Vaissnavi Shukl
We came across Elliot Nash’s work on LinkedIn, out of all possible platforms to explore path breaking, academic work in architecture. He just graduated from the M.Arch program at the Bartlett and his LinkedIn post read and I quote, “My graduating project, ‘Forgetting White Hall, Casting Black Hall’, supports traditional methods of physical and non physical preservation to arrive at a counter-monument in London. The project moves through themes of production and transience and employs casting to find new ways of remembering our collective and material histories. Ellliot’s post was accompanied by a few very intriguing images from his project, some plans, some internal views and some photos of the impeccable models that he had cast. Now I’m not familiar with the historical area where Elliot situated his project, but I’m fairly familiar with the discourse on counter-monuments, and wondered what made him choose this theory for his graduating project, knowing very well that historically, the act of building a counter-monument is an oxymoron in itself. Artists and architects around the world have used voids to create these counter monuments, almost immediately challenging the notion of physically building species to retain public memory. I had questions and knew we had to invite Elliot on the show. Of course, he graciously agreed.

My name is Vaissnavi Shukl and this is Architecture Off- Centre, a podcast where we highlight unconventional design practices and research projects that reflect the emerging discourses within the design discipline and beyond. Architecture of Center features conversations with exceptionally creative individuals who have extrapolated the traditional fields of Art, Architecture, Planning, landscape, and urban design.

Elliot Nash
Oh, wow, I’m quite boring… a boring person when it comes to tea. I’m stuck in my ways. I do have the same tea all the time.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Ah, well. Before getting into your project, I wanted us to get an idea of the context within which you’re working, that is London. It’s a city whose urban fabric is overpowered by the physical remnants of its history in the form of buildings. Now, what does it mean for you, an architecture student or a recent graduate to question the idea of preservation in a city like London?

Elliot Nash
Well, I think… I think London is an incredible city. And I might be biased, because I have lived in London all of my life. And in fact, my dad is a London black cab driver. So we do as a family, we know quite London quite well. And him being a black cab driver, I’ve grown up with hearing lots of different stories of, of London, and of the passengers that you might have picked up. So I think I’ve grown up around that environment of finding things interesting within the city, even if it wasn’t part of the architecture. But studying architecture in London is another thing in itself. And I… I really enjoy walking, I love walking through the streets in different alleyways of London. And I think there’s nothing more appealing than turning down a new street or finding a new street sign or for just the boring things on… on the street that might be new. And there’s a kind of… there’s always, no matter what walk you take in London, there’s always a kind of disappointment I feel when I… when I turn into something that’s familiar, when… when I recognise my surroundings, I think in London, there’s always new things to discover. And in terms of the context of preservation, London is such it sounds odd to say, but London is such an old city, there is so much history in London. And it is built up in so many different layers. And London, one of the most amazing things about London is you can have a skyscraper next to an old church, and they just sit very well. And in terms of British attitudes towards preservation, they I remember, I was doing a research project looking into these tracing the history of, of these attitudes. And I was surprised to know that the preservation ideas of preservation do date back to 1100s in the UK. So it’s much… it’s a much older city, I think that was with the… they were rebuilding Canterbury Cathedral after a fire and there were the competitors of that competition were asked in the 1100s to preserve as much as possible the old choir that used to be there. And I think London has… has that within it there is there’s so many of these layers of restoration of preservation that have been built up over the centuries, that I think that there’s no better place to, to question what these things mean. And to better understand what they mean and then question them I guess.

Vaissnavi Shukl
There’s there’s two interesting concepts that come to my mind right now when you’re talking about preservation and, you know, a skyscraper being kind of just standing there next to this old building. In my undergrad, I think in my third year of undergrad or something our… our history professor introduced us to the two words tabula rasa and palimpsests. And I often keep going back to these two words tabula rasa as an absolute blank slate, where you have nothing that has been done before. I mean, it’s a condition that we probably in today’s time, find very difficult to come across by. And then the second idea was that of a palimpsest, which is a paper or a canvas that has had something on it before, but it’s been erased and rewritten over. And then every time you erase something will not I guess erases the wrong word. Every time you write upon it, it still be… it still bears traces of what existed before. And so the kind of urban conditions that we work in right now is quite akin to a palimpsest, where the land or the context bears those traces of things that existed before.

