Big Buildings, No Meaning: The Capitalist Utopia and its influence on human identity

Big Buildings No meaning The Capitalist Utopia and its influence on human identity Iara Silva 12071790 April/2014

U30025 Issues in Architectural History and Theory

CONTENTS PAGE1.

Introduction

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The importance of context

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The Capitalist Utopia

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Globalisation: how did we get here?

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Identity and globalisation

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Conclusion

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Bibligraphy

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Image References

When technics become the universal form of material production it circumscribes an entire culture, it projects a historical totality – a ‘‘world’’ – Hebert Marcuse

INTRODUCTION The London skyline, once purely made of brick-and-mortar is now faced with the possibility that more than 230 buildings be constructed, some over 20 storeys high and many of which were designed with complete disregard of their surroundings and ‘make a minimal contribution to the public realm or street-level experience’ (Hurst, 2014). Prince Charles has condemned London’s existing ‘faceless’ towers but yet, he requested for ‘high-density mansion blocks to counter the capital’s housing crisis’ (Hurst, 2014), demonstrating the never ending dilemma of globalisation.

More than 6,000 people (Saveourskyline.co.uk, 2014), and 51 leading architects (Hurst and White, 2014) have joined to prevent some, if not all of these 230 buildings from being approved. They claim that ‘’much of what we are building is aimed at servicing this money-spinning scam’’ (Hurst, 2014), it seems as if they have had enough of these alien, sky-high glass boxes and their ability to establish a country’s economic power.

What surprised me the most about this sudden tumult surrounding the consequences of globalisation; is how long it took to actually take place. I recall when I was about 13 years old, walking around downtown Lisbon, on a sunny day without a particular direction. I can say that that was the first time I was actually paying attention to what surrounded me, how people used the spaces provided, how shops where integrated on the ground-floor of these old 18th Century buildings constructed after the Great Earthquake of Lisbon in 1755.

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I was suddenly taken by surprise when in a blink of an eye I had left the uniform neoclassic buildings and entered what looked like a completely different town, an alien, ‘futuristic’ city which had swallowed me without my consent. How could this have happened? And when did these gigantic glass boxes landed in Lisbon?

I later found out, that it had been built in 1985, and it was probably the starting point for the ‘modernisation’ of that side of town, a ‘brand-new’, ‘modern’, ‘global’ side of town which could be seen from different parts of town, like the main road to the infamous 25th of April bridge which is main and often preferred way of crossing the river, where from a far those gigantic glass tower blocks look like they were cropped out of a Times Square set.

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THE IMPORTANCE OF CONTEXT The human ability of comprehension is based on context, the word is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as ‘’the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood.’’, in order to fully understand an idea, event or statement, one has to be able to identify the set in which said thing takes place, like it is visually demonstrated by the Ebbinghaus Illusion, which reminds us of how our eyes and brains are programmed to interpretate based on context. – The two orange cirles are exaclty the same size; however, the one on the left seems smaller.

When it comes to architecture, the discussion concerning the importance of context usually tends to demonstrate a ‘one-dimensional understanding’ (Alverson, 2010) of the subject, due to the common belief that architectural context can either be black or white, the common misconception that a building can either be identical to its surroundings or completely distinct.

Similar to the designing process, context sensitivity is more complex than what meets the eye. Aubrey Alverson points out that it is fundamental to define architecture as a profession which either provides a service or is an artistic outlet, or both. Ideally it ought to be both, but if so, how can the two extremes be balanced out in order for a ‘collaborating architect creating a building that both exhibits an artful interpretation of architectural form derived from contextual understanding and a building that truly services those who will inhabit it, those who will look at it, and those whose lives

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will be affected by it in any number of ways’ (Alverson, 2010).

Although it might be impossible for every building to achieve that, like Simon Unwin states in his book Analysing Architecture ‘creating places and spaces that enrich the lives of the people who use them is the foundation of architects’ work. Every building can and should engage in a dialog with the history, beliefs, and needs of a particular place and time’ and as Alverson reinforces ‘’our cities are nothing more than the canvas upon which we inflict our desires (…) how can we not consider that what goes into creating our cities is deserving of such careful consideration?’’.

I now realise that looking back, as I stood in front of those two massive glass blocks, feeling as misplaced as I had never felt before, that I was standing before an ‘architectural’ piece of work which interpreted contextual sensitivity as black and white and did not rejoice in the endless possibilities of the immense grey zone, between them.

