Throughout the history of architecture, the role of the Architect has been to determine lines that ordered the world –and through such stabilizing of forces, provide a sense of reality.  In the past two centuries, however, as cities have rapidly expanded into vast urban territories that are increasingly pluralistic, the ability to determine such lines has become progressively more complex and suspect. While Architecture is a discipline embedded in determinacy, it now seems to yearn for its opposite – flexibility, choice and indeterminacy.  The roots of such an ‘identity crisis’ are tied to the rise of liberal pluralism and date back to the 16^th century. Fully formed by 1968, such a disciplinary identity crisis is clearest in the debates of the public sphere, which is also at the core of our sense of reality.  In light of the emerging crisis of ‘reality’, is there an opportunity to utilized this new alienation to reaffirm our role as architects ?

Publics FORM Reality

The notion of reality as being inherently tied to the functioning of the public is perhaps most eloquently and precisely stated by political theorist Hannah Arendt. According to Arendt, one only puts forth ideas and thoughts into the public sphere once they are internally digested and ready to be presented (or made ‘fit for appearance’).  This act – of putting forth a part of oneself to be seen and heard – is what constitutes a form of reality.  Arendt posits that, “Each time we talk about things that can be experience only in privacy or in intimacy, we bring them out into a sphere where they will assume a kind of reality which, their intensity notwithstanding, they never could have had before.”[1] For Arendt, the reality that ensues from making something public both assures us of the common world and our private subjectivities.  Arendt’s second definition of the public realm resides in the world that connects and simultaneously separates us.  She uses the metaphor of a group of strangers sitting around a table.  For her, the table is the public sphere – it is the world that gives us a common platform to understand one another, yet allows us to be separate (and unassimilated) individuals.  The act of simultaneous connection (or equality) and separation (individuality) is directly linked to the notion of plurality, which resides at the core of the public sphere and its associated affirmation of reality.  Thus, while pluralism ensures reality, it also makes it increasingly difficult for the architect to respond in a world that is no longer a unified public but rather a grouping of various constituencies.

Giacometti’s ‘City Square’ is an analogous sculpture to the Arendt’s definition of the public realm. The piece reveals a grouping of distinct individuals tied together, yet separated by the platform. This frail dialectic frames the project of pluralism.

Identity Crisis

The emphasis on Pluralism as the central political and social apparatus of the public sphere has produced an ‘identity crisis’ within the urbanized territory of individual interests. Only by understanding the roots of such a crisis can we project and steer our possible future(s).

Liberal pluralism is a political structuring principle that allows for a multiplicity of interests and ideologies to peacefully coexist in one society. The notion of pluralism emerged in nascent form with the expansion of the public sphere as early as the sixteenth century, in which the European social landscape transformed rapidly as capitalist trade took a more central role in economic and political life.  These processes created a growing interdependence between the centralized state and merchant capitalists.  The relationship was quite simple: the state was able to secure political and military force to expand to foreign and domestic markets, while the capitalists could obtain revenue for the state.  This caused the feudal powers – the Church, the Nobility, etc. who were formerly the representatives of “public-ness,” to disintegrate[2].  But disintegrate into what? It is no surprise that the Age of the Enlightenment emerged at this moment and was able to provide order and authority to a public that was already in the process of fragmentation. The Enlightenment placed objective truth and reason in highest regard and put forth the proposition that all humans were equal due to an identical capacity to be rational.  This allowed for an emerging role of the individual and a transformation and expansion of the “public.”  Moreover, the search for fixed structures in the universe was believed to ultimately lead to a greater understanding of society and offer peace. While the Enlightenment espoused universality, reason, and objectivity, this was quickly challenged by the Counter-Enlightenment or Romanticism, which set up the first contradiction for Modernism, arguing that there was no structure of things and advocating the creativity of the subjective individual.

The tension between Enlightenment and Romanticism is at the core of the dialectic of Pluralism.  This tension still haunts us today and has made it exceedingly difficult for Architects and Urban Designers to conceive of a coherent public sphere.  Yet, we are continually trying to unpack and reconcile such positions.  Think of the similarity between the couplings on various debates: Commonality vs. Distinction (Pluralism); Objective vs. Subjective (Enlightenment vs. Romanticism); Collective vs. Individual (CIAM); Exterior vs. Interior (Team X’s Doorstep Analogy), Control vs. Choice (Archigram); Frame vs. Pod (Megastructure); Container vs. Interior (Megaform), Determinancy vs. Indeterminacy (Hard vs. Soft Systems); etc.  The emphasis on such an apparently irreconcilable project has more recently been ignored in praxis and research while the goal of ‘rescuing’ the public realm still remains. Largely informed by the ‘main street’ of the Charter of the New Urbanism, this “new” project has only grazed the surface of the dialectic of the public sphere. As the alienation of a fragmenting public sphere increases, our approaches as architects are exceedingly conventional and in denial of the forces of urbanization   We are in need of a reality check, if only to save the reality created by the public sphere.

