Architecture as Cultural and Political Discourse

Case studies of conceptual norms and aesthetic practices

Daniel Grinceri

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317423942
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

This book is concerned with cultural and political discourses that affect the production of architecture. It examines how these discursive mechanisms and technologies combine to normalise and aestheticise everyday practices. It queries the means by which buildings are appropriated to give shape and form to political aspirations and values. Architecture is not overtly political. It does not coerce people to behave in certain ways. However, architecture is constructed within the same rules and practices whereby people and communities self-govern and regulate themselves to think and act in certain ways. This book seeks to examine these rules through various case studies including: the reconstructed Notre Dame Cathedral, the Nazi era Munich Konigsplatz, Auschwitz concentration camp and the Prora resort, Sydney's suburban race riots, and the Australian Immigration Detention Centre on Christmas Island.

1 Architecture as cultural and political discourse

In the introduction to one of the many books showcasing the work of Rem Koolhaas, arguably one of architecture’s most well known and influential celebrities, Aaron Betsky presents a rather simplified and stereotypical image of architects in general. From his description, perceptions of architects oscillate somewhere between being servile capitalists “willing to place large structures where they don’t belong”,¹ and “diva-like” artists who pursue their own agenda at the expense of client and budget. Perhaps as a result of this egoism, architects, Betsky claims, see themselves as unappreciated, overworked and underpaid, forever “trying to communicate the importance of good design to an uncomprehending public”.² From my experience as a practising architect it is difficult to disagree with Betsky’s observations. On the whole, architects are motivated by a desire to contribute something worthwhile to the built environment. However, no matter how well intentioned, architects are often frustrated by the inevitable process of negotiation and compromise that might significantly impact on a building’s suitability, economic viability and public acceptance. Sometimes it is more a matter of how one finds solutions to these frustrations, such as by-laws, budget, client changes and so forth, that produces appropriate architecture rather than any particular talent for design itself.

Yet star architects like Rem Koolhaas, while still complaining about not being understood or receiving the right commissions, seem to be the exception.³ They have ostensibly risen above the everyday tedium of architectural practice to become, as Betsky puts it, “the conscious collector, manipulator and projector of images”.⁴ When these architects produce a new work it generally assumes a status of significance. It becomes reviewed in all the major architectural publications and admired for the way it supposedly challenges common conventions and expands the horizons of architecture and design. Moreover, the building itself becomes revered as an object of ‘high’ art and ‘culture’ because it, by most accounts, reveals to its observers something about the building’s setting and its inhabitants. In other words, so it is assumed, it makes for a better environment in which to live. This sentiment is perhaps best summarised by Kazuyo Sejima in his speech at the 2010 Venice Biennale where Koolhaas was presented the Golden Lion award for a lifetime of achievement in architecture. Sejima declared: “Rem Koolhaas has expanded the possibilities of architecture. He has focused on the exchange between people in space. He creates buildings that bring people together and in this way forms ambitious goals for architecture. His influence on the world has come well beyond architecture, people from very diverse fields feel a great freedom from his work”.⁵ It is this praise that many architects aspire to, in the hope that their ‘art’ will also be deemed important and somehow transform the way people live and think for the better. I recall, as an undergraduate student both deriding, yet admiring the egocentricism of Ayn Rand’s architect hero Howard Roark in the Fountainhead, who never compromised his ideals and aspirations for an architecture that would significantly benefit the world. But one might ask: can buildings alone ever achieve this? Certainly, one can point to the many examples of other star architects that have transformed the economy of a city through the addition of one of their architectural ‘masterpieces’. Jorn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House and Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao readily come to mind. These iconic buildings have not only brought in the much sought-after tourist dollar, but also an increased sense of identity and greater recognition to the city in which the buildings reside.⁶ Indeed, the success of such buildings has inspired many other cities and institutions to attempt to change a city’s identity through architecture.⁷ But having said this, architecture is a product that, given the right context, might symbolise certain objectives, but does it have the power to transform, coerce, guarantee or even determine certain economic, social or personal outcomes, like a change to a city’s identity?

In this regard, Koolhaas is unique amongst most other architects because he downplays, even denies, the significance of his architecture. As he once acknowledged in conversation with his students: “There is an unbelievable overestimation of the power of architecture in terms of the good it can do, but even more, in terms of the bad it has done or can do”.⁸ Interestingly, here, Koolhaas echoes Michel Foucault when the philosopher and historian declared in an interview with Paul Rabinow that the “architect has no power”. Foucault continues: “If I want to tear down or change a house he built for me, put up new partitions, add a chimney, the architect has no control . . . I would say that one must take him – his mentality, his attitude – into account as well as his projects, in order to understand a certain number of the techniques of power that are invested in architecture”.⁹ The question of power as addressed in Foucault’s later work is essential to this book. It is not my intention to formulate a theory of power and architecture, nor to consider architecture as an object of power, as such a discursive strategy is likely to be “condemned in advance and to set the analysis of power on a wrong course”.¹⁰ Foucault’s remarks on power dismissed conventional understandings and conceptions of power, yet he offered them not as a theory of power but as a tool kit for the analysis of power relations.¹¹ With this in mind, this book intends to adopt this ‘tool kit’ as a means of analysing the built environment and the power relations through which meanings circulate in the formation of the self and the governance of a population. Foucault proposed that the architect and his work are the subjects of power, suggesting that their values and attitudes are constructed within the same field of legibility and understanding as the rest of society. In other words, they do not possess an exemplary and self-evident authority of the kind a doctor might be thought to hold. Thus, according to Foucault, if an architect’s work is to resonate with a particular audience it is more likely to be the result of the architect’s ability to draw upon and perhaps symbolise or give form to particular ways of thinking that circulate within that audience rather than exhibiting an inherent capacity to change the way people think.

