THE POSSIBLE PROGRESS

“L’amour pour principe, l’ordre pour base et le progrès pour but”
“Love as principle, order as basis, progress as goal”

–Auguste Comte

The Positivist Stage, as stated by Comte, marked the entry into an era when, due to gradual but constant scientific developments, increasingly accurate predictions of the future could be done. But this entry has also prompted a new condition, in which the consequences of the steps being taken towards a certain destination contained the potential to lead mankind into a more precarious situation than previously. This perception was enhanced as well by a critical approach to history during the beginning of the XX century. Walter Benjamin pictures progress as a wrecking storm ¹. Comte defines progress as the “goal”. But can one understand progress without knowing which, what, for whom the effects and goals are and pertain?

SCIENTIFIC ASSUMPTIONS AND CULTURAL CONSTRUCTIONS

During the past two centuries, narratives around the future developed into the offer of scenarios containing possible solutions to current problems at a given moment in time. The notion of progress became a tool for the definition of desired behaviours, implying either that the future will be necessarily better or that a certain course of action will lead us to a worst-case scenario. It seems difficult to reach an agreement on which ideals we should aim for but, regardless of the ideas behind a certain position, technological progress is mostly seen as one of humanity‘s great hopes.

Though scientific advances definitely influence the notions of progress, progress itself seems to be far from scientific. Rather than a straight line, freed from “the silence of envy, or the caprices of fashion,” progress is a rather sinuous, fluid string that fluctuates according to the tides of political intentions². Utilitarian notions of speed, amount, range, volume, brightness, size, etc. keep being revisited and reappropriated, according to the prevalent views of the day on the correct direction to move towards, pushing habits and conventions along with the sliding shell of a fragmented cornucopia. On October 24, 2003, Concorde flew its last commercial flight. Ultimately it was retired not because of the catastrophic accident in Paris in 2000, not because it was not profitable and consumed gargantuous amounts of fuel, nor because it could no longer fulfil its initial functions, but due to the subsequent unbearable noise caused by the breaking of the sound barrier. Its supersonic nature—heralded as the future a mere 27 years earlier—ended up being the reason for its failure.

This shift in perception of noise is closely connected with the evolution of the broader political and technological landscape. After all, the effects of the supersonic jump have not changed (neither have the fuel consumption of the planned costs per trip). What changed was the relevance and scope of the voices of the people and property affected by Concorde’s flights. New media brought enhanced visibility to anything witnessed by anyone with a device to hand. It rendered governments either liable or responsible for ensuring justice, first in the compensation for the damages and, later on, for assuring the comfort and quality of life of those affected. This very symbol of British design and scientific excellence in an era obsessed with speed and distance was sacrificed by the political forces in the name of a society focused on comfort and safety.³

STATIC VS. FLUID

Shifting goals means shifting notions of progress. But progress—since the Enlightenment, at least—inherently contains the paradoxical nature of change being the key for the development towards an improved or more advanced condition. How does this implicitly fluid characteristic relate to the built environment?

The Positivist Temple in Porto Alegre, Brazil, a remnant of the church based on Comte’s semi-lunatic proposal for mankind, serves as an example of the volatile nature of the notion of progress: it borrows its typology, structure, form, materials, function and identity from the Neoclassical churches built at the time. Though Comte was aware of the non-linear character of the stages, pointing out the necessarily conciliatory nature of Positivism, the ambiguity in the architecture of a building which is supposed to be the embodiment of progress, seems to go beyond the acceptance of said ambiguity, rather questioning the possibility of progress itself.

THE POSSIBLE PROGRESS

Perceiving architecture as a synthesis of the ideals and technology of society, positions architecture as a privileged barometer of the movement towards disparate notions of progress at different times. Departing from this position, with the first issue of this editorial cycle, we present a current definition of possible progress, through concrete case studies, opinion pieces and visual essays.

As a first case study, Max Kuo addresses Eisenmans’s view on media and its influence on architecture, picturing an impossible future where Eisenmann himself could begin his career in the 21st Century as a young chinese father.  Continuing with Charly Blödel’s take on the ruin as implicit reference for the extreme present invites us on a critical tour from South Africa to OMA’s La Défence, with a stop in St. Louis, guided by Roberto Matta. Jeannette Kuo skillfully unweaves the relation progress has with building standards in Switzerland, questioning the current take on general comfort. Julia Dorn builds an argument for a contemporary Utopia, unfolding what now constitutes utopian thinking in the dimension of technological progress. In the same dimension, Chiara Davino and Lorenza Villani reveal the territorialization of social technologies that aim for efficiency but land in repression. Sara Davin Ommar and Felicia Narumi Liang, discuss the de-politicization of the swedish modern project of the 1930’s. Simone Marcolin and Diletta Trinari postulate Pier Luigi Nervi’s Burgo Paper factory as a Hymn to Progress. Adriano Niel discusses the opposite stances of the second half of the 20th century on the decay of the modern movement that shaped the contemporary discourse of architecture. Marta Malinverni and Alex Turner summon Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot to voice a sharp definition of progress. Sonia Ralston gives us an insight into the politics of progress in Soviet Estonia through the collective farm architecture developed in the pursuit of modernizing an establishing a scientific narrative for soviet agricultural industry. Finally putting biopolitics on trial, Simran Singh interrogates the image of domesticity in the form of mass housing.

The stances chosen by each of our contributors result in a critical survey of the current understanding of progress, highlighting complementary and contradictory aspects alike.  These offer no definitive answers to the questions we posed in the call for papers. They nevertheless go beyond what we expected as each contribution plays a key role in positioning the responsibility on the decisions and consequences of all which progress might be, in our own hands as citizens of the global market society we are inserted in. On this sinuous route, flying towards semi-tangible goals, constantly looking back, the controls seem to be there for the taking, if we only wish to do so.

The Possible Progress will go on. This first issue lays the theoretical foundation upon which a series of sharp answers by key guests will be set, to be published during January, February and March 2020, and followed in April 2020 by a comprehensive design issue with contributions by some of the most interesting architectural offices worldwide.

¹ “The face of the angel of history is turned toward the past. Where we perceived a chain of events, he sees a single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress.” – Walter Benjamin, in Theses on the Philosophy of History, on Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus
 ²„Art depends on popular judgments about the universe, and is nourished by the limited expanse of sentiment. . . . In contrast, science was barely touched upon by the ancients, and is as free from the inconsistencies of fashion as it is from the fickle standards of taste. . . . And let me stress that this conquest of ideas is not subject to fluctuations of opinion, to the silence of envy, or to the caprices of fashion that today repudiate and detest what yesterday was praised as sublime“ –  by Santiago Ramón y Cajal.
³ “Concorde Wins by a Nose.” BBC – Press Office. BBC, March 16, 2006. http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2006/03_march/16/design.shtml.

Along with formal innovation, each new age in architecture invents subjectivities who discern, design, and inhabit those forms. This history has included an eclectic cast of both human and non-human characters ranging from Da Vinci’s Vitruvian man, Superstudio’s unshaven hippies, and even parametricism’s emergent slime molds– all personas that project ideological contexts for architecture to exist within. The search for today’s subject poses an unusual historical predicament–one of endedness, a man¹ without a future. In his landmark book The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the end of times, a tautological story of mankind overcoming war, enslavement, and disease, arriving upon the greatest and best solution for self-government and self-regulation in the form of Western liberal democracy. If modernism set forth great problems so that architects could design great solutions, then Fukuyama’s political thesis inevitably poses an existential question in an era of endedness where political perfection comes at great cost: without perpetual struggle, man no longer needs great art or philosophy, forever resigned to their new and last role as caretakers of human history.

In 1984, just prior to Fukuyama’s manifesto, Peter Eisenman had articulated an architectural corollary to this end of historical time. In his essay “The End of the Classical: the End of the Beginning, the End of the End,” Eisenman declared the end architecture’s dependence upon classicism’s three fictions of representation, truth, and history. Dispelling architecture’s mythology of origins and endings, he constructs a non-classical alternative “structured on absences” where design is founded upon timeless modulations, independent of external reference and meaning.² For Eisenman, the end of classicism marks the beginning of “timelessness that is no longer universal” whereby architectural design proceeds according to its own internal disciplinary authority manifesting as notational acts of reading and writing.³ In spite of both Fukuyama and Eisenman’s states of endedness, new global technologies and forces have since arisen in the three intervening decades. These developments have fundamentally undermined the stasis and status of this last humanist subject.  

Today’s news headlines reveal how subjectivity is both under threat while undergoing radical reconstruction. Whether it be urban wildfires, lab-grown meat, or social media surveillance, our knowledge of the world coincides with our loss of control over it. The effects of climate change, automation, the internet, global finance, and resource depletion combine to short-circuit Fukuyama’s claims of a final self-regulating political system whereby Hegel’s master-slave dialectic is finally overturned. Our millenium offers new predicaments beyond the struggles framed by Fukuyama–that of men who strive to govern as equals (isothymia) versus those who reign by aristocratic meritocracy (megalothymia). Instead, the stakes now lay upon our ability to design a world which emanates through the uncontrollable feedback of eco-technological systems that we’ve set into motion. In her book How We Became Posthuman, Katherine Hayle points to the internal contradiction of Fukuyama’s self-regulating man:

“By the mid-twentieth century, liberal humanism, self-regulating machinery, and possessive individualism had come together in an uneasy alliance that at once helped to create the cyborg and also undermined the foundations of liberal subjectivity. Philip K. Dick tapped into this potential instability when he used his fiction to pose a disturbing question: should a cybernetic machine, sufficiently powerful in its self-regulating processes to become fully conscious and rational, be allowed to own itself?”⁴ 

This critical sleight of hand introduces the cyborg as the perfect post-human avatar for the Last Man. For Hayle, post-structuralist models of meaning founded upon absence and presence is less relevant in a world replete with computer-enabled simulation. Experiences as esoteric as jet flight simulation or as quotidian as writing emails are now governed by pattern and randomness and how these processes distribute subjectivity across both biological and virtual networks. In this scenario, Eisenman’s textuality is less relevant than the entanglement of multiple cognitive systems. Though his aforementioned essay marks a point of abandonment to make way for a new architecture after endedness, Eisenman continues to point the way forward. Combing through a series of anecdotal references scattered across his work, one discovers that he indirectly hints at who today’s architectural subject might be.

Beginning with a 1993 lecture at the Architectural Association, Eisenman presents his 22 month-old son as an anthropological case study—an exemplar of the Western subject born in the electronic age. He describes propping his son in front of the TV when Sesame Street is suddenly interrupted by commercials. The child is blasted by “the density of light and sound…[as] his head snaps up and he is absolutely riveted to the commercial event though he doesn’t know he is getting a commercial message… in fact what is bombarding his sensibility… having his spatiality and his capacity to understand narration taken away.”⁵

Eisenman the Younger’s comprehension of narrative is overwhelmed by this density of light and sound. For Eisenman the Elder, this oversaturated media environment triggers a new affective state that architecture must now contend with. The classical embodiment of an architectural space-time continuum becomes ineffectual. To address this problem, the Elder proposes his Columbus Convention Center as the antidote to this shortcoming, where its architectonic instability competes with media, inducing vertigo and nausea in the occupant. The Elder delights in the trauma reported by visitors to the building and the subsequent consternation of his clients.⁶ But this countervailing mechanism comes with a half-life as architectural novelty wears thin, similar to the disappearance of widespread air sickness as commercial air travel became more accessible. Thresholds of resistance build up once new initiates have assimilated these aggressions as routine operations. For Eisenman The Younger’s generation, this new affective world is their native habitat–a new generic, even placid, mise-en-scene primed for their own subsequent inventions. 

