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Prologue on critique
Here
is a critique of architecture. The first task of critique is to break
apart. The second is to put back together. We cannot overemphasize the latter
at the expense of the former. The architect’s task is usually one of designing
the objects of peoples’ environments, which makes analysis feel like dead
weight. A critique of architecture will oscillate between breaking apart
architectural production and putting together possibilities of future
arrangements, funding models, and politics of architecture. What would this oscillation look like? This
project is an attempt to follow “Marx’s work … as an exposé of the world turned upside down and the attempt
to right it.”[i]
Many of my
architect friends say: “Tell us what to
do!” “How can we build spatial justice?” “What is a socially responsible floor
plan?” To them, I say, you must engage with such controversies on your own
terms, within your professional repertoire and nonprofessional lives. In between
ideas and practices is a grand canyon of mystery, and the request for instantly
satisfying and deployable methods by practitioners, risks replacing emancipatory
aspirations with ambiguous aesthetic gestures.
We have to distinguish between pathways
and models. The written critique creates a pathway for practitioners to walk
down, where they can interpret for themselves the world and how they wish to
reinterpret their practices. Models come from the realm of practitioners – or
those who slide between the worlds (pinch hitters) – to be tested, analyzed,
and reflected upon, to oscillate between the failures and possibilities.
I am not interested in shallow
concepts, flashy images, or indiscriminate measurements, but in a precise
balance between critique’s deconstruction and reconstruction. It will be
obvious to my readers that I will not invest in the economy of architectural
images. Instead, the project here will introduce a theoretical framework of
critique and integrate the everyday knowledge of people in Berlin through
micro-ethnographies of cooperative housing strategies, as a balance between my
own spatial analysis and suggestion for a critical urban praxis.
[i] Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2003, page 100.
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