The Routledge Companion to Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture

Swati Chattopadhyay, Jeremy White, Swati Chattopadhyay, Jeremy White

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317422655
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

The Routledge Companion to Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture convenes a wide array of critical voices from architecture, art history, urbanism, geography, anthropology, media and performance studies, computer science, bio-engineering, environmental studies, and sociology that help us understand the meaning and significance of global architecture of the twenty-first century. New chapters by 36 contributors illustrated with over 140 black-and-white images are assembled in six parts concerning both real and virtual spaces: design, materiality, alterity, technologies, cityscapes, and practice.

1

Introduction

Contemporary Architecture, Crisis, and Critique

Swati Chattopadhyay and Jeremy White

Premise

The term “contemporary” has become a common parlance in architecture, and in many respects, seems to have supplanted the terms modern and postmodern. Yet there is no agreement on what the term means. Mimicking the discourse on contemporary art, some scholars use it to invoke post-WWII architecture, which then becomes a surrogate for mid-century modernism and the backlash of postmodernism. Or, it extends the modern into the present moment, implicitly asserting fundamental continuity. For others, the substitution of contemporary for modern simply implies jettisoning the ideology of twentieth-century -isms and their grand narratives. Some critics use it to represent the fashionable trends in current-day architecture—dynamic building forms with luminous skins that defy the imagination of the organic—with some scattered references to sustainability, new materials, and digital media. No critical unraveling of the term takes place; its apparent self-evidence becomes tautological. The widespread yet inconsistent use of the term, however, suggests a need for critical examination.

Most of the books published in the last two decades on contemporary architecture are architect-centric lavishly illustrated volumes—architectural monographs or compilations of works by various architects.¹ The only volume that attempts an historical perspective, A Critical History of Contemporary Architecture, 1960–2010 (2014), edited by Elie G. Haddad and David Rifkind, is a collection of essays that portray the plurality of modernisms around the world since 1959. It makes no attempt to interrogate the notion of the contemporary and contains none of the issues that pertain to the digital revolution or multiple global crises that concern this volume.

In this book, we convene a wide array of critical voices from architecture, art history, urbanism, geography, media studies, bio-engineering, environmental studies, and sociology to help us understand the meaning and significance of contemporary architecture, that is, architecture of the twenty-first century. By “architecture” we mean the full range of built environments from the scale of the building component to the scale of the city and landscape. It allows for “real” and “virtual” spaces and habitations, and is global in its scope. It also allows for everyday spaces as well as the exceptional, encompassing more than mere art-architecture. The other term, “contemporary,” is more problematic.

What is the “contemporary” in contemporary architecture? Is it merely a temporal signifier? Since the early twentieth century, the term has referred to the architecture of the writer’s present day: the Russian Constructivists described their architecture as contemporary, their “now” inaugurated by the Bolshevik Revolution. They were not alone. The art-minded writers and architects in the 1930s and 1940s, were keen to give expression to the present day, asserting a modernist architecture that had its roots in Europe between the two world wars. This deliberate emphasis on the present marked a conceptual and spatial break with the past, although the preference for European source material was hardly new.

Nearly a century has gone by since the formulation of a modernist architectural ontology, disseminated across the globe via colonial and imperialist power relationships. It seems appropriate, given the temporal distance, to pose what may seem like the implicit if simplistic question: Is the modern of the twentieth century the modern of the twenty-first? Today, as architectural historians in the West are busy bringing the entire repertoire of practices since WWII under the rubric of “contemporary” (Haddad and Rifkind 2014), architects and architectural critics in China insist on describing their cutting-edge contemporary architecture as “modern” architecture (Ding 2014). To allow for a repertoire of divergent modernisms was at odds with the universalizing manifestoes of the early and mid-twentieth century. This alone, if we take a narrow stylistic approach, would seem to give credence to a new descriptor. We do not, however, propose one all-encompassing contemporary that has somehow replaced twentieth-century modernism. The many fissures and inconsistencies in posing a pan-contemporary make it as unsuitable as insisting upon a consistent and persistent notion of modern.

If we turn to the philosophers, we encounter a more nuanced understanding of the “nowness” of the contemporary. For them, contemporariness as a temporal concept is more concerned with the “untimely” rather than timeliness. In “What Is the Contemporary,” Georgio Agamben describes contemporariness as a “singular relationship with one’s own time, which adheres to it and at the same time, keeps a distance from it” (Agamben 2009: 41). This kind of temporality, defined by anachronism and disjuncture, suggests a way of seeing that extends beyond architecture and yet informs it: “The contemporary is the one who is struck by the darkness that comes from his own time” (Agamben 2009: 45). If we take Agamben’s cue that to understand the contemporary we need to confront the beam of darkness that emanates from an epoch and attend to its obscurity, a useful starting point may be the many crises of the present century that are constitutive of how we build and inhabit the architectural landscape of today and sets the parameters for how we think about what is built.