Long after that primal scene in front of the electronic tube, we meet Eisenman the Younger as a twenty-something adult in his father’s essay “Strong Form, Weak Form.” He has since become a New York disc-jockey of exotic nightclubs flexing his wily abilities of turntable scratching, erasing the “structures of rock or pop music…that is, the rhythm, the harmonics, the melody, the narrative sound.”⁷ Whereas the “strong form” of pop songs exhibit one-to-one correlations between meaning and its structure, the “weak form” of turntablist scratching and mixing distorts those correlations, where noise, hesitation, and collage instill delight. The strong form of Elmo’s alphabet songs or any Swedish pop anthem relies on the elimination of uncertainty in order to communicate and connect with its audience. As Claude Shannon described: 

“For the purposes of communication theory, the “meaning” of the message is generally irrelevant; what is significant is the difficulty in transmitting the message from one point to another…Information is closely associated with uncertainty. The information I obtain when you say something to me corresponds to the amount of uncertainty I had, previous to your speaking, of what you were going to say.”⁸ 

Therefore, communication depends on the reciprocal feedback between certainty and uncertainty. But this proportion does not maintain the same coefficient over time. Expanding commercialization continues to subdivide our subjective states into finer micro-attentive states until we are reduced to perpetual states of uncertainty. Just try to get anything done while email and app notifications constantly ping you. Having grown up in this uncertain state, DJ Eisenman’s choice of musicianship exemplifies this collapse of subject-object relations: platform becomes content, noise becomes signal, and audience becomes the performer.

In Eisenman’s third act, the son is all grown up, working for hospitality developers, and ensconced in his own world, uninterested in his father’s architecture. Acknowledging how far they’ve drifted from one another, the father eulogizes the waning of his own architectural relevance: “I’m living in a very different world than my son. I love my son, he is a great guy. And he is doing very well. But he doesn’t need to hire me because I would be a problem for him.” ⁹ Upon this irreconcilable rift in the parable of father and son, Eisenman the Elder abandons the West traveling to the far Orient in search of an unknowable future. In 2017 and at the age of 86, he arrives in Shanghai for the first time in his life, well after the iconic architectural boom at the turn of the millennium. He is flummoxed by the city’s lack of classical form, civic discourse, and human rights. In an interview at Tongji University, his instinct is to dash his critical mind against the perceived obstinacy of Chinese non-democratic society. But as the crisis dissipates, we find the Elder wistfully speculating on an alternative future: 

 “I think that right now China to me seems to be why I am here, seems to be the most important idea for the 21st century. It is not Europe, it is not the Middle East, it is not the USA, nor South America – it’s China. It is certainly going to be the place where possibilities exist better than any other place. I think, if I were being born today, I would like to be born in Shanghai. I think I would have more chances in the world than anybody else, it seems to me. And no one seems to care…I would rather get a better chance here, have a baby here, and bring it up here than New York City. I just have that feeling.”¹⁰

This epilogue doubles as a moment of inflection, whereupon the Elder metamorphosizes into the Younger in a reverse Oedipal plot twist. Ruminating on an atonal future, Eisenman slips into a prolepsis of his own reincarnation as a young Chinese father. Xenophobic cliches aside, the specter of the inscrutable Chinese has often instrumentalized the undoing (or completion) of the Occidental dialectic. Whether it be Leibniz’ pursuit of universalism, Foucault’s Chinese encyclopedia, or most recently Nick Land’s post-human singularity, Chinese tropes offer an intellectual sleight of hand, whereby in one fell swoop, declares the death of the Enlightenment project while also sublimating it into a new imaginary. In Eisenman’s case, the catastrophic decline of Western metaphysics is simultaneously salvaged by the relinquishing of civic responsibility and all the burdens of an all-knowing moralism. The relief of “no one seem[ing] to care” allows Eisenman to carry on into the future as a new avatar where Father becomes the Son, albeit a Chinese one this time around.¹¹ Adopting this new avatar of a Young Chinese Father, Eisenman is able to lay claim upon this unknown future that would otherwise slip beyond his grasp.

Eisenman’s avatar, described as a Shanghainese family, exemplifies the arrival of a new post-human architectural subject, no longer underwritten by Western metaphysics. This subject, similar to virtual avatars and lab-grown meat, are synthetic and scripted: their presence, sometimes real and sometimes unborn, is detached from ontology and nourished by the interaction of multiple platforms, commands, and codes. Russian agents posed as Black Lives Matter activists during the 2016 American presidential campaign, and soon, your vegan cousin will be able to eat beef without a guilty conscience. These are examples of a non-representational world that has begun to replace the linguistic models of Eisenman the Elder. Reimagined as a Young Chinese Father, Eisenman’s new avatar embodies Hayles’ “flickering signifier”¹² –an interdigitated reality of both the body and its multiple transcriptions onto the everyday. Like the refresh of a webpage, each flicker holds the potential for wild transformations of the typical and expected. While this unpredictability may induce anxiety for us, the new subject has moved on to better and more plural things. The failures depicted in science fiction’s doomsday scenarios and the trauma of Germanic fairy tales work only on those who still cling to master narratives. Avatars are contingent, with moral commitments only required by any particular task at any given time while remaining open to the cacophonous spontaneity of a complex and messy world. 

To design this brave new world, the new architectural subject must cultivate a distributed design methodology, and from this distance, encourage unexpected results. This unpredictable ad hocism is already at work throughout the urbanized world. China constructs fake islands in order to nationalize the ocean wilderness, while the most undisturbed wilding of nature occurs in post-industrial sites like Chernobyl. Following Eisenman The Elder’s prescient longing, we should engage in the immanence of the algorithmic uncanny native to this turbulent world. If we still have the audacity to speculate on the sustainability of liberal values, we must adopt the avatar as a means to cloak and transform our voices, speaking and designing in pluralistic tongues of sincerity and subterfuge. Like Eisenman’s post-ethnic Chinese children, we already live in a non-universal and plural world where architecture is no longer persistent but mutable and endlessly possible.

 

¹ The author deliberately uses “man” only to underscore the fact that these historical projects are typically hostile to the existence of women
² Peter Eisenman, “The End of the Classical: The End of the Beginning, The End of the End,” in Re: Working Eisenman, Academy Editions (London: Ernst & Sohn, 1993), 24–33.
³ Ibid.
⁴ N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
⁵ Peter Eisenman, “Architecture in the Age of Electronic Media,” accessed October 6, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkDO8CR_Udw&t=1596s.
⁶ Ibid.
⁷ Peter Eisenman, “Strong Form, Weak Form,” in Re: Working Eisenman, Academy Editions (London: Ernst & Sohn, 1993), 50–54.
⁸ Claude Elwood Shannon, Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers (New York: IEEE Press, 1993).
⁹  Peter Eisenman, Qing, Chang, and Gonzalez, Placido, “Built-Heritage | Peter Eisenman,” built-heritage, accessed October 22, 2018, https://www.built-heritage.net/peter-eisenman-interview.
¹⁰ Ibid.
¹¹ Ibid.
¹² N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman:Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 30-31

Max Kuo designs with ALLTHATISSOLID and teaches with Harvard GSD Department of Architecture

 

WET WALLS

As fortunate as he was to work together with the grand master of modernism, Chilean painter Roberto Matta could not help but disagree with the principles of Le Corbusier. Working as a draftsman in Le Corbusier’s office, Matta rejected his idea of modern architecture as a fusion of the aspira­tions of classical renaissance architecture with the qualities of accelerating new technologies at the time. In the article of the surrealist magazine Minotaure¹ he describes his contrasting ideals as “walls ‘like wet sheets that change shape to fit our psychological fears’, furnished with biomorphic couches that appear in his illustrations to mould to and at the same time threaten to swallow the human body”². Matta describes his ideas of space as a flexible coat, almost fluid and imperceptible in its alignment with the human body. He portrays a synchronised relationship; two entities moving, intersecting, merging. An architecture rids itself from its material character, the essential “stuff it is made off” as opposed to the monumental and rigid qualities of Corbusier’s renaissance references. An architecture that shows no restraint in adjusting to the needs of its user producing the agility of different modes of usage.

Increasing shifts in the modes of usage of the built environment are a symptom of the continuous forward-facing motion of accelerating progress in our time. Socio-political and economic dynamics in society in the context of greater independence through digital connectivity fuel migra­tional movements around the globe. Yet, as bodies move at an increased rate, the spaces that they inhabit and leave behind accumulate in contrast to Matta’s scenario where they dematerialise and do not leave a trace³. In other words, the accelerated state of mind and body clash with the perceived ‘slowness’ of material which ultimately culminates in desertion and abandonment of buildings. In precisely this moment, the phenomenon of the contemporary ruin reveals itself. Our surroun­ding built environment expires much sooner⁴. It is continuously demolished, transformed, improved and readjusted, dressing the urban landscape in scaffolding. These disruptions tear the urban fabric and its interconnected social life that cannot be patched up as easily as it is dismantled. As these motions of building and removal accelerate, the term ‘ruin’ could receive new meanings: Can architecture only work or not work? Or could it actually be successful in its dysfunctionality? Put another way, could the ruin become productive? 

This essay speculates on our relation to the contemporary ruin in the context of the accelerated times we find ourselves in. From the perspective of its static material presence in the fluid terrain of continuous progress it explores the productive potential and societal relevance of the friction that it carries. These accelerated times are what Hartmut Rosa identifies as conditions of ‘dynamic stabilisation’ through which we attempt to navigate the waves of progress.To achieve temporary stabilisation we feel required to push for constant growth, innovation and cultural reproduction of a status quo⁵. Upsurge of production and social change are the result. We experience these conditions as a feeling of accelerated time. This notion is vividly summarised by Douglas Coupland, co-author of The Age of Earthquakes: ‘The future for me, growing up, was always something that was ahead. In the distance–then it started to get closer. Then it was there, and now suddenly, right now actually is the future. What we’re inhabiting is no longer in the distance anymore but in this state of very, very profoundly accelerating flux.’⁶ With times in flux and progress inevitable, lifespans seem to become a questionable measurement, leaving the ruin in an ambiguous position. 

Elaborating on the term ‘ruin’ words like “vestige”, “remnants”, “trace”, or “relic” come to mind, describing the idea of loss manifesting itself in the de­caying traces of a failed utopia. The mere word, ‘ruin’, triggers nostalgia instantly and provokes the unquestioned response of preservation. Walter Benjamin’s definition of the ruin aligns with this notion in the sense that it is an object-trace capturing ‘nature in a petrified state to nature in a permanent state of transition’⁷. Nonetheless, Benjamin limits the value of the ruin to its documenting, capturing capacity and implies a need for maintaining this ‘petrified state’ to secure its meaning. This makes Benjamin’s ruin inaccessible as we have to keep a secure distance. By extension, it leads to the problematics of preservation—as we cannot sustain everything, what is worth keeping and who decides such matters? 

