Architecture and «pessimism». On the political condition of architecture - Pedro Levi Bismarck

pedro levi bismarck

architecture and ÂŤ pessimism Âť

stones against diamonds

stones against diamonds

pedro levi bismarck

architecture and ÂŤ pessimism Âť on the political condition of architecture

ex-curso . series b <1>

il faut organiser le pessimisme Pierre Naville

foreword

.

3

object and landscape

.

7

an architecture without project

the architect as an entrepreneur

. 19

the privatization of architecture

to organize pessimism on the political condition of architecture

. 25

This essay was originally published in Portuguese in September 2018. Subsequently, it was revised and expanded for a conference held at École Polytecnique Fédérale de Lausanne, in February 2019, which was organized by the Laboratoire Bâle (laba) on the occasion of Portugal Lessons' book presentation.

foreword

A conference by the young team of Portuguese architects sami-arquitectos, in the Fall of 2017, was at the origin of this small essay. One can say that it was fundamentally an attempt to enquire a paradox that could be placed as follows: the poetical ambition of their work seemed to resist fiercely the utter disenchantment of their own speech.

But isn't this poetical ambition just a way of hiding the widespread conversion of architecture into a techno-logistical machine, condemned to its lack of purpose and the tedious management of the solutions of the possible? The emergence of a whole set of discourses around the «essentiality», «immateriality» and «poetry» of architecture – which aim to endow its works with a kind of «sacred» status – seems to be a way to purge the violent transformations that have shaken not only the profession (between unemployment and precariousness), but also the whole horizon of an architectural disciplinary culture built upon the irreducible belief in the «end of history» and in the promises of happiness of liberal capitalism. At the same time, if theory and history seem to have been rendered useless, it is also because these discourses have become powerful validation tools. «Object 3

and landscape», the terms of sami's title conference, are the substitutes of two by now outdated terms: project and city.

The current dissolution of architecture as a discipline corresponds to the privatization of architecture, that is, the expropriation of its own public condition. That central figure of the history of twentieth-century architecture that was the architect as a liberal professional gave way to another figure: the architect as an entrepreneur. If the former was an individual endowed with a humanist and universal conception of architecture as a public exercise, the latter is a subject-architect more concerned with surviving in the competitive market economy than with any disciplinary duty or theoretical ramblings. The slowly privatization of public commissions meant the erasure of the city as a «territory of architecture», that is, the erasure of architecture’s collective condition, and, therefore, of all its knowledge, of all its disciplinary condition, now relegated to the category of historical curiosity or “research project”.

The financial crisis of 2008 and the definitive consolidation of neoliberalism marked the definitive dissolution of the categories that stabilized the conceptual framework of architecture, but also the exhaustion of the principles that built a whole model of living together since the postwar period: the social-democratic city. Far from all the idyllic pastoralism with which a certain architecture has sought to essay its vie poétique, what we have before us is a territory in deep transformation and convulsion.

Against the dilettantish optimism that seems to have invaded all the institutions and places of discussion of architecture 4

(closed in the eternal return of the celebration of architecture), we can only follow an old challenge of Walter Benjamin: «to organize pessimism». Far from being a fatalistic resignation, such pessimism will be, first and foremost, a way of preventing the onset of disaster by all possible means. Against all «poetic politics» – still following Benjamin – that do nothing but to impose their silence upon us, it’s a matter of stating a political poetics; that is, as far as we are concerned, a political poetics of architecture that denies all resacralisations, all entrepreneurial dilettantisms, all idyllic optimisms.

Ultimately, what is at stake is to admit the possibility of a political condition of architecture capable of questioning the real and objective function that architecture plays in the current processes of space production, but also of opposing the expropriating and privatizing movement (economic, political, ecological) of the neoliberal metropolis. Perhaps, that was also the meaning of Giulio Carlo Argan's words when, in Progetto e Destino, he wrote that «one never designs [projects] for, but always against someone or something».

Now, any reflection on the political horizon of architecture will necessarily have to challenge and rescue from obliviousness a power of conflict that the project never failed to open in its own movement: a project-of-architecture – which will also be a project-of-the-city and a project-of-living-together – capable of placing in crisis and in critique the institutions against which it works, rather than simply being object and landscape for its untiring and catastrophic reproduction.

5

6

object and landscape an architecture without project

A series of conferences held at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto welcomed a group of Portuguese architects from different generational backgrounds and places of activity (other than strictly Porto or Lisbon)1. The invited architects – Manuel Aires Mateus, Paulo David, sami-arquitectos and João Luís Carrilho da Graça – were alike in the way they interpreted the key subject of this cycle as the «dialogue between the vocation of essentiality and the concrete conditions of place and life»2.

Inês Vieira da Silva and Miguel Vieira, who together form sami-arquitectos, contributed to this cycle with a conference entitled «Object and landscape», with this being an opportune moment not only for what this young team of architects showed us of their work, but also in the way they demonstrated a certain understanding of what nowadays is the practice and discourse of architecture.

