This is an unpublished text first written, and subsequently reworked, for the series of events I curated around the theme of Architecture and Freedom which took place at the Royal Academy of Arts, London in spring 2016 and which coincided with exhibition by Ai Weiwei.
‘Who holds the devil, let him hold him well / He hardly will be caught a second time’. These are the words of Faust, the eponymous hero of Goethe’s tragic play, uttered as the devil offers him access to life’s very essence in exchange for his soul. The ‘Faustian pact’ – the noble yet naive figure trading all they hold dear for the means to achieve their otherwise unobtainable dreams – is a familiar trope in western culture. Rarely, however, has it been applied to a professional discipline, and rarer still to the relationship between that discipline and something as pervasive, all-encompassing yet ultimately intangible as capitalism. At first glance, this proposition might seem a touch grandiose. How could a profession form a pact with an economic system? However, one only need glance at the towering skyline of any modern metropolis to see that the connection between architecture and twenty-first-century capitalism has never been tighter.
Architecture is unlike other professions. Take a profession such as law, for instance. Like architects, lawyers also work for clients: people who come to them requiring legal services. But what defines the law as a profession is not simply the training and qualifications needed to operate as a lawyer and provide these services, but the strict ethical and professional codes that govern their conduct. Lawyers’ responsibilities are always to their clients. In architecture, it’s a little different. Yes, architects are similarly contractually bound to perform the services their clients are paying for. But architects, and with hardly any exceptions, also profess to be acting on behalf of the public.
In part this is as a legacy of the twentieth century, and in particular the post-war era when many architects worked for local authorities, often on public housing projects, where notions of ‘working for the public good’ were intrinsic to the discipline, even if what was actually built sometimes suggested otherwise. Today less than 1% of architects work in the public sector, so this explanation only gets us so far. In fact, if one digs a little deeper, one finds that the concern for the public is actually fundamental to the discipline. Architecture is not simply about design, but on a structural level operates as the process by which private capital is converted into public effect.
Almost every building exists in, and in some way shapes, the public realm, whether intentionally or not. Architects have traditionally been the mediators of this process, working to ensure that the public effect of a building is a positive one. Yet the evidence from so many cities around world indicates that this aspect of architecture is being lost, or rather traded, for money, by developers looking to squeeze every available penny from a building project. But we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that it's also being traded by architects themselves for the sheer personal, professional and, of course, financial rewards of seeing their design built – and often at a vast scale.
This trade-off has always been part of architecture and development, and it’s one that has led to the creation of some of the great cities of the world. However, to take a city like London, the balance has shifted decisively towards rampant, indiscriminate and superficial development, more interested in making a quick profit than in sustaining the city in any meaningful or lasting way. The towers going up across the city stand as totems of the race to the top of the housing market, as developers see how far they can push prices – not always successfully, we might add. And as the market turns, as it inevitably will, today’s high-end housing may in some perverse logic become the slums of tomorrow
This strange inversion is what happens when architecture ends up operating solely as an agent of capital, and the delicate balance of private and public interests, which should define the discipline, is ignored. It hasn’t always been like this and there have been moments in history, such as the post-war era, when the balance has gone the other way – and not always to positive effect. So to understand where we are now and how we’ve arrived here, it’s instructive to look back to earlier moments and also beyond the western sphere. It’s only from these perspectives that we might understand our present situation and perhaps find a way beyond it.
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The histories of capitalism and property development are closely intertwined, so much so that as capitalism began to be first theorised – and critiqued – at the end of seventeenth century, it was done so in explicitly architectural and urban terms.
For inhabitants of London in the decades following the Great Fire of 1666, capitalism’s most visible manifestation was the city’s expansion beyond its old medieval walls into the virgin fields of Stepney, Hoxton and Shoreditch. Driving the city’s growth were some of the first speculative property developers who used borrowed money to erect modest, uniform, brick houses, making early use of standardisation, and aimed at the emerging middle classes. The financial motivations of these pioneer developers did not go unnoticed, especially the ways they resorted to whatever means necessary to extract maximum return. The most notorious was Nicholas Barbon – a ruthless developer but also economic theorist of such importance as to be quoted by Marx in the very first pages of Das Kapital. Barbon became infamous for his refusal to pay debts, ostentatious lack of scruples and general skullduggery; he was not averse even to provoking a riot, as he did at Red Lion Square, if it served his ends.
Very few of the houses that Barbon built survive today, victim to the same forces of capitalist creative-destruction he advocated. Looking at those fragments of elegant streets which have escaped redevelopment, it is hard to see much correspondence with the view of Barbon’s contemporary, the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor, who saw them as ‘Scoundrell Streets … [which developers like Barbon were] Continuously Cobling up to Sell by wholesale’. Hawksmoor’s words were driven by moral as much as aesthetic concern, taking aim at the methods and behaviours of developers who he saw as a ‘Vermin [which] has run, & spread all over ye Country, and as they have Ruind ye Captiall Soe have they all ye Other Citys & Townes in Engld’. Barbon would have cared little about this attack. For him, property development was a means to profit financially from the transformative economic forces which capitalism was unleashing. Already, architecture was becoming a conduit for capital.
