Architecture or Revolution

Emancipatory Critique After Marx

Nadir Lahiji

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000045048
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

By linking building theory to the emancipatory project of critique advanced by radical thinkers in our time, this work investigates the key conceptual and historical elements that culminate in an emancipatory theory of building entitled: 'Toward a philosophy of shelter'. Taking Marx as its only resource, this work proceeds with the conviction that our era is contemporaneous to Marx's historical era. This means 'not judging the validity of Marx from the perspective of the historical situation', but rather, 'demonstrating the validity of a Marxian perspective for a singular historical situation', as ours. This work will therefore translate this perspective into seeing the situation of architecture through the eyes of Marx.

All those concerned with the predicament in our current condition in which architecture must play a major social role in upholding the universal value of what Alain Badiou calls ' generic humanity' will take an interest in this work. In particular, architects, critics, scholars, and students inside the field of architecture who would be seeking the application of this universal value to a new theory of building will be a welcoming audience for this work.

Part I

Chapter 1

The Blank Wall: Architecture and the French Revolution

Figure 1.1 Jacques Louis David, The Death of Marat. Description: French neoclassical school. The death of Marat (1743–1793), journalist, French revolutionary politician. La muerte de Marat. Brussels, Fine Art Museum. Credit: Album / Art Resource, NY

It has been said, that the French Revolution resulted from Philosophy, and it is not without reason that Philosophy has been called ‘Weltweisheit’ [World Wisdom].

Hegel, The Philosophy of History ¹

Architecture and bourgeoisie

Only one thinker, Walter Benjamin, took a Marxian step to delineate architecture as an instrument of the bourgeois power linking it to the event of the French Revolution. He is the thinker of the irruption of politics into architecture at the inaugural moment of modernity, which also entails the irruption of democracy insofar as ‘democracy’ is synonymous with ‘politics’. This constitutes the cornerstone of emancipatory critique in architecture. Benjamin traced the failed revolutionary sequence that ended with the Paris Commune. This would establish a conception of architecture in the era of liberal capitalist modernity that must be understood in the dialectical relation with Revolution. Benjamin’s investigation into the failed revolutionary sequence does not leave any doubt as to the relation between ‘proletariat’ and ‘bourgeoisie’, a point of contention debated for long that continues to this moment in the twenty-first century. Benjamin did not show any sign of ambivalence about the nature of ‘bourgeois revolution’—as opposed to ‘proletariat’ revolution—the concept of which goes back to Marx when he used the term in his The Poverty of Philosophy in 1847. It was the failure of ‘progressive’ bourgeoisie giving its place to ‘reactionary’ bourgeoisie with Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état on 9 November 1799, better known in the revolutionary calendar as 18 Brumaire, year VIII, that would lead to Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état and the Second Empire in 1851 after the defeat of revolutions of 1830 and 1848. The question that has been asked is the same as the title of Neil Davidson’s massive work: How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeoise Revolutions? ² If the ‘revolution’ in architecture in the moment of modernity is a bourgeois product, I analogically pose this question: How revolutionary was the revolutionary architecture in the time of the Bourgeoisie?

Benjamin, implicating architecture in the emergence of the bourgeoisie and its transition to dictatorship in the Second Empire, had a clear vision when he wrote the following passage in his 1935 Exposé:

The barricade is resurrected during the Commune. It is stronger and better secured than ever. It stretches across the great boulevards, often reaching a height of two stories, and shields the trenches behind it. Just as the Communist Manifesto ends the age of professional conspirators, so the Commune puts an end to the phantasmagoria holding sway over early years of the proletariat. It dispels the illusion that the task of the proletariat revolution is to complete the work of 1789 hand in hand with the bourgeoisie [emphasis mine]. This illusion dominates the period 1831–1871, from Lyons uprising to the Commune. The Bourgeoisie never shared in this error. Its battle against the social rights of the proletariat dates back to the great Revolution, and converges with the philanthropic movement that gives it cover and that is in the heyday under Napoleon III. Under his reign this movement’s monumental work appears: Le Play’s Ouvriers européens [European Workers]. … Rimbaud and Corbet declare their support for the Commune. The burning of Paris is the worthy conclusion to Haussmann’s work of destruction.³

It is not accidental that the moment of the French Revolution also contained the germ of an egalitarian theory of architecture. A revolutionary architect and theoretician emerged who later became a famous teacher at the newly established institution that was founded in 1794 named École Centrale des Travaux Publics, later to be renamed École Polytechnique. This École takes its rightful place as one of the first écoles spéciales created by the National Convention. The name of this architect is well known: Jean-Nicholas-Louis Durand. It is unfortunate that Benjamin did not directly address Durand in The Arcades Project given the fact that he took a special interest in the École Polytechnique to which he devoted an entire Convolute: ‘r [École Polytechnique]’.⁴ He was quite familiar with the history of the École as he cited numerous times the work of G. Pinet entitled Histre de l’École polytechnique published in 1887. As evidenced in Convolute r, we learn that Benjamin had in fact come across the name Durand and his famous work, if only in passing, when he quoted the architectural historian Emil Kaufmann, the author of Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier, which was published in 1933. Benjamin cites the following passage from Kaufmann’s book:

