Architects of the Future

Walk up to floor five of the Sackler, turn right and go through the first room to the smaller second chamber. On the far wall, sketches for Giambattista Piranesi’s Carceri d’Invenzione are on display. The 18th-century etchings of labyrinthine subterranean prisons are said to have come to Piranesi in a fever vision—in the completed series of 16 plates, staircases loop round solid cylindrical towers, and before stone walkways cross half-drawn gangplanks. Outside the frame, vaulted chambers continue without end. Here and there individuals are visible, murkily silhouetted.

It’s worth losing oneself occasionally in the gloom of these images, simply because of their nightmarish beauty. Today, though, Piranesi’s visions seemed especially striking, if only as contrast. Nearly 50,000 people attended a national demonstration in London on Wednesday to protest the proposed British university tuition fee hike from £3,290 to £9,000; in a widely printed photograph, students who have gained access to the roof of 30 Millbank are darkly visible against the skyline. As with the Piranesi image, the viewer sees them from below; as with the vaults, the looming building—Tory headquarters—extends past the photo’s edges. But here no individuals wander alone in a world of fantastic machines. Instead, the silhouettes are clustered close, gesturing to each another, talking, clapping.

Moments like these are the moving side of the protest, which has been both inspiring and frustrating to follow from this side of the Atlantic. What’s inspiring has been the social cohesion of British students in making their voices heard against what for many will be a devastating increase in tuition. It’s difficult to find an analogue to that feeling on this campus, where several student editorials in the past weeks have catalogued feelings of either boredom or apathy. Although the usual fears were at work in London—students were worried about “kettling,” the controversial police procedure of last year’s G20 demonstration in which people were squeezed together in a small space and denied exit—there was also a sense of fun. The importance of the issue and excitement of the protest made students feel they were in something together.

That feeling of unity partly plays off the rhetorical contradictions of the Conservative Party’s 2010 “Big Society” platform, which aspires to “take power away from politicians and give it to people.” The policy is intended to cut government spending and encourage private organizations to take over the bulk of community social initiatives. But listen to U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron himself: the Big Society is “about liberation, the biggest, most dramatic redistribution of power from elites in Whitehall to the man and woman on the street.” Right now, the “man and woman on the street” are university students.

More frustrating has been the violence, the focus of the media’s attention. A few fires were started; a window was shattered. That disappointing end may have had to do with the protest’s inarticulateness of vision—one of the problems with the event, organized by the National Union of Students, was that it failed to offer any concrete counterproposal. (The event slogan was “Fund Our Future.”) The circumstances themselves remain nebulous: How much violence actually was there? In the news the same scenes are projected over and over. Who exactly was responsible? The finger’s been pointed at everyone from Cambridge University undergraduates to anarchists. The challenge now is how to channel group-feeling into rational activity.

In a very good essay on Piranesi, Aldous Huxley points out the special role that the isolated figures play. The effect of their presence is to further magnify the size of the enormous monuments: “Men and women are reduced to the stature of small children; horses become little larger than mastiffs. Inside the basilicas, the pious reach up to the holy water fonts and, even on tiptoe, can hardly wet their fingers. Peopled by dwarfs, even the most modest of baroque buildings assumes heroic proportions; a little piece of classicism by Pietro da Cortona seems gravely portentous, and the delightful gimcrack of Borromini takes on a Cyclopean quality.”

Kicking in the windows at Tory headquarters was just the opposite, a literal attempt to bring down to scale the buildings of “Big Society” government. What students are really saying, if less articulately than they might, is that it is possible to work together, that they needn’t break into isolated individuals or communities—and that, standing beside government institutions, one shouldn’t ever feel small.

Jessica A. Sequeira ’11, a former Crimson associate editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House.