Between reform and instrumentalisation:architectural krisis
‘If crisis is not there, it mustbe created’
Matei Călinescu
The idea of critique wascentral to the project of the Enlightenment as a way to justify the use ofreason itself in terms of the distinction of its public and private uses. Whilethe Enlightenment is broadly understood as the process by which reasonconsolidates along the eighteenth century as the primary source of authorization,Kant’s version of the Enlightenment questions the legitimacy of the use reasonby differentiating its privacy and publicity, corresponding, in blunt terms, tothe poles of domination and autonomy. Critique is central to suchdifferentiation, being indeed what legitimates reason at the leads of aconscious subject, criticism being the essential function of reason. Criticism inturn is ‘the activity that marks reason as a factor of judgment’, and againalong Kosseleck it is ‘the art of arriving at proper insights and conclusionsvia rational thought’. Modernity, in these terms, is a project of critique; an‘incomplete project’ of emancipation led by reason. Architecture’s engagementwith the Enlightenment’s aims is clearly illustrated by the nineteenth century searchfor a scientific method of design to be applicable to any building. The teachingof architecture in the context of the École des Beaux Arts embodies such searchfor a rational and systematized approach to the discipline, the hunch for aseries of operations intrinsic to architecture (reified in JNL Durand’s mécanisme de la composition), that is, asearch for a disciplinary autonomy which will later form the bases of modernplanning and at the same time will constitute the fundament of its own ‘critique’.
The word critique sharesthe same etymological root than ‘crisis’, coming from the Greek krino(to separate, to choose, to judge, to decide, and also to quarrel, to fight). Krisis meant a decision, a judgement, and above all a turning point: a crucialmoment between blatant alternatives—‘right or wrong, life or death’. Crisis becomesa supreme signature of modernity, discusses Kosseleck, and critique refers inthis context to an action of separation whose aim is not only reform the status quo, but to an action able totrigger stark change. Crisis encompasses the modern experience becoming ‘a permanentconcept of history’, that is, thefundamental mode of interpreting historical time as a single crisis that isconstantly and permanently taking place. This is the latent potential ofcriticism which architecture has managed to elude, I argue either since reform has been prioritized against revolution or because criticism has becomeinstrumental rationality.
The aims for progress andreform, delivered mainly trough planning, is exemplified here by discussing LeCorbusier’s fanaticism on the Plan and his famous aphorism ‘Architecture orRevolution’. By ‘instrumental rationality’ I refer to Adorno’s extension of Kant’sdistinctions of public and private use of reason, by challenging his subjectformation as ‘essentially deformation’, describing a process by which thesubject gives a desired shape to the object of his concern. In architecturaltheory this has been discussed by Manfredo Tafuri as ‘operative criticism’: aplanning of history in which the past is not any longer a tool to assess thepresent, but rather a prognosis device to operate the future. Criticism istransformed into a programmatic analysis of history (an actualisation of history in Tafuri’s words), a distortion of thepast, a prescription for the planning of a project:
“operativecriticism is an analysis of architecture (or of the arts in general) that,instead of an abstract survey, has as its objective the planning of a precisepoetical tendency, anticipated in its structures and derived from historicalanalyses programmatically distorted and finalised.”
It isintentionally biased and manipulated history used to support specific ideologiesand trends in design – a paradoxical mode of critique in which reason issubjected to particular operative ends.
Is the crisis set forth by revolution possible in the hands of the reformer or the operativecritic?
[reform]
Arhetoric of reform dominated early narratives of modern architecture, being aperiod for social utopia, however not criticism. The new architecture called bymodernity refers to the possibility of a new society: a project of a space ofsocial order delivered mainly through architectural plans. Within this desire,the organisation of the plan and the division of built space become primary,and space is used as a tool of social control and reform. New institutions, newarchitectural genres, and new modes of communitarian dwelling, are central partof the histories of modernism, which are introduced as problems of spatialdistribution. Architecture, through the plan, was to reify utopic objectives ofsocial reform operating as instrument to manage, regulate and potentiallyreform society. This deterministic and optimistic utopian desire of socialprogress is not only present in almost every history of modern architecture,from Pevsner to Kaufmann, in Vidler and Evans, but also intimately linked tothe idea of an autonomous discipline.