Thus far, the twenty-first seems a century of anxieties. Besides 9/11 and the prolonged state response to it, this anxiety has been deepened by a financial crisis, a housing crisis, a ballot-box crisis, an environmental crisis, a food security crisis, not to mention the crisis of the Westphalian state whose sovereignty is increasingly adumbrated by multinational corporations and non-state actors: migrants, immigrants, guest workers, and aliens. Wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, heightened racism and ethnic cleansing, and border wars in a dozen states continue unabated. Assassination by drone, that long arm of the state extending well beyond national borders, constitutes a new type of warfare. This technological revolution of the twenty-first century is fired by the digital age. It has not just revolutionized warfare but everyday life at its core. State surveillance of its own citizens alternates with corporate surveillance of the consumer public, challenging the conception of civil rights and democracy. The prospect of living in privately managed smart cities fundamentally alters notions of public space by blurring what was once the finely articulated line of privacy. Digital communication has opened up wonderful opportunities for forming new communities and accelerating development of new construction technologies. It has, however, also fragmented communities and communications between proximate groups.

Instead of treating these crises and revolutions as incidental, outside, or merely incentives or departure points for architectural form-making, we ask: How can we see these crises as informing and contributing to architecture in the twenty-first century? How might the practice of architecture and architectural history and urbanism responsibly engage with these crises?

When we think of architecture in the broadest sense—all of the built environment and spatial practice—connections between larger crises and architectural production become clear. For example, the financial crisis of 2008 was part of the housing crisis in the U.S. and was implicated in a global real-estate crisis; global climate change casts a shadow over the growing reliance on concrete as a building material because concrete manufacturing produces 10 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide that aggravates the green-house effect on the planet. The recent flurry of tall construction in Asia and the Middle East—often claiming to be energy-efficient—has been accomplished in large measure by the design work of American and European architecture and engineering teams who crisscross the globe in vehicles burning jet fuel, one of the most notorious contributors to climate change.

Or let us take the example of the digital revolution that has fundamentally transformed the way we communicate, imagine, and represent our ideas of architecture and design. Building information modeling (BIM) is supplanting computer-aided design (CAD) and focus seems fixed on the digital as a technology, but it also is an environment, one scarcely imagined by modernist and even postmodernist thinkers of the previous century. The digital environment has spawned its own calculus of aggregates: it absorbs labor hours in the billions and even operates as a surrogate habitation for millions around the globe. As economist Edward Castronova argued over ten years ago in Exodus to the Virtual World (2008), the virtual realm of gaming and social media shapes the way we conceive of the real world. Given that designing for the virtual world has become as compelling as for the real world, questions arise anew about what constitutes architecture. Perhaps it is not a specious question in the contemporary world to ask an architect, what is your avatar? The significance of architecture and the materiality of space that shape social practice is not only fundamentally different today than it was three decades ago, this significance registers differently in various parts of the globe. It is also important to understand the points of view of different constituencies as well as different disciplines: it is a dizzying puzzle.

This book is not a solution to the puzzle. No single book could be. Instead, we present essays from disparate academic disciplines, each representing the voice of a scholar who has given some thought to a piece of the puzzle that has intrigued them in some way. Only some of these writers have made an academic career in architecture, many hail from other scholarly disciplines, thus lending this volume a variety of approaches that we hope will stimulate the conversation if not complicate the puzzle.

Plan of the Book

In response to the confusion caused by the term contemporary, this volume addresses the paucity of studies that bring social, economic, technological, and environmental concerns to understand architecture in the twenty-first century. Here we look to different disciplines to aid our approach by providing multiple perspectives on the subject. However, our goal is not to codify contemporary architecture. We aim to provide the grounds for critique. Despite the breadth of disciplinary perspectives and the historical and global sense we bring to this project, this is not an encyclopedia of contemporary architecture. A comprehensive account of contemporary architecture, even if it were possible, is beyond the scope of this volume. Instead we asked our contributors to focus on what distinguishes this epoch and its architecture and spatial practice from their disciplinary point of view. Aimed primarily at undergraduate students, and secondarily at graduate students and faculty, we expect the book’s approach to be instructive in terms of method. We hope the volume will urge students—would-be architects, designers, historians, and preservationists—to rethink how the larger world of socio-politics and habitation is related to form-making. The essays in this volume, we hope, will help them question their assumptions about the contemporaneity of architecture in the twenty-first century, and recognize there are histories of their contemporary. Some of these are too stark to ignore: camps confining immigrants and ethnic minorities along the U.S.–Mexico border in 2018 repeat the dreadful legacy of the twentieth century. Camps as the nomos of twentieth-century modernity also defines their contemporary (Agamben 1998).