1 Territory(ies) of Portuguese Architecture - immateriality and circumstance(s), FAUP, Porto,

October-November 2017.

2 As one can read, quoting Emílio Tuñon, in the cycle's introductory note available on the website of the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto.

7

The sami presentation did not introduce any empty rhetoric or refined conceptual operations. This showed that the years prior to the 2008 crisis are definitely behind us.

Indeed, sami have a particularly effective (and seductive) way of managing the difficult commitment between the rigor of design, an economy of means and an aesthetic domain of form in a balanced relation between that which they designate as «object» and «landscape». But what is relevant in their presentation is both the absolute absence of hesitations, impasses and crises in their design procedure, as well as the absence of any kind of minimal theoretical instruction which helps us to recognize and find the meaning of their architectural project.

The world is seen by sami as a landscape to be contemplated and the project becomes an object that is materialized in the competent, effective and operational management of problems placed by the «program», the «terrain» or «pre-existing aspects». The project is exclusively defined as a problem of formal (re)solution and functional organization of pre-defined components. In this respect, sami are disconcerting: they represent the definitive arrival of a generation without illusions. There is no (dis)illusion, no pessimism about the role and vocation of architecture.

There isn’t that artist’s anguish that used to mark the permanent confrontation between the power of the author and the limits of their capacity for (political, social, architectural) action, causing impasses and crises that we have observed so many times, although in an (excessively) autobiographical manner, in architects such as Álvaro Siza or Eduardo Souto de Moura. For sami, architecture does not 8

have to express anything else and does not need conceptual metaphors to validate its design activity, it does not need eloquent narratives, it does not need critical discourses about what surrounds, conditions or determines it. And if they dispense theory, they certainly do not need history, the history of the discipline and its specific knowledge – it has, indeed, never been called upon to guarantee or validate any project operation.

In fact, perhaps the term project is inappropriate to talk about sami’s architectural production strategy. Perhaps we are looking at an architecture without project. Because project would entail, from the outset, a permanent relationship of criticism and crisis with its direction, its unfolding and the conditions in which it operates and is positioned. We could say that the project always means something more than the solution, more than the object. The project is always something in excess, it is that which stays in potentiality before and after the work, in suspension waiting to be questioned and critically unfolded. It is the encounter-confrontation between desenho and desígnio [design and designation/purpose] – to use a formula by Nuno Portas.3 And if sami have no illusions, it is because they have exchanged the critical-crisis territory of the project for the landscape of the object (to reverse the terms of the title of the conference), not because of their own choice, but because it seems to be the terrain vague that architecture tends to occupy today. Its role as an apparatus for city production and as a reflection on the forms and conditions of 3 Cf. Nuno Portas, A cidade como arquitectura (1969), Lisbon, Livros Horizonte, 2011.

9

dwelling has reached a point of exhaustion. This change is not disconnected from the transformation of the State itself and the scarcity of public commissions.4 Today architecture is carried out, mostly, as a private exercise for a specific client and in this gesture there is no time for impasses, criticisms or crises. The architect is an entrepreneur. Offices are companies or brands. The end point is the market and not the city. There is no time for experimentation, nor for problematic guidelines for design activity, much less for public or theoretical discourses on architecture and the city. Architects earn their living, ensure the survival in the competitive and rarefied market of private commission, by providing a competent and effective response.

The poetic ambition that sami pursued throughout their conference, evident in their somewhat disenchanted use of the term ÂŤpoetryÂť, exposed all the paradoxes of an architecture which, after all, cultivates its own illusions. And because it needs to be legitimized in the sphere of architectural culture, poetry thus becomes a kind of last refuge to fill in the void of an architecture reduced to pure logistics, condemned to its lack of design and to the competent and boring management of the possible, even if in its most beautiful form. But this refuge is also the funeral chamber that allows to mourn and to overcome the death of the project. The further the confinement of architecture and its 4 Long gone are the days of large public promotion housing and urban planning pro-

grams that marked much of the 20th century in Europe (and also in Portugal, although later and with particularly different conditions), mobilizing the theoretical debate from ciam to team 10 in a decisive way.

10

erosion as a discipline progresses, the greater discourses on the essentiality, the immateriality and the poetry of architecture grow.

The intensive use of the word «landscape» throughout their conference is also paradigmatic because it reduces territory – as a political and social construction – to the mere disinterested contemplation of the world: an aestheticization that so much serves to describe the territory of an island, a fragment of nature or the interior of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation building (where sami set up an exhibition project for the 2016 Lisbon Architecture Triennale). Terms such as «casario», used to identify the set of buildings in the city of Setúbal, describe what is around us in an abstract and generic way, without providing an understanding of the social and historical geography which creates the permanent conflict that is the city.

