Alain Pilote wrote on an article published in 1994 that reality —the environment— is sacrificed for the symbol – money. Searching alternatives to the ongoing capitalist system, it’s impossible no to think on how it leads and affects environmental issues. Oil, energy, water, and waste are conducted by economical forces, beyond its geopolitical, social, economic and infrastructural implications. The cycle of extraction, production and recycling has demonstrated to be a failed system and some of the worst environmental disasters in the past years are related with industrial models and the micro-politics of economic power. At this point and with the access to information and digital tools, the response to environmental issues have reached the masses to enable new models, ideas and innovative proposals. Thus, it’s worth to think which can be the architectural response to the emerging conditions presented by climate-changed terrains?

Utopie Dynamit, Gunter Rambow. MoMA Collection

The juror of this competition is Keller Easterling and is called Subtraction. Here you can read her competition brief:

Consider the pleasures of building removal. Whatever the prodigious efforts associated with erecting architecture, the art of causing it to disappear can be equally violent, compelling or satisfying. Methods for demolishing, imploding or otherwise subtracting building material are not among the essential skills imparted to architects in training. Believing building to be the primary constructive activity, the discipline has not institutionalized special studies of subtraction. In fact, for architects, building envelope is almost always the answer to any problem, and subtraction is often understood to be the preparation of a tabula rasa.

In the often indifferent ecologies of building subtraction, marketers, financial experts, planners and politicians man several different kinds of remote controls that can detonate building and landscape creating destruction and political disenfranchisement in ways that are only somewhat slower than warfare. This subtraction generally signals loss while accumulation or accretion generally signals growth. But every act of building is already an act of subtraction. Most buildings today are designed as repeatable spatial products with rapid cycles of obsolescence. Financial industries surround the seemingly static and durable building with a volatile balloon of inflating and deflating value, be it a small house, a massive sports stadium or a 4000-room casino. Populations migrate into and away from cities causing both rapid growth and rapid decline. Buildings subtract other building because they replace a previous structure but they can also, just by their often toxic presence, cause surrounding buildings and landscapes to tumble to the ground.

In the wake of recent crises, catastrophes and population shifts, as buildings turn over and radiate negativity, a significant portion of the heavy machinery used to construct buildings is also now busy taking them apart. Ruin and decay has its own pornography. Demolition has its own TV shows. Disassembly and teardown are now popular art forms. The newest approaches to building removal even appear to retract skyscrapers into the ground. Finally, it is easy to see, with half closed eyes, an accelerated time lapse, like harvest and cultivation, within which large swaths of building and landscape seem to be simultaneously built and unbuilt —an economy where subtraction is the other half of building.

Bringing its own aesthetic pleasures, subtraction tutors an enhanced repertoire of form-making and opens onto a redoubled territory of endeavor. Space making through clearing is one pleasure. Still, subtraction is not simply absence but a moment in a set of exchanges and advances, aggressions and attritions.

Subtraction.

Building subtraction, as a heavy industry and a design protocol, is an emergent lucrative enterprise, a source of employment and a political instrument of extrastate governance. A subtraction protocol might be appropriate in many parts of the world where, for instance, sprawling overdevelopment has attracted distended or failed markets, where development confronts environmental issues, where development would be wise to retreat from exhausted land or flood plains, or where special land preserves are valued for attributes that development disrupts.

A subtraction economy may mark the end of an era within which building is treated primarily as financial instrument. While there are elaborate schemes for manipulating the virtual values of buildings and landscapes —in real estate markets or carbon markets— there are fewer spatial variables of value. Materializing risks and rewards in a physical, spatial constructs, shares and mechanisms in an alternative portfolio of values can be traded in an parallel market. Active forms can be designed as spatial levers, ratchets or offsets in this market. These negotiations can stabilise, compete with or even overwhelm financial markets to grow, contract or erase development.

Financial systems are good at haphazardly deleting building and landscape, but since architects have been trained to make the building machine lurch forward, they may know something about how to put it into reverse.

