The Resistant Object of Architecture

A Lacanian Perspective

Petra Čeferin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000329445
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

Architecture's role is becoming increasingly limited to serving the all-pervasive system of globalised capitalism and becoming a constituent, complicit part of its mechanism. The Resistant Object of Architecture addresses this problem, and does so in a way that represents a marked departure from predominant responses which, as the book shows, do not address the core issue.

The book addresses this problem by focusing on the question "what is architecture?, " and responds to this question by developing the immanent structural logic of architecture that enables it to work not only as an instrumental thinking practice, but as a practice of creative thinking. This means that it alone determines its issues, problems, and priorities, and precisely because of that it has the capacity and cogency to destabilise, indeed pierce holes in the system in which it operates.

The Resistant Object of Architecture draws on various theoretical sources, from the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan and the philosophy of Alain Badiou, to contemporary architectural theory. In contrast to the predominant view of today, it demonstrates that architecture has an affirmative, transformative capacity.

This book is an ideal read for those interested in architectural theory and history, analysis of contemporary architecture, and philosophy of architecture.

1 The four positions in architecture

Let us begin by examining, more systematically, the possibilities that today’s world affords architecture as a creative thinking practice. We will first observe in what ways the activity of architecture is understood and explained within the architectural profession today. Everyone who designs, draws, or writes about architecture also explicitly or implicitly maintains a certain understanding of what she does, what she practices—what architecture is. The notion that architecture is, or ought to be, a creative thinking practice is just one of the current views. These different views and explanations constitute different ways this activity is imagined and appears in the world. In this chapter we will look at these understandings or images of architecture as they can be traced through professional discussion, in articles, books, exhibitions, lectures, blogs, etc. Our starting point in this analysis will be two criteria, based on which architecture can be defined in terms of its basic characteristics.

The first criterion concerns the activity of architecture itself. It concerns the question of what type of activity architecture is. This criterion entails two options: either architecture is an activity that alone determines the body of its issues and the production of its objects; or it is an activity that responds to the issues assigned it by others (society, culture, the market, etc.), and subordinates the production of its objects accordingly. In the first case architecture is the type of activity determined by itself, or it is determined from the inside. In the second case, architecture is the type of activity that is determined from the outside.

The second criterion concerns the relation of the activity of architecture to that which is exterior to it, the society or the world in which it works. This criterion can be specified as follows: either architecture is an activity that accepts the given order of things, the given conditions in society; or it is an activity that operates—or should operate—by way of critically intervening in the given social reality. In the first case we speak about architecture as a practice of acceptance, and in the second case of architecture as a critical practice.

Based on these two criteria the multiplicity of different views and positions on architecture can be systematised into four basic categories, which correspond to the four possible combinations of the two criteria: the activity of architecture can either be determined from the inside or from the outside, and it can either accept the world as it is or maintain a critical position in relation to it. In what follows, we look closely at each of these four categories or positions.¹ The question that leads us is this: what does this analysis tell us about the possibility, the prospect of the existence of architecture as a self-determining or creative thinking practice in the world today—that is, as a practice that not only has its own domain of theoretical and practical knowledge, a history of its own, but which alone determines or chooses its problems, objectives, and purposes?

Architecture of the logic of the market: outside determination + acceptance

In keeping with this position, the activity of architecture is simply a form of industry comparable to the automotive or entertainment industries. Accordingly, the task of architects is to design such products-buildings that can successfully compete on the market. It is the market that ultimately decides whether an activity is necessary or not, and only if architecture can prove itself as a successful competitor on the market will it also confirm itself as an activity—or an industry—that is somehow necessary and thus worth investing in.

That the world is led by the logic of the market is, for the advocates of this position, not something that architecture should concern itself with. The task of architecture is certainly not to try to affect the order of the world. Its task simply is to make good, or even superior, products. They have to be functional, technologically advanced, environmentally friendly, as well as economically viable, and they have to be appealing.² This is what the advocates of this position like to emphasise: that architecture has to fulfil people’s expectations, needs, and wishes and conform to their various tastes. For architecture is meant for people, argue the advocates of this position, and thus it is only logical that architects design buildings that people like and want.³

This argument, however, is based on a very specific understanding of people. These are people with formed tastes, expectations, preferences, and sensibilities, as well as capacities—as opposed to people as human beings who can advance their own sensibilities and capacities, who can in fact redefine themselves, recreate, in a way, who they are. The latter understanding was characteristic for many architects of the modern movement, and they saw architecture as a force that can engender and support this process of redefinition or recreation. In fact, in their view it was precisely this that was the task of architecture—to broaden people’s intellectual horizons, change their expectations, activate their potentials, indeed, to re-create its people.⁴ This could not be further from the position and attendant sensibilities of the proponents of architecture of the market. What the modernists understood as the activation of human capacities, they consider a restraint, one that forces people to accept things that simply aren’t close to them. In their view, one of the fundamental problems with modernism—and for many advocates of this position modernism decidedly has many problems—lies precisely in the fact that it strove to change both individuals and the larger society. People are the way they are and the world is the way it is: this is the firm starting point of the advocates of the architecture of market logic.

That the world is as it is and people are as they are is, for the advocates of this position, neither a good nor a bad thing; it’s just a fact. The problem for them is that architects are still not willing to face this fact, and to accept it. Instead, they insist on architecture having some logic and some body of principles of its own, and argue that the primary principle around which this architectural logic turns is creativity, which requires that architects be creative. For the advocates of market architecture this is one of the worst ideas architects ever embraced. Creativity was both the raison d’être of modern architecture and its promise to humanity, they argue, and today we all know that modern architecture has failed in this promise entirely.⁵ And not only did modernist architects fail in their supreme goal to change society for the better, but in their idealistic endeavours to realise this change they in fact actively and significantly contributed to the deterioration of our living environment.⁶ The advocates of market architecture are convinced that it is high time architects stopped insisting on their far-fetched ideals and principles, which are indeed nothing but the principles of a self-centred utopian world of architecture, in which architects retreat from the real world and the real needs of people. Instead, they should confront reality and join the real world, which in the twenty-first century is a world governed by market-instrumental logic. If they refuse, architecture will prove unnecessary and be replaced by some other industry.