Obviously, it would be misleading to see this as a specific characteristic of sami. On the contrary, we are dealing with a model of understanding of the city and the territory which is dominant and the origin of which is right at the center of the current architectural theoretical framework. Is it necessary, after all, to ask what is or what constitutes a discipline or field of knowledge? Responding precisely to this question, Jacques Rancière argues that a discipline is always «a provisional regrouping, a provisional territorialization of things and issues that do not in themselves have a location or a domain»5. And therefore it's a «regrouping» which specifies, at each moment, who is qualified to speak of what 5 Jacques Rancière, Et tant pis pour le gens fatigues, Paris, Éditions Amsterdam, 2009, p. 478.

11

and what must belong or must remain excluded from a certain field of knowledge. As far as we are concerned, it's a «regrouping» that defines the body of «things and issues» that make the knowledge of architecture and the set of qualifications and skills of architects, that is, what is it to talk about architecture and who can talk about architecture.

If there was a preponderant moment of this «regrouping» in the last decades, that corresponded to the way in which a certain idea of autonomy served to mobilize an artificial delimitation in this field of knowledge, constructing the illusion that architecture could have a private and exclusive world on the edges of «contemporary currents of thought»6, triumphantly handed over to the timeless criteria of beauty and to the internal mechanisms of composition. It is what Manfredo Tafuri, in the 1970s, identified as an «architecture dans le boudoir» (to evoke Marquis de Sade)7 entertained by the infinite divertissement of it «glass bead game». An architecture that sought to «reclaim the dimension of the object and its character as unicum by removing it from its economic and functional contexts; by marking it as an exceptional – and thus surreal – event, placing it between parentheses within the flux of “things” generated by the system of production».8 This «placing it between parentheses» 6 Ignasi de Solà-Morales, «Sadomasoquismo. Crítica y prática arquitectónica» (1988),

Diferencias, Barcelona, Editorial gg, 2003, p. 152.

7 The title of Manfredo Tafuri’s article is a reference to the book by D.A.F. de Sade or the Marquis de Sade, La philosophie dans le boudoir (1795). Cf. Manfredo Tafuri, «L’architecture dans le Boudoir: The Language of Criticism and the Criticism of Language», Oppositions 3, 1974, pp. 38-62.

8 This article was republished (with alterations made by the author) in La sfera e il labirinto (1980) to form part of a chapter entitled «Il giuoco delle perle di vetro» [«The Glass Bead Game»], and this version was chosen. Manfredo Tafuri, La sfera e il labirinto. Avanguardie e architettura da Piranesi agli anni ‘70, Turin, Einaudi, 1980, p. 345.

12

implied, from the outset, a split and an (epistemological) cut within the «things and issues» that make up the field of the discipline, separating and detaching the aesthetic dimension (in the proper sense of the word aísthêsis, as that which is apprehended by the senses) from its own political and ideological condition. And, therefore, excluding or expropriating political resonance from architectural practice and knowledge as well as the effects and relations of power that the gesture of composition and «distribution of the sensible» – which mobilizes the function of architecture in the relation between body and form – necessarily entails.9 Thus, the architect’s poetic gaze on the landscape is nothing more than the sign of an absolute estrangement regarding a territory that has become impenetrable to him. Just as the melancholic Angel of Albrecht Dürer10 silently contemplates a set of objects, tools and utensils strewn on the floor 9 Jacques Rancière’s notion of «distribution of the sensible» can be defined as the «im-

plicit law governing the sensible order, that parcels out places and forms of participation in a common world by first establishing the modes of perception within which these are inscribed» (Gabriel Rockhill, «Glossary of Technical Terms», in Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, London/New York, Continuum, 2004, p. 85). In this sense, aesthetics is not a theory of art in general, but must be understood in terms of Kant’s critique as the system of forms a priori that determine what is given to feel. For Rancière, there is an aesthetic of politics and a politics of aesthetics. That is, in politics it’s always at stake a certain «distribution of the sensible» and the true political gesture is always a contestation of the natural order of bodies, a reconfiguration of the sensible. On the other hand, there is a politics of aesthetics, because artistic practices «take part in the partition of the perceptible insofar as they suspend the ordinary coordinates of sensory experience and reframe the network of relationships between spaces and times, subjects and objects, the common and the singular. There is not always politics, though there always are forms of power» (Jacques Rancière, «The Politics of Aesthetics», 16 Beaver - online edition). It is in this sense that one can say that in architecture what is at stake is always a certain «distribution of the sensible», since this intervenes in the forms of visibility, the modes of composition of spaces and times, the ordering and distribution of bodies, thus defining the forms of experience and experimentation of the world.

10 On the interpretation of Albrecht Durer’s engraving, Melencolia I (1514), which has been used here, see Giorgio Agamben, L’Uomo Senza Contenuto, Macerata, Quodlibet, 1994.

13

around him – as if they had lost their use value and, therefore, all and any meaning –, architects also seem to contemplate the spoils of the territory surrounding them like ruins of a past that they can no longer understand except through aesthetic judgment and educated categories of taste. In this state of strangeness, the «landscape» is a condition of a paradox where human beings make (their) absolute ignorance of the world a motive for aesthetic enjoyment. And just as the landscape is nothing more than territory converted into phantasmagoria – that is, into a commodity –, the «object» also signals the full absorption of the work of architecture within the realm of commodities.

