for developing a porous architecture of memory.

V Building a porous city

As I have argued in this article, the use of nostalgia in the built environment can have troubling political consequences. While large-scale architectural and urban planning projects must position themselves in some way relative to history (whether to question, appropriate, or overcome it), the case of Oriole Park at Camden Yards suggests that nostalgia destabilizes cultural markers and submerges past and ongoing oppressions. Nostalgia-peddling thus results in the normatively troubling consequences of killing both the dead (by erasing them from history) and the living (by situating them outside the perceived authentic material form of the city).

I have argued that Walter Benjamin’s materialist historiography provides a means to explore the architectural possibilities for building in contested historical and material terrains. Benjamin’s concept of porosity gives us a powerful critical tool for evaluating the relationship between material forms and history, outlining a positive framework for designing and constructing our built relationship to the past. The ideal of porous architecture suggests that spaces ought to welcome, create a place for and be accessible to all interested parties, while deferring authoritative historical statements. In line with democratic political norms, no space ought to claim to speak definitively for all. Porous architecture is therefore a theory and practice of design that avoids the stamp of the definitive, spatializing the possibility that there are complex histories and identities that are implicated in the built environment.

Representative of the ways that nostalgia frames our relationship to history, Camden Yards fails to satisfy the standard of porosity and instead draws attention away from more troubling elements of Baltimore’s past and present. Rather than building a critique of extant sporting archetexts or engaging with the complexities of the city’s past and ongoing racialized injustices, Oriole Park at Camden Yards makes a definitive historical statement in the name of commodifying a wish-image of the city. In drawing on bourgeois and racialized dreams of bygone urban and sporting authenticity, the stadium proposes to speak for the city, and so silences the ongoing marginalization, poverty and exploitation that characterize much of Baltimore’s urban experience.

The ongoing problem is that the new stadium, while an excellent sports venue and (arguably) a successful contributor to the city’s economy, performs the problematic political work of silencing the urban histories that its architectural form claims to speak for. ⁶⁷ I have described this as a form of anti-black violence: not only is the stadium difficult for the city’s poorer residents to access, but it presents a totalizing image of the city’s history that draws attention away from the reality that all design and construction involve remembering and forgetting, mentioning and silencing. Should Baltimore therefore have left the old Memorial Stadium intact? This is an important possibility to consider, particularly in light of the difficulties associated with design and construction in a complex historical context. Memorial Stadium’s design neither claimed to speak for the history of the city, nor facilitated the exclusion of Baltimore’s marginalized populations. It also provided a powerful built reminder of the unromantic past of the city. However, the need to reduce economic decline in the city was (and remains) real. ⁶⁸ Memorial Stadium failed to contribute to such progress, while also being a terrible venue for nearly all events even relative to its multi-use contemporaries.

Rather than cheap nostalgia, a stadium reflecting the ideals of a porous architecture ought to represent the stories and lives of all of its stakeholders (strikers, descendants of slaves, former residents of the Inner Harbor) without the cheap grace of narrative closure. By presenting the necessity and impossibility of total historical reference, a porous architecture would have to operate at the level of the individual occupant to stress the complexity and unrepresentability of Baltimore’s history, while working to be open and accessible to all. Of course, it should also remain a great place to see a ballgame.