Elliot Nash
Well, I think that I also…I also teach young architecture students, though people who think they might be interested in architecture, and one of the things that you have to tell them is that architects are never starting from a blank, you know, architects are never given a blank site with nothing there. There’s always some context. And in London, there’s it… there’s so much more than that there is… there’s so many layers of history on whatever plot of land even if it is just a square metre. There’s so much that has happened on that square metre that it is definitely palimpsest-ual. It’s like the layers of paint that end up on a painting, but over… over a much longer period of time. And I think that the idea of a tabula rasa is, is very rare in the world of architecture and even rarer in London.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Yeah. And also given the fact that even if you do get a blank side, one can always argue that it’s never really blank as you still have earthen you serve a certain kind of soil that always, you know, through some kind of flora, fauna, vegetation, so on and so forth. But speaking of palimpsest, where… we’re now at that point where so many monuments are being listed as, quote unquote, heritage structures now, kind of referring to the UNESCO listing where we’re running out of space for any kind of change. In our previous conversation, we briefly spoken about Liverpool and how it got delisted as a headed city because of the dogs and the kind of development that happened on the dogs. And that apparently took away the beauty of the… of the… was it the Victorian era? The Elizabeth? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But with… With that in mind, you were inspired by James Young’s writings on the idea of a counter monument, and how it has been pivotal to your, your own project. Now, James Young, of course, looks at the idea of a counter monument in relation to memory and counter memory in Germany. And in this one essay office that I read, he mentions, artist,Horst Hoheisel who proposed to carve out an empty space to avoid, so to speak, as a Memorial to the murdered jews, instead of erecting a new edifice that is quite different than the approach. We architects squirt, or even other artists would usually take. It’s… it’s very provocative. Now, with that theory, at the back of our conversation today, can you introduce us to your project and how this idea of a transient counter monuments stands relevant to the current times?

