1. The failure of political
philosophy and the failure of architecture
The French
philosopher Jacques Rancière begins his book Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy with the question: “Is there
any such thing as political philosophy?”[i] He
argues that the Platonic and Aristotelian models of governance (the philosopher
kings or political parties) as well as modern versions of democracy – which he
would not label political, but an order of the police – are ultimately based
upon deceptions of the people and a dislocation of people’s imaginative
potential. For Rancière proper politics is not the agents of the politicians,
the parliamentary debates or voting procedure, or the institutions of the state
or departments of its operations. “Politics exists when the natural order of domination
is interrupted by the institution of a part of those who have no part.”[ii] Political philosophy, Rancière argues, has failed because it
falsely conceives the people and disguised the fundamental societal conflict
between the haves and the have-nots.
Architecture
has also misplaced its purpose at the expense of its content. The architect and sociologist Franco La
Cecla points out that “architecture has nothing to do with the substance of
true geography of the present;” thus, “one cannot do less than renounce architecture.”[iii] The
geography of the present is a continuously changing and contested urban world,
what Lefebvre called the everyday. Even some architects recognize this
discplacement of their own purpose. Koolhaas writes:
An architect’s
interests are ultimately determined by a series of random encounters with
projects and clients that do not allow an independent investigation of issues
or conditions outside their field of vision. Thus architects operate, by
definition, with ulterior motives; the capacity for independent analysis,
research or investigation is simply not within their repertoire. It is becoming
increasingly important for architects to operate
on a level independent of architecture, in order to understand, at the most
basic level, the phenomena affecting the development of architecture and the city.[iv]
The philosopher, sociologist/architect, and architect, frame
one of this project’s motivations. How
can architecture integrate the intelligence of the people? What broader design
tools are necessary to guarantee spaces or conditions of the people?
Berlin’s cooperative
housing models illuminate contemporary alternatives to the developer, urbanist,
market-architect, built urban world that follows a buy-off-the-shelf logic. The
critique looks at three case studies and three different models of collective
housing: Baugruppen (Building Groups), Neue Genossenschaften (New Cooperatives),
and Mietshäuser Syndikat (tenement trust). The different models of are
market-rate housing groups, limited equity housing cooperatives, and tenement
trust with dual ownership.
The models must be analyzed in a
specific time-space – in the time of now and in the space of Berlin. Before
going deeper into the cooperative housing models, I will first introduce the
broader scope of the project: my academic background, research questions,
analytical framework and methodologies of critique. The project attempts to
develop a balanced strategy between the ethnographer and the architect as two
nominal agents, one analytical and one propositional. All people apply ideas to
their daily lives, whether or not self-reflectively, as theories to their
everyday practices. “There is no
thought,” Adorno writes, “insofar
as it is more than the organization of facts and a bit of technique, that does
not have its practical telos.”[v]
It might be a practice of categorization, deconstruction, or analysis
(academics), or one of space proposition (architect, urbanist, or planner). The
balance between analysis and proposition will propose feedback loops as tools
to retain awareness of personal, disciplinary, or strategic shortcomings as a
reflexive engagement of writing and designs. Other tools include ethnographic
fieldwork, participant observation, interviews, documentary film, urban
analysis, and a syntheses of critique within a critical urban praxis. What are the mechanics, tools, and steps of
a critical urban praxis?
Architecture
must be understood through its continuous evolution or trajectory,[vi] which
includes a conglomeration of human and non-humans. Cooperative housing must be
researched in the current constellation of historical, state, and cultural
influences of Berlin: post-1989, withdraw of state programs,
liberalization of the housing market for private purchase and speculation, and
the transformations of the modes of labor within a post-fordist economy. What kind of dwellings do people want today?
Live-work spaces? Self-designed? Community spaces? Purchased off the shelf? The
evolution of a architectural project through concept, design, negotiation, and
development must be interpreted within the broader city, including the
communities and academics who dispute the progressive vision of the projects by
arguing that they contribute to the displacement of residents from
neighborhoods, increasing polarization between various groups, and legitimating
the creative city branding campaign on the micro-scale in neighborhoods that
are threatened by large-scale neoliberal urban development projects.[vii] The
critique will be in comparison and eventually in strict opposition to the
celebratory accounts, exhibitions, and publications, in order to broaden the
discussion to the new housing need, which is in part a result of the roll back
of state funding for social housing. The spike in wealth for the captains of
industry – the 1% – is manifest and reinvested within the expansion of
urbanization.
Space is no longer only an indifferent
medium, the sum of places where surplus value is created, realized, and
distributed. It becomes the product of social labor, the very general object of
production, and consequently of the formation of surplus value. This is how
production becomes social within the very framework of neocapitalism.[viii]
To unpack the controversies of the
contemporary city and evolution of capitalism, I will draw on a mix of
analytical frameworks and methodological traditions from urban sociology,
critical theory, and actor-network theory, in order to oscillate between a
critique of architecture and architecture as critique of society.
I will briefly sketch out my
background to introduce the reader to my foundational influences, to reveal my
intuitive interest to develop a sociology, philosophy, or theory of
architecture. I have long taken this balanced role between ethnography and
architecture. In 2006, I entered the architecture classroom at the University
of Colorado[ix]
to study and apply concepts of ecological sustainably to architectural
projects. However, I transferred to Marlboro College to develop a project that
broadened the architecture and ecological emphasis into sociology and community
practice. I studied classical sociological theory and trained in participant
observation fieldwork methods, which I utilized during eight months of
ethnographic fieldwork around the US on so-called social architectural
practices or design-build programs. This resulted in a 268 page sociological
analysis; 28 minute documentary film; and 2 yearlong community design project
to realize a farm greenhouse and community center.
