Structural Adjustment.
Photograph by Simon Thorogood.
The current renovation work on the Jubilee Column in Stuttgart has transformed it from historical memorial to something more abstracted and intriguing. No longer a conventional public monument, the dressed structure now presents itself as a catechism, inviting us to question the nature and purpose of public buildings, spaces and interventions. It stands as a reminder that, like the column itself, our take on the world should be perpetually subject to renovation and adjustment.
The very first time I visited Stuttgart, some 16 years or so ago, I remember it being a miserable day, with a bleached out white sky. I remember, too, being captivated by the Jubiläumssäule, or Jubilee Column, in the city’s Schlossplatz. It was undergoing extensive renovation works and was covered in a steely web of scaffolding poles, walkways and ladders.
The memorial, about 35 metres in height, was built between 1841-1846 to commemorate the 60th birthday of King Wilhelm I of Württemberg. The column has four reliefs to its base depicting historical scenes, flanked by four allegorical figures, and with two attendant water fountains. The pillar is crowned with a figurative sculpture of Concordia, the Roman Goddess of virtue, loyalty, peace, justice, honour and happiness.
As it so happened, I was in Stuttgart a week or so ago on much the same type of day as before – a cold, bleak day with the same bleached out sky. Strangely enough the Jubilee Column was undergoing exactly the same renovations as before, with the same imposing scaffolding framework in place. Once again, the column’s details, reliefs and figurines could only be partially determined through the metallic mesh, which assumed differing compositions and configurations as one wandered around it.
It struck me that my engagement with the Jubilee Column has always been a peculiar one, where I have only really regarded it during episodes of restoration. For me, it has remained a strange mediation – not quite monument, not quite renovation, not quite architecture, not quite community project, not quite sculpture, not quite art; yet all of these things at the same time.
As a delusion, fabrication or chimera even, a ‘thing’ composed of different parts and understandings, the monument encapsulates all that I subscribe to in the arts. It conveys a particular alchemy conjured up through contradiction and unfinishedness; a thing having no clear starting or end point. But, more than just a compelling physical structure, its real potency is as conceptual trigger or motivating idea that can take us ‘elsewhere.’
If the monument is therefore hypothetical, of course it is not alone in this operation. Many other buildings in the city might function similarly, where they are not necessarily just examples of civic architecture – a town hall, a shopping centre, or a train station, for example.
So, the Domkirche St. Eberhard in Königstraße, is no less a concept than the distended Jubilee Column. Not only is it a refined modernist Catholic church, re-built in 1955 for local parishioners to attend mass again following its destruction by bombing in WW2, it also serves as a conduit for spiritual and philosophical energy and interpretation. The church provides physical shelter for its congregation but it also affords conceptual harborage for collective belief, faith, and matters of the mind. Its role, then, is to administer imaginary affordances – arguably the principal function of any religious site or place of worship, or any art gallery, theatre, cinema, or library.
And, as an aside, if the responsibility of religious architecture (or perhaps all architecture) is to make visible the invisible, is its task also to render the visible invisible?
Sometimes however, perhaps due to conditions of extended familiarity, we can fail to acknowledge a building, development or form as something more than architectural exercise, however modest, imposing, unsightly or visually impressive it may be. We can forget that a building, especially where this might be implied by a lesser-seen interior, can purposefully prevail as figment, premise, or hypothesis.
And that is why the ‘vested’ Jubilee Column resonated with me so much. On the two separate occasions I experienced it, I found the monument to be neither quite one thing nor another. But, through its eccentricity it became something far more stimulating, something far more expedient, and something far more useful.
I am reminded, then, how important exercising one’s imagination is as a medium of invention and discovery. As we might agree upon, a creative procedure is very often not about fully understanding something, but about a strategic encounter that is able to reveal or ‘renovate’ something within us. Engaging Martin Heidegger’s notion of ‘stimmung,’ or attunement, the aggrandized Jubilee Column can immediately speak of many other things in the world - the appalling and ongoing conflict in Ukraine, for instance.
But for me, the monument is distinguished as negotiator of an uncertain relationship between an uncertain structure and an uncertain observer facing an uncertain future.