Elliot Nash
Well, I think that that does give that… does give a lot of context to the project that I’ve, that I’ve been working on. But I think the monuments are a very interesting thing to start off with. And that’s what got me into the… the ideas of the project. And it was initially, the things that happened with a black lives matter protest that the statue that was in Bristol, and there were…. There were lots that happened over the US as well. But there was a statue in Bristol, in the UK, that was taken down by protesters and thrown into the nearby water. And then English Heritage as the kind of national keeper of the… the country’s heritage, I guess, said that they don’t believe it must be reinstated my thought but that is suddenly a… an interesting kind of turn in their… their whole attitudes. And yes, I think that the… the Liverpool being struck of its UNESCO world heritage status is definitely part of this conversation as well. And I, I think you’re definitely right in the things are being preserved at such a rate that, you know, how long can we go on doing this before we’ve preserved everything. And perhaps, perhaps the best example of that is a building in London, the Lloyds building, which was designed by Richard Rogers to be very flexible; the services are all on the outside so that the occupants aren’t disturbed by it. And it was all supposed to change over the years. And suddenly 2025 years after it was built, it was listed, so then it can no longer change. And so I was interested in all these different ideas. And then lastly, before I introduced more of the themes of my own project, the… the article that you mentioned about James Young, I found a fascinating thing, the idea of a counter monument.
One of the reasons why is because he writes about it in the context of German war memorials. And I’ve grown up as I said, in London, all my life where a war…a memorial, particularly to World War Two is a very different one. A British one is a very different one to a German one, because it’s…it’s heroic, it’s commemorating victory essentially, whereas the Germans are commiserating and remembering those who fought right but to…to a completely different outcome. And the one that that I was particularly interested by the…he writes about was one by Esther, shallow guts and jaquan gets I think, I don’t know if they were husband and wife or or something similar, but they they design A monument that was a massive, tall red obelisk, that over time disappeared into the ground, and then it becomes nothing. And this idea that you have a monument that doesn’t exist. It was just the idea of the monument that is very similar to the other one that you’d mentioned by Hoheisel. And so I was really interested in these ideas.
And as I said, I’m very interested in how these what the conversations about these are in London. And I was lucky enough, in the project that I was pursuing, we were given a lot of freedom. I was a student at the Bartlett. And I started to think, Okay, how can I start to question these ideas, and I cited my building that I proposed, I called it ‘Black Hall’, and it was sited in Whitehall. And it proposed a new kind of architectural language to remember and forget things in different ways to not be a traditional monument. So I was fascinated by the idea of the word monument as well means to warn or to advise, it comes from the Latin Monterrey. And I thought, well, what might we want to warn against or what might we want to advise or remind that we don’t currently do so I started to design things that might catch passes by or the weather, the things that aren’t normally remembered, catch those and cast them into concrete. And so the building that I designed was a large kind of concrete, almost like a monolith that sits in the road in Whitehall, in the centre of London. But it picks up on different material histories. They’re not always past histories they might be, I don’t know if there is such a thing as present histories, but the things that are always happening around us, and uses concrete to catch these different things. So for example, the some of the external walls of the building I proposed are cast against the sound surface which picks up which carries the footprints and from everyday use, as well as the hoof prints from the horses at Horse Guards Parade next door. And so you have this concrete war with the relief of these things that no one else really cared about. And instead of remembering, you know, a famous figure as there are so many statues to often war leaders, and those who are, quote, unquote, important people. But history wants to remember is important people. I thought, well, how can we remember the more normal things, and another… another part of it was that on the inside there, I wanted to use this idea of casting and picking up these things that are always forgotten. And just round the corner from the site in Parliament Square is where everyone goes to protest… the protest outside the Houses of Parliament. And so the building I proposed, it was a debate chamber for the conversations around Delisting architecture, because there’s, as I’ve said, I think that that should happen much more. But the cushions that these council members would sit on, would be pulped cardboard from all of these spent protest placards, which would otherwise be thrown away. And so it tries to remember these… these small, these small things, these much more kind of human histories than architecture normally remembers and create a building out of it that… that opposes the, the norm, I guess of preservation and conservation in London.

Vaissnavi Shukl
It’s interesting when you talk about the word present histories, and I’m reminded of this one essay by Rem Koolhaas where he’s arguing for a different kind of preservation, zoning almost. And he talks about the role of time in preservation. I mean, over the period of time, especially, we’ve witnessed it in India, as everywhere else you said is that time duration between what was earlier preserved and what needs to be preserved now is just as a huge time warps. So from buildings and ruins and forts and palaces, which were centuries old or do now preserving buildings of modern architecture, which are, say 40 years or 50 years old, or your Richard Roger building that’s 25 years old. He argues that the speed with which we are with the time warp is happening in relation to preservation. We’re not too far from the day when we will start preserving buildings as we are building them. So he’s questioning whether… whether there’s ever going to be a time where while the building is being constructed, you’re all you’re already preserving it. You’re already you know, taking the measurements to preserve and when you talk about present histories, I’m… I’m almost reminded of that argument and I’m thinking whether present history or capturing of a certain move meant or a certain placard for that matter. By default, becomes again, as time goes by, become a relic of the past, you know what I mean? Because while we’re doing it, it’s in that time in that moment, but as time progresses, it still becomes something that is from a bygone era. And I’m almost thinking if the counter monument also, with the passage of time, has the potential, by its own one argument , by its own thesis, by its own narrative to eventually become a monument because of the way it stands, or because of the provocation it provides. I’m just thinking about it. I don’t know, what do you think about it?

