In this installment of Cross-Talk #9 — The Architecture Play, we talk with Taraneh Meshkani about the role of autonomy or maybe its non role in Architecture and how scale just might be the answer.
The role of Archinect’s series Cross-Talk is to bring forward the positive aspects of the polemic and allow for the resulting conflict to bring to life an otherwise still and comfortable climate of creativity—if there can be one. Cross-Talk attempts—if to only say that it did—to allow text the freedom that the image has accepted and embraced. Cross-Talk attempts to force the no, to contradict itself, to anger, to please and then anger again, if only to force a stance, to pull out the position of the self, of the discipline and of the hour as a means to begin and maintain conversations moving forward.
“There is a shift form the model of the polis founded on a centre, that is, a public centre or agora, to a new metropolitan spatialization that is certainly invested in a process of de-politicization, which results in a strange zone where it is impossible to decide what is private and what is public.”—Giorgio Agamben (2006)
In the post-political era, are we merely witnessing the architecture of managerialism? By abandoning the utopian thinking of modernism and dissociating from the radical project, the interest of the architecture discipline and theory has shifted to study “things as they are, as non-ideological problems that need technical solutions” (Spencer 2014, 164).
In the post-critical tradition, the architecture looks inward. The “autonomy project” which has been discussed by many in the discipline such as Peter Eisenman and Pier Vittorio Aureli highlights the importance of the absolute architecture as the precondition to social, political, and cultural processes. The architecture that renounces utopia does not need to be concerned with culture, but only with form. By distancing itself from economy and politics, the project of autonomy becomes paradoxical in highlighting the irrelevancy and isolation of the discipline instead of giving it more agency. Or as Hays states, “one should ask not whether architecture is autonomous, or whether it can willfully be made so, but [...] what kind of situation allows for architecture to worry about itself to this degree” (Hays 1998, ix).
But what about urbanism? If the autonomy project doesn’t save the discipline, would the re-engagement of architecture with the city rejuvenate it? How does scale negate the project of autonomy in architecture?
In “Bigness or the problem of Large,” Rem Koolhaas states that “only through Bigness can architecture dissociate itself from the exhausted artistic/ideological movements of modernism and formalism to regain its instrumentality as vehicle of modernization” (Koolhaas 1995, 510). For Koolhaas, the question of scale can solve the problematic of the architectural agency. There are new spatial tropes that resurface this notion. The emergence of new geographies of an information-based economy has brought new material manifestations besides the socio-political and cultural transformations that have changed the contemporary urban planning schemes and left new footprints in the cities. Even though the process of urbanization is global, the neoliberal economy generates uneven urban growth. A manifestation of this phenomena is the new tech-enclaves and their unique infrastructural and administrative procedures. Apple Park in Cupertino is the best example of such enclaves. Designed by Foster and Partners and built as the latest headquarters of Apple, the building accommodates around 12,000 employees with the provision of 8,255 parking spaces.
Even though the process of urbanization is global, the neoliberal economy generates uneven urban growth.
Call to mind Ebenezer Howards utopian city model of the Garden Cities (1898), which considered a maximum population of 8,000 people. It is vital to highlight the scale of the Apple Campus, which becomes more than an architectural building. Located opposite early suburbia, the campus provides its employees with everything they may desire, aside from catering purely to their housing needs. Technotopia, as I call it, is a new utopia of the neoliberal regime and is different from its predecessors. It is autonomous in a real sense both in terms of form and context, which gives new meaning to the privatization of space. Its bigness, Koolhaas reminds us, “is no longer part of any urban tissue. It exists; at most, it coexists. Its subtext is fuck context” (Koolhaas 1995, 502).
Is the autonomy project and bigness still capable of proposing new emancipatory ideals for the architecture discipline? Does architecture need to happen on a different scale? Will embracing the city instead of abandoning it produce new spatial formations?
Does architecture need to happen on a different scale?
In the process of emancipating architecture—during which the discipline is unable to respond to technological, environmental, economic, and social challenges—persists an urgency to rethink the ties between the scales of architecture and the urban. This happens not merely as formal, typological, and morphological exploration but concerning processes that are emerging in tandem with new forms of urbanization that manifest on the larger scalar side as landscape and territory.
The “play” between the scales can be the answer!
Anthony Morey is a Los Angeles based designer, curator, educator, and lecturer of experimental methods of art, design and architectural biases. Morey concentrates in the formulation and fostering of new modes of disciplinary engagement, public dissemination, and cultural cultivation. Morey is the ...
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