Hopefully, architects such as the one who designed those towers, fail to realise the social and cultural impact which their architectural works have on the surrounding areas, otherwise it shocks me that they would have easily forgotten that, like Alvar Aalto said ‘’the very nature of the art of architecture is to serve humanity’ and that ‘’it is an utilitarian art, even in its most spiritual form’’.

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THE CAPITALIST UTOPIA An utopia is an imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect (Oxforddictionaries.com, 2014), dystopia being the opposite. Any type of architecture without context is described by Tschumi as an utopia. He states that context has the flexibility of being historical, geographical, cultural, political, or economic, but how can context be economic?

It might be the reason why it is called a ‘Capitalist Utopia’, the fact that it is the reflection of an imaginary world of a never-ending, always developing, economic power. A perfect example of this was the Great Wall Street crash of 1929, also known as Black Tuesday which resulted in the Great Depression eventually that led to a worldwide economic crisis of catastrophic dimensions, from which an argument could be made that the world is still recovering from.

Essentially, a ‘Capitalist Utopia’ is an assumption and expectation driven system which leads people to believe in a false sense of wealth instigated by whatever factors are established as the setting factor of said wealth. Called by some the lost generation, generation Z, generation of the ‘’I’’, the iphone, the ipod, the ipad, the individual. The materialistic generation that is integrated and generated of mass culture, broadcasted through the several platforms available such as the internet, the television and publicity, the generation of the digital, of images, of the non-existent, the fictional. ‘’Images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream, and the former unity of life is lost forever’’ (Debord, 1994).

In the capitalist utopia, centered around the ‘’myth of free mar-

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kets, heroic individuals and patriotism’’ (Borden, 1996), the individual is led to the belief of a false consciousness which, advertised as unity, separates and isolates him from his community, leaving him more prone to the marketed ideas of perfection. ‘’Reality unfolds in a new generality as a pseudo-world apart, solely as an object of contemplation’’ (Debord, 1994) and the cityscapes resultant of this globalization process create the perfect pseudo-world ready to be object of contemplation. The giant glass towers and sculptural ‘mutant’ designs surround the observer completely, physically transporting the user to this fictional world of images and deception where ‘’sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness’’ - like Feuerbach stated in the Preface to the second edition of The essence of Christianity.

Architectural ideas, theories and styles are made acceptable through the same images which transport the viewer to that imaginary world, the exact same ones which specify the set of ideas and assumptions that the public ought to have regarding future designs and strategies. ’We are fanatics’’ declared Ralph Rumney in 1957. According to Kostas Axelos in his book Arguments, published in 1950, the human is not in the world but of the world, of a society so proud of the self that it is unable to realize how blinding the sought illusion is. A society of consumers whose sense of context is so deeply integrated in that fictional world, lead purely by economic profit, that they fail

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to realize that an individual’s identity is being constantly molded, in order to enable the user to eternally be infatuated by the said world of adoration, as it was elegantly put by Guy Debored, ‘there can be no freedom apart from activity, and within the spectacle all activity is banned – a corollary of the fact that all real activity has been forcibly channeled into the global’ (1994).

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GLOBALISATION

HOW DID WE GET HERE Globalisation has come about by the spread of the capitalist agenda throughout the world, it is defined has ‘’the process by which businesses or other organizations develop international influence or start operating on an international scale’’ (Oxforddictionaries. com, 2014). Integrated in what Debored described as a ‘society of the spectacle’, the spectacle itself is carefully planned within each city with the purpose of acquiring as much capital as possible, each town with the goal of becoming more succeful than the neighbouring town, whose colaboration is vital to the global exposure of the city in question.

This pattern was first experienced with the 12th Century’s race to the construction of Gothic cathedarls and the mid 19th Century’s chase to the erection of Victorian buildings.

The contemporary metropolis constantly competes for the main position in the global capital circulation scheme, and the efforts to reach said position include the transformation the city with he intention of becoming the main stage of cultural, festival and historic memories, but how can that be accomplished when most, if you not all traces of historic identity are erased or replaced by simplistic, minimal, reflexive, ‘futuristic’ facades which main concern is to reflect the city’s economic power with complete disregsard for the representation of its residents? How could a celebration of said memories be possible, when the existing architectural movement is more concerned with portraying the imagined, highly fictional, robotic future than emboing the existing present.