Elliot Nash
Yeah, no, I think it’s such an interesting topic. Because when you…you start to think, “Okay, well, we already have monuments, okay, how can we design something that is a counter monument?”, and by…by doing that, you are eventually going to end up with something that is a kind of monument. And there are, you know, the typical way, if we don’t think of it in monuments, if we think of preserving things, there are a lot in the UK, there’s the National Trust, which preserves lots of properties, and sort of catches them at a moment in time, and never to be kind of lived in again, if it’s a house, it catches it in the time that a certain person lived in it. And you wonder whether that…that’s not being true enough to the architecture? Is it the person who lived there that we care more about, and where they live, left their last cigarette? Or is it the fact that it’s their house, and it’s the space that’s been lived in over so many years that might be lived in until it can no longer be lived in? That’s more important, and it’s, it’s always going to be a case of? Well, it depends. And it depends on the building, or it depends on the… the object or whatever it is. But it’s, I guess, the way that history is written as well in such a way that there are decisions made about what you know, in school, in the school classroom about what gets taught us history and writing these timelines, and how they might be just completely switched up.

Vaissnavi Shukl

Inset ranajay trailer

Because I’m almost thinking about it in a very pragmatic, brutal way, if you were to describe a monument or criteria that make a building or any edifice, a monument. Couple of things that would come to my mind are one, there’s a question of scale, it’s, it can be a teeny tiny thing, it usually has a certain grand scale, it makes some kind of a statement, there’s some aspect of boldness to it and programmatically or otherwise, it’s something that you don’t usually cross paths with on a day to day life. And when I look at your counter monument, and we’ll put the image of your project as a thumbnail for the episode, but also, you know, put it on social media so that people can get a visual image of what it’s like. It’s this black monolith blocks, and we will come to the details of talking about colour black is quite essentially, taking off all the boxes of in the future being a monument it says, I don’t know if, if you ever thought about it that way.

Elliot Nash
I think, because the other thing about a monument, to add to those three criteria, which I completely agree with. The other thing is that a monument is normally something that doesn’t change. Yeah. And that’s one of the things I project started I was reading a lot about, what David loewenthal, the history historian and geographer who spent most of his career at UCLA, I think he collected this incredible book and to some extent, it’s problematic because there’s too much information there. It’s called the past as a foreign country. But he mentions Shakespeare a song in Shakespeare’s The Tempest were in Ariel’s song, there’s a line that says four or five and five, by far the lies of his bones are coral made, those are pearls that were his eyes, and where you have a body changing into the elements of the sea. I think that embodies what exactly what a monument isn’t. There’s… there’s never a monument doesn’t turn into something else. And I think that’s what I wanted my guess. And I think you’re right, in that I kind of stumbled upon actually having something that does stand quite monumentally, in the way of other things. And I guess, in one way, the project isn’t finished, because I need to sort of understand what it will look like in 100 years time, or to kind of project the, the length of time that any other monument would have in order to define it as a counter monument to what it becomes But yeah, I concede completely that it is a counter monument that’s ended up being very monumental.

Vaissnavi Shukl
So I’m going to reel it in a little bit and talk about some details of your project. And in your proposal, there’s a very conscious and assertive of use of the colour black with even just in terms of the nomenclature, you’re creating a Black Hall in an area that’s called Whitehall. You use black tarpaulin to wrap the space that houses other elements from the Black Lives Matter protests. In a way it almost envelopes your counter monument in a black cloak. What is the use of the colour black signify in your project both materially and also metaphorically? Is it… Is it a direct allusion to what lies inside? Which are fragments from the Black Lives Matter moment? Or is it just trying to be a radical in this area while all the monuments would be these pristine stone white monuments. And this is the one that offers an argument that is diametrically opposite to what the other monuments stand for.

