Can Architecture Be an Emancipatory Project?: Dialogues on Architecture and the Left - Softcover

Nadir Z. Lahiji

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1782797378 ISBN 13: 9781782797371

Publisher: Zero Books, 2016

Synopsis

Can architectural discourse rethink itself in terms of a radical emancipatory project? And if so, what would be the contours of such a discourse?

About this title

About the Author

Nadir Lahiji is Adjunct Associate Professor of architecture at the University of Canberra, Australia. He is an architect, educator and a critical theorist. He teaches architecture theory, modernity, and contemporary criticism in the intersection of philosophy, radical social theory and psychoanalytical theory. He has taught in number of institutions including the University of Pennsylvania, Penn State, Pratt Institute, Georgia Tech in the US, and the Lebanese American University, Beirut.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Can Architecture be an Emancipatory Project?

Dialogue on the Left

By Nadir Lahiji

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Copyright © 2015 Nadir Lahiji
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78279-737-1

Contents

Notes on Contributors, 
Introduction — Nadir Lahiji, 
Questions, 
Dialogues: Round One, 
1. Autonomy's Adventures: or What Does it Mean to Politicize Architecture? — Libero Andreotti, 
2. Architecture, the Built and the Idea of Socialism — David Cunningham, 
3. Architects, Really — Peggy Deamer, 
4. On The Impossibility of an Emancipatory Architecture: The Deadlock of Critical Theory, Insurgent Architects, and the Beginning of Politics — Erik Swyngedouw, 
Dialogues: Round Two, 
5. The Misery of Theory: On Universality, Contingency, and Truth — Libero Andreotti, 
6. Architecture, Capitalism and the 'Autonomy' of the Political — David Cunningham, 
7. Architecture/Agency/Emancipation — Peggy Deamer, 
8. But What About Left Architecture? — Erik Swyngedouw, 
9. The Project of Emancipation, the Communist Hypothesis, and a Plea for The Platonism of Architecture — Nadir Lahiji, 
Afterword — Joan Ockman, 
Notes, 

CHAPTER 1

Autonomy's Adventures: or What Does it Mean to Politicize Architecture?

Libero Andreotti

It might be said that a chiasmus has emerged recently in one of the longest-running debates in architectural theory: from the autonomy of architecture that was the almost obsessive preoccupation of so much post-modernist writing, one has passed, with a recent book by Pier-Vittorio Aureli, to the architecture of autonomy. This reversal, or shift in perspective, brings the hyper-politicized discourse of the Italian movement autonomia back into a conversation over a term — autonomy — that some among today's "new pragmatists" had already consigned to indefinite retirement.

But is the figure of speech that Fredric Jameson once called the Marxist trope par excellence just a rhetorical ploy, a redundant pleonasm designed to uselessly prolong the debate, or is it actually capable of generating the disjunctive shifts the chiasmus has rightly become famous for in the writings of Marx, Benjamin, or Debord? The long answer to this question would depend on whether the ideas advanced by Italian workerists — on the immateriality of work, the centrality of the working class, and the essentially reactive character of capitalism — might offer a plausible framework to understand some of the major developments that have taken place in the field of architecture over the last four decades. Such an analysis, important as it is, is beyond the scope of this essay. What might be worth trying, instead, is a more general reflection on how the chiasmus itself might work to reshape the conversation around the scope and limits of autonomy, and the possibility of critical work more generally.

For Debord, the particular type of chiasmus under consideration here, called the "reversed genitive," was nothing less than "an expression of historical revolutions distilled into a form of thought." Hegel had made it the basis of his epigrammatic style, and Feuerbach, alongside other left Hegelians, had used it to mount a devastating critique of Christianity. The unmatched master in the use of the chiasmus, however, had been the young Marx, who in The Poverty of Philosophy (a chiastic inversion of Proudhon's The Philosophy of Poverty) had made the chiasmus into the principal rhetorical trope for an "insurrectionary" style of argument that, according to Debord, "restored all the subversive qualities of concepts that have congealed into respectable truths." The Situationist technique of detournement was itself heavily indebted to the chiasmus for the way it sought to achieve both a conceptual reversal and an active diversion of accepted truths towards new forms of revolutionary practice.