The 2008 financial and economic crisis, which significantly affected the countries of Southern Europe (but also the European project as a whole), meant not only the sudden reappearance of a forgotten figure in the history of architecture, the activist, but also a whole set of renewed vows for the ethical values of architecture. A testimony to this was the way in which social architecture was converted into a theme and quickly integrated into the biennial markets and specialized fairs. Let us, for example, consider the latest editions of the Venice Biennale of Architecture or Alejandro Aravena's Pritzker prize in 2016.

In an article published in 2012, Jeremy Till pointed out that one of the reactions to austerity policies consisted of a «refuge in the more rarefied realm of aesthetic discourse»11 11 Jeremy Till, «Scarcity contra austerity», Places Journal (online edition).

14

where the work of the architectural elite functioned as a kind of redemption, consolingly promoting high values to an entire class doomed to the irrelevance and technocracy of their day-to-day affairs. It is what Pierre Chabard, in a recent and controversial article, identifies as a process of resacralisation of architecture which, by claiming a transcendence proper to the architectural act – combining «disciplinary puritanism, passion for origins, hermetic discourse and worship of the purified object»12 –, desperately tries to conjure up «the growing powerlessness of the majority of architects and, at the same time, to expiate the complacent formalism of the elite few»13.

For Jeremy Till, «just as the politics of austerity often claim a moral imperative, so too this architecture of austerity does not merely trumpet the aesthetics of simplicity, precision and honesty, but insinuates that they are a form of moral action. Beauty is the most radical thing I know, claims [Peter] Märkli»14. The point is, however, that by directly associating moral values (austerity) and aesthetic values (simplicity and honesty), architecture does nothing other than to remove them «from the social dynamics where ethical issues are indeed present». Therefore, «the ethics of aesthetics thus presents a false morality, but where many architects find comfort and even inspiration»15.

12 Pierre Chabard, «Utilitas, Firmitas, Austeritas», Criticat, nº 17, 2016, p. 52. The text

undertakes an interesting diagnosis of the years after the 2008 crisis, although it seems rather equivocal in the criticisms that it directs at Pier Vittorio Aureli and which do not seem to take into account the totality of his theoretical work.

13 Id., ibid., p. 52.

14 Jeremy Till, op. cit.

15 Id., ibid.

15

It will not be inappropriate to take as an example the case of Studio Mumbai. Bijoy Jain's office is presented as an example of an architecture of resistance against capitalism and against globalization. Let us consider the catalogue of the exhibition curated by Mirko Zardini at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, where the Indian architect is presented as an «alternative to the contemporary architecture mode of production»16. The expectation of other ways of life outside (sub)urban logic, the relationship with an exotic and virgin nature, the attempt to recover the vernacular in the face of the unstoppable advance of logistic technocracy and massification, are action principles that guide an apologetic set of discourses on his work – somewhat in line with Valerio Olgiati or Peter Zumthor. But, in fact, its production strategy is fully within the neoliberal economic and social framework, effective in transforming the anxieties and fractures that capitalism creates and multiplies in new business opportunities.17 Far from being a gesture of resistance, the architecture of Studio Mumbai takes place in the setting up of exotic lifestyles for a consumer market of ways of life and, above all, as a suggestion of a harmonious relationship between human beings, architecture and nature (we could say «object and landscape») that is as beautiful as it is absolutely illusory.

First of all, because it produces a narrative and a powerful comforting effect which tends to forget the instability and 16 Cf. Mirko Zardini (ed.), Rooms You May Have Missed: Umberto Riva, Bijoy Jain, Zurich,

Lars Müller Publishers / Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2015.

17 Cf. Pedro Levi Bismarck, «The Artificial Paradises of Studio Mumbai», Quaderns de Arquitectura i Urbanisme (online edition).

16

absolute precariousness of this bond between humanity and nature, at the hands of the infinite demands of capitalist production and exploitation in the era of what is conventionally called the Anthropocene.18 The houses of Studio Mumbai translate this sacralisation of the object, but also of the landscape itself: a sacralised architecture (that is, relegated outside the profane world) which no longer works with the city as a space of the common, failing to operate and to think critically the problematic caesura between city and house, collective and individual (that in between space which marked the architectural discussion of the second half of the twentieth century)19, thereby abandoning any defence of the social and transformative power of its gesture. But this nature turned into landscape serves a final purpose: to fill the traumatic void opened by the untying of this space between city and house, human beings and nature, which only the sacralisation of the object can make bearable.

We must therefore view these houses as sophisticated immunization strategies, where an elite with high economic power finds a form of isolation from the violent processes of the production of space that it itself sets in motion.20 18 The Anthropocene is a designation that accounts for the impact of Human Beings on

Earth, ushering in a new geological era that would follow the Holocene. This concept is not free from criticism because it constructs a narrative that abstractly opposes human species and nature, without taking into account the social divisions and antagonisms that exist within the capitalist production process.

