Against architecture

text by Andrea Branzi

A pile of books is rising higher on my desk, all on a merciless battle ‘against’ architecture: reading matter that would have been unthinkable a few years ago, because the ‘politically correct’ defense of design was part of the ceremonial weaponry of a vast populace of the enlightened.

Now those same enlightened mavens are the ones attacking this ancient, noble discipline. What’s going on? Where does this sea change come from, indicating a sort of genetic mutation of the present generation of intellectuals, architects and sociologist (and also of lesser categories)? Franco LaCecla uses the explicit title “Contro l’architettura” (edizioni Bollati Boringhieri, 2008). Gianni Biondillo has published “Metropoli per principianti” (edizioni Guanda, 2008). Nikos A. Salingaros has written “Anti-Architecture and Deconstruction”. But there are also more noble forerunners, like the conference in Trent “Contro l’architettura” with contributions by Stefano Boeri and Enzo Mari, or “Contro l’arquitectura” by Argentina’s Ricardo Blanco. We could also trace back to the essays in the 1970s by Charles Jencks on the end of modernity, which led to the reactionary proposals of Léon Krier, not just against modernity but against design in general. And how could we forget the critique of Manfredo Tafuri against this bourgeois institution, “destined to die” with the advent of workers’ socialism? This vitriolic trail also gave rise to Deconstructivism, born as a hypothesis of urban dissolution in the era of the computer revolution, and soon transformed into a new International Style with which to build any sort of monstrosity… I believe that this polemical front is the effect of the great wave produced by ‘post-modern’ culture. Probably Pasolini too, if he were still alive, would belong in the vast ranks of anti-architecture, which contain noble personalities like Prince Charles, but also naive media figures like Adriano Celentano and Beppe Grillo. The movement also has some ‘very noble’ (and very dangerous) ancestors like Julius Evola and his revolt against the modern world, against democratic societies and anti-traditionalist modernity. Active participants in this composite, contradictory front also include many fringes of environmentalism, who see anything ‘new’ as a potential alteration of ecological balances. The extreme factions of international terrorism also feed on antimodern themes, as in the case of the fundamentalist architect Mohammed Attah, the head of the attack on the Twin Towers, seen as the symbol of blasphemous western society. Why is this theme, which has also been part of a critical line of the first and last avant-gardes (including part of our ‘radical movement’) become so widespread today? The reasons are many and are anything but occasional. I believe they can be summed up in terms of two major historical crises. The first motivation of the ‘anti-architectural front’ is the objective failure of the modern city. Designed to promptly and definitively perform a series of new social (and technical) functions, it has turned out to be a rigid organism unable to respond to the continuing evolution of those functions themselves. The crisis of modernity was philosophical in origin (with the end of Positivism), but it was also fed by the incapacity of all modern devices to control their devastating impact. Modern architecture suffers from this more general crisis of credibility; it can no longer create a widespread aesthetic quality appreciable on the urban territory, so it resorts to making only single ‘visual’ episodes, expressive exceptions that take a conflictual place inside the anarchic, out-of-control scenario of the contemporary city. The historical conflict between city and architecture (which we ‘radicals’ addressed for the first time back in the 1960s) has reached a level of great clarity: after the success of Bilbao even public administrations and large corporations are turning to starchitects to construct a ‘scandal’, because architectural scandal produces information, attraction, curiosity, all very functional things in the present context of media competition among large cities and large brands. The second, and more serious, motivation comes from the failure of politics, both on the left and on the right. This failure has produced widespread lack of faith in the future, while modern architecture was always the standard-bearer of the future, the most optimistic and visible of its champions. Once upon a time politics could take credit for contributing to the beauty of the polis, and the Greek philosophers saw democracy as the most suitable instrument, not to achieve social justice, but to achieve the decorum and functioning of the polis. Now this theorem has been broken and the future no longer seems to belong to the expertise and duties of politics. New architecture has completely lost its redeeming aura. It is now seen as a gratuitous, random, even dangerous gesture, because it produces transformations that seem senseless and may lead toward a dark future, not based on consensus, certainly not desired. The direct responsibility of architects in this context seems to be limited; but actually they are also to blame, even seriously so. They can be accused of having lowered (or perhaps erased) the intellectual component of their work, continuing even in the first decade of the 21st century to discuss old compositional questions, forcing architecture into a self-referential funnel that interests nobody other than sector professionals. Another accusation is that they have abandoned any type of ‘research’ that is not the pursuit of new clients. In the name of tough professional realism most of contemporary architecture is no longer capable of positively coping with its own epistemological crisis as an opportunity to activate processes of profound innovation. So most of the ‘new’ architecture that appears is already ‘old’, because it is not suited to the big opportunities offered by social and technological transformations. Contemporary society instinctively senses all this: that behind appearances of innovation there is actually lots of improvisation; that behind environmentalist issues, discussed constantly in our universities, there is really a lack of ideas. Society senses that architecture, until today, has remained cut off from the new technologies, extraneous to information science, to the new social economics, to the globalization of ideas. An architecture that has “great difficulty fitting into the contemporary world” – possibly by criticizing that world – and prefers, in its self-love, to live through its crisis as the last sign of its own lost grandeur.