Lefebvre for Architects

Nathaniel Coleman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317567318
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

While the work of Henri Lefebvre has become better known in the English-speaking world since the 1991 translation of his 1974 masterpiece, The Production of Space, his influence on the actual production of architecture and the city has been less pronounced. Although now widely read in schools of architecture, planning and urban design, Lefebvre's message for practice remains elusive; inevitably so because the entry of his work into the Anglosphere has come with repression of the two most challenging aspects of his thinking: romanticism and Utopia, which simultaneously confront modernity while being progressive.

Contemporary discomfort with romanticism and Utopia arguably obstructs the shift of Lefebvre's thinking from being objects of theoretical interest into positions of actually influencing practices. Attempting to understand and act upon architecture and the city with Lefebvre but without Utopia and romanticism risks muting the impact of his ideas. Although Utopia may seem to have no place in the present, Lefebvre reveals this as little more than a self-serving affirmation that 'there is no alternative' to social and political detachment. Demanding the impossible may end in failure but as Lefebvre shows us, doing so is the first step towards other possibilities. To think with Lefebvre is to think about Utopia, doing so makes contact with what is most enduring about his project for the city and its inhabitants, and with what is most radical about it as well.

Lefebvre for Architects offers a concise account of the relevance of Henri Lefebvre's writing for the theory and practice of architecture, planning and urban design. This book is accessible for students and practitioners who wish to fully engage with the design possibilities offered by Lefebvre's philosophy.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Lefebvre for architects

Inasmuch as they deal with socially ‘real’ space, one might suppose on first consideration that architecture and texts relating to architecture would be a better choice than literary texts proper. Unfortunately, any definition of architecture itself requires a prior analysis and exposition of the concept of space.

(Lefebvre, 1991 [1974]: 15)

Lefebvre for architects

Although the work of Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) is now fairly well known in the English-speaking world through translation and interpretation, especially since his 1974 masterpiece, The Production of Space was translated in 1991, his influence on the actual production of space, on architecture and the city, has been less pronounced. Even if now widely read in schools of architecture, planning and urban design, Lefebvre’s message for practice remains elusive because the entry of his work into the consciousness of the Anglosphere has arguably come at the cost of repressing two of the most challenging and central aspects of his thinking on reform and renewal: Romanticism and Utopia, which simultaneously confront modernity while being progressive, in particular by identifying the tensions between social justice and modernity, especially in relation to work, community and space.

Paradoxically, contemporary discomfort with Romanticism and Utopia makes it difficult to transform Lefebvre’s thinking from objects of theoretical interest into tactics for practice. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in those attempts to understand and transform architecture and the city that are supposedly influenced by Lefebvre but which attempt change without Utopia and Romanticism. Although Utopia and Romanticism may seem out of place in the present, Lefebvre’s ideas on practice and the methods he elaborated rely on both; rejecting them does little more than affirm that ‘there is no alternative’ to social and political disengagement. Demanding the impossible may ultimately end in failure but doing so anyway is the first step towards other possibilities. To think about Lefebvre is to think about Utopia, and thinking about Utopia when thinking with Lefebvre is to make contact with what is most radical about his project for the city and its inhabitants.

Paradoxically, contemporary discomfort with Romanticism and Utopia makes it difficult to transform Lefebvre’s thinking from objects of theoretical interest into tactics for practice.

This book offers a concise account of the relevance of Henri Lefebvre’s writing for the theory and practice of architecture (and by association, planning and urban design as well), without shying away from his Utopianism and Romanticism or the centrality of Marx to his thinking. The main objective of this book is to highlight for architects and architecture students, as well as for planning and urban design students and practitioners, the substantial possibilities Lefebvre’s work holds out for renewed practices even at a time of neoliberal consensus in which dwindling of the state, privatisation and free markets are imagined as ensuring freedom through economic growth.

Each of the chapters that follow considers the main themes of Lefebvre’s thinking, including the production of space, representation, architectural practices, everyday life, the city and rhythms as a reunification of time (history; social processes) and space (geography; architectural settings), which Western thinking tends to separate. The value of this approach resides in illuminating what is most progressive in Lefebvre, not least by demonstrating the real continuing relevance of his ideas for the imagining and making of architecture and cities worthy of their inhabitants. In this way, the method employed throughout this book is in equal measure hermeneutical, engaging in a

Photo of Lefebvre, Amsterdam, Holland, 9 March 1971

critical interpretation of Lefebvre’s thinking which in its aims is reconstructive; phenomenological, inasmuch as experience and sensual perception, which make the mind and identity, are given emphasis by asserting the value of qualitative understanding; and–perhaps surprisingly–pragmatic, insofar as the discoveries of individual experience inevitably occur within social spaces, suggesting that real social, political or architectural reform are matters of collective action informed by experience and observation of real conditions. The hybridised method employed here, which conjoins hermeneutics, phenomenology and pragmatism, links theory to practice, space to time and form to content, in identifying how the imagination and production of concrete alternatives are, as Lefebvre believed, hiding out in the plain sight of the everyday.