ENDING POINT: SYSTEM

Dutch architectural firm OMA thematises the proble­matics of preservation in their masterplan for La Defénce in Paris. La Défense is one of the main business areas in Paris, that was bound to be expanded in 1991. As a proposal for this undertaking, OMA produced a scheme, causing a stir at the time, that rather than imposing another superstructure onto the dense area to focus on what lies beneath⁸. From the point of view of statistics, most of the current buildings would reach the end of their life span within the coming 20 to 30 years which would bring to light very naturally a tabula rasa, a blank slate, free of contextual conditioning. In anticipation of this emergence, OMA planned for the continuous revealing of an underlying grid that is the basis for not only the existing but also the extended areal of La Défense. In their proposal, they criticise that in Europe as “the Old World, the ‘continent of history’, there is an unspoken assumption that all its substance–even the most mediocre–is historic, and therefore has the right to eternal life.”⁹ “Mediocre substance” is what OMA’s masterplan categorises as recently erected buildings, doomed to imminent expiration and demolition or in other words—the contemporary ruin to be. 

La Défense is a celebrated example of city planning. The role of the architect: patience. The elegant removal or “unbuilding”, is what Keller Easterling calls ‘perhaps the only subtraction project in recent memory that is pro­minent enough to be awarded a Pritzker equivalent for building removal’¹⁰. What her evaluation alludes to is that the existing buildings are acknowledged in their life cycles. Progress is registered as the driving force behind expiry and translated into a system bringing forward the new. Nonetheless, this system maintains the ruin clearly as an ending point. It restricts its potential to removal in order to unlock the possibility of a fresh start hidden underneath.

While Benjamin sees the value of the ruin in its preservation and OMA in its removal, an alternative that mediates between the two becomes very interesting, as both options are questionable in the face of global resource shortage and current carbon footprint of the building industry. So, how can we not merely cope with but take advantage of the material qualities of the ruin? How could the friction between the physicality of the expired building and our mind be a fruitful one? Svetlana Boym provides an insightful view of possible scenarios in her analysis of ruins. In her opinion, ruins do not only portray “a romanticising notion of the past layered with a contemporary reflection of our inner landscapes” but prove to be “sites for a new exploration and production of meanings”¹¹. Boym lifts the heavy layer of dust. Interaction becomes possible and in this case crucial.

ENDING POINT: COMMUNITY

A project that makes use of building removal beyond the recovery of a blank slate, is A Way, Away [Listen While I Say]. The project taking place over several months in 2017 in St. Louis, Missouri, centred around the activation of an empty land plot and an adjoining building that would be demolished in the course of the project. Chicago-based artists Amanda Williams and Andres Hernandez choreographed the process of taking down the building as a community process in five phases of “Marking”, “Subtracting”, “Translating”, “Shaping”, and “Healing”¹². The process was initiated by painting the complete building with golden paint to articulate the focus of the conversation. Throughout the documentation and retrieval of building materials from the demolition, the community made proposals and guided their use in the transformation into a green space for the city.

A Way, Away demonstrates how the ruin, given the time, can be opened up to a civic process to evaluate and  formulate collective adaptation in a bottom-up manner when progress triggers urban transitioning and calls for new schemes. In engaging of the community throughout the process, Willians and Hernandez cultivated reflection and assessment of the life cycle of the urban landscape. However, in this case the developed conclusions were left without major impact on the previously planned park that eventually replaced the demolished building. The insights articulated meanwhile could not be channeled back into the planning process as the new plans had already been finalised.

Even though A Way, Away shows the potential of a ruin still in relation to its removal, it yields another insight. As a building is abandoned, it is removed from the market and the original financial envelope it initially emerged from. The ruin, as it has moved beyond the gaze of the market, does not have to function within its system of regulations anymore. In minimal periods of time, expired buildings can outline what is needed. Spaces are adjusted radically and rudimentarily to find quick solutions for temporary adjustments. In this sense, architecture takes the shape of a practice or performance as opposed to a scripted scheme. What seemingly lies in decay can become a 1:1 testing ground for conclusions such as the ones outlined by the community in St. Louis. This practice reminds of Matta’s image of ‘walls like wet sheets’ changing and morphing to the body’s motion With life re-entering into its deserted spaces, the ruin can be seen in a different light, posing the question: Could the ruin be reevaluated to be not seen as an ending point but become an actual starting point?

ENDING POINT: RUIN

Sans Souci Community Cinema in Soweto, South Africa shows what this notion could look like. In 1995, the Sans Souci Community Cinema was destroyed in a fire. In 2002, Lindsay Bremner and 26’10 South initiated its reconstruction through concept development from the spatiality of the ruin itself. Instead of speculating on the potential of the ruin, its capability to sustain a variety of functions was rendered tangible through open-air screenings, installations, performances, workshops and festivals¹³. This way the transformation was envisioned on-site, anchoring the future building at the heart of its community. Furthermore, the programme helped promote and raise a budget for reconstruction. Following a very successful campaign and further developments in the realisation of the generated proposal, heavy rainfalls led to the partial collapse of the remains of the building. 

Nonetheless, the project is a strong case study for the ruin activated as a testing ground. In this sense, Sans Souci Cinema shows that the ruin today can exceed the role of “new exploration and production of meaning” (Boym) which remains on the theoretical level. It has the capacity to metamorph from an ending point of a life cycle into a starting point for the transformation of urban texture within specific local contexts.

RUIN AS NAVIGATION

OMA’s scheme for La Défense stopped at defining that buildings have shortening lifespans and applying this notion as a system. The project of A Way, Away shows how a community can be a driving force in the development of the built environment and foster a culture of engagement and initiative. Deconstruction becoming a civic process. Sans Souci Cinema develops this aspect further as the ruin then is transformed into a 1:1 testing ground to help reflect on past concepts to develop new ones. The ruin itself becomes a process. In this way, less defined areas in the regulated pattern of the urban landscape provide a fertile ground to become a thermometer of the relation between progress and inherent social change, emerging needs and necessary actions. Seeing the connections with buildings and how and why they do or do not work can let them have an influence and shape established architectural practices.

Now progress can be observed manifested on all scales throughout our daily paths and destinations. We see “with half-closed eyes, an accelerated time-lapse within which large swaths of building and landscape seem to be simultaneously cultivated and harvested or built and unbuilt”¹⁴, Keller Easterling describes. Yet buildings carry with them much more than the bare weight of their compiled building materials and are much harder to remove in concept as in practice. They do not decom­pose without a trace. They do not only answer to a grid that is drawn by an urban planner but also to the much more organic grid of appropriation by use of its community. Buildings, from their inception to their removal carry the stories that render the social tissue that holds and makes the built environment habitable. 

The picture of ‘walls like wet sheets’ that Matta paints, seems to come very close to Easterling’s suggestion of ephemerality. Yet, the fluidity that he describes is of a different kind. It describes space that registers and is aware of the human being, is connected almost physically, lets itself be shaped and helps shape through productive friction. This fluidity asks for interaction, engagement and active shaping. From this perspective, the ruin moves beyond a mere milestone or an anchor point to navigate and position yourself against. The ruin is reconfigured from an endpoint into many possible new beginnings. As such, it can provide a fertile ground for cyclic motions of iteration, testing and evaluation on an urban scale. It can help form fluid, spatial narratives centered around an evolving ’social architecture’ as opposed to the remoteness and perceived slowness of conservative planning and construction practices. Positioned as such, the ruin gains a key role in the critical approach to, and navigation of continuous waves of progress in the extreme present.

¹‘Mathématique sensible—Architecture du temps’, Minotaure, Paris, no.11, May 1938
² Attlee, James (2007). Towards Anarchitecture: Gordon Matta-Clark and Le Corbusier. Retrieved from https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/07/towards-an-architecture-gordon-matta-clark-and-le-corbusier#foot- noteref26_a6tj2o5
³The notion of a tendency towards dematerialisation manifests itself in the continuous digitalisation of major parts of our lives, such as money through contactless payment, social interactions through digital networks, etc. yet hits firm limitations in the built environment. Our struggle with these limitation reveals itself on different levels such as the nomadic lifestyle being celebrated and articulated in the success of Airbnb, the home wherever you come to be, or the emergence of workspaces harnessing the creative, entrepreneurial industries all over the world. Furthermore, the need of space limited in time reveals itself in the extended application of cutting-edge technology such as large scale 3D-printing from bio-based materials such as the exhibition pavilions and cabins by DUS Architects such as the “Tiny [Bau]haus” stationed temporarily at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. (See the website of DUS Architects here: https://houseofdus.com) The “Tiny [Bau]haus” is a cabin constructed from 3D-printed elements from bio-based plastics, creating a space that can easily be disposed of after travelling Europe for a year. (See the introduction to the Tiny [Bau]Haus on the website of HNI, Rotterdam here: https://neuhaus.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/curriculum/tiny-bauhaus)
⁴The term ‘expiry’ returns several times throughout the essay. What is meant by expiry is, that the building stops being used in the way or loses the context that it was initially planned for. Buildings today expire in their original purpose after around 20 to 30 years as described in OMA’s masterplan for La Défence that is discussed further along. (See OMA (2018). Mission Grand Axe. Retrieved from https://oma. eu/projects/mission­grand­axe­la­defense) Furthermore, the research of architect Jenny Bevan has shown that this estimated time until buildings generally expire continuously shortens. Each decade, we can expect the buildings that are being newly built to have a life span ten years shorter than the previous decade. (See Bevans TED Talk on “Our Disposable Architecture” here: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=7OLsIvyF­i8&t=60s&frags=pl%2Cwn) A curious thought, what will happen when the life span of a building in this sense moves into the negative from 2030 on.
⁵ Wajcman, Judy & Dodd, Nigel (2017) The Sociology of Speed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
⁶Jones, Charlie R. (2015). Inside The Age of Earthquakes. Retrieved from https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/24283/1/inside-the-age-of-earthquakes
⁷Gómez Moya, Cristián (2011). Ruins. Retrieved from http://monumenttotransformation.org/atlas-of-transformation/html/r/ruins/ruins-cristian-gomez-moya.html
⁸OMA (2018). Mission Grand Axe. Retrieved from https://oma. eu/projects/mission­grand­axe­la­defense
⁹OMA (2018).
¹⁰Easterling, Keller (2014) Critical Practice 4, Subtraction. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
¹¹Boym, Svetlana (2011). Ruinophilia: Appreciation of Ruins. Retrieved from http://monumenttotransformation.org/ atlas-of-transformation/html/r/ruinophilia/ruinophilia-apprecia- tion­of­ruins­svetlana­boym.html
¹² Fleischmann Brewer, Kristin (2017). Between Precarity and Possibility. Retrieved from https://www.awayaway.site/blog/between­precarity­and­possibility
¹³Spatial Agency (–). Sans Souci Cinema. Retrieved from http://www.spatialagency.net/database/sans.souci.cinema
¹⁴Easterling, Keller (2014) Critical Practice 4, Subtraction. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

 

Charly Blödel (b. 1992 in Germany) is a student in the Master department of Social Design at the Design Academy Eindhoven (NL). Having worked between communication strategies and exhibition design in the cultural sphere, she currently acts as an independent researcher. In her masters thesis, her focus lies on the potential of alienation and the reimagining of spatial constructs in the context of common definitions of waste and material shortage problematics. She is based in Rotterdam. 