Elliot Nash
Yeah, I think it’s a… it’s a good question. And it’s the reason for it is to have something which was at a kind of umbrella that goes over the whole project, something that drives the project. And I spent a long time finding the right site for a project that really deals with these questions of preservation of monument and counter monument and stumbled upon Whitehall, about halfway through the year, because for a few different reasons, because it is very stigmatised site. It’s… it’s the home of UK…the UK Government. But it’s also its name, bears memory to a historic palace, the Palace of Whitehall once stood there, which I never knew, because there’s only a few tiny remnants of it. And one of those, although it’s a rebuilt remnant is the banqueting house, which is exactly where the project is sited. But I… I had this sort of idea that giving the project a really strong name, like Black Hall, enables it to have a really firm opposition to what already exists as Whitehall. And if that opposition can carry through the name of the project…carry through the materials of the project as a colour cam, I started to use black pigment in tests and models that I was making. And it can carry through in ideas of kind of dirtiness that monuments, as you say, are normally kind of pristine things, although sometimes monuments are black, but they’re normally clean, I think the dirtiness of of blackness comes through, I think that it is much more of a coincidence that black lives matter, because that is talking about completely different, well, not completely different things… but it’s… it’s another world. But it was just really an idea to have something, you know, in my experience, the most successful students, student projects are those that are really assertive, that you can describe in a one liner to someone and they know, they completely get it. But you know, the project was, it was loose for quite a while and, and having just a colour and having a name that is black hole, just gave it it gave it more ground to stand on, I thought. And, you know, I did some, I found out some really interesting things that the history of Whitehall, but I never knew, you know, the term white it was this palace that was named after the stone that the palace was built with. And so then naming this black hole, it should be in a kind of poetic loop. The black colour should refer to the colour of the building materials, if it.. if it is an architecture project. And…, and I quite… I quite liked that, that kind of poetic cycle. So it was just a Yeah, it was, it was something that brought the whole project together, made it… it gave it a strength.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Well I want to talk a little bit about just history here and we’ve spoken a fair bit about the word history and the idea of history because preservation, by default, in some ways attach to the idea that there’s something that’s happened in the past and that’s something that should be preserved and just questions of, you know, historiography, but really talk to me about your dad and you know, him having all these stories about people who have who’ve rode with him. I’m curious if you’ve ever considered doing an oral history project about your dad’s view of the city and how he sees the history as he drives every day. I think that could be a really cool project.

Elliot Nash
It’s a really good question and it… the reason being is that my third year project, my graduating project tried to memorialise the Black Cab in. It was… it tried to prepare, but it was unsuccessful, I’ll talk a little bit about why but it tried to. And I thought it was thinking back it’s a great when I explain it like this, it’s it has the bones of a really great project to immortalise a Black Cab, which is falling out of fashion because of Uber and mini cabs being much cheaper Google Maps being able to tell you where, where to go. And so the idea that, you know, in London, a black cab driver has to train for three years to learn the streets of London. So it’s a… it’s a qualification as difficult as a degree. And these things are going out of fashion. And so I kind of recognised that when I was doing my undergraduate and thought, okay, there’s an opportunity to do… to make a piece of architecture out of this to be a monument or to be a memorial to this, this thing that’s dying off, or that’s going to lose its way. But I found it, maybe it was to do with maturity. But I found it so difficult to spatialize that in a piece of architecture, because it was about mapping in the city, which is obviously spatial, but to boil that down to a single building that represents things. And I actually found it very difficult to try and work with my dad, because, as you say, it makes for some great…an oral history and these stories. But actually plugging that into some kind of design becomes really difficult. And there’s a just it does just remind me of, I think it was a project done at the BBC where they realised I think it was in the 1960s and 70s, they realised that the population of those who were part of the First World War, were dying off. And so they wanted to record all of these stories. And so there is this amazing archive that I think now is quite difficult to tap into. But if you go searching, you’ll be able to find of these… these stories of these people who were probably in their 70s in the 80s that had all these stories to tell. But it’s, you know, you can create amazing archives about this. But actually then using that information in, you know, in the world of architecture, plugging that into a design becomes really difficult. And I kind of I got waylaid by really interesting studies about the brains of cab drivers being formed in slightly different ways and the kind of wayfinding of, of turning down streets and the language that they use. And I think it was sort of too close to heart to you, I couldn’t sit down with my dad and have a… have a converse… have a proper conversation where I’d get out the right things because it was much more familiar than that. But yeah, it’s a funny, funny that you mentioned that because that is and that’s I guess, part, you know, those were ideas of memorial and monument that are… that are still in my mind. And it’s definitely a project, as I said, it’s a… it’s got the bones of a good project. And it’s something that if I do ever have the time in the future to… to go back to. I’d love to return to those… those things, because I think with the maturity that I have now, there are things that could come out of those ideas.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Cause I’m almost thinking that I see why it would probably be rejected as a student project, because you need to design something in architecture school, but it would be such an amazing way to archive or record urban history through the lens of the black gap. And not to give any ideas. But absolutely, to give you an idea, one way to do it is quite literally start a podcast of your own where you get data about different aspects of different areas and have that as an oral history or archive project because as a city evolves. and as you said, as just the sheer number of Black Cabs reduce it would be absolutely fascinating to learn more about the time where, you know, your sense of navigation wasn’t necessarily linked to a black screen, aka, iPhones, maps. But yeah, let me know if you ever want to start a podcast. I’m always… I’m like, literally here with so much of research, and so many tips and advices. If you… if you want to do this project, I’d love to just to wrap things up now with your graduation and completion of this incredible project. What’s next for you apart from the podcast that you’ll be starting soon. And what’s next in terms of advancing your ideas of preservation in London? I don’t think we’ve mentioned here but you’ve actually worked in an office that is known for their preservation projects. So now that you go back into the workforce and you start practising professionally or academically however you choose to do it. How do you see this progressing from here on?