To sum up, according to this position, architecture is determined from the outside—it is determined by the market. As an activity with purpose and meaning it confirms itself when it performs well on the market. That human endeavours are obliged to prove themselves on the market is a given and unproblematic fact, and architecture has to adjust to this in order to operate as it should. For the advocates of this position architecture has to be usable and useful for the world as it is.

Architecture of the imperative of invention: inside determination + acceptance

According to this position, architecture is an activity that is determined by itself. It alone defines its own principles and assigns itself its issues and tasks. The task this position posits at the centre of architecture’s activity is the invention of the new (in the field of architecture). For this position, invention is the driving force of architecture. Architects have to be daring and imaginative, they have to experiment with new materials, technologies, formal solutions. They have to discover and explore new architectural possibilities beyond architecture itself. They have to perform a leap into the unknown, over and over again.

And this can probably be done today better than at any time before, the advocates of the imperative of invention proceed, because we live in an excellent time, because the current time enables, indeed encourages, such an inventive way of thinking and action. In terms of technology, it offers incredible possibilities, the kinds of materials and technologies that were only a decade ago almost unthinkable. What’s more, the entire planet is available today for these new planning and architectural interventions. Architects can work simultaneously in different parts of the world, fly from one construction site to another, from one invention to the next. And perhaps most importantly, today’s world favours and rewards creativity, the invention of the new, and thus by extension it also favours architecture. So instead of trying to “change the world” architects should take advantage of the potentials the world offers and respond to the exciting challenges it presents. The advocates of this position use the metaphor of the surfer riding the waves of globalisation to describe the way the architect of the twenty-first century functions: she has to seek balance in the demanding conditions of global capitalism, and in so doing perform her acrobatic designer feats in the most daring and elegant of ways.

One case that can in many respects be considered a paradigmatic example of this position is Ordos 100, the monumental project planned for Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region of China.⁷ Ordos 100 is a project for a complex of 100 villas planned for construction in the Mongolian desert on the outskirts of Ordos, a city of a million inhabitants. One of the objectives of the project was to demonstrate that a different kind of residential architecture could be built in the region. The residential structures that are commonly built, including the structures designed for Ordos City, correspond to what the architecture of market logic would find correct and agreeable. The Ordos 100 complex, however, was an attempt to design a different kind of architecture: daring, experimental, and contemporary—that is, architecture with the potential to break with the established views of what constitutes prestigious residential architecture today. The project curators invited architectural offices from around the world to design a villa for the complex, with each team assigned one villa. Ai Weiwei explained in the film that he made in connection to this project that he wanted “to introduce young foreign architects to China. They can’t just have good concepts, they need practice, they need opportunities.”⁸

Even a superficial view of the project, however, reveals that this project offers a rather limited range of opportunities. When it came to shaping the program and the urban plan there was actually no room left for conceptual experimentation: for Ordos 100 was from the very outset defined as a set of luxury villas for rent, and each villa was generally positioned in the middle of its assigned lot, with all of the lots arranged on a conventional grid. The opportunity for architects was in fact limited only to the design of individual buildings, or more precisely, to their conceptual drawings and models. All later design phases, during which significant design decisions are usually made, were no longer part of the architect’s domain, but were instead left to the investor to determine. The architects were indeed expected to focus on a specific set of questions, on the how questions: how to do what they were asked to do. They were invited to think, but only to think that which the leading project team gave them to think. And these are the questions predominantly related to form and spatial configuration of an individual object-villa, the questions that can be responded to in the form of models which were indeed the final products of the architects invited to take part in this project. It is these questions that were considered to belong to the domain of architecture, the so-called inner-architectural questions; which is why Ordos 100 is an illustrative example of the position of the imperative of invention. This position aims at the invention of the new in architecture, whereby it perceives said invention as invention within a clearly defined set of coordinates, within the inner-architectural field. Within this field architects are expected to be fully creative, fully inventive. They can do whatever they want—as long as they stay within the set limits.

To return to the Ordos 100 project: it was in just this way that architecture was treated by the media in their coverage of the project. Whatever the architects tried or succeeded to develop in their designs, whatever they did in the pursuit of their architectural experiments, the media simply reduced to experimentation with the forms and spatial compositions of the buildings. Similarly, architectural accomplishment was sought and celebrated in the unusual character of individual solutions and in the diversity of the proposals. Artforum enthusiastically catalogued what the architects proposed: “a villa without distinction between inside and outside, a monolith, a villa of different boxes colliding together into one unstable form, a green mountain rising out of the desert …”⁹ And based on the simple observation that the architects had designed buildings of unusual shapes and treatments, the media declared them contemporary avant-garde, and hailed their projects as revolutionary housing solutions (Figure 1.1).¹⁰

Figure 1.1 Ordos 100, Inner Mongolia, China, 2008. Presentation of the architectural proposals. Photo: Territorial Agency.

This is the understanding of the revolutionary, of invention and the new, that is characteristic for the imperative of invention in general. It claims that it aims at i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Introduction
• 1 The four positions in architecture
• 2 Towards the fifth position
• 3 The structural logic of architecture
• 4 The four structural elements of architecture
• 5 In lieu of a conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index