The book is organized in six parts—Design, Materiality, Alterity, Technologies, Cityscapes, Practice—although many of the essays cross-cut this parcelization. The rubrics stand for the key concerns expressed in the essays. Under Part I: Design, five authors offer divergent understandings of what constitutes design in the twenty-first century. Alice Friedman’s and Rachel Hall’s essays concern issues of privacy, publicness, and security. Friedman investigates how the changing notions of privacy and domesticity have cast an impress on residential design in the U.S., examining recent designs that tackle efforts by queer and unconventional clients to resist public voyeurism. Hall’s essay analyzes design strategies that attempt to mitigate “risk” in school building design in the face of gun violence. The design features “embedded security” that “nests the cultural refusal to enact gun control within nostalgic design tropes,” alluding to a past when schools were considered relatively safe spaces. Hall’s critique of such design strategies echoes Andrew Herscher’s concerns about the claims of humanitarian architecture and how housing for refugees has produced a new politics of global segregation. The essay by Max Hirsh and Dorothy Tang on the transformational dynamics of a peri-urban region in the Pearl River Delta in China conveys successful strategies of informal production of space in the wake of the failure of the planned university town to provide adequate facilities for the student population. Mechtild Widrich revisits the idea of the counter-monument to show how recent designs to memorialize lost lives in war and mass murders address the complex terrain of viewership in a multi-media world that memorials encounter in the present. In analyzing the design decisions made by architects, these essays pay particular attention to the use of construction materials and the materiality of privacy, violence, displacement, refuge, and loss. The next section extends this discussion to a larger set of concerns about the materiality of architecture.

In Part II: Materiality, Abby Smith Rumsey asks what is the function and materiality of memory in the present as we cross the digital divide into a supposedly “immaterial” realm of digital networks. The “immaterial” domain is after all carefully grounded in the imposing materiality of a new building type: the server plant. Humans are scarce in this new building type. As architects learn to design new knowledge environments they also encounter the changing parameters of the body that is fundamental to architecture. Jeremy White’s essay in this section argues that there is very little that is self-evident in the idea of body as it relates to architecture and explains the shifts from the idea of a universal body of the modernists to the idea of universal access by rethinking the relation between the boundaries of bodies and space in real and virtual environments. The boundaries between the body and the environment is also the subject of Sarah Robinson’s essay where using the findings of neuroscience she explores the role of design to engage human empathy. Aron Vinegar’s essay in this section raises a different set of questions about the body by challenging the idea of habit, habitus, and habitation as these have been traditionally understood in architectural and social theory. His essay counters the idea of “flows” that permeates the discourse on contemporary architecture and space. The recalcitrance that Vinegar discusses with respect to the body extending into the environment shows up with a different urgency in Heather Davis’s essay on the role of plastic—its “pervasiveness, banality, and longevity”—and the imagination of ecology, duration, and finitude that ensues from our encounter with this recalcitrant matter. Swati Chattopadhyay’s essay critiques the idea of permanence that afflicts architecture and suggests we rethink the idea of duration in reimagining how the built fabric is put together.

The concern over agency and identity that pervades the essays in the first two parts of the book is brought front and center under Part III: Alterity. Borders, edges, duration, permanence, recalcitrance, memorial, informality, and urban infills here appear in other forms. In Danny Hoffman’s essay material recalcitrance appears as a defense building that “resists” reclamation and new fantasies of urban incorporation. The Brutalist architecture of the mid-twentieth century as a detritus of modernism here becomes a different site for thinking about architecture, violence, and occupation that is the subject of Anoma Pieris’s meditation on the failure of the architecture profession in Sri Lanka to come to terms with the legacy of the nation’s protracted civil war. Pieris wants us to think of alterity as self-scrutiny rather than as self-affirmation. Charlie Hailey, Arijit Sen and George Flaherty examine issues of mobility and (im)migration. Flaherty considers how militarized borderlands might be reconfigured as commons, and shares some concerns with Sen’s essay that sees immigrant architecture as a “dramaturgical performance of emplacement” enabling immigrants to straddle multiple worlds. Hailey’s essay sheds light on the contradictory formulations that support the building and containment in camps to address the enormity of human displacement—over 60 million people—in the contemporary world. The scarcity of materials and new digital technologies that define the lifeworlds of the refugees in camps, Hailey notes, is not contradictory but the mark of the contemporary.

Part IV: Technologies elaborates on many of the issues raised in the first three sections: the imagination of temporality, materiality, and built fabric when new technologies and knowledge systems are confronted by architects, developers, and planners. Daniel Abramson historicizes sustainability in the light of the long twentieth century’s experimentations with obsolescence. Bringing the dominant paradigm of sustainability with planned and unplanned obsolescence is intended to help us think critically about the future of sustainable design. Karen Piper’s essay on water inf...