If we fast forward to the 1920s, we see architecture finally fully embracing the transformations and emerging possibilities of the industrial age: new technologies, modern materials and the availability of capital. Some architects even saw their discipline as offering the means to reconcile the internal contradictions inherent in capitalism itself which Marx had so influentially identified. The most notable was Swiss-French architect, Le Corbusier, who, seduced by the glamour of the ocean liner and motor car, was determined to fashion a corresponding architectural language for the new modern age: rejecting decoration in favour of the supposedly rational approach of a building’s form being determined by its function. But ‘modernism’ as it became known was not simply about aesthetics. Without making architecture an ally, Corbusier argued, capitalism was at risk of being overthrown by the masses of the proletariat in the way Marx had predicted. In short, it was, in Le Corbusier's words, either ‘architecture or revolution’.
Thus, Le Corbusier’s utopian city plan, ‘Ville Radieuse’ – with its elevated tower blocks set in open parkland, long linear motorways, separated vertically from pedestrian areas – was conceived as a way to transform spatial and social relations, and in doing so (and despite the architect’s dalliances with syndicalism) preserve the underlying capitalist economic order. Architecture would, instead, provide the revolution: offering social emancipation, improved living and working conditions and pointing towards a better life in the future.
If the first wave of modernist architects of the 1920s and 1930s sought to reconcile capitalism’s internal contradictions, the second wave, who came of age in the late 1940s and 1950s, aimed to mitigate its effects and inequities. As Western Europe rebuilt after the destruction of the Second World War, architecture was brought into the service of the welfare state as a powerful bulwark to capitalism’s sweeping of all before it. The market was seen as a necessary evil, and for that reason confined only to sectors of the economy where its advantages clearly outweighed its downsides. The welfare state filled the vacuum where, it was felt, the market had failed or had no place: notably in education, healthcare and, above all, housing. This was the era of the council estate and urban regeneration, with architects leading the charge in trying to create a brave new world, in which the market was made to serve people, rather than the other way round.
As the post-war consensus gave way from the late 1970s to the free market doctrines of Thatcher and Reagan, architecture became one of the most visible manifestations of this dramatic economic and political shift. The doctrine of ‘form follows function’ was abandoned in favour of stylistic pluralism. Suddenly, colour, decoration and historical quotation were in; earnest abstraction and truth to materials were out. In many ways, the stylistic relativism that characterised what became known as ‘postmodern’ architecture, which so decisively toppled modernism’s insistence on absolutes, was the natural and logical response to the era's economic liberalisation. The individual (or more often the corporation) was now the prime economic agent, with the ability to exercise choice in the marketplace the embodiment of one's freedom from state interference. With architects operating in a market for their services, the proposed external appearance of a building was the easiest and most immediately obvious way of differentiating their work from that of their competitors, even if the structure underlying the stone veneer and classical stylings often differed little from those of steel and glass modernist buildings.
Postmodernism’s radical moment passed after only a few years, having served its purpose and been assimilated by the market. Apart from the most marginal of practices, architecture now stands as an instrument, for some even an agent of capital, operating for hire to generate value for investment. That is not to say that all architects operate this way. Rather, despite whatever social or otherwise missions some architects may have, as a discipline, architecture is now subservient to its underlying economic function.
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Architecture’s place in the neoliberal capitalist economy, and its ultimate subservience to the market, has been explored from many angles, with the architect Rem Koolhaas, founder of Dutch practice OMA, among those to take it furthest. With typical brazenness, especially for those architects still ambivalent about their capitalistic function, Koolhaas has embraced and arguably revels in the new realities the market has created, a position that he famously articulated nearly four decades ago in his seminal book Delirious New York (1978).
Posing a ‘retroactive manifesto’ for a city that was then mired by crime and financial crisis, Koolhaas recast the very aspects of New York’s urbanism that many saw as the cause of its difficulties as the root of its success in creating a new urban reality:
Manhattanism is the one urbanistic ideology that has fed, from its conception, on the splendors and miseries of the metropolitan condition – hyper-density – without once losing faith in it as the basis for a desirable modern culture. Manhattan’s architecture is a paradigm for the exploitation of congestion.
The byproducts of the modern capitalist city – principally congestion – should not be mitigated, Koolhaas suggested, but embraced for all their resultant irrationality, even if that means building ever taller and heading further underground. In a system in which the freedom to shop has become the ultimate emancipatory experience, what’s left for the architect to do other than to play capitalism’s game with a wry smile and see how far its internal logic can be pushed?
Intriguingly, Koolhaas’ firm is one of the global practices to have undertaken a significant number of projects in China, a country that despite its economic liberalisation, which has helped drive modernisation and urbanisation at a pace unprecedented in world history, remains a one-party state. In comparison to the capitalist west, China stands, in Koolhaas’ words, as a ‘parallel universe’.