Today, it is an open question whether any conceptual reversal within architectural theory could seriously make such lofty claims. Even so, some of the possibilities inherent in Aureli's reversal seem worth pursuing. To this end, a few points on political context, obvious as they may be to some, are essential.

Since the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980, no discipline has been immune to the deeply corrosive effects of the neo-conservative ideology he ushered in. As Paolo Virno notes, Reaganism was much more than a right-wing reaction. Across the world, its material effects were closer to those of a "revolution in reverse." A "long state of emergency" that "went to the root of things and worked methodically," leaving nothing unchanged, Reaganism not only dismantled the Welfare State, strengthening what Pierre Bourdieu called the "right hand" of government (its military and policing functions) over the "left hand" of its social programs, but invested massively in propagandizing, through every available means and with an unprecedented power of penetration, an extreme anti-statist market fundamentalism designed to discredit any political alternative, in the workplace above all, but also, and more insidiously, in the places where public opinion and cultural attitudes were formed.

In the United States, the widespread imposition of neo-conservative doctrine had two major effects on architectural discourse. One was to initiate a long decline in the social awareness inherited from the 1960s. Given theory's investments in that radical critique, this process was reflected in the changing position of theory in many schools and critical venues where, hemmed in by the taboos and prohibitions imposed by the corporatized structure of university departments and cultural establishments like the MOMA in New York, critical discourse came to display an increasingly passive and almost reverential character reminiscent of the polite conversation of an eighteenth century salon. The other major effect was a cultural transformation for which the best comparison, for me, would be the movement of "hermeticism" in the 1930s — a term used to describe the mechanism of containment whereby social and political critique are driven underground and made to resurface on a purely aesthetic level. In the US, this was especially apparent in the conflicted formal language of deconstruction and its politically resonant, but materially ineffectual, forms of argument and address. In architecture schools and elsewhere, deconstructivism's aestheticisation of politics resulted in a characteristic mode of theorizing that Debord called "lateral critique," a stance "which perceives many things with considerable candour and accuracy, but places itself to one side. Not because it affects some sort of impartiality — for on the contrary it must seem to find much fault — yet without ever apparently feeling the need to reveal a cause, to state, even implicitly, where it is coming and where it wants to go." Elsewhere, in what can now be seen as an effort to defuse, and then to disarm the critical force of theory, Debord would compare this type of discourse to a "weapon without a trigger." Critical theory's final demise, however, came with the emergence of the overtly managerial and pop-marketing discourses that began to dominate architectural debates under the term "new pragmatism" in the early 2000s.

It is beyond the scope of this essay to consider the extent to which the discourse of autonomia — in the peripheral but symbolically central context of Italy from the 60s onward — might itself have been an effect of similar changes rather than a clear-headed analysis of them. Undeniably, however, the autonomists did at least attempt to theorize the massive dislocations brought on by Reaganism and the so-called post-Fordist economy within an overall perspective of political emancipation, and this is certainly what gives force to Aureli's chiasmus. Put simply, the shift from "the autonomy of architecture" to "the architecture of autonomy" opens the possibility of a movement outward and against the aestheticizing trend of the last four decades, towards a repoliticization of architecture that might reconnect with a long-suppressed utopian tradition of radical critique that was a central feature of Modern Architecture from the start.