Elliot Nash
Yeah, so for me architecture, there’s more… I think architects are at the height of architecture rather than I think academia is fascinating, but for me, I think the… the more interesting stuff is in practice is…is… is following through with the ideas that you have. And so I…I’m definitely going to go back into practice. And as you said, I worked for my it’s called your part one in the UK, I worked for two years for a practice called write and write architects, which dealt with lots of heritage projects and fitting in new pieces of architecture within historic contexts. And at the moment, I don’t really know I might go back there, I think I have unfinished business, I’ve still got lots to learn from them about how to… how to make buildings essentially. But what I really quite was one of the disappointing things of my third year project about black cabs is that it felt unfinished. But also, it’s one of the most exciting things about my more recent fifth year graduating project is that it is unfinished, there is lots more work to be done on this project. And I will continue to make models and continue to make drawings of this, this counter monument for London, because it has a lot of, I think it has a lot of scope to keep going with that. And so for as long as I will be in practice, I think I’ll, I’ll be thinking about these things and acting on them continuing this project. And I’ve been invited to share it on different platforms and I’m always…I’m always open to do that. I also do some teaching. So I teach Sixth Form students 16 to 18 years olds who are interested in doing architecture, and I want to continue doing that for as long as possible, then it’s, I quite like to wear these different hats. And I also do a bit of teaching with first year students. So for as for as long as I can carry over these different hats can wear all these different hats, I will of doing a bit of teaching practising, but also carrying on these, these personal ideas of, of preservation to hopefully in the future, fulfil them in in some built work that that, that I can put my name to, I guess.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Well I really can’t wait to see where this leads you. And hopefully in the near future, we do see a counter monument designed by you. So we will wait for that time. We can circle back to part two to this episode. But no, thank you so much, Elliot for your time and for sharing your work. And yeah, as I said, if you ever want to do that podcast, let me know.

Elliot Nash
It’s been really enjoyable to share… to share my ideas and to share my project a bit more with people who are just outside of… the outside of my normal world. It’s been a really fun experience.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Special thanks to Ayushi Thakur for the research and design support, and Kahaan Shah for the background score. For guests and topic suggestions, you can get in touch with us through instagram or our website through our website archoffcentre.com, both of which are ‘archoffcentre’. And thank you for listening.

References:
Check out his project: https://summer2021.bartlettarchucl.com/pg12/year5-elliot-nash

Horst Hoheisel- https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/aschrott-fountain

James Young’s article on Hoheisel- https://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/articles/memory-and-counter-memory/