In thefamous Le Corbusier’s aphorism ‘Architecture or Revolution’ the only possiblemechanism for architecture is reformation.In these terms the only possible path for the modern critic is consensus and tolocate progress, along Kosseleck, as the modusvivendi of criticism. Le Corbusier was indeed a reformist, his social andpolitical position being always very elusive, while in agreement with themodern project he believed architecture was a tool for social redemption, in practicalterms politics becomes irrelevant. As he declares about himself, he was aboveall a professional, or even more, a technocrat. In the conclusion of Urbanisme he states ‘I am an architect;no one is going to make a politician of me’ and he later adds regarding the Ville Contemporaine: ‘It is a technicalwork….Things are not revolutionized by making revolutions. The real revolutionlies in the solution of existing problems.’ Housing was the main target forsuch claims of social reform by problem-resolution, the focus of the lastchapter of ‘Towards an Architecture’, a title which already contains an attemptof prognosis of the of the future. Thelack of appropriate dwellings in the modern city is associated with health andhygienic issues, but also and most important, with moral consequences to bereverted and reorganised through planning. ‘Tuberculosis’, ‘mentaldemoralisation’, and furthermore ‘the destruction of the family’ are identifiedas the terrible effects of poor housing conditions. The book concludes with anextreme rhetorical plea for reform:
Societyis filled with a violent desire for something which it may obtain or not.Everything lies in that: everything depends on the effort made and theattention paid to these alarming symptoms.
Architecture or Revolution.
Revolution can be avoided.
Le Corbusierdismisses ‘critique’ and calls for reform to ‘avoid revolution’. This example representsthe general modus operandi of modernarchitecture: to plan and tailor solutions within the existing political andeconomic structures, as opposed to judge or challenging them, leaving in theseterms scarce room for critique. He further identifies the plan, andparticularly the plan of the house as the tool to put forward his project ofreform. The house, the private realm parexcellence historically at the margins of the affairs of the polis, becomesprecisely the tool to assemble and manage the modern city:
The law of Economy necessarily governs our actions;only through it are our conceptions viable. The problem of the house is theproblem of the era. Social equilibrium depends on it today. The firstobligation of architecture, in an era of renewal, is to bring about a revisionof values, a revision of the constitutive elements of the house.
The plan is thegenerator.
Without a plan,there is disorder, arbitrariness…
The great problemsof tomorrow, dictated by collective needs, pose the question of the plan anew.
Modern lifedemands, waits a new plan for the house and for the city.
Later onhis career Le Corbusier attempts to radicalise his own views. As Mary Mc Leodhas pointed out his aphorism naively drifts into ‘Architecture and Revolution’:
The present social systempreserves the status quo, opposes any action, eliminates or rejects proposalsboth pressing and necessary in the public interest.... Let's change the system.Such an act would be called revolutionary. There are those who would make theword ‘revolutionary’ mean ‘destructive.’ Untrue; it is a completelyconstructive point of view.
Despitethis rather naïve expression of discontent, his technocratic approach to the disciplinenot only distanced him and the whole agenda of modern architecture from revolution, but worse than that, alsoconceals his failure to achieve any real reform.Within the framework of modern planning, there is nothing left for the criticbut to see progress as an achievable aim. Tafuri argues regarding LeCorbusier’s famed aphorism:
Architecture between 1920 and 1930 was not ready toaccept such consequences. What it was clear was its ‘political’ role.Architecture (read: programming and planned reorganization of buildingproduction and of the city as productive organism) rather than revolution. LeCorbusier clearly enunciated this alternative.
[instrumentalisation]
Theultimate consequence of such ambiguity has been the discipline’s instrumentalisationby the dominant forces of power. Kosseleck sustains that with the emergence ofthe Liberal State it also arose a duality between morality (the stage) andpolitics (the State) at the core of the enlightenment idea of critique. This separationreflects the paradox embedded in criticism: the critic, coinciding with theauthor, attempts to individually project the future as public norm, blurringthe boundary between the critical and the operational, between the theory andthe practice of architecture (or the arts), between judging and productiveroles. How an inner thought can become interesting and relevant to the publicbecome intertwined with law and morality. How to negotiate between thesubjectivity of inner thought and the public good became related to moralvalues:
Politicalcriticism is based on this division and is at the same time responsible for it.This constitutes a genuinely historical-dialectical fact and forms the basis ofthe political significance of the criticism that gave its name to theeighteenth century. In its historicity the dualistic division of the world intoa sphere of morality and a sphere of politics is the precondition andconsequence of political criticism.