Progress, for much of the past century, has been associated with technology and its promises as a panacea for the control of our environments. Technological progress through mechanization and digitization have allowed us not only unprecedented means and speeds of production, it has enabled us to temper previously inhospitable environments at financially affordable rates. These advancements were by and large necessary, bringing significant improvements to our way of life on many fronts, not least of which was the increase in human comfort. On social ends, it has also brought about monumental improvements, introducing leisure and relaxation as a condition of everyday life no longer just for the upper class or royalty. However, in the typical perfectionist ambitions of the technological revolutions, the taming of the environment became so totalizing that it brought along unintended consequences, the most significant of which may be the radical shift in our habits and the expectations we’ve developed towards the role of a building over the years.

Comfort in buildings, since the introduction and widespread adoption of mechanical systems, had been associated with the control of our interior environments –a sealing-off from the exterior context as a means to ensure the „perfect“ interior climate. Buildings became a means for us to escape and insulate ourselves against the hostilities of the exterior context. Whatever happens outside, we would be endlessly blessed with a constant and ideal comfort of 22°C. This control of the interiors was further heightened in the early 2000s as subsequent calls for sustainability became equivalent with the regulation of energy-consumption, not by removing the machines but by piling on automated technologies, and thereby adding to the mechanization with yet more mechanization. In the distrust of human nature, we have relinquished control of our environments to machines, so much so that we cannot even manually open a window for a breath of fresh air, lest we forget to close it. The faith in machines to address energy-loss in buildings has however led to cumbersome systems that not only continue to consume energy but that prove difficult to run and maintain, and in the end enslave the buildings to the very energy systems from which we seek to escape. Financially, it is equally difficult to justify. The upfront and operational costs take on significant percentages of the construction costs, and increasingly so. But an even greater side-effect of such approaches has been the encouragement of a certain lethargy. They have on one hand absolved the buildings’ inhabitants from participation in the responsible management of the conditions and on the other hand in an intolerance for any deviation from the idealized comfort. Mechanization has made us all spoiled brats.

 

At the same time, the well-intentioned certification systems that hold designers accountable for the sustainability of a project became more and more a straitjacket to a bureaucratic checklist of objectives that leave little room for creativity. In Switzerland, the ever-thickening build-up of facade sections since the 1990s, coupled with the ubiquitous use of automated exterior metal shutters and the prohibition of manually-operated windows, has led not only to an increasingly hermetic interiorization of built spaces but also to a prescribed aesthetic that seems almost unavoidable for buildings seeking a certain standard of ecological certification. While a system of accountability is by all means necessary to ensure certain goals and objectives are upheld, the insistence on progress as linear and one-directional may prevent us from seeing the bigger picture.

While the establishment of standards has at the base of it the right intentions, we do need to question the consequences they may have brought about, including the possibility that these standards may have hindered progress. Sustainability standards were largely introduced in the late 1990s – LEED in the US and Minergie in Switzerland were both established in 1998. This was a time when such guidelines were used to set the high bar for emblematic and pioneering projects. They were a way to shine the spotlight on innovative projects as an example for future practice. Yet as these standards have become adopted into everyday practice we should re-evaluate not only their goals but also the motivations of those who seek the certification. In Switzerland, Minergie has become the normative expected by most public clients. Most school buildings, public administration, and even housing have been built according to Minergie standards to such a degree that it is rare these days to come upon a project that does not in some way reference it. They have become, so to speak, standard practice.  

You might wonder why this would ever be a hindrance to progress since we have indeed collectively raised the bar. However, the equation is not so simple. Design is always a weighing of priorities and with a public client who might have more modest means this weighing of priorities carries with it more existential bearing. By becoming standard practice, these construction standards are no longer an aspiration of working to find the best possible solution that may push the boundaries of current practice but rather a checklist of items required to absolve any further responsibility on the matter. 

At the same time, the certainty by which such standards define particular performance criteria and the widespread acceptance of the particular solutions ends up producing a culture of automatism. It seems that by achieving the certification and checking off the requirements, we’ve done our share in regards to the ecological question. It’s no longer about elevating the field but about achieving the norm. As with most regulatory measures, the market always tips in favor of the lowest common denominator – the solution that is simultaneously the most cost effective and most performative–resulting in an industry standard that may be less than innovative. 

The most visible consequences are in what I would call the contemporary Swiss façade — not the exceptions that are lauded on the international stage like projects of Olgiati, Kerez, or Herzog de Meuron, but rather the facades that enshroud the other 90% of buildings built since the late 1990s. This Swiss façade is more often than not a compact façade (exterior insulation and stucco finish), roughly 40cm in depth, with punched openings that are then dutifully regulated by motorized louvered metal sun-shading. Another consequence is the widespread use of mechanization, from heating and cooling systems to the operation of windows, as mentioned earlier. These types of blanket responses have incited quite some backlash from design architects who don’t want to be defined by the norms. So rather than promoting sustainability as an integral and inalienable part of design culture, these standards have instead produced a schism between design and sustainability goals. 

If questioned objectively, most if not all architects in Switzerland would agree that responding to ecological issues in the building industry is critical – even urgent—today. However very few would probably be excited by the idea of working with the standards. Fewer still have managed to push through these regulatory measures to achieve true innovations on the end of sustainability. And yet given the extremely high level of design culture (Baukultur) and given the prolific construction in the country during the last decade, the relative lack of experimentation for matters of sustainability gives pause for thought. 

Let’s go back for a moment to the issue of weighing priorities in the design process. True innovation and experimentation often entail a certain cost (either financial or performative) which, if not offset somewhere else, may prove unfeasible to a budget-strapped client. The hardline approach that most regulatory oversight takes (zero-tolerance for deviation) means that the evaluation becomes a very black and white checklist with all deviation treated equally. While in theory it’s true that the point system of standards like Minergie allows some degree of flexibility, in practice the risk-aversion of most clients who are laymen leads invariably to a general distrust of everything not proven or recommended by the norm. But most design is fundamentally the negotiation of relative conditions. Standards are often written as average ideals, not for the idiosyncrasies of projects whose overlapping complexities often produce contradictions that cannot be resolved without some form of compromise.  But if a slight deviation on a set of criteria achieves much greater innovation elsewhere should conformity to the standard still be enforced? And this is just considering the quantitatively measurable criteria. What about the qualitative criteria that cannot be accurately measured but that we know contribute not only to the overall well-being of users but also to a greater quality of life? I’m speaking of course of architectural qualities such as spatial atmosphere or tectonic expression. Where does our reliance on quantifiable data begin to weaken design? 

If public clients with high-exposure projects are to set the example for the future, how can they promote ambitions beyond the mere satisfaction of the norm? In a context like Switzerland where the base standards are already quite high and the impulse for conformity already strong, perhaps it is possible, despite the cultural aversion to risk, to promote more experimentation by rethinking our means for evaluating accountability. Can we break free from the bureaucratic checklist mentality to find a system that rewards innovation and promotes progress? Can we restore trust in the individual or at least rebuild a culture of the active user, tuned-in and responsive to their built space?  

 

Jeannette Kuo is co-founding partner of Zurich-based Karamuk Kuo Architects and Assistant Professor-in-Practice of Architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her research and work focus on the intersection of structures, space, and culture and include two publications on the workspace: A-Typical Plan (2013) and Space of Production (2015). Recently completed projects include the Weiden Secondary School in Rapperswil-Jona and the International Sports Sciences Institute in Lausanne.

 

We are finding ourselves in the age of the Anthropocene, a time and space in which the human habitat is so encompassing that traces of our impact can be found in the most distant places and unlikely scenarios. It is overdue then, that we, as individuals and as a society, need to take responsibility in redefining these traces. We have been deprived of our faith in progress when realizing that all technological achievement comes at a cost, and resignation spreads. Understanding that there is not one holistic solution to all challenges, often utopian aspirations are demonized as blue-eyed and instead self-limitation is an overarching quick-fix. What does the way out of this self-imposed stalemate situation look like? How does society negotiate between collective action and collective agendas? What role does the positive element, a notion that is inherent to Utopian thinking, play for society’s understanding of resistance and common striving? Do Utopias exist, and what are their current constructions?

Any Utopia can only evolve from the present, in that it is created. Thus Utopian thinking reveals the substantive conditions of the present and its reflection helps to formulate wishes for the future. Depending on how this relationship between present and future is negotiated and what is declared as ideal, implications on power arise that define social development. These implications are, among other things, determined differently in various attempts at defining “Utopia”. 

INHERITED CATEGORIES OF UTOPIA

One idea of Utopia is the hopeful thinking of the desirable, but the space of possibilities that allows one to achieve their desires is not yet given¹. Consequently, this type of Utopia imagines a future without elaborating on the realization methods. To eliminate common reflection on the obvious lack of these realization methods, simplification is an inherent aspect. Therefore, it is prevalently engaged in the language of populist politics, where the negotiation of alternative truths is sabotaged with “fake news”. As this approach often leads to societal manipulation and results in an abuse of power and public sovereignty, it gives meaning to the negativity surrounding “utopic” ideas. Yet, as it can be investigated in populist camps, this approach can generate an enormous captivating drive, and in turn celebrates strong positivism on an individual level as a general and universal concept of the future.

Contrasting this populist ideology, Early Socialism Utopias precisely construct a distant time or space in detail. Hereby, certain ideals and principles function as coordinates. These Utopias conceive an ostensibly more successful holistic system. Due to the detachment of current circumstances, these Utopias bear the potential of great inventions as the space of possibilities seem endless – ultimately a positivist approach. Yet, by striving for social cohesion, these Utopias tend to create a rigid system. Early utopists like Morus or Fourier underestimated the notion of authority neglecting that the total principle of personal wellbeing finally manifests as an imperative implying a forceful form of civic solidarity². Often understood as a tool to integrate social cohesion into planning, many urban Utopias claim to paint the “ideal city”. It is “erected on new, virginal ground. They elide what Rem Koolhaas once evocatively called “junkspace”—the accumulated layers of (built) environments, weathered, eroded, and transformed by time, by usage, by life”³. While in modernity, the ideal city was of functional division and car-oriented planning, today’s “Smart Urbanity” is eager to erase friction and provide an Instagrammable Utopia. Problematic examples of ideal cities include Pruitt-Igoe, the “Google Sidewalk Labs” in Toronto and on a political level, Eastern Europe’s liberal Utopias.