/// More info about the Think Space Money—Environment Competition ‘Subtraction’, including deadlines and registration requirements, here.
/// Keller Easterling will be presenting the competition today Feb. 28th from 7pm CET live-streaming at www.think-space.org

Following that review, we received a text that architect Quilian Riano wrote expanding on thoughts from the same event. Riano is a designer, researcher, writer, and educator currently working out of Brooklyn, New York; and founder of DSGN AGNC. This text can be understood as a response to Wolfe’s text and more important, it opens the discussion by sharing a different point of view and strengthens the conversation about issues so important in the current moment as capitalism, economy, politics and architecture. Here is Quilian Riano’s text:

“It has to be said that historically, the connection between capital and architecture has not been so mysterious; architects in the not so distant (European) past actually did build their practices around their overtly formulated economic positions.”
-From Peggy Deamer’s introduction to Architecture and Capitalism

Last week, during a public conversation at the Storefront for Art and Architecture for the book launch of Architecture and Capitalism, I said that “all design is a political act.” This made blogger Ross Wolfe cringe in an opinion piece about the event here in Quaderns. In his piece, Mr. Wolfe consistently ignores the context for the event and many of the remarks from that evening. I will, however, take this as an opportunity to give just such context to my remarks and expand on what I meant.

First, I invite everyone to see the entire discussion online and to read a short post I wrote after the event summarizing and expanding on my thoughts, here on Architecture and/or Capitalism Conversation.

The discussion began with moderator Peggy Deamer bringing up a claim she made in the book regarding the Marxist distinction between superstructure and base. In the introduction, she claims that architecture primarily functions in the superstructure, in the “realm of culture, allowing capital to do its work without its effects being scrutinized.” In the conversation, she posed the question of whether urbanism, because of its more clear ties to the economy, resides more in the base. All panelists promptly dismissed the binary as unhelpful and perhaps even dangerous. As part of my response, I stated that is important to keep in mind that both architectural and urban form are the result of political and economic forces.

As we continued to discuss that statement, it became clear that we were all troubled by how the role of capital is almost completely obscured in architectural practice. In architectural offices, designers make decisions every day while ignoring potential political consequences, such as labor conditions and environmental impacts. We then talked about the need to confront this willful ignorance.

When I said that all design is a political act, I meant it both as a statement and as a question to provoke further discussion. Why is it important to state such a seemingly obvious point? Because architecture is not often discussed that way, especially in academia or in practice. I often go to reviews where students and faculty only discuss the formal aspects of projects, ignoring all social and political conditions produced by or enabling the work. This is in part because the post-functionalist ideas popularized by Peter Eisenman are now the predominant ideology of architecture schools, especially in the U.S. This ideology claims that architecture should only work within formal discourses, rejecting any political discourse in what can be seen as an over-reaction to the failure of heroically humanist discourses of the late-modernist period. Eisenman has gone as far as to claim that “Liberal Views Have Never Built Anything of any Value.” These views are so ingrained in the field that even emerging practitioners espouse them as given truths as seen in a recent interview with Jimenez Lai who said: “When people talk about being more than just architects, about solving other world problems —affordable housing, carbon emission, landscape urbanism—in my mind, they’re effectively forfeiting the very thing they’re supposed to be an expert on. If we’re not going to cultivate formalism, who will?”

Image of a Peter Eisenman-designed house with glass slot in the center of the wall continuing through the floor that divides the room in half, forcing there to be separate beds on either side of the room so that the couple was forced to sleep apart from each other. ArchDaily

Furthermore, most often professors and practitioners who talk about larger political processes at all do it with the ironic detachment that has at times has been the modus operandi of one of the most prominent architectural practices, Rem Koolhaas’ Office for Metropolitan Architecture. In fact, one of my favorite essays in Architecture and Capitalism is “Irrational Exuberance: Rem Koolhaas and the 1990’s” by Ellen Dunham-Jones — you can read an excerpt of it in Places Journal. In the essay, Dunham-Jones says the following about Koolhaas’ ironic flirtation with capitalism:

“Nonetheless, over the decade, his writings and designs contributed significantly to shifting design discourse away from critical theory toward post-critical, non-judgmental research, and from autonomy toward engagement — albeit engagement largely with the elite beneficiaries of the New Economy, now often described as “the 1%.” From our contemporary perspective, it is thus worth asking: What is Koolhaas’s legacy vis-à-vis progressive practice?” (Page 151)

In the current context of architectural production, politics are either ignored and not thought to be important for form-making or referred to ironically, without any real consequence.

