The role of Archinect’s new 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. 

A sort of Anti Imperial Split Manifesto

1. Architecture has a Flat Earth problem. Its institutions, structures, and experts insisting on a marked division between West and East (and its ideological subdivisions) that can only exist on a territorial plane.  Otherwise, how could such contrast be justified on a rotating sphere of dirt endlessly (or at least for 4.5 billion years) orbiting the cold void of space? Each trip around the world (by Magellan, Drake) would have made it more evident that the neighbor to the right, is also the neighbor to the left. After all, China is located both, to the East and West side of Chicago and almost as distant from Buenos Aires coming from any side. So how did architecture became part of this society of geomorphic conspiracy?

After all, China is located both, to the East and West side of Chicago and almost as distant from Buenos Aires coming from any side.

2. Architecture has always been a tool of imperialism. A critical review of the history of imperialism displays an inexhaustible obsession with ‘otherness’ (other aesthetics, sensibilities, ways to make and live in architecture). The colonizer in its desire to conquer has to continuously render attainable horizons with romantic landscapes and otherized people. The portraits done under the ideology of hegemonic powers have the capacity to render nature, customs,  cultural artifacts and architecture—always architecture, as fetishized, politicized and historicized commodities. Have you seen landscape paintings inspired by the Orientalist tradition? Nature washed under theological light? Kitsch rooms filled with hypersexualized bodies? The subjects of scrutiny (people, plants, buildings) devoured with a Gaugainean appetite? What about the role of architecture as a tool for warfare and part of the threat of forced political expansion?As in the Bosnian war or Palestine? Aren’t these conflicts part of idealized images of West and East? But, can the idea of the West exist without rendering its antithesis in the East? And how can architecture as an ideological device instead work as a tool for decolonization?

Tupac once infamously declared that the irreversible split of contemporary rap was not about ‘East or West’, but about ‘power and money; riders and punks.’

3. Tupac once infamously declared that the irreversible split of contemporary rap was not about ‘East or West’, but about ‘power and money; riders and punks.’ And just like that, he and Biggie, icons of a harsh coastal division lost their lives in a series of murders yet to be solved. Similarly, a forced more or less continental, more or less arbitrary division has killed the possibility of a comprehensive understanding of history as a global construction. In their cynical alliance,  curatorial, archival and academic programs have been tainted by the biassed readings of so-called East and West. Entire University curriculums, museum collections, and encyclopedia pages are complicit in the permanent and profitable reinforcement of bland forms of collective identity. Institutionalized experts travel the world identifying products responding to the ideological boundaries set by the status-quo. The wild pillage, re-appropiation, and theft of cultural, religious and artistic icons that has been going on for centuries has been ideologically mitigated with this or that exhibition or publication devoted to rediscovering the virtues of Chinese, East-European, Mid-Eastern, African, or Latin American cultural production (art and architecture included). Every day with a new academic program shifting its view to an ‘emerging’ economy, with a new program dedicate to an expanded ‘foreign’ field to perform an ideological and economic transaction.  Just like Biggie and Tupac belonged to the era of Gangsta’ rap, the crimes perpetrated by cultural imperialism are a true form of Gangster Ideology.

4. To talk about East and West as fully formed opposites is to be fundamentally anti-modern. The Modernist project sought through the distillation of mediums to their bare structures a form of universalist vocabulary that transcended time and place. Stripped from vernacular and stylistic tics, music was arranged arrhythmically, literature constructed without narrative, painting non-objectively without representation and architecture, presented as raw elements and strategies (pilotis, free plan, free facade, raumplan).  Within this repertoire, the hegemonic powers aim to construct a version of history in which they invent new forms by neglecting the advancements of the ‘other’. Embarked on a futile race of denial, time and money has been splurged to reconstruct global narratives and make projects melt into air. Wasn’t the CIA investing in art as tool of global warfare? But, is it possible to perpetually deny the Black Square roots of Hard Edge and Color Field? The Malevichean heritage of Kelly, Stella, Rothko or Newman? In a world split between East and West, how would the Universe of Sengai Gibon relate to Walter De Maria, or Plato, or Rem Koolhaas? Aren't Jung archetypes part of a ‘universal’ collective unconscious? If kept hidden behind the thick layers of the Iron Curtain, what’s the relationship between Malevich’s ‘Houses of the Future’ (1923-24), Khidekel’s ‘Layered Architectures (1930’s) and Frank Llloyd Wright’s most radically abstract architectural iterations? Could Le Corbusier pull off a Unité d’habitation without’s Ginsburg’s Narkomfin? What about the Metabolists and their early predecessors in Archigram? Can the Bauhaus (or even Vhkutemas) exist without the People’s Art School in Vitebsk? After all, if we’re contemporaries aren’t we all ‘comrades of time’?

...critical architecture can offer a vision of a world where humanity, architecture and the environment are in radical balance, and where East and West are just geographical references to explain where the Sun rises and the day sets. 

5. Just like critical theory seeks human emancipation, a true form of critical architecture is only possible in its capacity to question its ideological, political and historical imperatives in a search for liberation. In its critical role, this architecture can challenge the parameters of the status quo and unearth a genealogy of movements (in victory or defeat) willing to threaten the superstructure and infrastructure of hegemonic powers. Following the echoes of the red wedge beating the whites in order to help free (and threaten) entire continents from the grasp of antiquated forms of imperialism, history also warns about the not-so-subtle role of Futurist anxiety in the formulation of Fascism and its multiple incarnations. Architecture, whether as a drawing or as poured concrete, as a public school building or as a dividing wall has the power to destroy or unite, to educate or indoctrinate, to entrap or decolonize. In the midst of an ongoing debacle of global proportions only a truly critical architecture can offer a vision of a world where humanity, architecture and the environment are in radical balance, and where East and West are just geographical references to explain where the Sun rises and the day sets.