Adorno opposes these painted Utopias with his “Bilderverbot” by drawing parallels to the testamentary ban of depicting the absolute and criticising the prediction of the future in a static condition of perfection as a prevailing act. His counterproposal is the relentless critique of the present as the only way to draw the contours of a pictureless future⁴. Here “utopia” doesn’t represent a distant time or space in the future but advocates for a processually utopian practice. By the critical analysis of current conditions, so-called “transformative elements” are detected⁵. This Utopia isn’t static in the Eschatologic sense, but functions as a self-assessment tool of the present and ensures that any change imagined is system-inherent, not superimposed. Yet, to understand the persistent reflection on the present as the foundation of systemic change, all inventive freedom that bears disruptive ideas is abolished, and at best a counter practice ex negativo evolves. This often manifests in a vortex of the same problems and provides no solutions. Looking at Christiania in Copenhagen, many positive aspects of an everyday egalitarian praxis of a lived utopia has fostered the idea of a slow city⁶. While replicating “Arcadian” ideas as found in Fouriers  Phalanstère, the “Provos” – countercultural provocateurs – practice of opposing the establishment was in the end overridden by international tourism. To take it even further, counter practice itself becomes repressive when it loses its liberating and enlightening element through its establishment. Bini Adamczak attributes the failing of former revolutions to the lack of sufficient Utopias in her book “Beziehungsweise Revolution” and shows how insufficient societal ideations inevitably cause repression.

UTOPIAN ASPECTS DISSOLVED IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY

When investigating the present, as Adorno suggests, one will understand how many significant aspects of these utopic categories are already deeply embedded in society: manipulation by structural simplification; a static “social cohesion” in illusory liberalism of the free market economy becoming an imperative; as well the desperate call for a restrictive reglementation as counter-practice and as the only solution to cope with climate change. 

Isn’t it contradictory, that despite this clear integration of utopian thinking, the public discourse equates utopic thinking as too greedy in its constant hunger for progress? This results in a fear of dreaming, knowing that any kind of depicted positive image of the future won’t be any holistic enough to take on the argument of presumption. The resulting abeyance of any Utopia is perpetuated by the feeling of “having nowhere to land”, as described by Bruno Latour. “The plane that has nowhere to land”, represents our society, that departed in the 20th century with the fundamental belief in technological progress. During the flight, there emerges the realization that this belief is leading to an unrestrained environment of exploitation that accelerated climate change perpetuated by a neoliberal economy⁷ – a circumstance that inevitably abolished society’s trust in the potentials of technology⁸. Yet, in a context that stigmatises technical progress as insufficient and strives to restrain progress as a consequence, any efforts are not progressive but reactionary and the discourse stagnates. Today the only concepts which offer a way out of the crisis are self-limitation and preservation, including strategies like efficiency improvements, impact offsetting and single-resource approaches⁹. But the self-limiting aspect in fact diminishes the space of possible solutions extensively. 

SO WHY DOES SOCIETY NEEDS UTOPIAS? 

Today every individual’s personal relation to future is prevailingly determined by utopias and dystopias conceived in pop culture and in the media. How can we shift that passive role of the individual, who is fed with mostly dystopian images, towards an active role of consciously imagining Utopia? Bloch’s conscious theory-practice describes the future as the unaffiliated space of possibilities and on the assumption of the incompleteness of being, it equates hope to dissatisfaction, to a “No to deficiency”. Only every individual’s conscious and active imagining of this unclosed space can mean progress towards the future. This concept is “The principle of hope”, in that the principle itself becomes imperative for every individual¹⁰.

Critiquing current systems bears the potential of infiltrating them. To avoid the way into repression and desperation, an emancipative striving prepares an alternative concept: one that is pieced together by individual actions. For contemporary Utopia this implies fragmentation, yet normativity, as these active fragments should be directed towards a quest for improvement. How can Utopia do justice to the claim of, on the one hand, actively changing the current material conditions of society and, at the same time, integrating the aspect of the positive and innovative? What would a Utopian movement look like today instead of a Utopia that merely stands for a future social form? 

ACTIVE PROGRESS FOR UTOPIA 

Returning to Bruno Latour’s allegory, the negative connotation of technical achievement faces another aspect. Current technology – somehow based on rationality – has reached an immense complexity, obvious specifically in Artificial Intelligence. Although society considers itself to be in the age of rational humanism, it is humanism, that implies, how complexity naturally provokes a counter movement towards oversimplification and one-dimensional answers, sometimes of a mythical, sometimes of a populist manner. 

From here we can unfold the narrative of our seemingly desperate situation. With the deprivation of faith in technology, the space of possibilities for Utopia was closed. Yet can a new understanding of progress restore our confidence?  

Having this in mind, it is now important to think of the role AI plays in social organization. AI-enhanced projects are exponentially designed and have no defined goal as they exist outside of our cognitive limits. Consequently, the vertical movement, that describes “progress”, is now extended by a horizontal direction, and not only is the space of possibilities seemingly infinite but also the space of solutions.

Embracing, rather than abolishing this relation makes progress the missing link that opens up the possibility space for Utopia. Progressive Utopia is fragmented as it will find ways to achieve one or more solutions for a specific system-inherent problem. This dissolves the critique Adorno and others imposed on early Utopists that depicted a coherent future with one prevailing method and solution to solve a multiplicity of problems. Instead Progress is an active cycle of inventing, testing, reviewing and adopting hypotheses, and therefore becomes a current and active utopian practice itself. Almost never reaching the point of satisfaction, progressive Utopia is normative in the way it unites an insatiable will to change with an unalterable positivism. 

A PLAIDOYER 

Are we in an egoistic society of consume-driven individuals that are deprived of the belief in progress, incessantly romanticizing the past, all the while crucifying hedonism and married to the idea of self-limitation as the answer to cope with crisis? To establish an alternative system that allows for an “improved” future, perhaps we can overcome these contradictions by uniting divergent, but positive, aspirations. The type of Utopia we now are projecting must restore faith in (technological) progress as a playground for ideas, inventions and concepts, because only progress as such can create an active environment of interdependent individuals striving for change, the endpoint not carved in stone but a web of possibilities. 

I am advocating for losing our fear of available tools and actively making use of them instead of our unconscious submission to them. Moreover, for uncompromisingly questioning resentments we carry against technological aspects due to a seemingly moral superiority. I am arguing for the unconditional desire to change, to stop the perception of mankind dissolving in crisis and to restore the courage to dream of Utopia.

¹ Key note by Martin Fries: Bildergebot – Utopie als notwendige Denkanstrengung
² de Bruyn, G., Die Diktatur der Philanthropen. Entwicklung der Stadtplanung aus dem utopischen Denken. Braunschweig/Wiesbaden: Bauwelt Fundamente. 1996.
³ Saadia, N., How ‘Blade Runner’ and Sci-Fi Made Everything Dystopian, CityLab. 2019.
⁴ Truskolaski, S., Bilderverbot: Adorno and the Ban on Images. Doctoral Thesis. 2016.
⁵ Dornick, S., Auf dem Weg zur utopischen Gesellschaft – Relationalität bei Judith Butler, Sara Ahmed und Édouard Glissant. Femina Politica – Zeitschrift für feministische Politikwissenschaft, 2019. pp. 46-58.
⁶ Saadia, N., Ibid.
⁷Latour, B., Das terrestrische Manifest. Berlin: Shurkamp. 2017.
⁸Freund, N., Das Ende ist nah. Süddeutsche Zeitung, Issue 05. Mai 2019.
⁹Brugmann, J. & De Flander, K., Pressure-Point Strategy: Leverages for Urban. sustainability. 2017.
¹⁰Bloch, E., Das Prinzip Hoffnung. Werkausgabe: Band 5 Hrsg. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. 1985.

Julia Dorn studied Architecture and Urban Design in Vienna and Berlin. Since the implications of an interwoven architectural and cultural landscape are of a special interest to her research, she focuses on the interplay between the discourse and its public reception. Beside being part of various exhibition projects recently, she currently works for CHORA Conscious City, Chair for Sustainable Planning and Urban Design, TU Berlin as well as Smart City | DB. She found her curiosity for Utopias in a seminar on “Alternative Truths and Fragmented Utopias”.

 

Progress, as a condition that is inexorably pursued in every age, has demonstrated over the course of centuries its chameleonic nature. It has become a flag of multiple ideals which are pursued by many communities. Its broad and mighty meaning identifies as beneficiary of its impact to the whole of humanity. However, it is never clear which spaces and subjects actually benefit and which are excluded by its implementation mechanisms. Progress, in the contemporary age, is a notion pursued by a small group that produces its effects. This small number of people declares to be the addressee and direct beneficiary; inevitably, an other part arises, and that takes part to its effects becoming waste opposed to the élite¹.

The contemporary definition of the word “progress” is  more often than not misrepresented. The tendency to focus on the provocative technological dimension of progress dismisses interest in the goals of the aforementioned other. Moreover, we are not able to identify which are the final objectives of this digital avant-garde.

In this case, progress finds its fortress within the apparently limitless field of action of virtual space. We perceive the virtual as the face of progress that mainly affects our idea of space, social organization and consequently architecture. 

The virtual in fact requires architecture, and its multiple tasks, to take an unusual position in relation to the space that we actually experience today, which is in-between virtual and physical space. This space is one big territoriality born by the synthesis of virtual and physical. 

This is evident when we acknowledge that humanity does not only live within the traditional palimpsest of urban projects. Instead, we constantly navigate and move through “projects” that are not directly designed by architects, but are nevertheless new infrastructures and spaces spread on a worldwide scale.

Arguably the most significant virtual connection is within electronic space, universally perceived as a clear consequence of progress in which we are all “equally” involved – in spite of the fact that its spatial translation generates a strict physical and unequal geographic hierarchy.²

Borders are increasingly enforced within physical space by institutional and legislative powers. Control systems put in place in order to safeguard and define fragile portions of physical territories from the other, perceived more and more as a threat. This binary relationship presents the key to reading the following spaces that are usually and commonly regarded as emblems of progress.  These spaces take on multiple forms through contemporary devices with specific impact, with the peculiarity to take new configurations depending on the involved political persona that is permitted access to certain territories. 

CONNECTIONS VERSUS BARRIERS

 

The map Connection vs Barriers draws a graph of the underwater fiber-optic cables totality (in blue): this global scale infrastructure physically allows the transfer of 95% of data and internet communications. Moreover, this map illustrates main airports with major airlines (in magenta) and existing border barriers (in green) such as checkpoints and walls.³
The ambition to free movement within territory requires the border redesign that allows to establish internal and external spaces and subjects. The result of this operation is the exclusion space, as physical as it is virtual.⁴

DIGITAL BORDERS

 

The project iBorderCtrl is financed by the European Commission at a cost of 4.5 million Euros. It was entrusted during its experimental phase to Hungary, governed by Viktor Orban, that in 2015 built along Serbia border the longest barbed wire wall in Europe. In order to cross this border, you had to complete an online questionnaire given by a policeman avatar that is apparently able to establish if your answer is valid based on face motion detection. This specific case is evidence of the bi-directional nature of progress, wherein this exponential technological development corresponds to an increasingly higher physical space segregation. 

NON-HUMAN SURVEILLANCE

In Corcoran, California, high-security prisoner surveillance does not require human intervention, allowing guards to maintain as little as possible contact with prisoners. Corcoran’s prison can be compared to the Bentham panopticon, working formally as a diagram of power  – “pure architectural and optical system”, figure of a “political technology that can be detached from any specific use”⁵. It emphasizes a singular remote gaze: Corcoran’s electronic and Bentham’s human.
The substantial difference concerns the staging of violence: blatant in Corcoran’s prison, extremely hidden in the panopticon.