He furthernotes that it is precisely this dual role of defender and prosecutor that turnsthe critic into a non-partisan authority. Instead of making critique, ideologyis set forth, which not only betrayed the task of critique but also hides thereal possibilities of transforming reality.
As I havealready discussed here the architectural plan becomes the central instrument inmodernity to deliver progress and reform. Tafuri’s critique of operativecriticism points out precisely to the ‘planning of a project’: the ideological instrumentalisationof past history into a prescriptive code ‘towards’ the future. The past is read selectively placing anapparent objective historical narrative above an underlying architecturalmanifesto, a normative projection. Architecture becomes an instrument of theexisting power structure and therefore deprived of any revolutionary potential.
ForTafuri the critic’s task is first to destroy the myths of social redemptionthrough architecture on the one hand, and find a course for revolutionarypraxis in the margins of the field on the other. That means that architectureis not able to trigger any important change on its own, but only as part of aglobal revolution, an overall transformation of the social order, an exhaustionof capitalism itself. The attempts for autonomy that we can trace in the work ofDurand in the nineteenth century briefly described here in the first paragraph,are precisely architecture’s main contradiction: the reduction of architectureinto a set of formal autonomous operations which will conceal its own politicalinefficacy. The core problematic of architectural modernity is that isincapable either of influencing the course of economy or of accepting that aform of 'planning' from outside architecture was required in order to have anyconcrete effect: a ‘planned coordination of production’. For architecture toadmit this was actually to accept its own demise according to Tafuri, architecturebecoming no longer the Subject of the Plan but ironically its Object. Thefailure of modern architecture for him is that instead of defining its scope aspart of a broader plan of reform, it projects itself as the author of thatplan
Kosseleckhighlights the risk to fall into an ‘hypocritical (and ironical) criticism’,one leading to progress and consensus as opposed to real change: ‘Criticism, aswe shall see, became the victim of its ostensible neutrality; it turned intohypocrisy.’ Architecture’s plan becomes the ideological agent of capitalism:form without utopia. A search for disciplinary autonomy which has beeninterpreted as the fall of architecture towards silence, towards the negationof itself. In Architecture and Utopia (1979), Tafuri describes a process ofsocial transformation related to an epochal change within capitalism, that is,the restructuring of capital and the realization of the modern economic formsby describing a shift from ‘Utopia’ to ‘Plan’ (or ‘Project’). The idea ofutopia becomes transformed from an ideology of anticipated ideal into a realworking concept.
[architecturalkrisis]
‘Betweenreform and instrumentalisation’ architecture reveals a conflict between its aimsof social utility on the one hand, and its own attempt to turn thearchitectural project into a self-referential entity. This is a challenge tothe very notion of architectural criticism, that is, how to be instrumental topromote change, and, along Foucault, ‘how not to be governed’. The legacies ofthe Enlightenment point out a tension within the notion of critique and itspolitical agency, architectural criticism being indeed a victim of its ownneutrality. Criticism, in the terms here discussed, never ceases from holdingcertain revolutionary political potential, however in modernity it has beenadapted not as a tool for revolution, but as an ideological device for constantand continuous reform, or as an ideological devise to plan the future.Emancipatory promises of freedom from ideologies haveproved to fail, yet, crisis is there, ‘it lies hidden in criticism’ and itis a ‘permanent possibility in history’. Even behind the apolitical stand of LeCorbusier, and the so-called pessimistic approach of Tafuri, there is apotential for the most revolutionary act of all, to modify space and within itto transform everyday life itself. At the same time, writing can be seen as atruly architectural project, with the ability to transform reality. That isprecisely what Tafuri calls for under his ‘typological criticism’, a dimensionof architectural activity which should focus on daily contingencies rather thanin general and finalised expressions, adjusting the scale form the analysis ofthe architectural object to the criticism of the modes of production, social,economic, legal context that conditions its configuration. It is called ‘typological’because it insists on formally invariant phenomena to construct a new criticalreading of the Modern Movement where history, criticism and planning meet withmutual advantage.
