Architecture vs. Capitalism 2021

How does one act ethically within a fundamentally unethical system? Should or could architects challenge the conditions of production within the economy, or should they rather simply work within the framework that has been prescribed by the powers that be?

Resources in one form or another are a non-negotiable prerequisite for construction. Primarily, these resources are financial, and architects thus work within the dominant financial system. Since the Industrial Revolution, architectural production has been inscribed within a capitalist order which is an amalgamation of economic and political ideas. The history of architecture is, as the architectural theorist Peggy Deamer reminds us, the history of capital. Despite this, she notes, the attention that the disciplines of architecture and architectural history have dedicated to understanding this precondition of architectural production has been negligible. The statement is perhaps slightly less accurate now than it was in 2014, when Deamer edited Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the present (Routledge) that sparked further interest in the relation between architecture and capitalism.

Architecture’s relationship to capitalism is by no means constant however; capitalism is famously versatile and crisis-prone, and where capitalism leads, architecture follows. Our present condition, financial capitalism, neoliberal capitalism, late capitalism, or whichever label we use, produces its own, specific, conditions for architectural production. Within the discipline of architecture, the question of how to relate to the capitalism circumscribing architects’ agency has caused an extended debate at least since the late 1960s. A moment that still colours today’s positions within the discipline was a debate at the turn of the millennium: the so-called “critical–projective debate”. One central question in the debate, which primarily took place within US academia, was how architects should relate to the system in which they find themselves: should or could the architect maintain a critical distance to the forces shaping its production? Or alternatively, should the architect embrace and “surf” the waves of capitalism, that is, use the forces that were beyond the architect’s control to perform tricks?

The latter position prevailed and came to dominate architectural discussion in the early 2000s. However, since the financial crisis of 2008 was largely caused by financial products linked to the built environment and architecture, the relationship between architecture and capitalism came into focus once again. It became abundantly clear that the old theories of architecture with a view to capitalism were if not outdated at least inadequate for addressing the dominant strain or mutation of financial capitalism.

In 2015, the British architectural theorist Douglas Spencer published The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How Contemporary Architecture Became an Instrument of Control and Compliance (Bloomsbury), where he explored the influence of the neoliberal thought complex that was pioneered by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman had exercised on post-millennial architectural theory. US architectural theorist Keller Easterling wrote the book Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso), in which she explored the physical effects of capitalism on infrastructure around the world and how the traditional state gave in to the demands for seamlessness and liquidity in order to accommodate financial interests. Another interesting aspect here was The Ingot, a project by the British architect and curator Jack Self, a proposal for a building that utilized the forces of finance to produce social housing for the 21^st century. The resulting bond-financed skyscraper would be plated with gold-electrolyzed glass, hailing a new form of architecture that was as much a financial as a (would-be) physical construction.

Three books published in 2021 develop the discussion on the relationship between capitalism and architecture and the architect’s role in this relationship. The three books cover different aspects and different fields, and they address different audiences and come to slightly different conclusions. Nevertheless, I think it is worthwhile to look at these three together, as they form an image of how architectural theory thinks of its relationship to contemporary capitalism in 2021.

The first of these books, Icebergs, Zombies and the Ultra-thin: Architecture and capitalism in the twenty-first century (Princeton Architectural Press), was written by the Vancouver-based architect and educator Matthew Soules. Soules’ primary focus is not on the architectural theory or the architect’s position within the capitalist system, but on how financial capitalism changes the built environment. Simply put, the principal question explored is: In what ways is the physical environment of the city transformed when buildings are primarily parking spaces for capital or objects of speculation rather than something to be inhabited or utilized? The book presents the reader with useful concepts to categorize spatial effects of financial capitalism based in the shape or physical attributes of buildings.