19 In particular, the reflections of Aldo Van Eyck and Alison and Peter Smithson, but also of many others who participated in the debate concerning the great collective housing programmes. Cf. Max Risselada & Dirk van den Heuvel (ed.), Team 10 (1953-81), in search of a Utopia of the Present, Rotterdam, NAi Publishers, 2005.

20 According to recent World Bank studies, one third of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s population living

17

These are immunization systems which constitute a conditioned environment, an artificial paradise, self-sufficient, minimizing all communication with the outside. In this sense, we should not see them as models of another habitat or another mode of production of architecture. On the contrary, we should see them, calling on Peter Sloterdijk, as «machine[s] of ignorance» or «integrous defence mechanism[s]» where «the basic right to ignore the outside world finds its architectural support»21; or, furthermore, as true machines of self-destruction, because in this «basic right to ignore the outside world» also lies the dissolution of the common and the erosion of that bond between humanity and nature.

below the poverty line is in India: 400 million (30% of the Indian population, a figure that has been rising since 2007).

21 For the German philosopher modern housing is the place which uninvited guests cannot access. In modern housing « ‘toxic people’ must stay outside, and bad news too if possible». Peter Sloterdjik, Spheres. Volume 3: Foams, Plural Spherology, South Pasadena, Semiotext(e), 2016, p. 504.

18

the architect as an entrepreneur the privatization of architecture

Coming back to sami, it should be clarified that this text is not intended to be a critique of their work, but rather a means at an attempt to recognize the place that architecture currently occupies as practice and discourse in the framework of a «neoliberal political rationality»22 on the rise. One of the key consequences of this process was the dissolution of the bond between the discipline and the profession with the demise of this central figure in the history of twentieth century architecture that was the architect as a liberal professional, replaced by another figure: the architect as an entrepreneur. If the former was an individual, both artist and homme de lettres,23 technician and intellectual, endowed with a vaguely humanist and universal conception of the practice of architecture – ensuring although not always in a stable manner the correspondence between the discipline and the profession –, the latter is already an individual totally captured by the universal and transcendent laws of the market, where architecture can only be a provision of services, a private professional exercise. That is, 22 Cf. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos. Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, New York,

Zone Books, 2016.

23 As Le Corbusier often referred to himself.

19

it's a new type of architects more concerned with securing the possibilities of acting in the international competitive markets, than with recognizing themselves as an integral part of a collective debate about the conditions and effects of architectural production: because the crisis and the low fees stop putting themselves in a position of social advantage; because public commissions have almost ceased thereby invalidating some of the traditional problems within architectural debate; because the legislative, regulatory and bureaucratic apparatus has become immense.

In this context, architecture as a discipline is reduced to the exercise of the profession, that is, the problems of architecture are the problems of the current management of the profession. This is the definitive erasure of the architect as an intellectual, now confined to the category of a logistical/ functional technician or an aesthete of the landscape and the object. It is, in fact, what we might call the privatization of architecture, that is, the expropriation of its public dimension (of its collective savoir-faire and knowledge) and its dilution within the merely technical-technocratic dimension of construction processes, disappearing that very last space for questioning its social and political condition.

The model that Portuguese architecture found for itself after April 25 – as an instrument in the service of the new democratic institutions of the Welfare State, in its construction, development and expansion – is now obsolete.24 24 The Carnation Revolution (Revolução dos Cravos), April 25 1974, put an end to more

than forty years of dictatorship, inscribing Portugal in the group of European liberal democracies. In 1986, Portugal officially joined the European Community.

20

No one can be tempted to think that is still living within the stable and guaranteed framework of the turn of the millennium, in the shadow of an announced «end of history»25 and of a fully permanent social and economic progress that enabled Western European architecture to build a comfortable entertained position – far from the past nightmares of the class struggle and the new exploited and colonized territories in the South and the East. The dream of Europe also created its monsters, wherein the 2008 global financial crisis meant, first and foremost, the consolidation of a neoliberal model based on the rhetoric of the permanent crisis, the financial deregulation of markets, the absolute monetization of everyday life26, the precariousness of all social and labour relations and, finally, the progressive dismantling of the institutions of the Welfare State, of democracy and of any notion of common – following the Thatcherian motto that there is no society, only individuals. This is an economic and political model with effects and consequences, first of all, on the dissolution of the categories that stabilized the mental and conceptual framework of architectural practice, especially with regard to a tacit commitment based on a relationship between the progress of architecture and social and economic progress.

25 «The end of history», Francis Fukuyama celebrated expression, defined the conceptu-

al horizon of our time, particularly of a whole segment of generations deeply convinced that with the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and capitalism's full supremacy we had come to the end of the entire historical process, that is, the end of all social conflit and of all class struggle. Cf. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, New York, Free Press, 1992.

26 That is, the conversion of all spaces and times into business possibilities and the dissemination of the market model and competition to all domains of human life.

