KRAUSS/EISENMAN VS. LATOUR/HARMAN ON OBJECTS

Peter Eisenman on the “autonomy” of architecture:

[Rosalind] Krauss has said that to preserve the singularity of objects we must cut them off from their previous modes of legitimation. This idea will be seen to be important to any project of autonomy (p. 90).

This is completely counter to Bruno Latour’s description of objects (he calls them “actants” to remove the connotation of passivity), which is that they become progressively more singular as they increase their attachments. Harman describes Latour’s position:

Actants are always completely deployed in their relations with the world, and the more they are cut off from these relations, the less real they become (p. 19).

Krauss’s statement (and Eisenman’s use of it) seem naïve to me. Overcoming oppressive modes of legitimation and authority is great, but to extend this to the general claim that objects are more themselves by being more cut off is essentialism.

Aureli:

“It is precisely within the rise of the space of urbanisation that architecture as the project of the finite, and thus separated, form(s) can be read as critical” (p. x)

The idea that architecture should be primarily critical is to me like saying that all writing should be critical. In my experience, it’s always accompanied by the argument that architecture is and should be a privileged subset of building—an exclusive art.

AURELI ON THE CITY VS. URBANISATION

Pier Vittorio Aureli, in The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (2011), distinguishes between the city, “the political dimension of coexistence”, and urbanisation, “the economic logic of social management” (p. x). The city is a political space, and urbanisation is an economic space. He claims urbanisation is managerial, driven by private concerns, oriented towards infrastructural functions, and tending towards a totalitarian whole. The city, by contrast, he characterises as agonistic, public, self-critical, and immune to totalitarianism.

Aureli justifies this distinction by appeal to the Greek one between polis, governed by technē politikē and oikos, governed by technē oikonomikē. He finds this reflected (through a little semantic gymnastics) in the Roman civitas and urbs. This appeal-to-the-wisdom-of-the-ancients isn’t convincing. It’s far from clear that Greek or Roman cities provide a good model for contemporary cities or politics.

To my mind, distinguishing between politics and economics is wrong and completely artificial. If that’s all Aureli’s distinction between cities and urbanisation rests on, then I think that’s wrong too.