From Content, by OMA/Koolhaas (Taschen, 2004). Places Journal

What I am concerned with is ways in which we can begin to ask political questions in architectural studios in academia and practice. I will posit that the first step is a reaffirmation that all architecture formalizes invisible forces and ideologies. A similar sentiment was expressed humorously and concisely by Slavoj Zizek in a Vice interview. In discussing postmodern companies and bosses that try to hide their power by dressing and acting casually, Zizek says that “the first step to liberation is to force him[/her] to act like a boss. Stop acting like a friend and give me orders.” Similarly, one of the first steps we need to take towards liberation is to recognize capital’s power lest one get seduced by the seemingly casual air of boutique architectural practices and tactical urbanism salons. Only then can we begin to have a conversation on how architecture can begin to formulate alternatives.

Presently architects who ask questions of the role of capital are labeled as political or activist architects. These monikers obscure the fact that we are all involved in the complex capitalist processes that produce a building, a space, a city. No one producing form can claim innocence.

Do we then need to stop practicing as architects? No!

Recognizing that current architectural practice is inextricable from capitalist processes can inject political discourse back into the discipline. Many architects, artists and designers are beginning practices that reject unrealizable utopianism and instead take on existing systems of power. These practices seek to understand and illuminate systems of power in order to change them. A project that attempts to enact such change, from outside of architecture, is Strike Debt! a project started by artists that effectively intervenes in the U.S. debt system.

This project points towards the potential of designing actions that are intentionally shaped by political forces and in turn are designed to push back on those forces. The Storefront was filled to capacity for this event, showing that architects, in fact, want to engage in critical political discourses. Perhaps this also signalled a clear dissatisfaction with the notion that we can do nothing in the face of a complex global capitalist system. A reaction against the notion that we cannot act critically on the city. There may be a time for a more fully utopian moment — for a revolution —but for now we can use design to illuminate systems of power and strategically act on them.

—Quilian Riano. Designer, researcher, writer, and educator currently working out of Brooklyn, New York. Founder and principal at DSGN AGNC. Masters of Architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design and Bachelors of Design (Summa Cum Laude) at the University of Florida, School of Architecture.

/// Header image courtesy of the Storefront for Art and Architecture
/// More info: Architecture or/and Capitalism, Storefront for Art and Architecture.
/// Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present, edited by Peggy Deamer

“On the occasion of the book launch of ‘Architecture and Capitalism’ edited by Peggy Deamer, Storefront presented a forum where some of the book contributors and other leading figures in the discourse around politics, economy, architecture and the city presented and discussed some historical and contemporary references on how alternatives have been articulated in the past and how we might be able to articulate them today.”

We were lucky enough that our friend Ross Wolfe, author of The Charnel-House, attended to the event and send us the following review:

Film still from the documentary Money and speed.

Last night’s book launch for Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present drew a large crowd to the Storefront for Art and Architecture in Lower Manhattan. The precise relation of the event to the newly-released Routledge collection was obscure, however. Of the four featured speakers —Thomas Angotti, Peggy Deamer, Quilian Riano, and Michael Sorkin— only Deamer and Sorkin contributed pieces to the volume. Deamer, the prime mover behind Architecture and Capitalism, wrote the introduction; Sorkin was responsible for its pithy four-page conclusion. Effectively bookending the discussion, then, the book’s themes entered into the conversation in a largely oblique fashion. For the most part, the talk was limited to generalities.

Some of the topics focused on by the speakers were fairly familiar, by now standard fare for reflections on architecture’s role in society. There was reference, of course, to the supremely compromised position of the architect within the existing system of capitalist reproduction. Given the present constraints encountered in the profession, Sorkin and Angotti pointed out, designers are typically bound to the whims of their clients. What little leverage can be mustered during the building process is usually a function of the “name recognition” of their firm. Otherwise, architects have very little say in how their visions are eventually realized, unless they stipulate specific guarantees beforehand [making it far more difficult to secure a contract in the first place]. If they don’t follow the instructions or meet the expectations of their employers, in most cases, all funding is cut off and the commission is lost. Questions concerning the supposed ethical obligations of the architect were also raised in this connection. Should architects refuse to lend their name to certain kinds of building projects? Prisons featuring cells for solitary confinement were listed by Sorkin as obvious examples, along with military installations with facilities built-in to serve as torture chambers. Deamer brought up the extraordinary conditions of exploitation suffered by the workers mobilized to construct, for instance, gleaming skyscrapers in Dubai. Not only the living labor involved in their assembly, Riano added somewhat vaguely, but also the dead labor embodied in the materials assembled.