The panopticon, as a diagram of power, has affected the space outside the prison and has become technologically performative. By and by, this detached spatial relationship is continued outside the prison through “electronic chains”. Harun Farocki argues, “the control electronic technique has as main result the border’s suppression. Places are losing their specificity.”⁶ Boundaries, which define use of spaces within through a specific form that they take, become homogeneous in functioning through electronic surveillance systems, making the spaces similar in operational dynamics – the shopping centre is kept under surveillance as much as a railway station; the entrance area of the main museums is organized through the same devices of the airport control area. New borders flank the physical ones and begin to eliminate their potency.

HIGH SECURITY FORTRESS

The U.S. embassy in London, UK  is explicitly inspired by a medieval fortress, exemplified by the water moat, the position up on a hill and the bastion features. ⁷ 
The project reveals a system of military-bucolic strategies shaped as typical English gardens features – as the architects argue – hidden within the landscape around.
The reason for such a particularly masked building appearance has the specific purpose of making it look unbreakable to attack. The glass panels in the facade, fifteen centimeters thick, are made of laminated sheets that make the embassy capable of resisting bomb attacks.
In the U.S. embassy in London, architecture plays a fundamental role as it becomes a symbol, a device and concrete manifestation of an unbreakable, solid and lasting political power. 

ALGORITHMIC SOCIAL CLASS

By scanning the code, the payment is automatic, while the purchase information is directly sent to the Chinese government “to stimulate the development of society and the progress of civilization”⁸. The Social Credit System (SCS) was designed by the Chinese government in 2007 in order to classify citizens through score – and so assign a precise social credit level, and moreover, awards and punishment to its citizens. It can be read, on the one hand, as social widespread organization, and on the other, as a mass surveillance machine entirely based on big data analysis.

SCS was fine-tuned in 2014 establishing its own “models of sincerity and virtues” able to positively influence citizens through “the guiding roles of television, radio, newspapers, Internet and other media”⁹.  This system feeds itself and it is able to transform individuals to guard themselves and others due to the internalization of control “devices”¹⁰. Scores, in fact, influence each other between family members, friends, and colleagues, all within a formidable chain mechanism. Surveillance at this scale corresponds to an urban space; this territory is becoming more or less accessible based on the score that you receive within the virtual space. 

Another case where the Bentham panopticon became digital.

 

The expansive world of technology in which we are all connected, all denuded and we are all on stage – the word “progress” projects on the big screen, we call for it and in its name all is fair.
The inherent dichotomies in this realm run parallel: on the one hand, we are massively communicating in a perceived holistic territory, and on the other, space is parceled, segregated and divided in elites and enclaves. An inside and an outside are established, wherein both the included and marginalized – politically and physically – are scanned.
Globally speaking, governments, experts and professionals from industry, infrastructure and policing are experimenting new technologies and devices in the name of progress and security as Counter Terror Expo in London that every year involves all these parties to discuss and promote the latest innovations in security. What it is often left behind is the relation between such technological development and the territories of the human habitat. It is now important to ask ourselves what the purpose of technological progress is and what shape it takes as territory.
Virtual systems of control are now superseding the ones that are put in place of physical territories, and they are both playing a central role in monitoring, supervising, excluding and building barriers.
The confluence of virtual and physical control system takes shape within the physical space we navigate, through different forms of accessibility in relation to the different subjects involved. Spaces of inclusion or exclusion are the product of both high institutional and single individual actions, decisions and thoughts.
To end or to begin: what are the several implications of belonging to a certain society-in-progress? 

¹ Stefan Czarnowski, Ludzie zbędni w służbie przemocy in “Dziela”, vol. 2, Warszawa 1956, pp.186-193.
² Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents, The New Press, New York 1999.
³ Due to a graphic choice some of the border barriers are represented with a continuous line along the whole belonging border, however, in reality these are present only in specific portions.
⁴ Giorgio Agamben, Stato di eccezione, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino 2003.
⁵ Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, Les éditions de minuit, Paris 1986.
⁶ Harun Farocki, Notizen zu einem Film über Strafen und Uberwachen in den USA in “Jungle World”, n.37, 1999, in Luisella Farinotti (edited by), Barbara Grespi (edited by), Federica Villa (edited by), Harun Farocki. Pensare con gli occhi, Mimesis, Milano 2017, pp. 81.
⁷ Oliver Wainwright, Fortress London: The New US Embassy and the Rise of Counter-Terror Urbanism in “Harvard Design Magazine”, n.42, Cambridge 2016, pp. 8-13.
⁸ Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System (2014-2020), State Council, 14 June 2014.
⁹ Ibid.
¹⁰ Giorgio Agamben, Che cos’è un dispositivo, Nottetempo, Milano 2006.

Chiara Davino (1994) and Lorenza Villani (1993) decided to undertake common research after a year of study in Lisbon (Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa) and Beirut (American University of Beirut), respectively. They graduated with honors in Architecture at University Iuav of Venice with the thesis “Panic. Readings of camps after September 11” (2019). Their investigation field ranges from the urban space militarization, due to the constant state of emergency and exception, to the narrative and ideological construction that supports the visual politics. Their approach to social space reading is characterized by a vast array of sources, from official and institutional to pop ones.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“It is true that development is not always the same as improvement, and we do not know whether horsepower is better or worse for human life and happiness than the horse. But building-art, like applied art, cannot decide such questions; it is a servant that has to accept the prevailing culture and base what it does on it”.¹

In 1931, a manifesto was published in Sweden that seemed to promote new polemic ideas. Modernism as a movement was hereby introduced with acceptera(accept!), a product co-written by prominent Swedish architects at the time: Gunnar Asplund, Wolter Gahn, Sven Markelius, Gregor Paulsson, Eskil Sundahl and Uno Åhren. Unlike Le Corbusier´s Toward an Architecture (1923) who recognized architecture as a biopolitical tool that could prevent revolution², and Ernst May’s housing project Das Neue Frankfurt (1925 -1930) whose modernity was an attempt at a “concrete politicizing” of architecture through the Social-Democratic model³; the authors of acceptera seemed to imply a much less political view on architecture. Instead, they propose the shift from neoclassical to modern architecture simply since it represented the spirit of the time. 

            “Accept the given reality – only thus may we have a view to control it, to master it in order to change it and create a culture which is a flexible tool for life.”⁴ The text is formulated as an imperative, ordering Swedish architects and designers to dare to take the step towards the inescapable spirit of the age: between the modern and industrialized “Europe A” versus the retrogressive and rural “Europe B”, lying 150 years behind its opposite model⁵. The manifesto seemed to introduce completely new ideas for the Swedish audience, but when looking at the modern interventions accentuated in the text – numerous of these had already been implemented in Sweden during the 1920s. For example, the important cooperative association HSB were already applying simple and effective plans, prefabrication of carpentry details and increased hygienic standards.⁶

One year before the publication of the manifesto, the national fair Stockholmsutställningen(the Stockholm Exhibition) introduced modernism for the masses of 4 million visitors.⁷ The exhibition featured contributions that seemed to harness modernism and optimism and even if most of the structures were all demolished afterwards, the event has been considered a symbol of how Sweden officially entered modernity and rebranded itself as a “modern” and “progressive” nation. Curated by Gunnar Asplund along with other participating architects such as Uno Åhrén and Sven Markelius, the exhibition was to a large extent dedicated to show elements that would make up an important part in the ongoing project of the welfare state, initiated by the national Social Democratic party. Models for rented apartments, townhouses and cooperative supermarkets were displayed, some of them rejected by critics as “a row of chicken coops and rabbit hutches”⁸. Nevertheless, it was in conjunction with this newly established self-identification of a modern society that the architects behind the exhibition could declare the architectural manifesto and all-embracing statement of how the life of modernity could be achieved in Sweden with acceptera. Even though Stockholmsutställningen displayed a built environment strongly in unison with the ideals of the Swedish welfare state, the manifesto of 1931 does not show an approach that actively defends the ruling political ideology of the time, social democracy, against its countering ideologies. 

              Despite the positivity regarding the spirit of the time with the modern aestheticism attained through mass-production, acceptance as strategy can also imply a somewhat indifferent attitude towards the surrounding political and cultural environment. Admitting that the consequences of the modern lifestyle and its innovative techniques were not necessarily more positive through the example of the horse and horsepower, the group still seemed to argue that it is the underwriting of the status quo; seemingly no matter what it may be, which will enhance the progress in the realm of architecture and design. 

              When arguing for a de-politicization of the modern project in comparison to attitudes as those of Le Corbusier and Ernst May, the main objective of architecture for the authors is the thematization of its time spirit. Implicitly this attitude is arguing for the acceptance of whichever prevailing condition, which in a way means welcoming a context in order to be able to change it. What it also can suggest is that good architecture, as long as it reverberates the spirit of its time, automatically will be born out of any social, cultural and political context. Time itself becomes the primary subject ⁹ of architecture that in the best case will lead to progress (funnily enough, the name of the Swedish publisher of acceptera can be translated as The time). Acceptance as progress seems to eliminate the possibility of rethinking form as opposed to the asymmetrical power systems that more or less always shape architecture. It therefore neglects the overturning, critical project. 

¹ Asplund, Gunnar; Wolter Gahn; Sven Markelius; Gregor Paulsson; Eskil Sundahl; Uno Åhren, acceptera, Tiden, Stockholm, 1931, p. 303.
² Le Corbusier, Towards an Architecture, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 2007, p 267
³ Mattson, Helena; Wallenstein, Sven-Olof, Swedish Modernism at the Crossroads (English and German Edition) Axl Books, Stockholm, 2009, p. 40.
⁴ Asplund et al, 1931, p. 198.
⁵ Ibid. 1931, p. 15.
⁶ Eriksson, Eva, Den moderna staden tar form: Arkitektur och debatt 1910-1935 , Ordfront Förlag, Stockholm, 2001, p. 464.
⁷ Hedqvist, Hedvig, 1900 – 2002, Svensk form – internationell design, Bokförlaget DN, Stockholm, 2002, p. 58.
⁸ Eriksson, Eva, Den moderna staden tar form: Arkitektur och debatt 1910-1935 , Ordfront Förlag, Stockholm, 2001, p. 458.
⁹ Mattson, Helena et al, 2009, p. 44.

 

Felicia Narumi Liang, born 1993, is currently pursuing her Master´s degree at Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm and Bachelor´s degree in Art History at Stockholm University. She did an exchange year at ETH and has previously written two articles for trans magazin;  Playboy Apartmens and A Youth Centre Zurich, Lisbeth Sachs.
Born 1994 in Stockholm, Sweden, Sara Davin Omar is currently studying the last year of the Master program in architecture at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, holding a bachelor’s degree from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. Her main interest lays in understanding the relationship between architecture, city and territory through the lens of the political.

With the Modern Movement’s decay, architecture was plunged into an aura of anguish and negativity, centered around the failure of a rational order in organizing the modern world and the consequent loss of a system of values and rules capable of anchoring architectonic production. The non-existence of that universal code of values made inevitable the need for some authors to initiate the search for a personal code of values that can define their approach. This fact became too evident in the second half of the XX century, when the search for construction – both physical and theoretical – of a new ethos would become central to the post-modernist architectonic discourse.