The aim of most books on Lefebvre is to explain his theories from an intellectual position–to render them comprehensible. A further aim of this book is to translate Lefebvre’s ideas into potentialities for action (which I believe he would have approved of). The dual challenge of such a project is to render intelligible Lefebvre’s thought for architects, while also demonstrating how it might be enacted, that is, to show how Lefebvre’s theories can inform practices. However, the most significant challenge confronting such a project is to achieve the translation proposed without reducing Lefebvre’s thought to a blunt instrument, that is to say, to show how it might influence the shaping and character of practices rather than simply becoming a mechanism for action or production.

The problematic of architecture

Attempting to understand how architecture might be renewed by way of Lefebvre is to raise a paradoxical situation. He was not an architect, but rather a sociologist, or more broadly, a philosopher. Thus, appealing to Lefebvre could be seen as just another example of exiting architecture to understand it before even attempting to do so from within. Withdrawing from architecture is acceptable only if, as some would have us believe, it is not a discipline in its own right. However, raising questions about architecture and seeking answers to those questions from within the discipline (in its own right) does offer the most promising avenue of research, for reimagining, rethinking and revaluing architecture (and the city). Nevertheless, not all of the questions one might ask in practice can be answered from within the discipline of architecture –from a consideration of its literature alone. Indeed, great benefit can be gained from enlisting the assistance of thinkers from beyond the discipline, who are unencumbered by its professional habits, and who can thus begin imagining otherwise unthinkable alternatives.

Architecture’s own traditions of thought arguably have a limited capacity for responding to the problematic of the city taking shape since World War II (but with much earlier origins). As such, the predicament of architecture under late capitalism–during the second half of the twentieth century, and into the early twenty-first century as well–has exceeded the capacity of the discipline to respond from within. The quandary–so effectively outlined by German philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885–1977), Italian architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri (1935–1994) and American political theorist Fredric Jameson (b.1934), amongst others, including presciently by nineteenth-century English critic John Ruskin (1819–1900) and his near contemporary, designer and social reformer William Morris (1834–1896) before them–concerns the all but total capture of architecture within the capitalist ‘hollow space’ that makes ‘true architecture’ (and urbanism) impossible, as Bloch put it (Bloch, 1988 [1959]: 190).

Arguably, paralysed by its capture, architecture can do little more than re-inscribe alienation into the built environment as something of a repetition compulsion. In doing this, architecture largely elaborates on its own cultural irrelevance: characterised by social emptiness, or a general lack of ethical purpose beyond technocratic proficiency, economic reductionism or novel extravagance. Ironically, much of the source for the persisting irrelevance of architecture (and its theories) derives from the rejection of Utopia imagined by most adherents of the discipline as a necessary first step in responding to the failures of orthodox modern architecture and urban planning. Setting aside for a moment the common view of Utopia as all negative, re-valuing its generative potential reveals it as crucial for any attempt to imagine alternatives to existing conditions. In this regard, it is precisely the value Lefebvre ascribed to Utopia that makes him one of the most important twentieth-century thinkers on architecture and the city.

Setting aside for a moment the common view of Utopia as all negative, re-valuing its generative potential reveals it as crucial for any attempt to imagine alternatives to existing conditions.

It is with Utopia’s potential and its banishment from architecture that the cul-de-sac of architectural theory in the present is revealed. Architects’ developing anti-utopianism has, since the 1960s, seriously narrowed possibilities from within the discipline for asking searching questions about the ethical task of architecture and for piecing together answers. A good step forward would be to widen one’s historical horizon, as Lefebvre does. Renaissance architect and theorist Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), for example, can begin to show the way. His treatise, On the Art of Building, is written as much, if not more, for patrons than for architects. His main objective throughout is to model a conception of right practice that both architect and client can aspire to, all within the social and architectural context of the city. Akin to Lefebvre, Alberti brings an extremely wide range of learning to bear on his topics.

However, there are other more contemporary theorists or practitioners from within architecture who can help to demonstrate Lefebvre’s relevance for architects, two of whom are the Dutch architects Aldo van Eyck (1918–1999) and Herman Hertzberger (1932–). Van Eyck, in particular, can be put to work to illustrate Lefebvre’s thinking for architects.