21

We are therefore faced with a model of coexistence and urban space that is based on very different assumptions from those which guided the production of the social-democrat city of the last decades: a neoliberal metropolis marked by the dissolution of the notion of public space (so dear to architects) and its replacement by the market as mediator between the individual and the collective, but also the dissolution of that other notion (or, rather, fiction) of citizenship27, which only shows in nuce the political downgrading of subjects in the hands of the new models and technologies for population control.

Therefore, the neoliberal metropolis corresponds to the full affirmation of an eminently biopolitical power paradigm which takes the form of a government of men and things, integrating and capturing the totality of life (individual and collective) within a compact, homogeneous and securitarian urban structure.28 At the same time, however, it is the consolidation of a «managerial paradigm»29 which, by 27 Citizenship has always been a notion of liberal democracy that is more rhetorical than

effective, building an abstract we that hides social processes and conflicts. However, it was, despite everything, a powerful fiction that gave rise to a series of discourses around the city in the last decades.

28 This is not the place for an in-depth discussion of the notion of biopolitics/biopower, launched on various occasions by Michel Foucault and later developed, among others,

by Giorgio Agamben. This notion marks the emergence of a paradigm of government that takes life (individual and collective – what will be called the population) and space (the territory) as an object of power: in its rationalization, management and control. Cf.: Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité 1: La Volonté de savoir, Paris, Éditions Gallimard, 1976; Michel Foucault, Sécurité, Territoire, Population, Paris, Éditions du Seuil/ Gallimard, 2004; Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer, Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita, Turin, Giuli0 Einaudi Editore, 1995. On architecture and biopolitics see Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Biopolitics and the Emergence of Modern Architecture, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 2008.

29 Cf.: Giorgio Agamben, Il Regno e la Gloria. Per una genealogia teologica dell’economia e del governo, Vicenza, Neri Pozza, 2007; Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, Cambridge (MA) / London, MIT Press, 2011.

22

completely substituting politics for the economy as a mode of governance, makes the territory a vast logistical and functional field, thus materializing a politically disqualified form of life, reduced to its purely economic dimension (as human capital exploited and condemned to the profitability of their bodies) and its strictly biological dimension (the infinite reproduction of its living conditions).

Far from all the idyllic pastoralisms with which a certain architecture has sought to essay its vie poĂŠtique between object and landscape is an urban territory in transformation and conflict: the generalized commodification of housing converted into a financial asset of global real estate funds; violent processes of gentrification; functional changes in an ever-increasing scale involving large areas of the city and territory; and, above all, the loss of capacity of the State and public institutions to mediate and counteract the global logic of capital flows (the offshore cases) and to ensure any regulation, mediation or redistribution. Not to mention the unsustainable weight of climate change and the presence of humans on Earth, in the name of a capitalist production-exploitation logic of nature as something to be monetized. If it is an illusion to think that architecture per se can directly respond to any of these questions, it is also an illusion to think that it is not for it to question the effects of these transformations on its practice or to overlook the function that architects themselves play in those ÂŤproduction of spaceÂť30 processes.

30 To invoke the title of an essential work by Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space,

Oxford, Blackwell, 1991 [1974].

23

24

to organize pessimism on the political condition of architecture

The generalized alienation of architect’s class regarding this state of affairs is intricate. Among those who have withdrawn from the profession and taken refuge in educational institutions and others who seek to survive without illusions, riding the tumultuous waters of a profession in the format of an entrepreneur, there do not seem to be many alternatives left.

Perhaps the first step in thinking all of this is to follow an old challenge by Walter Benjamin: to leave a certain «dilettantish optimism»31 that today seems to have contaminated all institutions and places of discussion, production and training of architecture. And then leave for an «organization of pessimism»32: an «active, ‘organized’, practical ‘pessimism’» which can critically address the present conditions of architectural practice and knowledge, beyond all conformist acceptance or all unlimited and enterprising optimism; a pessimism not as a contemplative feeling or 31 Walter Benjamin, «Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia»

(1929) in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, volume 2 - part 1, 1927-1930, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2005, p. 216.

32 Id., ibid., p. 216.

25

fatalistic resignation, but as a way «directed entirely at preventing the onset of disaster by all possible means»33.

Rather than seeking a refuge in the aestheticized dimension of those «bad poem[s] on springtime»34, which guard the coming paradises of eternal reconciliation in the name of essentiality, it is a question of organizing a generalized reflection on the role of architecture as practice and knowledge in an economic, social and political context in transformation and conflict, far from the announced end of history. From the outset, this seems a principle to follow: «Pessimism from beginning to end, without exceptions», as Walter Benjamin writes, «mistrust in the fate of freedom, mistrust in the fate of European humanity»35 and, we might add, mistrust in the fate of architecture.