The growing settling of a never-ending multitude of approaches and ideologies we’ve inherited from the post-modernist period makes it relevant to look at the subject’s progress, from the viewpoint of a confrontation of stances. The famous and exciting debate between Peter Eisenman and Léon Krier in the late XX century serves as premise for a dichotomic reflection on how to face progress that is built upon a confrontation of ideologies between four cornerstone figures of contemporary architecture. When their works are counterpointed and their paradoxes revealed, Peter Eisenman, Léon Krier, Glen Murcutt and Rem Koolhaas are amongst the contemporary architects that best represent the idea that facing the future is merely a matter of stance.

TECHNOCENTRISM / ANTHROPOCENTRISM

The bedrock changes on civilization triggered by scientific and technological breakthroughs that characterize the modern times drives taking a dichotomous stance on how to face the future related to our vision of our cosmic condition. The classical idea of the man as the center of Space present in the origin of the history of art and architecture has reached its maximum expression during the Renaissance period, with the invention of one-point perspective. This anthropocentric model would come to be gradually discarded since the Copernican revolution of the XVIIth century, when the Cartesian method as the cornerstone of analytical thought, the Newtonian laws and definition of an immutable Space, absolute and abstract, produced a mechanistic view of the Universe, completely reforming the foundations of civilization. This new paradigm would become the theoretical core of the modern movement, based on functionalist and mechanist logic. Nevertheless, with its end and the discredit of its values, the architects of the Vanguard found themselves having to rethink the roles of Man and Machine in defining their new paradigms. Eisenman explains that man has traditionally defined himself in a cosmic triad, composed by Man, God and Nature, assuming three different stances: theocentrism (God as mediator), anthropocentrism (Man as mediator) and, lastly, biocentrism (Nature as mediator). However, he defends that, considering the current potential for civilization’s nuclear destruction, a technocentric objective exists in which external forces that are out of humanity’s control have assumed a position in the system, making it impossible to return to an anthropocentric view and constantly forcing us to react to new limits. On the other hand, Krier supports the idea that innovation should be passed down through generations and tested by time in a process of sedimentation. The fundamental aesthetic and ethical values should be considered as universal values that transcend Time and Space ¹. Starting out from the attack against modernist ideas, still impregnated with contemporaneity, he sustains that, in our necessarily anthropocentric conception of time, Nature’s typological inventory is invariable and should be the basis of any human conception. While Eisenman’s anti-humanism deals with the disappearance of the heroic figure of the Vitruvian man as the center of Space, Krier seeks to rebuild a classical humanism, based on notions of stability and continuity, assuming man as the central figure.

CONTEMPORARY METHOD / TRADITIONAL METHOD

Technological innovations triggered by the industrial revolution would come to transform the very notion of Space and Time. Recurrently, the masters of Modernism manifested their ambition to work beyond borders. Le Corbusier, Mies Van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn made it their permanent quest, travelling in order to understand and investigate in loco, as well as to expose and impose their architecture. In this way, the architectonic method reflected a necessity to know the site, stropped in the Beaux-Arts tradition: drawing as an instrument of observation, investigation and knowledge. In the second half of the XXth century, as communication technologies developed and became widespread, reality would transform itself more intensely, bringing about an evolution in digital software that foreshadowed the direct transposition of imagination unto the physical/virtual form, in a sort of fantastical bypass². The fascination with the new digital media, the pressure from capitalist markets and the reduction in production time would lead to a mutation on the perception, conception and construction creative methods in architecture. 

In an attempt to keep up with evolutions in the subject, Rem Koolhaas introduced new methodological processes. One of them is the diagram, a replacement for traditional representation models. In a way, it accompanies the transfer of the architectural commission from public to private domain, from state to the corporate world. Research/analysis is another such process, becoming essential for the success of his production in his work: the creation of AMO proves it. The interest in data collecting in Koolhaas breaks out in the incessant production of writings on urban realities that precede the projectual inclination. The diagram took drawing’s place as a communication method, while research/analysis replaced drawing as a method of perceiving spaces. In an antagonic perspective, Glenn Murcutt’s practice is consolidated in two traditional methodological processes. The first being the drawing, the connection between imagination and the hand, as a method which is transverse to all project phases. Juhani Pallasmaa mentions that, in their embryonic stage, Murcutt’s drawings are croquis with quick notes that capture the basic schema and the dynamics relative to the place whereas, in its development phase, detailed drawing is perceived as a creational process³. Murcutt’s take is that «to draw is to reveal; to reveal is to understand; to understand is to begin to know»⁴. He draws by hand and admits his skepticism regarding the extensive and uncritical use of new technologies as a process. Mimesis is another methodological process. Regarded as a sedimentation of his architecture’s basic principles, it reflects a search spread out through time, by observing Nature and the drawing itself as a means for knowledge. Amongst his initial works like the Marie Short house (1975), and the more recent works, such as the Mount Wilson house (2008), there is a mimetic perfecting of the same solutions as a synthesis for his foundations. If in Koolhaas’ work the contemporary method reflects his condition as a slave of Time, the traditional method in Murcutt’s work exposes him as a manipulator of his own time. This two antagonic stances towards the severe mutations on the way architecture method in contemporary times is understood represent the idea that, regardless of the difference between scale, type and complexity of their work, there’s a kind of a personal code of values and rules that precede and measures their ambition. 

The well-known text by Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia”, explains that, in the face of losing someone, something or an ideal there are two types of emotional extrapolation that can manifest themselves: mourning and melancholia. The difference resides in the fact that melancholy is connected to the loss of an object that is unconsciously maintained, which is to say that one knows what he has lost but not what he lost in that “someone”; mourning is connected to the conscious loss of an object, which would imply someone’s capacity to become autonomous with respect to that loss. This text will certainly have some form of correlation with processes due to postmodernist approaches. While reacting to the loss that represented the Modern Movement’s decadence, some architects have positioned themselves as searching for the return to bygone ideals, whereas others have understood its bottom line and looked for formal autonomy. 

Figures such as Aldo Rossi, Christopher Alexander, Demetri Porphyrios, Léon Krier or Glenn Murcutt, whose discourse centers itself in a vision of the future through a melancholic interpretation of the past, would fit in a kind of doctrine of melancholy. As mentioned by Freud, melancholy’s characteristic traits are the decrease of self-esteem, a heavy discouragement or a disinterest for the world that external to his ego. Krier makes this clear. The numerous sketches comparing the classic era and the modern world, praising the former and incriminating the latter, bear a form of anguish, discouragement and disinterest for the modern world.

Characters such as Daniel Libeskind, Bernard Tschumi, Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenmanor Rem Koolhaas, whose approach is built on a grief-stricken search for the subject’s autonomy towards its own progress, would then fall under the doctrine of mourning. There is a clear conscience of loss and of that which it means, which in turn leads to giving up what that loss represents. Grief makes giving up the object compulsory by offering the ego an incentive to go on living. Koolhaas is perhaps the best agent of this doctrine. He understands early on the Modern Movement’s failure and looks to overcome this loss by adapting to the vicissitudes of contemporaneity. As someone who is “grief-stricken”, despite accomplishing autonomy when it comes to loss, he still denounces the negative trend in which the subject proceeds. Writings such as Junkspace or Generic city are paradigmatic examples of that.

If melancholy refers to an incapacity in untethering the past from present and future, then mourning concerns an acceptance of losing and the search of new autonomous paths that may lead to values that have faded. Whether one takes a more melancholic or a more mournful approach towards the subject, progress will always remain a matter of stance.

¹ KRIER, Léon in “Architecture: Choice or Fate”: 47
² KOOLHAAS, Rem in “The Smart Landscape: Intelligent Architecture”, «https://artforum.com/inprint/id=50735»
³ Juhani Pallasmaa – ‘Plumas de Metal’ in EL CROQUIS in “El Croquis 163/164: Glenn Murcutt 1980-2012”:39
4 LEPLASTRIER, Richard; MURCUTT, Glenn – Glenn Murcutt and Richard Leplastrier in conversation (1:22:34), Architecture Foundation Australia, University of Newcastle, 2014, «https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ESYEENgUGA» 

Adriano Niel (Lisboa, Portugal, 1992) is a Lisbon-based architect, researcher and writer beginner. Graduated in 2016 from FAUL, Faculty of Architecture from University of Lisbon, with a master thesis focused on the role of international architecture in the city of Luanda and the antinomies of its progress. Currently working at Aires Mateus. Also collaborates with different architects in several private architecture projects and competitions.

 

In 1958, French mime, actor and filmmaker Jacques Tati, directed the movie “Mon Oncle”. He cast himself as the protagonist of the film: Monsieur Hulot, a dreamy figure politely out of fashion, who rejects modernity in favour of the traditionally warm and picturesque neighbourhood in which he lives. However, Hulot is inextricably linked to the modern world through his sister, who resides with her husband and son in the stylish, super-modern Villa Arpel, a strange and alien, all too neat-and-tidy place for Hulot. The villa, which represents the modern post-war life of the French elite, in the same year as Le Corbusier’s proclamation of the house as a ‘machine for living’, was conceived by Tati and interior designer collaborator Jacques Lagrange by sifting clippings of the latest trends in design and architecture from period magazines, resulting in a set of modern architecture portraying stylish but superficial living.

In the movie, the full shallowness of the Arpels’ trappings are often revealed to us by the youngest character, Gérard, who, still unburdened by the notion of inter-neighbourhood socio-economic or cultural inferiority, agonises over his bleak upbringing, seeking his uncle’s affection at every opportunity; and it’s the nascent, unblemished perspective of this character, which the filmmaker entices us to consider in critique of modern living.

Tati is quoted as saying, ‘geometric lines do not produce likeable people’, the architectural expression of Villa Arpel having been created by him to embody modernity as a manifesto of basic geometrical forms, which in themselves represent socio-cultural ‘progress’ in the lives of its inhabitants. Through irony, Tati emphasizes how despite all that which the modern movement purports to improve, human lifestyle can inevitably rebel against its idealistic surroundings, to render said humans no more than humorous caricatures of themselves. Indeed, budding Gérard is seen to be perilously bored growing up in the villa, much preferring the outdoors, while his parents struggle desperately to maintain the (frequently malfunctioning) perfect home and thus their social status.  

If architecture truly is about experiencing visceral emotion for the spaces which we occupy, spaces which shape us in ways which we do not even realise; and if Zumthor’s assertion that, ‘a good building must be capable of absorbing the traces of human life and thus of taking on a specific richness’,^¹ holds true, then the prospect of living in such a sterile and autonomous, technological home as the Villa Arpel, should be no more an enticing proposition to us than to poor Gérard. Yet, it would seem, in our eagerness to ‘keep up with the Joneses’, the simplified notion of progress as identified by our rapid adoption of the latest trends and technologies, trumps our better judgment and too often prevails. In “Mon Oncle”, this argument is provided visually by Tati and Lagrange, depicting the ‘progressive’ bourgeois fascination with minimal, ultra-functional design; and intimating through frequent humour its perceived limitations as a new standard for living. ‘I am not all against modern architecture, but I believe it should come with not only a building but also a living permit’, Tati is recorded as saying.