Theproblem is how to conceal the search of a conscious, knowing and autonomoussubject, who plays a central role over its object of knowledge, with the riskof instrumentalising that very role. There is a difficulty and resistance in definingthe notions of objectivity and subjectivity, about the contradictions of theirvery separation and how they are ‘mutually mediated’: object by subject, but mostly subject by object. When separated, this fake claim of independenceover the object becomes instrument of dominance and ideology, warn us Adorno.The Subject ‘swallows’ the object in these terms, whereas the process ofsubjectification, that is, the constitution of the individual subject isinevitably linked to the formation of its object - an object that is also a subject. The object of criticism then demandsits primacy, calling for a subject, whichis ‘object’s agent, not its constituent’. The subject, after all, is an objectas well, and is in its role as mediator that critique can be delivered.Mediation, subsequently, becomes a central category within critique: a state ofdifferentiation without domination, a new state of consciousness of thesubject.
Thepractice of architecture, currently led first and foremost by the laws ofeconomy, has given way to a generalized scepticism regarding the possibility ofradical thought and action. On the other hand, the present moment witnesses aquestioning of neoliberal forms of governance and a proliferation ofmanifestations of resistance and revolts across the world, from Chile to Egypt,from OWS to the London’s riots, these locate a decisive moment to examine thelimits and scope of critique and its relationship to architectural practice.The question is how to rearticulate political resistance, political critique,under these conditions and from within architecture when traditional lines ofrevolutionary struggle no longer hold. Revolutioncomes no longer from above -from planning, or from below –from the ‘unplanned’ butinstead, ‘from the middle.’ It is worldwide communication systems that createthe illusion of Adorno’s ‘difference’.
Is it thetime of continuous ‘progress and reform’ to come to an end? Is it the time for‘typological criticism’, for the ‘planning of projects’ in which subject andobject might converge?
So whatis left of critique in terms of architectural writing and practice, when ‘theillusion of difference’ is now embedded in the modes of knowledge and regimesof practice of architecture?
Foucaultinterrogates us: How are we constituted as subjects of our knowledge, assubjects who exercise or submit to power relations, as moral subjects of ouractions? It is Critique indeed -of reason, of knowledge, of judgment, ofsociety- what allows us to constitute as free driven subjects, but subjects in which the world, as object, isconstituted. Criticism is aresponsibility of ‘the planner’ who has to break the link between architectureand its ideologies.
‘If crisis is not there, it mustbe created’
Matei Călinescu
The idea of critique wascentral to the project of the Enlightenment as a way to justify the use ofreason itself in terms of the distinction of its public and private uses. Whilethe Enlightenment is broadly understood as the process by which reasonconsolidates along the eighteenth century as the primary source of authorization,Kant’s version of the Enlightenment questions the legitimacy of the use reasonby differentiating its privacy and publicity, corresponding, in blunt terms, tothe poles of domination and autonomy. Critique is central to suchdifferentiation, being indeed what legitimates reason at the leads of aconscious subject, criticism being the essential function of reason. Criticism inturn is ‘the activity that marks reason as a factor of judgment’, and againalong Kosseleck it is ‘the art of arriving at proper insights and conclusionsvia rational thought’. Modernity, in these terms, is a project of critique; an‘incomplete project’ of emancipation led by reason. Architecture’s engagementwith the Enlightenment’s aims is clearly illustrated by the nineteenth century searchfor a scientific method of design to be applicable to any building. The teachingof architecture in the context of the École des Beaux Arts embodies such searchfor a rational and systematized approach to the discipline, the hunch for aseries of operations intrinsic to architecture (reified in JNL Durand’s mécanisme de la composition), that is, asearch for a disciplinary autonomy which will later form the bases of modernplanning and at the same time will constitute the fundament of its own ‘critique’.
The word critique sharesthe same etymological root than ‘crisis’, coming from the Greek krino(to separate, to choose, to judge, to decide, and also to quarrel, to fight). Krisis meant a decision, a judgement, and above all a turning point: a crucialmoment between blatant alternatives—‘right or wrong, life or death’. Crisis becomesa supreme signature of modernity, discusses Kosseleck, and critique refers inthis context to an action of separation whose aim is not only reform the status quo, but to an action able totrigger stark change. Crisis encompasses the modern experience becoming ‘a permanentconcept of history’, that is, thefundamental mode of interpreting historical time as a single crisis that isconstantly and permanently taking place. This is the latent potential ofcriticism which architecture has managed to elude, I argue either since reform has been prioritized against revolution or because criticism has becomeinstrumental rationality.