However, the question is not just «what to do?», but «who can do it?». And the answer could be, from the outset, the educational institutions of architecture, which not only have the task of teaching (re-producing learning models) or of researching (re-producing knowledge), but also of constantly reflecting on the present state of the discipline itself. But this implies that schools of architecture are con33 As Michael Löwy writes, Walter Benjamin will look for the expression «organization

of pessimism» in Pierre Naville who had written La Révolution et les intellectuels in 1926 («il faut organiser le pessimisme», claimed Naville). For Benjamin, this pessimism has nothing to do with any fatalistic resignation in vogue within the currents of German, conservative and reactionary kulturpessimismus, but it is a criticism of the optimistic cultures of commitment of social-democracy. «Their concern is not the decline of the elites or the nation, but the threats that technical and economic progress offered by capitalism weigh upon humanity.» Michael Löwy, «A filosofia da história de Walter Benjamin» in Utopias, Lisbon, Ler devagar & edições Unipop, 2016, p. 47.

34 Walter Benjamin, op. cit., p. 216.

35 Id., ibid., p. 216.

26

fronted with what they have long preferred at all costs not to see: the crisis and the impasse of their own project, school-project and architecture-project. Namely: its generalized homogenization, its reduction to the condition of the mass formation of an army of technical-specialist architects converted into a pure work force, its enclosure in the infinite swallowing of architectural historiography and, finally, the exile in the practise of an object without project and a landscape where all of humanity seems to have disappeared and where, quoting Rainer Maria Rilke, «beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror»36.

If the notion of autonomy of architecture holds a potentiality, this is not in the generic claim of an «autonomy from» as the exclusion of architecture from its historical, social and political context, nor from the demand for its own private space devoted absolutely to the sacred mysteries of composition and language. On the contrary, as Pier Vittorio Aureli argues37, it lies in a bold and radical claim to an «autonomy for» as an effort to appropriate the political condition of architecture rather than simply its negation.

This implies the unfolding of a theoretical discourse capable of recognizing the place of crisis and conflict that is the city – beyond the positivist and mystifying discourses where «social and political development comes to be seen as an evolutionary progress»38–, but also the interpellation 36 Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, New York, North Point Press, 2000, p. 331.

37 Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Project of Autonomy. Politics and Architecture within and against

Capitalism, New Yok, Buell Center / Princeton Architectural Press, 2008, p. 12.

38 Id., ibid., p. 83.

27

of an artistic vocation of design [desenho] as designation/ purpose [desígnio] that is not to be found in the demiurgical cult of authorship, but in its power of questioning, understanding and transforming existing conditions.

What is at stake is, therefore, to consider in what terms one can think the political condition of architecture and its artistic vocation. This means claiming another function for architecture, outside the reproductive movement of the politics of catastrophe in which we live, and outside of all the aesthetic and moralistic metaphors which, in the name of the paradises to come, do no more than impose silence.

It is this vocation of art that Walter Benjamin seeks to save in his 1929 text on the French surrealists, calling on the expression «organization of pessimism» and which «means nothing other than to expel moral metaphor from politics and to discover in political action the space par excellence of the image»39. Against the insidious camouflage of politics by morality, which remits to the moral sphere struggles and conflicts properly social and political; against the optimistic «poetic politics»40 that, with their contemplative images, capture language, dominate experience and close the field of the possible; against all this, it's a matter of stating a political poetics: a political poetics of architecture that denies all resacralisations, all moral metaphors, all entrepreneurial dilettantisms that do nothing more than have catastrophe dressed in the clothes of optimism.

39 Walter Benjamin, op. cit., p. 217. [Translation slightly changed by the author, following

Portuguese and German editions.]

40 Id., ibid., p. 216.

28

In order to do this, one must first recognize what the current architectural discourse seeks at all costs not to see – because theories are also machines of not seeing. Firstly, it is not possible for architecture to constitute a space of its own based on a disconnection between the political dimension and the aesthetic experience of its «things and issues» (recalling Rancière), because this means emptying its specific condition as a discipline: reducing architecture into simple construction (as a logistical tool of an urbanization without qualities) or into singular object (as a commodity for amusement only). Secondly, as Ignasi de Solà-Morales warned, «one should remake the history of architecture as an history of violence»41. That is, architecture is as much an act of colonization as an act of violence and not simply an instrument in the service of a continuous progress, which is no more than a fiction intended to justify – and one should add, to redeem – the «aggression» and the «traumatic dimension» of its gesture. As Ignasi adds in Colonization, violence, resistance, «a smoke screen veils the genuinely violent and destructive nature of architecture and the radical mutations that each act of construction imposes on the environment» and «thus it is utterly misleading to think of the action of architecture on the territory as a gesture in harmony with the permanent and universal order of things»42. Thirdly, architecture produces not only forms or spaces between subjects, but it is, itself, an apparatus where the production of subjects and the reproduction of the conditions of their existence is at stake.

41 Ignasi de Solà-Morales in Anyway conference, Barcelona, CCCB, June 1993.

42 Ignasi de Solà-Morales, «Colonization, violence, resistance», in Anyway, New York,

Rizzoli, 1994, p. 120.

29

Now, if there is a fundamental movement linked to modernity, it is precisely the affirmation of a new function for architecture, no longer as an instrument of the representation of power, but as a technology (par excellence) of a biopolitics that takes place in the government of life, population and their territory: in their partaking, distribution and composition. It was Le Corbusier who best seized the entrance of architecture into this biopolitical equation when he wrote that the house is a «machine à habiter»43: a machine-machination to make habitation and inhabitants, an apparatus for the inscription of life and its forms into a regime of visibilities, uses, experiences, relationships and hierarchies, both domestic and social, reproducing strategies of subjectivation and individuation.

