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_By_______________________
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_Ziad Jamaleddine_________
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Roland Barthes’s 1967 essay, “The Death of the Author,” ignited an intellectual debate on the question of authorship in literature. Carried into architecture, the conversation critiqued the role of the architect as the singular creator of architecture, the significance of the user, the complicity of the “starchitect” in an age of excess, and the death of the starchitect (again?) in an age of scarcity. Yet even before Barthes’s essay was published, the erasure of authorship was already playing out in architectural practices across the Mediterranean Sea from Western Europe — where the author would have no say in his or her legacy in the decades to come.
 
In 1943, a small group of young European architects were deployed in Tunis, still under French control, on a four-year campaign to design and construct public buildings. At the end of World War II, Tunisia suffered from a shortage of industrial construction materials, so the European architects had little choice but to embrace available building supplies, and to learn and adapt “vernacular” building practices. Jacque Marmey, the group’s most prominent member, reportedly spent a year and a half on the construction site of the Lycée Carthage school, mastering the construction process and adjusting its design accordingly. The outcome was an instant success, marrying modernist forms with local materials and methods.
 
Soon Marmey and his group, under the direction of chief architect Bernard Zehrfuss, became widely celebrated; their work circulated in European and American architecture magazines without mention of the master-builders they had worked with and learned from. [1] As briefly acknowledged by Marmey more than 30 years later, the success of his architecture was dependent on the knowledge of local Mahlems. [2] That much delayed acknowledgement was the extent of the credit given. Neither the magazines publishing the work nor the architects promoting it ever mentioned the Mahlems; nor were they included in any of the construction photographs plastered across the architecture journals.

As we continue to debate the responsibilities of the architect and begin to acknowledge the collaborative network in which the architect works, we should also recognize figures like those vital master-builders in the “Arab City” of Tunis — trained at a time when no formal architectural school existed — who were conveniently erased, their contribution to the project of modernity denied just as the modern nation of Tunisia was forming. In 1956, six years after the completion of Lycée Carthage, Tunisia gained independence, which opened the door for a new wave of international architects — including Marmey and Zerhfuss – who were commissioned to envision and build the new nation. Once more, the “periphery” sustained European modernists’ architectural experiments and adventures, while the contributions of its native peoples were written out of history. 
 
One can’t help but wonder about the unseen native architects and master-builders. What were their names, how did they learn and develop their craft, where did they come from, what techniques and knowledge did they carry with them, how did they reinvent their tools to satisfy emerging needs, how did they communicate and negotiate with the European architects? In other words, what was the story of their encounter with the “project of modernity”? In rendering these “co-authors” invisible, the global history of modern architecture — including debates on the role of the author — is still incomplete, if not also deeply deceptive.

NOTES ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓

Images from Marc Breitman, Rationalisme, Tradition: Jacques Marmey, Tunisie 1943-1949 (Liège: Madarga, 1986).

[1] For more information on the work of the Department of Architecture and Urbanism headed by Bernard Zehrfuss, see L’Architecture D’Aujourd’Hui 20 (October 1948). See also Architectural Review vol. 118, no. 705 (September 1955), which credits the “Tunisian Engineer Corps” for building the French Military Cemetery at Carthage-Gamarth, designed by Bernard Zehrfuss. 

[2] Mahlem, derived from the verb Allama (“to teach”) and the noun Alem (“knowledge”), is commonly understood as the on-site foreman, but can also be translated as “teacher.”

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