The most obvious precedent for such a movement (it is significant that Aureli's book appeared after 2008) were the vast public building campaigns that were realized — in an astonishing variety of forms — in the aftermaths of the two World Wars, the Russian Revolution, and the Great Depression. Their remains — some brilliant, others crude or confused if well meaning — still make up a good part of the urban fabric of cities from Paris to Vienna to Amsterdam and New York. The product of socialist administrations, they issued from a tradition of enlightened political thinking that, as Vidler makes clear, formed the intellectual context for Emil Kaufmann's Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier (1933), which first popularized the idea of autonomy among architectural theorists. Indeed, a left-wing, utopian, anti-fascist impulse was central to much of the debate over autonomy all the way up to the 1970s. Aldo Rossi's writings, for example, carried forward Kaufmann's Jacobin rationalism, stressing as much the autonomy of form as the wider ethico-political project of autonomy developed by Raniero Panzieri in the early years of Italian workerism.

In the US, however, the drive to extinguish all remnants of radical politics from Modern Architecture in what Reinhold Martin has rightly called a vast project of "unthinking utopia" tended automatically to privilege a very particular and for architectural theory until then marginal tradition of formal autonomy developed by Colin Rowe and his student Peter Eisenman. Like any specialized area of activity, architecture was held to be bound to an internal investigation and transformation of its own language. The assertion of a disciplinary "specificity" centered on the question of form served to claim a margin of action against 'external' forces that (whether in the form of deterministic theories of design or as powerful pressures from the world of business or politics) were felt to threaten architecture's integrity as a discipline. In Eisenman's more intransigent version, this tradition simply equated autonomy with self-referentialism, thus bringing the discourse of autonomy in line with an art for art's sake tradition that was always deeply rooted in the romantic Ayn Randian view of architecture in the US. This return to (or persistence of) nineteeenth century aestheticism, though disguised in avant-gardist terms recalling the critique of representation in the arts, resulted in the characteristic stance of elitist condemnation of utilitarianism and philistinism that echoed through much of the American discourse of autonomy, borrowing from Adorno, Popper, and many others to target commercialism, 'vulgar Marxism,' and all things 'ideological.'

In practice, of course, such principles were hard to reconcile with the globally expanding business enterprises that, beginning in the late 80s, occupied many of autonomy's one-time proponents. Eisenman himself made the point painfully clear in a recent lecture to Edinburgh architects when he declared:

There are pressures being put on all of us. They say, "We want your signature on our shopping mall." Do I know what to do? I don't. I want to work, like everyone else. I'm not certain, and I want to be forgiven by all of you for trespassing into the world of commerce! The rhetoric of modernism has gradually become the rhetoric of capital.

But of course "the rhetoric of modernism" did not undergo this transformation all by itself. None of it would have been possible without the active participation of designers, theorists, and critics. Eisenman's belated contrition suggests instead a feeling of bitter victory — of success gained dishonestly — that is not without relevance for the present-day interest in an architecture of autonomy, as opposed to the autonomy of architecture.

From a left perspective, Aureli's chiastic reversal has at least three obvious advantages. The first is its wide political scope: by shifting the focus of attention from the internal exploration of language to an "outside" of architecture, it foregrounds the need for alternative forms of practice beyond the corporate, neoliberal business model that is now enshrined in architectural education. The second is that it undermines the validity of a purely aesthetic notion of autonomy of the sort proposed by Eisenman but also practiced, to a significant degree, by more nuanced theorists like Michael Hays. Third, it discredits one of the most pernicious tendencies in US theoretical discourse, which is the habit of opposing autonomy on the one hand with political commitment on the other.

These advantages are not negligible. In my view, they open up a series of useful questions that might serve to revitalize architectural criticism.

One obvious question relates to the variety of possible alternative practices. Here I would simply point to two useful sources for anyone seriously interested in taking up the challenge. One is the early writings of the Tendenza, where Rossi and others developed a critical discourse on "the ideology of professionalism" — namely, the laissez-faire practices of an older generation of "humanist" architects (Zevi, Quaroni) implicated — or so they claimed — in some of the worst excesses of Italy's post-war building boom. Bonfanti's writings, in particular, sought to address through a variety of architectural as well as legal, political and financial means the rampant speculation and class imbalances of cities like Milan, developing criteria that are still cogent in the present-day context. One aspect of this discourse was a renewed focus on the pre-conditions of design and on design itself as the most direct, de-aestheticized expression of those conditions — an orientation towards the 'what' rather than the 'how' reflected in a conscious deskilling of design itself in a challenge to the technical specialistic discourse of a degraded professionalism.