Besides these scattered considerations, more theoretical issues of interpretation were also touched upon. Included here was some debate regarding the relationship between the material “base” of social production and the ideological “superstructure” it supports — that controversial architectural metaphor supplied by Marx over 150 years ago. While Sorkin dismissed this thought-figure out of hand as a vulgar Marxist holdover, Deamer interestingly suggested that there was an isomorphism that placed urbanism closer to the “base” and architecture closer to the “superstructure” in terms of the self-understanding of each field. Riano and Angotti rejected the notion of a stark separation between the two, pointing out that the two spheres often impinged upon one another, but failed to address the substance of Deamer’s contention. Though her argument could have probably been articulated more forcefully, Deamer did gesture in the direction of a key distinction between urbanism and architecture: a striving toward autonomy in the latter that is absent in the former. Urbanism deals more directly with the naked economic realities of real estate and the concentration of capital at the municipal level, despite entertaining some quaint delusions about its ability to act in the public interest. Architecture is closer to art in its pursuit of an autonomous ideal, although it requires marshaling significantly more resources to realize its object. There is more attention to form and abstract tectonic and stylistic considerations in architecture than city planning. Mention was also made of the building principles prioritized under neoliberal capitalism, as zoning laws seem predisposed to favor increasing property value for high-end real estate. Centrally located, spectacular design proposals receive preferential treatment as potential sites for capital accumulation. Sorkin repeatedly expressed dismay at architects’ propensity to “monetize air” by encouraging speculators to invest in costly buildings that will likely sit empty for years before seeing a return. To correct this corrosive trend, he recommended policy solutions that would reduce income inequality through a progressive tax and reform the building code to better serve the city’s inhabitants.

Cover of the book Architecture and Capitalism, 1845 to the Present.

A few members of the audience could be seen squirming, however, as some of the panelists’ remarks were further specified. Stressing the importance of the utopian dimension in architecture as a way of thinking outside the limits imposed by capitalism, some slippage occurred in the terms used by the speakers. “Utopia,” one casually remarked, “is simply another name for what we used to call socialism.” Responding to this apparent parapraxis, someone from the audience challenged the discussants during Q&A: “Isn’t it possible that we might be able to work within capitalism to make the world less ugly? Couldn’t there just be a more beautiful capitalism?”

Thomas Wensing, a Dutch architect who was in attendance, quickly interjected: “They already have that. It’s called OMA.”

On the whole, the quality of the evening’s proceedings was wildly uneven. Without a doubt, Sorkin was the highlight of the event. He alone was able to distill the essence of the questions at hand and concisely formulate a response. Deamer was flatfooted and awkward throughout the majority of exchanges, and Riano seemed incapable of dealing other than in gross platitudes [including the cringe-inducing refrain that “all architecture is political”]. Even then, it is unclear whether the measures Sorkin was hinting at pointed beyond capitalism in any meaningful way. Consulting more architects and urbanists in policymaking decisions will hardly improve matters; in any case, capitalism cannot be designed away. For the very same reason, however, the decision of some architects to withdraw from objectionable ventures is unlikely to change what are by most accounts structural or systemic problems. At best, it might help them sleep at night. Perhaps the takeaway from all this is not that the panelists were simply tiptoeing around the task of giving an answer. What was more unsettling, in all probability, was the tacit recognition that the present impasse of architecture —as of society in general— no longer seems to elicit an immediately practicable answer. Toward the end, Angotti more or less said as much: “Back in the ’60s, or better yet the ’30s, when there was a real labor movement, we had a readymade answer to the question of what needed to be done. Nothing like this exists today.” This, and nothing else, was what was being avoided: not the question, but the lack of an answer.

—Ross Wolfe. Writer, critic, translator. Author of the forthcoming book, The Graveyard of Utopia: Soviet Urbanism and the Fate of the International Avant-Garde, scheduled to be published in the next few months by Zero Books.

/// More info: Architecture or/and Capitalism, Storefront for Art and Architecture.
/// Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present, edited by Peggy Deamer

UPDATE: This review has been responded by Quilian Riano on the post From Affirmations to Disruptions: Understanding Design as a Political Act and followed by Ross Wolfe on his own blog The Charnel House. For more updates about this interesting debate about architecture, capitalism and politics, you can follow @quilian, @rosswolfe and @Quaderns.