The aims for progress andreform, delivered mainly trough planning, is exemplified here by discussing LeCorbusier’s fanaticism on the Plan and his famous aphorism ‘Architecture orRevolution’. By ‘instrumental rationality’ I refer to Adorno’s extension of Kant’sdistinctions of public and private use of reason, by challenging his subjectformation as ‘essentially deformation’, describing a process by which thesubject gives a desired shape to the object of his concern. In architecturaltheory this has been discussed by Manfredo Tafuri as ‘operative criticism’: aplanning of history in which the past is not any longer a tool to assess thepresent, but rather a prognosis device to operate the future. Criticism istransformed into a programmatic analysis of history (an actualisation of history in Tafuri’s words), a distortion of thepast, a prescription for the planning of a project:
“operativecriticism is an analysis of architecture (or of the arts in general) that,instead of an abstract survey, has as its objective the planning of a precisepoetical tendency, anticipated in its structures and derived from historicalanalyses programmatically distorted and finalised.”
It isintentionally biased and manipulated history used to support specific ideologiesand trends in design – a paradoxical mode of critique in which reason issubjected to particular operative ends.
Is the crisis set forth by revolution possible in the hands of the reformer or the operativecritic?
[reform]
Arhetoric of reform dominated early narratives of modern architecture, being aperiod for social utopia, however not criticism. The new architecture called bymodernity refers to the possibility of a new society: a project of a space ofsocial order delivered mainly through architectural plans. Within this desire,the organisation of the plan and the division of built space become primary,and space is used as a tool of social control and reform. New institutions, newarchitectural genres, and new modes of communitarian dwelling, are central partof the histories of modernism, which are introduced as problems of spatialdistribution. Architecture, through the plan, was to reify utopic objectives ofsocial reform operating as instrument to manage, regulate and potentiallyreform society. This deterministic and optimistic utopian desire of socialprogress is not only present in almost every history of modern architecture,from Pevsner to Kaufmann, in Vidler and Evans, but also intimately linked tothe idea of an autonomous discipline.
In thefamous Le Corbusier’s aphorism ‘Architecture or Revolution’ the only possiblemechanism for architecture is reformation.In these terms the only possible path for the modern critic is consensus and tolocate progress, along Kosseleck, as the modusvivendi of criticism. Le Corbusier was indeed a reformist, his social andpolitical position being always very elusive, while in agreement with themodern project he believed architecture was a tool for social redemption, in practicalterms politics becomes irrelevant. As he declares about himself, he was aboveall a professional, or even more, a technocrat. In the conclusion of Urbanisme he states ‘I am an architect;no one is going to make a politician of me’ and he later adds regarding the Ville Contemporaine: ‘It is a technicalwork….Things are not revolutionized by making revolutions. The real revolutionlies in the solution of existing problems.’ Housing was the main target forsuch claims of social reform by problem-resolution, the focus of the lastchapter of ‘Towards an Architecture’, a title which already contains an attemptof prognosis of the of the future. Thelack of appropriate dwellings in the modern city is associated with health andhygienic issues, but also and most important, with moral consequences to bereverted and reorganised through planning. ‘Tuberculosis’, ‘mentaldemoralisation’, and furthermore ‘the destruction of the family’ are identifiedas the terrible effects of poor housing conditions. The book concludes with anextreme rhetorical plea for reform:
Societyis filled with a violent desire for something which it may obtain or not.Everything lies in that: everything depends on the effort made and theattention paid to these alarming symptoms.
Architecture or Revolution.
Revolution can be avoided.
Le Corbusierdismisses ‘critique’ and calls for reform to ‘avoid revolution’. This example representsthe general modus operandi of modernarchitecture: to plan and tailor solutions within the existing political andeconomic structures, as opposed to judge or challenging them, leaving in theseterms scarce room for critique. He further identifies the plan, andparticularly the plan of the house as the tool to put forward his project ofreform. The house, the private realm parexcellence historically at the margins of the affairs of the polis, becomesprecisely the tool to assemble and manage the modern city:
The law of Economy necessarily governs our actions;only through it are our conceptions viable. The problem of the house is theproblem of the era. Social equilibrium depends on it today. The firstobligation of architecture, in an era of renewal, is to bring about a revisionof values, a revision of the constitutive elements of the house.
The plan is thegenerator.