The conceptual categories established by Soules are on an architectural scale: iceberg residences (residences where only a small part is visible above street level), pencil towers (the ultra-thin skyscrapers of Manhattan), superpodiums (where several residential high-rises rise from a common podium that mediates between building and city), etc. On an urban scale, Soules identifies other categories of spatial effects: zombie cities (urban areas with many empty residences for the rich), ghost cities (newly constructed urban areas devoid of people, with Kilamba in Angola as a prominent example – a city for half a million inhabitants built with Chinese loans where nobody could afford to live, and which has mostly remained empty). Soules’ arguments are grounded in first-hand accounts and reinforced by general statistics. In the course of writing, he sought out numerous places that ended up being collectively forgotten or unseen, such as half-completed urban developments that stopped in their tracks. Soules reads these as indicators of a form of capitalism in which the pendulum shifts from boom to crisis and back again faster and faster. As architecture loses its use value and becomes increasingly integrated into financial capitalism, it becomes increasingly vulnerable to financial dynamics.

In a financial economy, the individual residence becomes a commodity that acquires value from the kind visual capital it possesses, either in the form of unobstructed views or in the form of the building itself as a spectacular object to be seen (as an icon). Soules argues that neither of the above cases relate to the usability of the dwelling, only its visual capital. Usefulness is secondary, even superfluous. Soules does not offer any direct response to the question from the opening lines of this text, about how to relate to this capitalism. The only point where he enters into a discussion on the practice of the architect is in a distinction between three practices: Rogers, Strik, Harbour + partners, DOGMA (Pier Vittorio Aureli) and Zaha Hadid Architects (Patrick Schumacher). In the analysis, Rogers is found to work with the view from the individual flat and Schumacher with the appearance of the residential building as such. Both, in this sense, act in accordance with the notion of the residence as primarily a commodity. This is contrasted with Aureli, who emphasizes use value with the not-unique dwelling and an ascetism associated with another relation to the dwelling than ownership, both inspired by the rules of the Franciscan order of friars. How to relate to capitalism is in Soules’ view a question of ideology. This is a position that will be problematized in the other two publications discussed in this text. Does the architect have any real agency? This question is addressed by de Graaf. What is the relationship between architectural ideology and capitalism? This is a question central to Spencer.

Reinier de Graaf, author of The Masterplan (Archis), is a partner at the Rotterdam-based architecture studio OMA, a studio headed by Rem Koolhaas, perhaps the most influential voice in architectural discourse over the last decades. The credo of OMA, Koolhaas, and presumably de Graaf is that there is no critical architecture and the architect in her work never can act critically, as architectural production is invariably dependent on the societal order that makes the production possible in the first place. Importantly, this position does not preclude the architect taking up a critical position in other media and contexts, in text for instance. OMA’s point of view is sometimes referred to as a kind of realism, where the ideology of the architect is of no matter since her agency is invariably subordinate to other, more powerful political interests. The built environment manifests the powers that be, and the architect is in no position to change this. From the realist perspective, the belief that architecture can be critical is a misunderstanding of the architect’s place in architectural production and possibly also an expression of hubris.

 

 

The Masterplan is a book that develops this realist position in the form of a novel by recounting the experience of a Portuguese architect embroiled in the building of a new capital in Africa, a project with several parallels with Kimbala, a project that was incidentally also a study object in de Graaf’s Harvard GSD project called “Phantom Urbanism” (here is obviously an overlap with the first book – in a lecture at Harvard published on YT, Soules is in the audience asking several questions). The Masterplan poses far more questions than it resolves, not least in terms of genre: What is a novel written by an architect, with an architect protagonist, written for architects, published by an architectural publisher? Should we read this as a novel or a book of architectural theory? OMA has a history of exploring the potentials of different formats as architecture publications, sometimes with a heavy dose of irony (Content as a magazine comes to mind). To me, it does in context seem reasonable to read The Masterplan in precisely this way: an architectural theory book trying out the affordances of the format of the novel.