In architecture there are no objects, only apparatus: machines for the capture of life, machines for the normalization of life. Under these conditions, architecture becomes both technology for production-organization (of spaces and times) of life, as well as a mode of composition and «distribution of the sensible»: a spatio-temporal sensorium that defines, from the outset, the conditions of experience and experimentation of the world and where a permanent struggle for its control is always at stake.44 43 Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture, Les éditions G. Crès et Cie, Paris, 1923. An expres-

sion coined by Adolphe Lance in 1853 (in a critical review of Traité d’architecture by Leonce Raynaud), which Le Corbusier would certainly have known. «A house is a tool, a machine so to speak, that not only serves as a shelter for Humans, but (...) must conform to their activity and multiply the fruit of their labour», cit. in Manfredo Tafuri, «‘Machine et mémoire’: The City in the Work of Le Corbusier», in H. Allen Brooks (ed.), Le Corbusier, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1987, p. 205.

44 If a definition of architecture had to be given, it could be said that it is, above all, a diagram or regime of partaking and disposition of spaces and times: a mode of composing and distributing bodies/individuals in places: a mode of segmenting, compartmentaliz-

30

What Walter Benjamin, in turn, sought to disclose through the expression «organization of pessimism» is in fact a new role for artists (and intellectuals), by assigning them «functions in key places of this space of the image», i.e., of this «distribution of the sensible» (even if this means the suspension of a certain concept of «artistic career», as the German author himself noted)45. Now, intervening in this space where political action opens up to image and where image opens up to political action is what is at stake. As far as architecture is concerned, it is a question of finding both a space for image and an image of space, mobilized in the experience of daily life, from the centre of this machine à habiter, of this machination of life. A space of image that, for this reason, will not cease to be a «space of the body» or bodies, affirming the power and intensification of another collective subject, another «collective body»46, where there is only solitude, where there is only human capital at the service of the economy.

But this means, can only mean, that architects are able to question themselves not only as «authors» (at the top of their careers), but also as «producers»47. This is a decisive ing, qualifying and functionalizing space; a mode of cutting out and linking the boundaries between what is common and private, proper and improper (defining ways of being together and remaining separate, forms of association and relationship); a mode of establishing regimes of visibility (what is visible and what is not); and a mode of defining protocols of use (what is usable/accessible and what is not). But it is also an apparatus because it contains power relationships, that is, certain types of effects that act on individuals and their bodies, re-producing processes of subjectivation and subjection.

45 Walter Benjamin, op. cit., p. 217. [Translation slightly changed by the author] 46 Id., ibid., p. 217.

47 Cf. Walter Benjamin, «The Author as Producer » (1934), in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, volume 2 - part 2, 1927-1934, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2005, pp.

768-782.

31

reversal that Manfredo Tafuri (who has traced the crisis and the impasses of the intellectual and social function of the discipline like no other) has sought after Walter Benjamin, which implies that one does not look at what «the work says about the relations of production» (as representation, or moral discourse), but for the «function of the work itself within the relations of production», that is, for «the real meaning of the project options with respect to the dynamics of the productive transformations that they set in motion, that they delay or that they seek to prevent»48.

This presupposes questioning not only architect’s role in these processes, but also the function of architecture within the neoliberal metropolis: the modes of space production, the dominant regimes of the «distribution of the sensible» and the forms-apparatus for the capture of life.

If art «is to open new possibilities for life»49 against the limitations imposed by the present state of the world, only as a gesture of resistance can architecture claim its own autonomy. What is at stake is therefore the affirmation of a condition of radical experimentation of the world and its forms-of-life, promoting alternatives to the expropriating movement of the neoliberal metropolis, through a project-of-architecture and a project-of-city that is not the endless reproduction of the catastrophe in view, but the reinvention of a space for a common to come.

48 Manfredo Tafuri, La sfera e il labirinto. Avanguardie e architettura da Piranesi agli anni ‘70,

Turin, Einaudi, 1980, p. 22.

49 Sousa Dias, Lógica do Acontecimento. Introdução à filosofia de Deleuze, Lisbon, Sistema Solar, 2012, p. 166.

32

stones against diamonds ex-curso . series b <1> january 2020 Translated by: David Hardisty

Revised, edited and designed by: Ana Catarina Costa Paulo A. M. Monteiro Pedro Levi Bismarck This translation was funded by FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia through CEAU - Centro de Estudos de Arquitectura e Urbanismo da Faculdade de Arquitectura da Universidade do Porto

© 2020 . Porto stones against diamonds www.revistapunkto.com issn 2184-5859

ISSN 2184-5859

inor ex-curso . m

tex

ts :

dr

ift

d s,

er

i

s . series b < 1 >

e nt

rim

xp e

ns ,e

io

va t