The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture

Nadir Lahiji

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781474242097
• eBook ISBN: 9781472509826
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture brings together a respected team of philosophers and architecture scholars to ask what impact architecture has over today's culture and society. For three decades critical philosophy has been in discourse with architecture. Yet following the recent radical turn in contemporary philosophy, architecture's role in contemporary culture is rarely addressed. In turn, the architecture discourse in academia has remained ignorant of recent developments in radical philosophy. Providing the first platform for a debate between critics, architects and radical philosophers, this unique collection unties these two schools of thought. Contributors reason for or against the claim of the "missed encounter" between architecture and radical philosophy. They discuss why our prominent critical philosophers devote stimulating writings to the ideological impact of arts on the contemporary culture - music, literature, cinema, opera, theatre - without attempting a similar comprehensive analysis of architecture. By critically evaluating recent philosophy in relation to contemporary architecture, The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture presents a thorough understanding of the new relationship between architecture and radical philosophy.

1

The Forgotten Political Art par Excellence?: Architecture, Design and the Social Sculpting of the Body Politic

Gabriel Rockhill

Abandoned buildings

Through the course of the long twentieth century, an expansive and robust philosophical debate developed on the relationship between art and radical politics, ranging from the work of the Frankfurt School to post-war French Theory and contemporary discussions in the Anglophone world. Although there are a few important exceptions, this debate has evinced a decidedly disproportionate interest in the literary and visual arts at the expense of architecture and design. The theorists who have participated in it – including such prominent figures as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Georg Lukács, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Rancière and many others – have primarily been concerned with the relationship between literature and the fine arts (occasionally music), on the one hand, and more or less radical forms of politics on the other. There are, of course, a few intermittent and partial reflections by these theorists and their major interlocutors on various types of public art and architecture, many of which have been meticulously collected by Neil Leach in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory.¹ However, these authors’ voluminous writings on the literary and visual arts far outweigh the small handful of texts that have been collected in this anthology or elsewhere.

We must not confound this tendency with a general law or fall into simplistic schematizations that lose sight of the fine-grained nuances of historical dynamics. Let us insist at the outset, therefore, on the exceptions to this trend by briefly spotlighting some of the thinkers to have significantly engaged with the politics of architecture: Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre and Paul Virilio in continental Europe, as well as David Harvey and Frederic Jameson in the Anglophone world.² As we will see with some specific examples below, architecture has clearly not been completely ignored. Nevertheless, it is still far from functioning as a lodestone in the dominant critical theory debates on art and radical politics in the long twentieth century, which have tended to gravitate around literature and the fine arts to the detriment of architecture, building, design, decorative art, public monuments, sculpture and urban planning.³ Three of the more prominent and lengthy collections of essays on contemporary architectural theory appear to corroborate this observation, at least insofar as it concerns critical philosophic engagements with the art of building. In spite of the fact that they are all over 600 pages in length, they only include a handful of pieces by prominent philosophers, and some of them only approach the issue of architecture rather obliquely (see Nesbitt, 1996; Hays, 2000; Contandriopoulos and Mallgrave, 2008). This is likely one of the reasons why Hubert Tonka has forcibly proclaimed, in a recent interview that critically reflects on Jean Baudrillard’s Vérité ou radicalité de l’architecture?: ‘architecture is a domain that interests almost no one from a philosophic point of view. There are very few texts, especially contemporary texts, on contemporary architecture’ (Tonka, 2013).

Architectural practice did not wait, of course, for its intellectual – and material – encounter with politics. Indeed, many of the political experiments of the long twentieth century cast their claims in concrete forms. The history of the modern world could, in fact, be written in terms of the battle of buildings, and the urban landscape is one of the privileged sites of ideological and social struggle. Kenneth Frampton provides an interesting account of these clashes in his now canonical work, Modern Architecture: A Critical History. In chapter 24, to take one poignant example, he revisits many of the central tensions of the period 1914–43 and recasts them in terms of the general opposition between the Modern Movement and the New Tradition. Analysing a number of the significant fronts in the architectural skirmishes of the period – from India and the Soviet Union to Italy, Germany and the United States – he charts out the shifting confrontations between monumental state powers and forces of change. The former ultimately triumphed, according to him, during the interwar period:

That aspect of the New Tradition which took the form of a stripped Classical style emerged as the ruling taste in the 1930s, wherever power wished to represent itself in a positive and progressive light. [. . .] This taste for Neo-Classical monumentality was not restricted [. . .] to totalitarian states, but could be seen in Paris [. . .]. It also made itself manifest in the United States. (Frampton, 1992, p. 219)

It was around the time of the Second World War that this tendency was reversed, he argues, and ‘after the war the general ideological climate of the West was hostile to any kind of monumentality’. (Frampton, 1992, p. 222)

