Involuntary Prisoners of Architecture

Involuntary Prisoners of Architecture FELICITY D. SCOTT Nothing is more common than the mass media technician who, after a hard day at work, goes off to the movies and cries. —Paulo Virno On the Silence of Ideas The recent swell of public discourse on contemporary architecture seems to have taken the discipline somewhat by surprise; the unremitting scrutiny and visibility cast upon it on account of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) competition for the World Trade Center site was met by an uncanny (or disquieting) silence of ideas.1 Following a tragic and traumatic violation of Manhattan—“Capital of the Twentieth Century” and long-standing site of modernist and experimental fantasies, even of retroactive manifestoes—the architectural vanguard was called on to fulfill public aspirations that were, for most, distinctly out of sync with contemporary concerns.2 It was interpolated into roles such as enhancing the symbolic legibility of the skyline, ameliorating a sense of loss or tragedy, and engaging social and political processes in order that rebuilding be debated in terms beyond the bureaucratic and financial. The discipline was thus also confronted by the embattled status of its role within the ongoing (post)modernization of the city.3 Most of the architects, like those to whom they 1. “It’s an interesting time,” Charlie Rose noted of this visibility, “because tragedy . has brought about a great sense of architecture. And for the first time in a long time, there’s more conversation about the role of architecture.” “We have never seen publicity all over the world about New York City,” Peter Eisenman responded, adding (in a departure from his long-standing commitment to architecture’s autonomy) that “architecture finally is where it should be, in the political, social process.” See Charlie Rose, January 8, 2003, transcript no. 3374. 2. Manhattan has long been a testing ground for “fantastic architecture,” from Emilio Ambasz’s 1969 fable “Manhattan: Capital of the Twentieth Century,” to Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York of 1978, to the work of the Italian Superstudio, Austrian experimentalists, and others from this period. 3. That this was unlikely to be affected was noted by many: “Ultimately, the market is going to dictate what’s needed and when it’s needed,” a “major downtown landlord” was reported to have said (Charles V. Bagli, “The Debate: Architect’s Proposals May Be Bold, but They Probably Won’t Be Built,” New York Times, December 19, 2002, sec. B, p. 11). OCTOBER 106, Fall 2003, pp. 75–101. © 2003 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228703322791034 by guest on 28 September 2021 76 OCTOBER promoted their schemes, did not question historical forces conditioning the competition program, but fell back on cliché versions of social tropes—heroes, monuments, rebirth, public space, “visionary architecture,” “defensible space,” spiritual and symbolic legibility—without offering critical strategies to address the political issues they raise.4 Taking them to be self-evident (and as easy vehicles to garner public and media support), architects missed an occasion to problematize the discipline’s imbrication within complex and shifting historical, social, institutional, and geopolitical contexts.5 They missed an occasion in which aesthetic practices and emergent technologies might have been regarded not just as palliative or functional but theorized as politically engaged sites of encounter, dissensus, and contestation.6 The symptoms of this disengagement are many and vary in their visibility and combination: a “postcritical” turn in contemporary practice and discourse that is at once a posttheoretical and postpolitical one; the recuperation of experimental strategies from the 1960s and early ’70s, but voided of any contestatory dimension; the implicit resurgence of a mode of signification or iconography with both expressionist and monumental (and in both cases spectacular) tendencies; the ascendancy of the signature architect (replete with glasses and cowboy boots) alongside a cynical disclaimer of such modes of authorship; a delirious immersion in information technology seemingly ignorant of the dystopic lessons of architecture’s earlier postwar engagement with cybernetics; and a call for avant-gardism that is, in fact, a vanguardism without critical or institutional stakes. This constellation of symptoms is not, of course, confined to the LMDC competition; it emerged during the waning of the discipline’s interest in theoreti- cal debates.7 In many senses these symptoms seem to be the residue of earlier polemics. We see, for instance, the persistence of a dichotomy forged in the late 1960s and dominant throughout the following decades, an increasingly unproduc- tive one that persists in various ruses today. According to this polarization, 4. That Oscar Newman’s notion of “defensible space” might enjoy a return in response to the terrorist attacks on New York was posited by Anthony Vidler prior to the LMDC competition. See “A City Transformed: Designing ‘Defensible Space,’” Grey Room 07 (Spring 2002), pp. 82–85. 5. On architects acting like “media-age politicians,” see Julie V. Iovine, “Turning a Competition into a Public Campaign,” New York Times, February 26, 2003, sec. E, p. 1. The LMDC competition was initiated as an “innovative design study” following the widespread rejection of the six initial variations presented by Beyer Blinder Belle. Out of 406 submissions, seven teams were selected and commissioned to develop proposals in response to “one recurring public suggestion—the desire for additional creative and inspiring plans” (LMDC brochure, Plans in Progress, 2002). There were many public forums: an exhibition of the finalists, Plans in Progress, at the Wintergarden of the World Financial Center, December 20, 2002–February 2003; a two-part symposium in mid-January 2003, jointly organized by the Architecture League, the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and widespread television and print media coverage. 6. On other logics of democracy, see Jacques Rancière, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); and Chantal Mouffe, ed., Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community (New York: Verso, 1992). 7. For a demonstration of this reactive turn away from theory, see Assemblage 41 (April 2000), the journal’s final issue dedicated to a questionnaire on theory. This stance did not reflect that of the editors, nor of many contributors, but was present in a large number of responses. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228703322791034 by guest on 28 September 2021 Involuntary Prisoners of Architecture 77 architectural practices are understood as situated at poles along an axis: at one end was the unwitting integration into the dominant technological and socioeconomic forces; at the other the dialectical withdrawal into an autonomous disciplinary domain of formal and semantic investigation. It seems important, however, not only to ask how these symptoms are related to this dichotomy and to the competition itself—the role it called on architecture to perform, and the visibility and public voice it conferred to certain streams of contemporary practice— but to ask what they are symptoms of, what they reveal about the state of contemporary architecture. * In his initial, euphoric response to the unveiling of the six LMDC entries on December 18, 2002, Herbert Muschamp, critic for the New York Times, noted of the project by Richard Meier and his collaborators that “It may strike some as a throw- back to the megastructural superblocks of the 1960s,” glibly adding, “So what?” Buckminster Fuller was also invoked with respect to the lofty ambitions of the towers, as was Louis Kahn (presumably the early experimental collaborations with Anne Tyng and Robert le Ricolais) on account of the twin lattice structures of the THINK team.8 Experimental practices might well have been on the critic’s mind following the recent exhibition of the Howard Gilman collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York: The Changing of the Avant-Garde included a diverse field of important “visionary” drawings, ranging from work by Yona Friedman, Arata Isozaki, Cedric Price, and members of the Archigram group of the 1960s to 8. See Herbert Muschamp, “Visions for Ground Zero: An Appraisal; The Latest Round of Designs Rediscover and Celebrate the Vertical Life,” New York Times, December 19, 2002, page 10. Muschamp also mentioned Russian Constructivist precedents. Arata Isozaki. Joint Core System (elevation). Project. 1960. © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228703322791034 by guest on 28 September 2021 78 OCTOBER the radical practices of Archizoom, Superstudio, and Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) from the early 1970s through to the emergent postmodern “paper architecture” of Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk, and Aldo Rossi. Curator Terrence Riley went so far as to position the work as “the root sources of our architecture today.”9 From exhibitions of the equally remarkable collections of the Fonds Régional d’Art contemporain d’Orléans (FRAC) and the Centre Georges Pompidou to retrospectives of Archigram and the inclusion of key protagonists of experimental architecture in Cities

Load more