When architects describe the aesthetic effect of a particular building they generally focus on its physical features. Foucault, however, is more interested in the particular ways of thinking that imparted a distinctiveness to such features and made them meaningful. One example given by Foucault is the addition of the chimney to European middle age houses. Foucault explains that at a certain moment it was possible to build a chimney inside the house, as opposed to open fire inside the house. It was at that “moment all sorts of things changed and relations between individuals became possible”.¹² Foucault enquires why the chimney came about at that particular point in time, “or why did they put their techniques to this use?”¹³ Thus for Foucault the chimney came into existence at a time when people were tending towards a different kind of relationship inside the home. As a result, the chimney facilitated these changes by making the house a more comfortable place in which to live. Typically, such architectural changes which come to be seen as impacting on the lives of individuals are attributed to a single originating idea. However, of interest to Foucault is not the authorship of such ideas like comfort, but rather the exploration of the ‘techniques’ that made the chimney possible and meaningful in new ways. He explains: “It is certain, and of capital importance, that this technique was a formative influence on new human relations, but it is impossible to think that it would have been developed and adapted had there not been a strategy of human relations something which tended in that direction”.¹⁴ By ‘strategy’, Foucault does not intend to describe a deliberate plan or system with the ability to determine a particular outcome, but rather a ‘technique’ that derived from a series of needs and innovations. Here, ‘strategy’ refers to, as Paul Hirst explains: “A definite pattern of means and objectives that can be discovered operating across a number of sites”.¹⁵ The chimney is thus one example of a number of techniques that tended towards the improvement of social relationships, comfort and healthy living.

The work of Michel Foucault is important to this study, particularly his writing in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), which examines how knowledge is put into practice through discursive formations in specific institutional settings to regulate the conduct of others. In particular, it examines how the circulation of knowledge and power operates within specific mechanisms and technologies, whereby a variety of diverse elements like regulations, laws, scientific statements, philosophic propositions, and, as it applies to this book, “architectural arrangements”, become normalised and aestheticised in everyday practice.¹⁶ Arguably, Foucault is one of the most cited authors in the social sciences and humanities and remains popular among architectural theorists. The attraction of architects to Foucault’s work may in part be explained by his repeated references to space and particular spaces (like the prison, clinic and asylum) in his writing.¹⁷ However, certain aspects of Foucault’s work are often underdeveloped in architecture. For instance, the panopticon is often used as an example of how architecture determines the conduct of individuals and contributes to the meaning of ‘penality’ and ‘the penitentiary’ at a given time by assigning various roles to the actors caught within the building’s spatial confines.¹⁸ Yet it is not Foucault’s intention to assert that the panopticon fully determined the behaviour of its occupants to the exclusion of their subjective responses to the building form and interior arrangement. He uses the example of the panopticon to demonstrate that the architecture has no ‘power’ over individuals, regardless of the building’s form, which could have just as easily been a “large shed”.¹⁹ According to Foucault, what makes the inmate regulate his own behaviour is not the architecture of the panopticon, but rather the gaze of the warden, which involves the inmate in a form of disciplinary power and establishes their capacity for self-reflection and moral reform. Contrasting this partial application of Foucault’s reasoning, theorists like Paul Hirst and Robin Evans have opened the way for architects to more fully question ‘conventional’ understandings about architecture, particularly architecture and power.²⁰ In addition, authors such as Paul Rabinow, and more recently Giorgio Agamben, have employed Foucault’s methods for analysing the associations between built form and history, sovereignty and biopower.²¹ These will be examined later in this book.

Foucault provides a framework for analysing...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Architecture as Cultural and Political Discourse
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Architecture as Cultural and Political Discourse
• 2 Meaning and the Death of Architecture
• 3 Statements on Architecture: Meaning and Determinism in the Athens Charters
• 4 Aesthetics and Politics: The Building of Nazi Germany
• 5 The Camp and the Resort: Exclusion and Inclusion Associated with ‘Bare Life’
• 6 Spatial Contestation and Suburban Riots
• 7 The Architecture of Indefinite and Mandatory Detention
• 8 Architecture and Ethics: Competition for the Christmas Island Detention Centre
• 9 Apparatus
• Index