Palimpsest

Definition

The palimpsest — the manuscript scraped and written over many times — names the model of the existing building as a text with many layers of writing, marking, and marginalia accumulated over time. Its architectural theory comes from Rodolfo Machado's "Old Buildings as Palimpsest" (1976, published, Berger notes, "around the same time as Barthes's landmark essay"): "remodeling can be seen as writing over, as underlining, as partially erasing, as interstitial writing, as a way of qualifying, accentuating, quoting, commenting upon, as digression, interlude, or interval, as a way of writing parenthetically, of setting off by punctuation, as a new form of an old story." When the building is repurposed, "it becomes an encounter between layers of signs and different kinds of signs" — and the remodeling intervention composes "a new plot… out of the old words." In Berger's application, the palimpsest names the alternative to both conservation's "singular mythological origin" and the developer's erasure of the "undesirable past": instead of a building "with a single identity, appropriation acknowledges the potential of multiple authors, multiple pasts, and the formation of a multiplicity of futures."

Key Thinkers

• Rodolfo Machado (named in the source, not yet paged — see log) — "Old Buildings as Palimpsest: Toward a Theory of Remodeling" (Progressive Architecture 57, 1976, pp. 47–49): remodeling as the writing operations catalogued above; the building as layered text.
• Markus Berger — the disciplinary reading (2018): the palimpsest as aneignung's image ("slow, accumulated transformations"); and the indictment — "Unfortunately, interior architecture largely ignores the rich semiotics and the multilayered histories of buildings."
• Edward Hollis — the historiographic twin: the altered building as a composite, "discontinuous, multiple, layered" work of collective, generational authorship (see adaptive-reuse).

Related Concepts

• Appropriation — the palimpsest is appropriation's textual figure: taking-over as writing over, underlining, quoting, commenting.
• Aneignung — Berger's name for the palimpsest's process: "the slow, accumulated transformations" of taking-away and adding-to.
• Death of the Author — the layered text has no single author; each layer "writes over" without owning the plot.
• Trace — the palimpsest's residue: "traces of the earlier 'words'" that overwrite-approaches leave behind and that aneignung preserves as creative raw material.
• Adaptive Reuse — the practice the palimpsest theorizes; the building's repurposing as "an encounter between layers of signs."
• Semiotics — the building read as a semiotic assemblage: "a new plot is composed out of the old words."
• Material Memory — the palimpsest's materialist sibling: the fabric's layers as carriers of memory (Marinic), whose erasure is insensitive renovation.

Source Support

• Becoming Places (Dovey 2010) — the resident-theorized palimpsest: Fitzroy's character as accumulated layers — "it's not violating an industrial character to make it into a 21st century dwelling, that's adding a layer" (p. 64); the mix as "a result of different layers of development over time" (p. 64); and the contrast-case, the new suburb's instant heritage ("an instant place identity… like an instant heritage zone," p. 69) as the palimpsest's manufactured counterfeit. The register grounds the palimpsest in the character politics: the layer-resident defends the palimpsest, the covenant-buyer buys its image. See neighbourhood-character, place-identity.

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Death of the architect: Appropriation and interior architecture (Berger 2018) — Machado's definition quoted in full ("remodeling can be seen as writing over… as a new form of an old story"); "a new plot is composed out of the old words, a new interpretation has taken place"; the building as text with "many layers of writing… but also marks and marginalia"; the two failing interventions (complete overwrite without "traces of the earlier 'words'"; mere juxtaposition for contrast) — both desiring "a tabula rasa, a clear canvas on which the architect's authorship can be clearly differentiated"; the aneignung alternative ("a far more vivid canvas of habitation to 'take away' from and add to").
• Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — the city-scale register (via the Harvey epigraph to ch. 5): "The contemporary city has many layers. It forms what we might call a palimpsest, a composite landscape made of different built forms superimposed one upon the other with the passing of time. In some cases the earliest layers are of truly ancient origin… But even cities of relatively recent date comprise distinctive layers accumulated at different phases in the hurly-burly of chaotic urban growth engendered by industrialization, colonial conquest, neocolonial domination, wave after wave of speculative change and modernization. In the last two hundred years or so the layers seem to have accumulated even thicker and faster" (Harvey 1988, quoted p. 117) — the palimpsest scaled from the remodeled building to the geohistory of cityspace, and connected to Soja's own ancient-layer case: the Çatal Hüyük/Jericho ancestry beneath the contemporary conurbation.
• (Re)constructing Histories (Hollis 2018) — the layered, generational building history that the palimpsest figure names (alteration as "repeated retelling").
• The Kitchen as a Place to Be (Potter 1990/2006) — the figure's practitioner form, stated as a conversion doctrine fourteen years before Berger's disciplinary reading: "to enter history into them, and to expose the meeting of old and new expressively – the usual alternative being to modify or screen an existing situation (as with a false ceiling) and use it merely as a weight-carrying discarded shell" (p. 268). The false-ceiling shell is exactly the palimpsest's failed intervention in Berger's catalogue — the old writing hidden rather than read, the existing situation "merely as a weight-carrying discarded shell"; Potter's "expose the meeting of old and new" is the aneignung alternative at kitchen scale, its built instance the cooker "isolated and vented through a former chimney breast" — the chimney breast quoted, not concealed. See material-memory, adaptive-reuse.
• Why Architecture Matters (Goldberger 2009) — the layered city: 'In a city, time becomes visible' (Mumford, p. 131); buildings change because we change, because they change, and because the culture changes (pp. 131–32); and the 'ever continuing past' as the legible, still-used accumulation of layers (pp. 147–48).

Open Questions

• Machado's operations are literary (writing over, underlining, quoting, punctuation) — can they be specified as design operations (the way collage, montage, assemblage name actual techniques), or does the figure remain metaphorical?
• A palimpsest is a scraped surface — the older writing was erased to make room. Does the figure secretly license the erasure it is invoked against, or does Machado's "partially erasing" name the honest middle between preservation's fixity and the tabula rasa?
• How does the palimpsest relate to the trace (Macken's walkable trace-document; Downey's "small signs of dwelling")? Is the preserved room a palimpsest whose last layer was written by the conservator?
• Berger indicts interior architecture for ignoring the palimpsest — yet Hollis reports that reuse became the discipline's center ground around 2000. Did the palimpsest enter practice as rhetoric while interventions continued as overwrites?