Shortly after 1800, things were already so far along that the ideas which appear in Ledoux and Boullée—elemental outbursts of passionate natures—were being propounded as official doctrine … Only three decades separates the late work of Blondel, which still … embodies the teachings of French classicism, from the Précis des leçons d’architecture of Durand, whose thinking had a decisive influence during the Empire and in the period following. They are the three decades of Ledoux’s career. Durand, who announced the norm from his chair at the École Royale Polytechnique in Paris … diverges from Blondel on all essential points. His primer begins … with violent attacks on famous works of classic Baroque art. St. Peter’s in Rome, along with its square, and the Paris Pantheon are invoked as counterexamples … Whereas Blondel warns of ‘monotonous planimetry’ and would not be unmindful of the function of perspective, Durand sees in the elementary schemata of the plan the only correct solution.⁵

Beyond this we cannot find any other reference to Durand in The Arcades Project. Alas! Benjamin of course had directed all of his attention to Le Corbusier, making references to his Urbanisme, but not to Vers une architecture. We can count seven citations of Le Corbusier, mainly in relation to Baron Haussmann, with one noteworthy exception to André Breton. As a reader of Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Bonaparte and The Communist Manifesto, Benjamin spent his time in the reading room of the Bibliothèque Nationale investigating the Second Empire and Napoleon III and his architects.

Durand belonged to the circle around the Idéologues. He shared the moral and political outlook of the Idéologues. The latter term is the derogatory name that years after its formation the First Napoleon gave to the intellectual circle who gathered around the Société d’Auteuil with a link to the culture of lumières. ⁶ We can recognize the more familiar figures associated with this circle that includes Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, Antoine-Louis-Claude Destutt de Tracy (who coined the term ‘Ideology’), Abbé Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, Madame de Staël, Benjamin Constant and Volney (the author of The Ruins, 1791), some of whom were involved in drafting the final French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. They would attend the meetings that Madame Helvétius hosted in her villa at Auteuil. There, as Sergio Villari informs us, ‘in memory of the deceased author of L’Esprit, the Idéologues continued their work: liberation from ignorance and prejudice, and the dissemination of the scientific truth of philosophes’.⁷ The Idéologues group had its headquarters at the Institut de France in Paris—inaugurated on 14 April 1796—and was associated with its ‘second class’, that is moral and political sciences. They reconstituted the ‘Radical Enlightenment’ in its post-Thermidorian phase. The member of the Idéologues ‘were the men who chiefly gave expression to the philosophique standpoint underpinning the Revolution’s values, aims, and ideology’.⁸ For Durand it was necessary to make sense of the Revolution that had already occurred. It was, moreover, necessary to affirm that the Revolution was ‘the product of the high ideals of philosophie’.⁹ As Villari writes:

It was important to trace out the meaning of civil engagement, of moral tension, of cultural experience. The inheritance of philosophie was understood as the historical consciousness of necessity of guiding great revolutionary events with rational thoughts, as scientific reason illuminating the progress of society, as the necessity of a continuous mediation between philosophie and politique. Durand’s work, in this sense, constituted itself as the extreme and even desperate achievement of that esprit des lumières that had so profoundly engaged architects and philosophers of the preceding generation.¹⁰

The fundamental trait of the emerging revolutionary architecture, with Durand at its center, that must be identified and recognized, was the ‘reverential’ and ‘austere’ void, the emptiness, about which Johann Joachim Winkelmann said: ‘aversion to empty spaces thus makes the walls fill in; and pictures empty of thought cover the emptiness’.¹¹ There is an elective affinity between Goethe’s Altar of Good Luck, the Cube and Sphere, and Durand’s experiment of emptiness in elemental geometry.¹² Durand, an student of Etienne-Louis Boullée and Julien-David Leroy (the author of Les Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce), ‘matured in the vital climate of the Revolution’.¹³ In linguistic terms, this emptiness is the degree zero. ¹⁴

At this point an excursus is in order to explicate the revolutionary event that led to the space of emptiness before it actually could be ena...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Apologue: Revolution, critique, and return to philosophy
• Exordium: Learning from Valéry reading Marx
• Critical pedagogy: Architecture or Revolution
• PART I
• PART II
• PART III
• Bibliography
• Index