Without a plan,there is disorder, arbitrariness…
The great problemsof tomorrow, dictated by collective needs, pose the question of the plan anew.
Modern lifedemands, waits a new plan for the house and for the city.
Later onhis career Le Corbusier attempts to radicalise his own views. As Mary Mc Leodhas pointed out his aphorism naively drifts into ‘Architecture and Revolution’:
The present social systempreserves the status quo, opposes any action, eliminates or rejects proposalsboth pressing and necessary in the public interest.... Let's change the system.Such an act would be called revolutionary. There are those who would make theword ‘revolutionary’ mean ‘destructive.’ Untrue; it is a completelyconstructive point of view.
Despitethis rather naïve expression of discontent, his technocratic approach to the disciplinenot only distanced him and the whole agenda of modern architecture from revolution, but worse than that, alsoconceals his failure to achieve any real reform.Within the framework of modern planning, there is nothing left for the criticbut to see progress as an achievable aim. Tafuri argues regarding LeCorbusier’s famed aphorism:
Architecture between 1920 and 1930 was not ready toaccept such consequences. What it was clear was its ‘political’ role.Architecture (read: programming and planned reorganization of buildingproduction and of the city as productive organism) rather than revolution. LeCorbusier clearly enunciated this alternative.
[instrumentalisation]
Theultimate consequence of such ambiguity has been the discipline’s instrumentalisationby the dominant forces of power. Kosseleck sustains that with the emergence ofthe Liberal State it also arose a duality between morality (the stage) andpolitics (the State) at the core of the enlightenment idea of critique. This separationreflects the paradox embedded in criticism: the critic, coinciding with theauthor, attempts to individually project the future as public norm, blurringthe boundary between the critical and the operational, between the theory andthe practice of architecture (or the arts), between judging and productiveroles. How an inner thought can become interesting and relevant to the publicbecome intertwined with law and morality. How to negotiate between thesubjectivity of inner thought and the public good became related to moralvalues:
Politicalcriticism is based on this division and is at the same time responsible for it.This constitutes a genuinely historical-dialectical fact and forms the basis ofthe political significance of the criticism that gave its name to theeighteenth century. In its historicity the dualistic division of the world intoa sphere of morality and a sphere of politics is the precondition andconsequence of political criticism.
He furthernotes that it is precisely this dual role of defender and prosecutor that turnsthe critic into a non-partisan authority. Instead of making critique, ideologyis set forth, which not only betrayed the task of critique but also hides thereal possibilities of transforming reality.
As I havealready discussed here the architectural plan becomes the central instrument inmodernity to deliver progress and reform. Tafuri’s critique of operativecriticism points out precisely to the ‘planning of a project’: the ideological instrumentalisationof past history into a prescriptive code ‘towards’ the future. The past is read selectively placing anapparent objective historical narrative above an underlying architecturalmanifesto, a normative projection. Architecture becomes an instrument of theexisting power structure and therefore deprived of any revolutionary potential.
ForTafuri the critic’s task is first to destroy the myths of social redemptionthrough architecture on the one hand, and find a course for revolutionarypraxis in the margins of the field on the other. That means that architectureis not able to trigger any important change on its own, but only as part of aglobal revolution, an overall transformation of the social order, an exhaustionof capitalism itself. The attempts for autonomy that we can trace in the work ofDurand in the nineteenth century briefly described here in the first paragraph,are precisely architecture’s main contradiction: the reduction of architectureinto a set of formal autonomous operations which will conceal its own politicalinefficacy. The core problematic of architectural modernity is that isincapable either of influencing the course of economy or of accepting that aform of 'planning' from outside architecture was required in order to have anyconcrete effect: a ‘planned coordination of production’. For architecture toadmit this was actually to accept its own demise according to Tafuri, architecturebecoming no longer the Subject of the Plan but ironically its Object. Thefailure of modern architecture for him is that instead of defining its scope aspart of a broader plan of reform, it projects itself as the author of thatplan
Kosseleckhighlights the risk to fall into an ‘hypocritical (and ironical) criticism’,one leading to progress and consensus as opposed to real change: ‘Criticism, aswe shall see, became the victim of its ostensible neutrality; it turned intohypocrisy.’ Architecture’s plan becomes the ideological agent of capitalism:form without utopia. A search for disciplinary autonomy which has beeninterpreted as the fall of architecture towards silence, towards the negationof itself. In Architecture and Utopia (1979), Tafuri describes a process ofsocial transformation related to an epochal change within capitalism, that is,the restructuring of capital and the realization of the modern economic formsby describing a shift from ‘Utopia’ to ‘Plan’ (or ‘Project’). The idea ofutopia becomes transformed from an ideology of anticipated ideal into a realworking concept.