Each genre or publication format is constructed around a set of rules. These rules offer certain opportunities while curtailing others. In any publication by OMA, noting which design moves they make in relation to format is imperative. The novel is a format for fiction, which seems interestingly paradoxical to the realism associated with OMA. Fiction is the apparent opposite of the fact. The tension between fact and fiction in The Masterplan is one of the things that carries it as an architecture book and remains unresolved. This tension is amplified through design moves. The press testimonial on the cover reads “Terrifyingly real!”, and is attributed to The Republic, a news outlet for fake news in the novel. A second move appears inspired by Thomas More’s Utopia from 1516. In the first part of Utopia, the author describes himself encountering the traveller, Raphael Hythlodæus, who tells him of Utopia, thereby preserving the tension between fact and fiction. De Graaf uses the imprint and preface to plant the protagonist Rodrigo Tomás as an alias for an anonymous architect who allegedly asked de Graaf to tell his story to the world. A protagonist, one might add, who shares more than a few characteristics with the son of a certain Catalan architect. The framing of the novel is, in other words, employed to erase the border between fiction and non-fiction.

What, then, is Reinier de Graaf trying to tell us of architecture’s relation to capital and capitalism? Where Soules investigates the effects of capitalism, de Graaf tries to chisel out the architect’s role in the production of these effects. Already in the first chapter, it is made clear that the protagonist Tomás is pretty far from autonomous. At every turn, he is dependent on others: his wife, the client for a construction project, his father, his father’s business partners, and many others. Tomás is portrayed as the precise opposite of Howard Roarke, Ayn Rand’s furiously independent protagonist in the infamous novel Fountainhead, who blows up his buildings rather than compromising his design. Every time Tomás finds any kind of agency, he ends up even more entangled than previously. His agency is found in the in-betweens, where none of those who actually decide his fate are present, and his actions amount to some half-hearted efforts of micro-resistance that have no effect on the way the project develops but which do present his own triviality in abundantly clear light.

The book is divided into an architectural project’s different parts – appointment, breaking ground, completion, and delivery – and in each, Tomás finds himself in direr straits. Despite this, he cannot abandon the project, but must follow through to the bitter end, when he has nobody to turn to for advice but the ridiculed and forgotten architectural theorist, a character seemingly even more peripheral to the developments than himself. Without giving too much of the plot away, theory turns out to play a key role, and Tomás’ encounter with the theorist unleashes a process that exposes the real mechanism behind the project.

It turns out that Tomás is not as superfluous as he imagined, but that his importance is both deeper and stranger than he imagined, and the bad guys are not necessarily those the reader expects. Just like in More’s Utopia, the format of the book returns and thwarts any attempt to draw direct conclusions. In Utopia, the intentions of the author are obscured in the very name, where utopia can refer to the good place (eu-topos) or no place (ou-topos) at the same time. In The Masterplan, it is the tension between “the real” and the novel that remains.

Elsewhere, de Graaf argues wholeheartedly against financial capitalism, using among other things Thomas Piketty’s The Capital in the 21^st Century to discuss the inequality of a world in which owning once again trumps working. Despite this, the question remains whether the plot resolution of The Masterplan is at least partially ironic? The deus ex machina moment of the plot does seem somewhat…utopian… Halting developments in order to get to the bottom of things and eliminate corruption regardless of whether they go all the way to the top is arguably not necessarily a sign of our times. Just like More, de Graaf leaves us with thoughts on how to better order the world – what is wrong in this present – and this provocation is presumably at the heart of his endeavour.

The possibility to transform the architect’s influence and agency in the societal order through theory is at the centre of Douglas Spencer’s Critique of Architecture: Essays on Theory, Autonomy and Political Economy (Birkhäuser), included in the series Bauwelt Fundamente that has been published since the early 1960s.

Critique of Architecture is a collection of texts written in the past decade combined with new texts into something that resembles a coherent argument. The fundamental issue in Spencer’s book is the rejection of criticality tout courts that was the outcome of the “critical–projective debate” that I touched on above. This rejection of critique has had the effect that architecture theory has not considered its relationship to capitalism and the development of what Spencer refers to as neoliberal capitalism. The realization that the architect is largely insignificant in capitalism allowed architects to ignore this and focus on what they could do within these constraints, i.e., surf the waves of the forces they could not change anyway. Critique thus remains a dirty word that is commonly understood to focus on problems rather than solutions.