This is not to suggest that we can thereby isolate architecture and focus simply on the confrontation between individual edifices. To begin with, there is no essential or natural dividing line between architecture and the other arts. The concept and practice of architecture have a complex history, and it is only in the modern era that individual architects have come to be recognized as the responsible agents behind particular designs. The overwhelming majority of what is built today is still constructed without an architect per se. Moreover, the art of building is very often part of a larger constructed environment, and it frequently includes sculptural elements, as well as drawing, painting and aspects of scenography. Architects have sought, at times, to foreground and enhance this potential for architectural designs to function as Gesamtkunstwerke, or total works of art that integrate all or most of the other arts. Walter Gropius’ 1927 Total Theatre project is a remarkable incorporation not only of the theatre with its biomechanical stage (based on the model of Meyerhold’s October Theatre in Moscow) but also of film and the performing arts since it included a cinema screen and an aerial stage.

It is also important to note that many of the other arts have what could be heuristically referred to as architectural elements. This is readily apparent in a significant portion of contemporary installation art, as evidenced by the aesthetic ecosystems produced by artists such as Matthew Barney, Thomas Hirschhorne, Ugo Rondinone and many others. Public art in the form of happenings, graffiti, outside projections, public performances and so forth obviously also has an architectural and urban dimension. Alex Villar’s project, ‘Temporary Occupations’, for instance, is an excellent example of the intertwining of performance art and architecture since he ignores city codes and the social regulations by occupying non-functional and unused spaces in the urban environment. Creators such as Leandro Erlich and Sophie Ernst weave together the art of building and the construction of art to such an extent that the borders between the two become porous, if not obsolete. It is also arguable, to take what might be considered a more extreme example, that there are prominent architectural elements in Victor Hugo’s writings, both stylistically and in content, as well as in Charles Baudelaire’s work. ‘With Baudelaire’, Walter Benjamin writes, ‘Paris becomes for the first time the subject of lyric poetry. This poetry of place is the opposite of all poetry of the soil. The gaze which the allegorical genius turns on the city betrays, instead, a profound alienation’ (Benjamin, 1999, p. 21). Architectural designs have also been reciprocally influenced by other arts, and Kenneth Frampton has suggested, for instance, that Albert Speer was so marked by Leni Riefenstahl’s film, Triumph des Willens, that henceforth his ‘designs for stadia at Nuremberg were determined as much by camera angles as by architectural criteria’ (Frampton, 1992, p. 218).⁴ For all of these reasons, and many more, we should avoid reifying architecture as a distinct entity with an identifiable nature and instead understand it as a negotiated social practice bound up in various and complex ways with other artistic – as well as social and political – practices.

With these important provisos in mind, it is now possible to nuance the structural frame of my argument. Rather than seeking to establish a massive historical generalization according to which philosophy missed its encounter with architecture in the twentieth century, my working hypothesis is much more specific: theoretical debates on the relationship between art and radical politics, particularly within the field of European critical theory broadly construed, have evinced a disproportionate interest in literature, the visual arts and sometimes music (which is also a special case) at the expense of what is commonly recognized as a distinct field of practices, namely those of architecture, building, design, urban planning and public art.

The social art par excellence?

As the practice of imagining and building a new world, architecture will always be political.

Kim Dovey and Scott Dickson

It is a question of building which is at the root of the social unrest of today; architecture or revolution.

Le Corbusier

The lack of gravitational pull exercised by architecture and design over core theoretical debates on art and politics in the contemporary era is particularly remarkable due to the patent ways in which the art of building is intimately interlaced with numerous social and political struggles. This is particularly apparent when we consider the social politicity of the built environment, meaning the various political aspects of its social life, including those operative in its design and production, its concrete materializations and its assorted appropriations.

Regarding design and production, to begin with, architecture and public art almost always take place, in our day and age, in a constructed milieu, or at the very least within the charted territories of traversed landscapes. They cannot, therefore, be easily isolated from their immediate inscription in a larger sociopolitical space, as the fetishization of individual buildings and architects is apt to do. National laws, local ordinances, building codes, zoning rules and urban planning influence the practices of architecture, as well as such things as non-codified regulations, building and design technologies, transportation routes, pressure from clients and investors, economic exigencies, media representations and cultural values.⁵ The fact that built architecture tends overwhelmingly to be anchored in a functional setting brings with it a series of more or less immediate social and political concerns (see, for instance, Ghirardo, 1991, pp. 17–26).⁶ Moreover, since production costs are often exorbitant, some authors have argued that ‘architects are reliant on their clients’ patronage in ways that other cultural producers are not’ (Jones, 2009, p. 2521).⁷ Whatever the case may be, it is clear that contemporary architectural design and production are very often the result of collective negotiations between multiple sources and types of agency. ‘The actions of architects, and other agents involved in the production of the built environment’, write Rob Imrie and Emma Street, ‘are entwined in complex ways with a panoply of state, non-state and civil organizations, associations and relations’ (Imrie and Street, 2009, p. 2508). It is in this force field of agencies that important sociopolitical battles are fought regarding what can be built, how it is constructed, what materials are used, where it is assembled, who erects it, how it interacts with its immediate environment, who has access to it and so forth. Louis Sullivan’s brief summary of the emergence of the high-rise building points to some of these ‘extra-architectural’ pressures and sociopolitical struggles over production that led to a novel type of building: ‘The tall commercial building arose from the pressure of land prices, the land prices from pressure of population, the pressure of population from external pressure’ (Sullivan, 1924, p. 310).