After completing my undergraduate
work, I wanted to enter a unique architectural graduate program where I could
expand my empirical, sociological, and community-rooted architectural
experiences into new models of practice. Architektur Studium Generale appeared
to be a suitable place due to its presentation as an interdisciplinary
architecture graduate program with the reference to engineering, sociology, and
philosophy in the description. While my interpretation of interdisciplinary and
the programs were not in synchronicity, the semi-flexible boundaries of
workshops somewhat provided the opportunity to deepen my theoretical
comprehension of space and strategies for political emancipation. My curiosity
and inspiration was spurred by the so-called “spatial turn,”[x]
proclaimed by Edward Soja in Seeking
Spatial Justice.[xi] Yet
architects’ pedagogy, design processes, and projects are largely empty of critical
theory, only filled with their own distinctive characteristics – aesthetics – what
Pierre Bourdieu called cultural capital.[xii]
This conundrum – perhaps a result of my Anglophone background in comparison to
localized and disciplinary-focused European traditions in the workshops –
became the central motivation for my research and projects, which ultimately
led me to find a body of theory that mobilized an emancipatory analysis and
politics of space: within the urban writings of Henri Lefebvre; the politics of
aesthetics of Jacques Rancière; the political geography of Erik Swyngedouw; the
transformation of policy for migrant communities by Teddy Cruz; and the
Berlin-based journal An Architektur:
Produktion und Gebrauch gebauter Umwelt. The intertwining of theories of emancipation
and spatial practices was a central struggle that I grappled with during the
workshops. I found one direct line from the theoretical explorations to the
cooperative housing strategies in Berlin, where An Architektur editors are participating in designing various
models of cooperative housing.
Along the way, I applied the
analytical framework from actor-network theory[xiii]
to reveal and explain some of the controversies that my previous empirical work
had explored.[xiv] Other external projects
explored the problem of architecture as object, the professional deficiencies
of the architect, and the ambiguous navigations between professional and
community perspectives.[xv]
And more recently I suggested that the vulgate of conscious spatial practices (“ecology,”
“social,” or “smartness”), ultimately lead to an ill informed methodology,
obsession with the object, and inability to transcend preconceptions of
practice.[xvi] Many of the themes were
also explored in a pedagogical community that I co-organized called The City and the Political, which has
seen over 60 visitors and finished its first set of printed papers this summer.
[i] Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and
Philosophy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, page xxi.
[ii] Rancière, 11.
[iii] Franco La Cecla, Against Architecture, San Francisco:
PM Press, 2012, page 4.
[iv] Emphasis added: Rem Koolhaas,
"Shopping: Harvard Project on the City,"Mutations, Ingoprint SA:
Barcelona, 2001, 124-183.
[v] Theodore Adorno, “Marginalia to theory and praxis, “
in Theodore Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998 [1969], page 265.
[vi] The concept of
analysis developed by Yaneva will be expanded later, that of the projectile of
the architectural object through concept, design, construction, use, and reuse.
Yaneva, Albena, Made by the Office of Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography
on Design, Rotterdam: 010 Uit- geverij, 2009.
[vii] Erik Swyngedouw, Frank Moulaert, Arantxa Rodriguez,
“Neoliberal Urbanization in Europe: Large-Scale Urban Development Projects and
the New Urban Policy” Antipode, 2002. 547-582.
[viii] Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, page 154-155.
[ix] In Colorado, I had been encouraged to leave the
architecture program to pursue a more rigorous academic experience by Joseph
Juhasz, a psychologist who taught in the architecture school for many decades,
and in whose class I developed experimental projects that involved performance,
costumes, body painting, and nakedness, leading to a campus investigation. His
academic writing I later found relevant during my balance between sociology and
architecture: Juhasz, Joseph, "The
Place of Social Sciences in Architectural Education," Journal of
Architectural Education, v34 n3 p2-7 Spr 1981.
[x] B. Warf and S Arias, The Spatial Turn:
Interdisciplinary Perspectives, London: Routledge, 2008.
[xi] Edward Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice, London:
University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
[xii] Gary Stevens, The Favored Circle: The Social
Foundations of Architectural Distinction, Cambridge: The MIT PRESS, 1998, page
86.
[xiii] Latour, Bruno, Reassembling the Social: An
Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
[xiv] Paul Jones and Kenton Card, “Constructing ‘Social
Architecture’: The Politics of Representing Practice, Architectural Theory
Review, 16,3 (November, 2011).
[xv] Kenton Card, “In Search of a Democratic Production of
Social Architecture: A Philosophical Anthropology of the Conflicts of Social
Architecture or Experimentation on the Poor,” Design Philosophy Papers, “beyond
progressive design,” 3/2011, http://www.desphilosophy.com/dpp/dpp_journal/cited_papers/paper3_KentCard/dpp_paper3.html,
accessed on 14.08.12.
[xvi] Kenton Card, “The Fetish of ‘Conscious’ Architectural
Practices,” Horizonte: Zeitschrift für Architekturdiskurs, 2012, page 112-117.
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