Spencer’s project is to restore or reconfigure criticality so that it can bear on contemporary capitalism. He emphasizes that the critique he is after is not the same as the critical architecture lauded by Michael K Hays and practiced by Peter Eisenman and others in the 1990s, where architecture was portrayed as exercising a certain amount of autonomy. Spencer instead builds on the work of Théodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, particularly the text “Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” from Dialectic of Enlightenment. From here, Spencer picks up on the production of subjectivity through the culture industry. As Karl Marx put it, capitalism produces objects for the subject whilst producing subjects for the object (Marx in Spencer 2021:20).

Spencer traces the ambition to create neoliberal subjects through architecture, the subject that Michel Foucault called Homo œconomicus in The Birth of Biopolitics. In Spencer’s line of thinking, built objects of architecture are not representations of an abstract incomprehensible capitalism, as Jameson puts it in “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1984), but a medium through which capitalism operates ideologically.

The book is divided in three sections. The first section analyses how neoliberal ideas and values have suffused and become integrated in the architectural discourse in an analytical approach we recognize from Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos, but with a welcome focus on the discipline of architecture. The second part is a critique of contemporary architectural theory that sets out to examine neoliberalism from perspectives that retain ideas of architectural autonomy. The principal target is the Italian architect and architectural theorist Pier Vittorio Aureli and how he applies ideas of agonism and autonomy in architecture. The third part aims at situating a contemporary architectural critique in a broader theoretical discursive landscape. Here, Spencer points out the de-politization in dominant theoretical discourses such as ANT (with Bruno Latour as principal target), ooo and other forms of New Materialism. Here, Spencer is carving out new ground for architectural theory to address the way neoliberal capitalist society works and how ideological neoliberalism reshapes the subjects’ self-identity through, among other means, the built environment.

The three authors have different understandings of the capitalism they set out to critique. Soules sees a global capitalism empowered by successive deregulation in country after country that makes built architecture increasingly liquid as capital. De Graaf sees it slightly differently: there is no one single capitalism, but different capitalisms, closely interwoven with geopolitical power blocs underneath a global surface. Chinese capitalism and European capitalism are contrasted as two different systems that only overlap in the competition for the same resources. Spencer, for his part, sees neoliberalism as our living environment, an ideological milieu that suffuses our view of ourselves, of the world and of architecture.

The architect and the architectural theorist play different roles in the different conceptualizations of capitalism. Soules’ analysis of Schumacher vs Aureli indicates that the practicing architect can choose not to participate and claim a kind of autonomy that defies the spectacle of architecture-as-capital. De Graaf’s The Masterplan is a strong rebuttal of this view. De Graaf presents us with the allure of capital, the dream of creating something out of nothing, the drive to build, and how these drives and desires of the architect play directly into the forces of capitalism that know very well how to make the most of these. De Graaf however appears to see a possible role for theory as journalistic report telling truth to power, but this is not the architect but a critic who exposes the prevalent power relations. The architect can only remain a more knowledgeable puppet or tend to things s/he can control, which are small and beyond the interests of the powers that be.

For Spencer, the impotence of the architect is exacerbated by those who suggest that architecture would be beyond politics if only architects were in charge. Since the neoliberal ideology dominates the architectural discourse, the quest for autonomy is futile and problematic. Critique is, in Spencer’s view, not embedded in the architectural production, but better launched from outside of the practice of architecture. Both de Graaf and Spencer emphasize the role of the critic as separate and separated from the vested interests of the architect (who, following de Graaf, is driven by an ego seeking confirmation by having buildings constructed). At the same time, Spencer and de Graaf are both painfully aware of just how peripheral such architectural critique has become over the last twenty years.