Once they are built, the materialized products of architecture and design often stand as powerful and lasting symbols of cultural values and systems of meaning. This is quite obvious in the case of the five types of urban shrines identified by Maria Kaika and Korinna Thielen:

Pre-modern monuments—deference to state and church authority; public cathedrals of technology and money power – tributes to a new era of secularization and industrialization; private secular shrines – homage to individual achievement under capitalism; social housing projects – patially [sic] inscribed bold statements of the post-war welfare state; and private-public shrines – temptresses for global finance. (Kaika and Thielen, 2006, p. 67)

Above and beyond these forms of iconic symbolism, the built environment serves as the revealing agent of social structure, a powerful force of naturalization and a potential site of contestation. It demonstrates the fundamental values of a cultural world order, which materially manifests itself in such elements – depending on the location – as prominent financial districts, cheap structures propping up corporate signage, highly accessible tourist sites, the structural privileging of vehicles over pedestrians and public transportation, the destruction or sequestering of the natural environment, etc. The constructed milieu simultaneously naturalizes this cultural system as well as its dominant social relations by creating an ingrained sense of ‘normal’ relationships, as is the case not only with the examples just cited but also with such things as the ample use of individual as opposed to collective living units, or the isolation and ghettoization of certain social groups.⁸ In all of these ways, architectural forms tend to both manifest and accentuate sociopolitical structures and norms, while at the same time being the site of ongoing struggles over the collective formation – and potential reconfiguration – of the social order.

Architecture and public arts also play a central role in sculpting the body politic by canalizing movement, structuring perception, forming social agents, conveying political imaginaries and codifying collective and individual behaviour in various ways. Walter Benjamin has cogently analysed, for instance, how the phantasmagorias of the marketplace took on architectural and urban forms in the transmogrification of the everyday aesthetics of modern Paris. From the world exhibitions and the proliferation of arcades to the rituals of fashion, the hypnotic meanderings of the flâneur, the development of private interiors and Haussmann’s muscular rending of the urban fabric, the entire cityscape came to be saturated with ‘the pomp and the splendor with which commodity-producing society surrounds itself, as well as its illusory sense of security’ (Benjamin, 1999, p. 15). In addition to examining the various and sundry ways in which the city became an expansive and intricate shrine to commodity fetishism, he notoriously insisted on the direct political implications of Haussmann’s project of slicing wide, long boulevards into the dense urban environment:

The true goal of Haussmann’s projects was to secure the city against civil war. He wanted to make the erection of barricades in the streets of Paris impossible for all time. With the same end in mind, Louis Philippe had already introduced wooden paving. Nevertheless, barricades had played a considerable role in the February Revolution. Engels studied the tactics of barricade fighting. Haussmann seeks to forestall such combat in two ways. Widening the streets will make the erection of barricades impossible, and new streets will ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Introduction:  Philosophy and Architecture: Encounters and Missed Encounters, Idols and Idolatries
• 1   The Forgotten Political Art par Excellence?: Architecture, Design and the Social Sculpting of the Body Politic  Gabriel Rockhill
• 2   Architecture and the Politics of Aesthetics: Autonomy, Heteronomy and the Philosophy of Art  David Cunningham
• 3   We Are Already Dwelling: Hegel and the Transcendence of Place  Todd McGowan
• 4   Kant, Modernity and the Absent Public  Mark Jarzombek
• 5   The New Phantasmagoria: Transcoding the Violence of Financial Capitalism  Douglas Spencer
• 6   Imitating Critique, or the Problematic Legacy of the Venice School  Andrew Leach
• 7   Gentri-Fiction and Our (E)States of Reality: On the Fatigued Images of Architecture and the Exhaustion of the Image of Thought  Hélène Frichot
• 8   Radical Infrastructure? A New Realism and Materialism in Philosophy and Architecture  Joel McKim
• 9   Casa Come Me: Rocks, Ruins and Shells in Kracauer and Chatwin  Graeme Gilloch
• 10   Habit, Distraction, Absorption: Reconsidering Walter Benjamin and the Relation of Architecture to Film  Richard Charles Strong
• 11   Hetero-Architecture: The Style of ‘Whatever’ in Art, Architecture and Fashion  Rex Butler
• 12   Architecture and Antiphilosophy  Nadir Lahiji
• 13   Architecture’s Theoretical Death  Gabriel Rockhill and Nadir Lahiji in Conversation with Slovenian Philosopher Mladen Dolar
• Index