The second source is the writing of Gar Alperovitz, especially America Beyond Capitalism, which offers an abundance of information on cooperative arrangements like community development corporations and land trusts, and as well as the financial instruments currently being used in hundreds of community–based urban design proposals that exist outside of, or hidden beneath, the grand narrative of US corporate architecture. Any serious effort to develop an architecture of autonomy, in my view, would have to be based on new institutional foundations such as those described by Alperovitz as based on the principle of a democratization of capital, without which autonomy is bound to remain an essentially defensive and ultimately declining political posture.

A second set of questions are more conceptual. They mainly consist in challenging the narrow empirical framework on which the Anglo-American tradition of formal autonomy is based. In different ways, the main proponents of autonomy in the US today, including Stanford Anderson and Michael Hays, both follow the art-historical tradition that goes from Wölfflin to Wittkower to Rowe — a tradition with a strongly limiting empirical commitment to the here and now. The effects of this art-historical and connoisseurial approach can be seen, for example, in the methodological emphasis both Hays and Anderson place on autonomy as a general principle valid for all theoretical and practical work. Configuring autonomy as a fact, rather than a value, however, radically undercuts the critical, utopian potential of autonomy as a project, allowing Hays, for example, to describe Hannes Meyer's League of Nations project as just as much an example of architectural autonomy as Mies's Seagram Building — despite the vastly different political orientations of these two works. A similar hypostatization of autonomy is reflected in the way Hays invokes Adorno's defense of autonomy to affirm the ineluctability of architecture's reification while downplaying the radical utopian tension that was absolutely central to Adorno's efforts to distinguish what he called "authentic art that takes on itself the crisis of meaning, from a resigned art consisting literally and figuratively of protocol sentences." In contrast to the generally ecumenical approach to autonomy practiced by Hays and others in the US, the notion of autonomy as a project would offer a sharper critical framework from which to evaluate the critical meaning of works, beyond their simple assertion of relative independence vis-a-vis their context. This would also lead to re-evaluating the historiographical categories of success and failure through which some groups of works achieve canonical status while others are simply removed from history books. To understand what such a revision would entail one has only to think of the treatment accorded to the publicly funded housing projects built in Europe in the 1920s, and to their extensions in the urban renewal schemes built in the US after World War II. Up for reconsideration in this sense would certainly be the most symbolic of these projects, Pruitt Igoe, built in Saint Louis in 1954 and destroyed in 1972 amidst a near-universal consensus about the "failure" of government-sponsored public housing.

Pruitt-Igoe, in fact, would be a good case study against which to test the third main advantage of stressing autonomy as a political project. For nothing has been more damaging to the US discourse on autonomy than the pretense of being a-political. The Cold Warrior role that Colin Rowe objectively assumes when his scorn for the utopian dreams of the Modern Movement that Pruitt-Igoe represented is placed side by side with the far more harmful and politically destructive effects of "actually existing American capitalism's" total re-engineering of life through suburbanization should be a reminder, if any is needed, of the fundamental dishonesty of assuming the political neutrality of any discussion of architectural form. Compared to this, Adorno's notion of autonomy as preliminary to political engagement — frustrating as it is — will always be preferable. An architecture of autonomy, however, would cut through Adorno's layers of mediation and reflexivity by demanding, with considerably less philosophical introspection, an explicit commitment to a project of political change.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Zero Books
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1782797378
• ISBN 13: 9781782797371
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 216
• Editor: Nadir Z. Lahiji