Van Eyck’s anthropological approach to architecture and his conception of relativity parallels Lefebvre’s own methodologies, especially with regard to how limited horizons of research and practice in architecture could be expanded. The central importance van Eyck gives to the social dimension and to the everyday, as the loci of potential, but also of conditions that limit possibility, associates him with Lefebvre. The two also share acknowledgement of the relevance of these factors to the production of space. The most explicit point of contact between Lefebvre and van Eyck is in the person of Dutch artist and architect Constant Nieuwenhuys (1920–2005), famous for his speculative New Babylon project, with whom van Eyck collaborated, and who Lefebvre was familiar with by way of his contact with the COBRA group of artists, and the Situationists (the group of social revolutionaries, made up of artists and intellectuals, active from 1957–1972, with whom Lefebvre was associated for a time). It is here that in a very real sense, Lefebvre’s thinking comes into close proximity with architecture practice, albeit in some of its most unique forms (Bitter, Weber and Derksen 2009; Stanek 2011).

In much the way Utopia does, Lefebvre, as a thinker for architects, steadfastly returns social imagination to a politically neutered architecture which, out of habit as much as necessity, tends to operate in lockstep with the controlling narratives of capitalist realism. Moreover, Lefebvre’s utopianism offers real and practical alternatives to the endgame of the Situationists (introduced above), the spatial limitations of Marxism (the foremost alternative system to capitalism), based on the political theories drawn from Karl Marx [1818–1883], which Lefebvre is most associated with, the pessimism of French postmodernist theorist Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) (whose PhD thesis Lefebvre supervised), or Tafuri (who, though a Marxist historian, comes to very different conclusions than Lefebvre), and the claustrophobia of global capitalism (the apparent total social, political and economic system which now dominates).

The counter-practices suggested by Lefebvre that are outlined in what follows are proffered as alternatives to the commonplaces of conventional and less typical (so-called neo-avant-garde) architectural practices alike. In this regard, van Eyck’s architecture, rather than Nieuwenhuys’s New Babylon project, presents a clarifying counterform to Lefebvre’s thinking on space, time and the city. Lefebvre’s writing and van Eyck’s architecture (and theory) still harbour radical implications for the invention of buildings and cities alike, even though the alternatives suggested by both have still been barely entered upon.

‘Counter-practices’, Amsterdam Orphanage, Amstelveenseweg, Amsterdam (1955–1960), Aldo van Eyck, Architect

Although the titles of Lefebvre’s key writings on cities already translated into English have become shorthand for what is imagined to be the sum total of his key concepts–The Right to the City, The Production of Space and the Critique of Everyday Life–his expansion of Marxism and his utopianism are, after all, what unifies the myriad aspects of his project. However, one of the key aims of this book is to develop an understanding of how Lefebvre’s contributions to contemporary architecture and urbanism could inform practice, thereby contributing to an understanding of him as well. In this sense, engagement with Lefebvre’s thinking herein endeavours to elaborate on a theory for practice that is concrete enough to make imagining the interdependence of formal closure (of architecture) and social processes (of community) as core to the problem of inventing cities and buildings, while providing for their appropriation by individuals and groups (Harvey 2000). Emphasis on practical application–or at least relevance for it–in this discussion of Lefebvre, in relation to architecture and urbanism, highlights the concrete aspects of his theoretical discoveries.

In this sense, engagement with Lefebvre’s thinking herein endeavours to elaborate on a theory for practice that is concrete enough to make imagining the interdependence of formal closure (of architecture) and social processes (of community) as core to the problem of inventing cities and buildings.

The very impossibility of inventing a ‘true’ architecture within the capitalist hollow space paradoxically becomes–or at least illuminates–the very possibility of how it might be possible to do just that. Beginning with the idea that the spaces we inhabit are so fully colonised by the market, and that subsequent spaces will be colonised by the same forces (from conception, to completion and inhabitation), the question of alternatives, as much as their prospect, would seem to turn in on itself, to implode under the pressure of those same forces that predetermine its capture within the panoptic sweep of the system–of the state and of capitalism. (Panoptic here refers–in a figurative way–to the prison designed by British social theorist Jeremy Bentham [1748–1832]. The prison he designed, called a Panopticon, was notable for its circular organisation of cells around a single point of observation that permitted one guard to keep an eye on all of the inmates. A further innovation of Bentham’s panopticon was that the guard’s station was shielded in such a way that he could observe the prisoners but they could not see him. Bentham believed that this arrangement would encourage prisoners to internalise the penal system represented by the all-seeing eyes of the guard and rehabilitate themselves. As used here, the panoptic sweep of the system refers to the pervasiveness of control associated with the dominant system of social, political and economic organisation, and the way individuals are encouraged to internalise the very omnipresence of the system by conforming to it.)

With the domination of everyday life–of work and organised consumption, and its spaces–by forces that can ofte...