No-Stop City – Endless Urbanization within the container of architecture. Absurd and a very real depiction of the contemporary metropolis. Drawing by: Ed Tung

Reality Check

One of the most interesting projects that provided a reality check to the transformation of the city and public realm emerged at the fall of modernism in 1968 –Archizoom’s No-Stop City. What makes Archizoom’s project so impactful is that it is one of the first to speculate on the process of urbanization rather than deny them, as many of the predecessor projects of the 1960’s Utopianism were guilty of. Emerging from a critique of the megastructure as well as industrial capitalism, No-Stop City takes the expansion of the factory and supermarket that encompassed society at large. In the scheme, the city has essentially expanded into an endless interior, programmed for production and consumption.  Without limits or edges, No-Stop City was a powerful statement on the state and role of architecture within urbanization.  No longer the civic apparatus of the collective, architecture’s most effective role amidst urbanization would be to provide large and ubiquitous interiors, realigning the flux and indeterminacy of contemporary urbanization as a function of interior design. Presented through discorsi per immagini (discourse through images), Archizoom attempted to suspend reality if only to reveal a very real condition that was emerging – urbanization was eroding the city.  As Branzi posits:

The problem then, is no longer that of creating a metropolis which is more humane and better organized, but rather that of understanding the objective laws which control the shaping of the urban-architectural phenomenon, demystifying the complex ideology which surrounds the discussion and conditions of the form it takes[3]

Archizoom realized that the project of the megastructure was not up to the challenge of reconciling such a condition and in fact was (ironically) itself embedded in the processes of urbanization and consumption.  Essentially, Archizoom’s No-Stop City projected the logical and ironic conclusion of the megastructure, thereby revealing its ‘falsity and immorality’.[4] This essentially terminated the project of the megastructure and redirecting architectural energy to real yet conservative approaches to the city, such as those espoused by Jane Jacobs. Archizoom, in fact, used the emerging fragmentation of the public realm to reveal a world without pluralism.  As such, it posited Arendt’s largest fears – a grouping of people that replaces the notion of a public, allowing reality to descend into alienation, delusion and isolation. As Branzi states:

The carrying out of a social organization of labor by means of Planning eliminates the empty space in which Capital expanded during its growth period. In fact, no reality exists any longer outside the system itself … The city no longer “represents” the system, but becomes the system itself, programmed and isotropic, and within it the various functions are contained homogeneously, without contradictions.[5]

Only through Archizoom’s suspension of the ‘real’ (the megastructural project), could they clearly announce the absurdity of new forms of urbanization.  As projects at the scale of the XXL often have no client (or translate into material world), Archizoom’s  discorsi per immagini was a powerful critique to the dilemma of pluralism, providing a clarified statement and the outlines of an enemy. Only once an enemy is identified can architect’s clarify their stance and trajectory.  As such, a reality check required a distancing from the utopianism of urbanization to frame the real project of urbanism – the political reconciliation of the individual and collective to reaffirm the reality of the public sphere.

As Architects once again engage in the problems of urbanization, it becomes increasingly natural to project a new optimism clad in techno-ecologies.  Yet, we need to ask if by projecting new utopianism further alienates the discipline from having an impact to structure the forces of urbanization.  This is not a call to revisit Jane Jacob’s manifesto, which was hindered by romanticism and nostalgia, but rather to clarify the project of the “city” by at once stepping away from reality only to project forward within the forces of reality. Ironically, this may be the only manner to reaffirm pluralism and the reality offered to the public realm

[2] Goode, Luke.  Jurgen Habermas: Democracy and the Public Sphere.  Pluto Press: Ann Arbor, 2005. P.5

[3] Branzi, Andrea. “No-Stop City: Residential Car Park, Universal Climatic System” in in No-Stop City. Andrea Branzi/ Archizoom Associati (Orléans: HYX, 2006), 176

[4] While Quoted by Natalini, both Superstudio and Archizoom had a shared belief in expressing the forms of urbanization as clearly as possible and taking these to their logical conclusion. See: Megastructure Reloaded (Berlin, Hatje Cantz, 2008), 31

[5] Branzi, Andrea. “No-Stop City: Residential Car Park, Universal Climatic System” in in No-Stop City. Andrea Branzi/ Archizoom Associati (Orléans: HYX, 2006), 178