In 2004, two years after his practice won the commission to design the CCTV building for China’s state TV agency, Koolhaas produced his Beijing Manifesto in which he reflected on the differences for an architect between working in China and the west:
In the free market, architecture = real estate. ... But in China, money does not yet have the last word. CCTV is envisioned as shared conceptual space in which all parts are housed permanently, aware of one another’s presence – a collective. Communication increases; paranoia decreases.
Architecturally these ideas were expressed through the interconnectivity of the building, which facilitated close collaboration between different parts of the company and even allowed for a public route through its zig-zagging form – the sort of openness that is more or less unheard of in China. Yet for some critics of the project this programmatic explanation was disingenuous. Many saw the CCTV building’s daring, apparently gravity defying structure – in its architect’s words, ‘A structure that violates some of the most sincerely held convictions about logic and beauty’ – as little more than a piece of architectural propaganda, glorifying an organ of state oppression. Even Koolhaas felt it necessary to ask, ‘Was its structural complexity simply irresponsible?’
The CCTV building bears interesting comparison to another internationally significant project completed around that time. This is the Swiss architects, Herzog and de Meuron’s bird’s nest stadium for the 2008 Olympics, a building that symbolised more than any other structure China’s arrival onto the world stage as one of its great powers. The stadium was co-designed with the Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei, who had initially hoped that through his involvement the stadium might become a symbol of the possibility of freedom. He later expressed regret for the way the Olympics became tool not of change but of ‘patriotic education’. However, in an ironic twist of fate, the transmission of the image of the stadium to a TV audience of billions across the world helped bring ever more global attention to Ai’s art and activism, and ensured there was international outcry at his house-arrest in 2011.
In China, the dissent of Ai Weiwei and others is bluntly and often brutally suppressed; his enemies are obvious. In the west, meanwhile, the right to dissent is a cornerstone of liberal democracy; without it the whole edifice on which it is built crumbles. But as freedom of expression becomes seen and practised in increasingly economic terms – with the freedom to express oneself though what we buy almost supplanting the freedom to express oneself through words or ideas – there comes a point when the very possibility of dissent can, conversely, act as confirmation – even reinforcement – of the correspondingly ‘free’ market economic order that otherwise smothers all in its path. The question we're then left facing is: how can one critique a system as repressive that not only permits that critique, but is actually sustained and reinforced by it? A different set of tactics are required, one that for architects especially requires looking beyond the confines of the present system.
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In attempting to chart a course forward, it’s currently quite hard to see beyond the chaos that has engulfed western politics, whether it's the rise of populisms of both the left and the right, nationalism, identity politics or the emergent politics of the environmental movement. But if we were to take a long view, and put ourselves in the shoes of historians looking back decades from now, it's a good bet that they would see the chaos of our present moment as symptomatic of a paradigmatic shift, of one economic system – the neoliberal order that’s been in place since the early 1980s – being replaced by another, as yet still in an embryonic state. Although it is far from fully formed, the early indications point to the defining role of new technologies in this emerging economic system: in particular automation and artificial intelligence, the blurring of the physical and digital realms through AR, VR and the internet of things, and the possibilities of new environmental technologies, from biological engineering to distributed energy production and storage.
Whether these technological developments will lead to capitalism’s demise or simply its transformation and regeneration into another form, the present moment of flux offers architects the rare and vital opportunity to redefine the sphere of their own discipline. Rather than trying to (re)negotiate a more enhanced role in the entrenched building industry, this is the moment for architecture to move decisively beyond buildings.
One of the few consistent aspects of the multitude of questions raised by these new technologies is their spatial dimension – which makes architects ideally placed to address them. To give a few examples:
Starting off close to home, construction is one of the biggest producers of CO2 emissions – the question for architects is how can we find ways to limit these emissions through new materials and localised digital construction techniques, and on a broader level begin to rethink the conventions of how buildings are inhabited and used across a day, year or even a century?
An ever ageing population is one of the greatest challenges that western economies are facing. But most healthcare systems are still focused towards acute conditions and not the chronic and longer-time conditions that ageing brings. What might architectural thinking bring to the design of the health and social care systems, and the broader role of social infrastructure? After all, the key challenges in these areas are as much spatial as economic or medical.
Looking even wider, what might architectural approaches have to offer in charting a way through the convergence of the digital and physical realms, which as it stands is already having a hugely deleterious effect on public discourse and debate? Architects, who understand the way we work and how we live, should be leading this debate and not the increasingly Orwellian tech industry.
Systems, institutions, political movements, indeed, social relations themselves – these are all areas that architects could and should play a major role in redefining over the next few decades. It is not enough for architects simply to wait and hope the system will change for the better around them. To do so is to shy away from the discipline's fundamental social and public purpose, risking not just professional oblivion, but that the new system takes shape without the guiding hand of such potentially powerful advocates of the need to design, build and imagine with the interests of everyone in mind. We – that is everyone – need architects now more than ever before. But it's up to architects themselves to throw off their shackles – no-one will do it for them – and take the lead in re-designing our economic and political system for the benefit of all. As Goethe fittingly observed, ‘None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free’.