[architecturalkrisis]
‘Betweenreform and instrumentalisation’ architecture reveals a conflict between its aimsof social utility on the one hand, and its own attempt to turn thearchitectural project into a self-referential entity. This is a challenge tothe very notion of architectural criticism, that is, how to be instrumental topromote change, and, along Foucault, ‘how not to be governed’. The legacies ofthe Enlightenment point out a tension within the notion of critique and itspolitical agency, architectural criticism being indeed a victim of its ownneutrality. Criticism, in the terms here discussed, never ceases from holdingcertain revolutionary political potential, however in modernity it has beenadapted not as a tool for revolution, but as an ideological device for constantand continuous reform, or as an ideological devise to plan the future.Emancipatory promises of freedom from ideologies haveproved to fail, yet, crisis is there, ‘it lies hidden in criticism’ and itis a ‘permanent possibility in history’. Even behind the apolitical stand of LeCorbusier, and the so-called pessimistic approach of Tafuri, there is apotential for the most revolutionary act of all, to modify space and within itto transform everyday life itself. At the same time, writing can be seen as atruly architectural project, with the ability to transform reality. That isprecisely what Tafuri calls for under his ‘typological criticism’, a dimensionof architectural activity which should focus on daily contingencies rather thanin general and finalised expressions, adjusting the scale form the analysis ofthe architectural object to the criticism of the modes of production, social,economic, legal context that conditions its configuration. It is called ‘typological’because it insists on formally invariant phenomena to construct a new criticalreading of the Modern Movement where history, criticism and planning meet withmutual advantage.
Theproblem is how to conceal the search of a conscious, knowing and autonomoussubject, who plays a central role over its object of knowledge, with the riskof instrumentalising that very role. There is a difficulty and resistance in definingthe notions of objectivity and subjectivity, about the contradictions of theirvery separation and how they are ‘mutually mediated’: object by subject, but mostly subject by object. When separated, this fake claim of independenceover the object becomes instrument of dominance and ideology, warn us Adorno.The Subject ‘swallows’ the object in these terms, whereas the process ofsubjectification, that is, the constitution of the individual subject isinevitably linked to the formation of its object - an object that is also a subject. The object of criticism then demandsits primacy, calling for a subject, whichis ‘object’s agent, not its constituent’. The subject, after all, is an objectas well, and is in its role as mediator that critique can be delivered.Mediation, subsequently, becomes a central category within critique: a state ofdifferentiation without domination, a new state of consciousness of thesubject.
Thepractice of architecture, currently led first and foremost by the laws ofeconomy, has given way to a generalized scepticism regarding the possibility ofradical thought and action. On the other hand, the present moment witnesses aquestioning of neoliberal forms of governance and a proliferation ofmanifestations of resistance and revolts across the world, from Chile to Egypt,from OWS to the London’s riots, these locate a decisive moment to examine thelimits and scope of critique and its relationship to architectural practice.The question is how to rearticulate political resistance, political critique,under these conditions and from within architecture when traditional lines ofrevolutionary struggle no longer hold. Revolutioncomes no longer from above -from planning, or from below –from the ‘unplanned’ butinstead, ‘from the middle.’ It is worldwide communication systems that createthe illusion of Adorno’s ‘difference’.
Is it thetime of continuous ‘progress and reform’ to come to an end? Is it the time for‘typological criticism’, for the ‘planning of projects’ in which subject andobject might converge?
So whatis left of critique in terms of architectural writing and practice, when ‘theillusion of difference’ is now embedded in the modes of knowledge and regimesof practice of architecture?
Foucaultinterrogates us: How are we constituted as subjects of our knowledge, assubjects who exercise or submit to power relations, as moral subjects of ouractions? It is Critique indeed -of reason, of knowledge, of judgment, ofsociety- what allows us to constitute as free driven subjects, but subjects in which the world, as object, isconstituted. Criticism is aresponsibility of ‘the planner’ who has to break the link between architectureand its ideologies.