At the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale “Fundamentals”(curated by Rem Koolhaas), the central exhibition “Elements of Architecture”, collected architectural components which are not always valued, but represent the fundamental instruments of building: walls, floors, ceilings, windows, stairs etc. The exhibition space in its entirety was a mix of ancient and contemporary, artistic and technological, common and obsolete: an exhaustive taxonomy of tradition and innovation. It was intended to expose architecture as a profession trained to put things together, things defined by a limited number of ancient categories, some unchanged for over 5,000 years and others that were (re)-invented yesterday.² In doing so, the exhibition highlighted the constantly evolving, but essentially never changing, character of architecture, where traditional, pre-existing knowledge and techniques are of equal relevance to their new counterparts.    

Ironically, at the same biennale, the French Pavilion curated by Jean-Louis Cohen presented four galleries demonstrating the contradictions that tell the story of modernity and architecture in France. One of which – Jacques Tati and Villa Arpel: object of desire or of ridicule? – displayed a model of the villa, distilling from Tati’s film the great dream of modernity and its progressive ideals based on the obliteration of tradition. 

In the thesis provided to us by Koolhaas, tradition, pre-existing knowledge and technique form a logical framework, a lineage that, even when purposefully broken with, has been and still is, intrinsic to cumulative progression. One which is more a delicate balancing of parts, incorporating innovation incrementally. 

Today, as then, it is fair to question why we so desire the idea of a technological home. However, in both eras it is perhaps fair to assume the influence of rapid socio-technical evolution as the driving force. Our homes may not be movie sets, where each component is carefully chosen for its scenic effect over functionality and comfort, but if we challenged ourselves to rifle through contemporary publications in an effort to collage a visionary ‘techno-home’ today, we could start to imagine a sequel to Mon Oncle displaying an even more outlandish conceit of ‘progression’.

What Tati created in Mon Oncle was a grossly exaggerated and unrealistic amalgam of technical innovations from the catalogue of architecture elements. One which looked solely to the future, with the explicit intention of highlighting the frivolity of contemporary bourgeois fascinations, and by extension the shallow belief that the adoption of such fascinations denotes social-cultural progression and brings about happiness. Considering this moving forward, perhaps ‘progress’ can be thought of as simply as: a more masterful mediation between tradition and innovation in the creation of our collage.

Indeed, it is the architect’s responsibility to decide, in line with his own tastes, restraints, ambitions and morals, his conformity to the generalised notion of progress. That which is inextricably linked with the future, with the new, innovative, radical and untested; and inevitably from a position originating in the past, one of adherence to rules, tradition, style and embedded knowledge.

¹ Peter Zumthor, Thinking Architecture, Birkhauser Verlag GmbH, Basel, 2017, Third edition, p.24

² Rem Koolhaas, Elements of Architecture: Taschen, 2018, pp. XLV

Marta Malinverni is an Italian architect, photographer and a passionate traveller based in Basel. She graduated from Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio (AAM) and has since worked in Basel for HHF and Christ Gantenbein.
For three years she has been leading workshops in Europe and Asia about representation in Architecture. Her photographs have been exhibited in Berlin, Basel and Chiasso (Biennale dell imagine 2014).

Originally from Nottingham, Alex Turner grew up adventuring in the forests once belonging to Robin Hood. Since then he has studied architecture at Northumbria University in the north of England, where he was a regional representative for the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). After travelling widely, he is currently on an extended stop in Basel, where he has worked for a number of practices. He plans on making it back to the woods soon.

Together they founded PLEO Architecture in 2018.

The porous nature of urbanism involves a multi-disciplinary spectrum of stakeholders, where state agenda – if mostly veiled – is of the highest priority. A political play at emotions helps governments steer the present narrative towards visionary proposals that would alter past failings for an ambitious future. Once hailed as pioneers, a plethora of failed housing projects such as Robin Hood Gardens and Heygate Estate in London or Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, were also targets of experimentation; be it post-war, poverty alleviation or socialist mass housing. However, underneath the humanitarian scheme of providing shelter as a basic necessity runs a grim dimension of progress: that of biopolitics.

If the workings of the familial mechanism relate with the existing social organization, and if the family were the foundation of improvement in the standard of living, then what design methodologies were architects employing to strategize housing as a consequence of the-then political debates?¹ Were the liberal, conservative, communist or utopian socialist attempts to strengthen the state’s power by regulating the family a successful step towards progress? 

If we were to believe that the ends towards which urbanism strives are always greater than the immediate project, then typologically tracing the influence of architecture on the individual’s domesticity becomes pertinent. Rather than retracting to blind faith on new technology’s efficient and modular residences that arms the government with control, it is necessary to search for essential housing morphologies as a call of the hour.

1. 

“… to replace our present haphazard arrangements, WE MUST BUILD IN THE OPEN. The layout must be of a purely geometrical kind. Unless we do this, there is no salvation”, proclaimed Le Corbusier.² Marx too, brazenly declared an impending Communistic revolution to ease housing shortage. The abolishment of private property was the solution against capitalism: “On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain.”³

Their love child was the Narkomfin (image 1) in the Soviet Union. Ambitious for a modern, technological and socialist society, Constructivist architects like Moisei Ginzburg relentlessly pioneered the interconnected anxieties of urbanism, mass housing and standardization.⁴ Corbusian overtones were apparent in Narkomfin’s elongated and slender slab. Poising on pilotis, its attitude is multi-scalar; the transparent ground maintains a rhythmic continuity of the city across the block, while the raised machine frees the worker from his daily strenuous activities to a conscious, if flitting, behaviour. Characterized by a singular boundary, the dialectical quality of the wall established between standardized dwellings and the centralized corridor is discredited by the horizontal ribbon windows on both sides. The worker’s perception is diminished and classified; the ambiguous façade is a control device which instructs a correct appreciation of a floating landscape.⁵

Here, the sojourned rigid plan, teasing a highly disciplined structuring of its social housekeeping under one communal block, was a futile attempt at a transitional housing. Its similar programmatic resources of a gym, kitchen and dining hall, however, shares a much-integrated spatial organization at the implicitly collectivized living of Spreefeld, a co-housing project in Berlin (image 2). Here, the differentiated architectural elements assembled within its three monoliths in a loose open configuration offer multiple opportunities for individual expression.⁶ Beside the domestic paraphernalia personalizing balconies, decks and terraces, a visual participation overlooking the various rituals of arrival and engagement is encouraged from the full-sized windows of the dwellings. While both projects were test models for a new architecture of fostering community beyond the nuclear family, the typological attitude of ‘glory in separation’ of Narkomfin versus the non-hierarchical flexibility of Spreefeld propelled the advantageous communal security into isolated living for one and a culture of trust for the other.⁷

2. 

“For decades, Aylesbury residents have found ways to cope with, or even enjoy, their derided environment. When the scale and the problems of the estate get too much, says Fudge, ‘You close your front door, and you get a sense of a refuge. I have a three-bolt front door’.”⁸

A narrative common in many welfare housing – the establishment of which implied a point of departure from housing as a place to housing as an activity – asks for speculation whether the smaller and empty plots left untouched by the monopoly of large companies post-Berlin Wall triggered the success of the communal housing movement in Berlin. The new form of ownership and sharing culture ushered in was foundational to escaping the ‘my-home-is-my-castle’ dream of a late-capitalist individualism as well as the universally delusional “desire for the shelter, privacy, comfort and independence that a house can provide.”^{9, 10}

Yet, the reality of society’s highly ideological constructs of preservation of the family exists within the notion of architecture to engender meaningful social change by exercising their power through the image, form and organization of the domestic sphere.¹¹ Ironically, the sense of belongingness integral to an ambiguous collective of nuclear families was compromised in the ambitious mass housing developments, a consequence of the overburdening subjection of a single architectural concept. To avoid the isolated towers set within rambling green carpet as well as the forced neighbourly ‘streets in the sky’ access of slab housing, the short-lived housing production agency of Urban Development Corporation (NY) invariably produced the recurring troubles of “housing for poor people” through the low-rise, high-density blocks of Marcus Garvey Park Village, Brooklyn (image 3).

Similar to Alexander Klein’s balanced plans of a functional house, the variation of its dwellings and close-knit yet ordered family arrangements ensured the smooth running of a frictionless living.¹² When indirect, the positioning of the entryway into an apartment maintains a diagonal stronghold over the strict and necessary traditional environment. Here, mum and dad are in control of the divisions and engagements of the household where the dominant kitchen and its table shapes the everyday. It is foundational in celebrations, central in child policing through the parental obligations of homework and care, and acts as a watchtower over potential terrors between the thresholds of public and private.

As a singular linear block, the six to eight repeating cells of two flats around a vertical circulation core is the ideal. Within an estate of self-repeating layout, however, the need for safety misinterprets as matters of interference and the independent flat access along the redundant streets subsequently draws the outside empty of any domestic conviviality. Unlike the traditional city where ensuing square and street provided a legible structure to the ground by acting like a public relief valve to alleviate density, the voids here are staged, just like the stoops implying a sense of ownership simply as a theatre of existence.¹³  

Marcus Garvey Village’s rhythm of built and open space is determined by the individual defining themselves first in contradistinction to the pre-existing collective. This is an act of closing contrary to the act of opening in Stadstuinen, Rotterdam, where the individual beings form a community together (image 4).¹⁴ While the two projects share the same density, typology and precedent of the Berlage perimeter block model, the latter’s scale, hierarchy and orientation of its structured open spaces critiques the present dominant agglomeration of urban objects and the plausibility of their exact possible multiplication. In our fixation for quick progress as a representation of our erratic ideals and ethos, how does one avoid the congeries of conspicuously disparate living machines and instead facilitate identification and diversity?¹⁵

Generic at first glance, Stadstuinen’s sectional variations amalgamate into a much more coherent whole, drawing upon the tactics of a reductive disestablishment of the bourgeois niceties of cosmetic hierarchies. The aggregation of three different dwellings types generate an event structure around the shared, elevated ground, the nonspecific flows of which liquefies the rigid programming of the family life inside. Here, the undifferentiated inside-out relationship weaves together the secure interior with an individualized exterior, along with the vestigial and primary spaces into a coherent matrix.¹⁶

Central to the aforementioned precedents is the conflict between the individual and the collective, the sceptics of modern architecture debating the abstraction around competing political and philosophical theories as failures of tangible experiences.¹⁷ Maybe the critical discovery of real and instrumental collaboration between architecture and freedom aligns with the plight of dwelling that Heidegger writes about in Building, Dwelling, Thinking: “The proper dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the essence of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell. What if man’s homelessness consisted in this, that man still does not even think of the proper plight of dwelling as the plight?”¹⁸ Yet our existing conditions and the projected trajectories dictates a set of behavioural instructions as a form of enforcement that manifests in social, legal and moral codes. At their total collapse and traumatic despair, when the very foundation of a person’s identity is under threat, it’s no wonder that one sometimes takes it out on the physical world.¹⁹ What if a state of equal and synchronized collaboration is the ideal progress?