If walls could talk....what could they tell us? // Part 1

Gottfried Semper asserts that the origin of the wall is in textiles and wall-hangings, specifically the carpet wall created by weavers of mats and carpets. ‘It is well known that even now tribes in an early stage of their development apply their budding artistic instinct to the braiding and weaving of mats and covers....the wildest tribes are familiar with the hedge-fence – the crudest wickerwork and the most primitive pen or spatial enclosures made from tree branches’. He asserts that masonry was an intrusion into the domain of the wall fitter, whose origins were from the building of terraces rather than houses. ‘Wickerwork, the original space divider, retained the full importance of its earlier meaning, actually or ideally, when later the light mat walls were transferred into clay tile, brick or stone walls. Wickerwork was the essence of the wall’. Walls are a boundary, a barrier to prevent ingress, a barrier to prevent escape; they are a means of protection, and, in the majority of buildings a structural support for a roof. In most cultures our domestic lives are quite literally surrounded by walls. There is more English idiom referring to walls than almost anything else in the language, and certainly more than any other architectonic component. We have, in wartime, been concerned that walls have ears, walls are often symbols of frustration or of thwarted ambition; we are driven up the wall or we bang our heads against a brick wall, we bounce off the walls in anger, we hit the wall in exhaustion or even see the writing on the wall when danger or disaster is imminent, and when we are driven as far back as we can go, we stand with our backs to the wall.

There are times when people choose, individually or as a group, to enclose themselves behind walls. Gated communities and monasteries come to mind. Both of these examples may rise from a similar human desire; a desire to exclude the external world; its worries, dangers and excitements, from a defined communal space. The word ‘boundary’ itself appears neutral, and a wall or barrier, at least if used defensively – as a city wall for instance, is benign or at least non-aggressive. Walls have also been used as vehicles of propaganda – in Beijing – and as memory – the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington DC. It is the use a wall (or barrier) is put to, rather than its physical architectonic expression that defines its nature.

As Peter Marcue points out, ‘all walls are boundaries, but not all boundaries are walls’. This extended essay concerns itself with exploring two of these boundaries in two very different parts of the world, and at different points in history. Both boundaries are sometimes expressed as walls, and sometimes in other forms, but they are nearly always (although not by both sides), described as a Wall. What they also have in common is the use of architectonic devices to control human movement and subsequently human lives. Sempers’ concept seems inadequate when faced with the reality of walls used, not for protection against weather and the fears of the night, or as a support for a roof, but those walls used to control citizens and enforce political ideology. Shamefully for the human race, they are not separated by millennia: the end of one and the beginning of the other is little more than a decade.