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Globalisation and modernity go hand in hand due to the fact that the existing assumptions of modernity are used in order to represent the current movement of gloabalisation.

The birth of modernisation can be traced back to the end of World War I, a prosperos time which held a promessing future, with scientific, medical and industrial break-throughs. Posterior to that, in the 1930s, instability settled in the newly urbanised masses, postwar repercussions and economic depression lead to global political and economic crisis which resulted, for the first time in history, in the separation of the capitalist state with the emancipating desires of cultural modernisation.

In the following decade, a building boom was generated as a result of a post-war Europe in need of a fast, large scale reconstruction in order to meets the needs of an expanding mobile population which was now transitioning from the country side to the cities.

Alongside these moments of architectural changes, philosophy gained strength and started actively influencing the artistic and architecture changes.

The 18th Century marked the beginning of the Enlightenment era, the ‘’realization of the being and the evolution of its collective psycho-social reality’’ (Frampton, 1983), and influence of this doctrine resulted in the return to what was, and still is considered to be the cradle of all Western civilization, Greece. Influenced by the revival of classical art and culture, Neoclassicism was born, acquiring is influence in France and England, and spreading it across Europe.

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Times changed, and doctrines evolved, the Enlightenment philosophy gave place to the Avant-Garde which began by pushing the accepted norm regarding culture, and soon spreading across the artistic and political domain. Inseparable from modernism, it was the vessel which facilitated the transition of ‘modernization’, behaving as the liberating form of the Enlightenment years. This post-industrial period, resulted in a second building boom. The developing cities needed to attract and mobilize the geographically expanding, global business sector.

Mid 19 Century, Gothic revival and the movement of arts-andcrafts rose as opposition against the fast-developing industrial process and neoclassic form, but the process of ‘modernization’ continued undisputed, and in the last half of the 19th Century, the popular artistic movement distanced itself from the ‘’harsh realities of colonialism and paleo-technological exploitation’’ (Frampton, 1983), and found refuge in the ‘’nostalgic or phantasmagoric ream-worlds inspired by cathartic hermeticism of Wagner’s music-drama’’ (Frampton, 1983).

This ‘modern’ era of the popular culture, of mass production, inspired by the fictional was perfectly translated into society’s main sectors: politics, art, cultural and architecture which perfectly rendered ‘the dominating trends towards technical standardization, spatial homogenization and off-site decision-making that provide the global context of ‘frame’, universal and modernizing’’ (Adam, 2012).

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The already developed American cities, such as Manhattan, were used as muses for this architectural movement, as it was, according to Koolhaas, Mau et al., the brilliantly solved paradox between the possibility of the permanence of even the most pointless architectural component and instability of the metropolis itself, portrayed as the development of a mutant architecture that combined the aura of monumentality with the performance of instability, a divorce between appearance and performance’’ (1998).

Denominated as ‘Reflexive architecture’ due to the constant use of minimal, simplistic glass facades, it was adopted by the newly liberalized global economies that set it as the preconceived symbol for economic stability, and became a fundamental factor for emerging nations looking to establish themselves among the leading economies.

Following the turn of the century, Postmodernism emerged as a ‘’strategic withdrawal from the project of totally transforming the existing reality’’ (Adam, 2012), it went against the modernist symbolism of the representation of a successful capitalist system, through the revival of historic elements and techniques such as building conventions that allow a person to identify a building’s function through symbolic pointers.

In a world infatuated by the capitalist system, the Post-modernistic attempt to liberate society of that virtual world resulted in the creation of a movement driven by recognition. A glass tower was no longer enough to attract capital and attention, in a society of

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admiration, the Bilbao effect came into play. Architecture became sculptural, with a vaster number of materials but driven by the same principles: capitalism and mass-culture.

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IDENITY AND GLOBALISATION ‘’The phenomenon of universalization, while being and advancement of mankind, at the same time constitutes a sort of subtle destruction’’ (Frampton, 1983) ‘’Blind drunken gaze into popular images of terminal space-time compression and urban decay’’ (Borden, 1996), production of masses, the never-ending feed of information, the constant admiration, the mirroring of behaviour, a generated idea of self, fed by the constant stream of images, the inevitable overload of information that leaves the individual without a foundations of the sense of the self, fragmented.

Globalisation lead to the creation of a physical, virtual world contained within the city, the place in which the individual exists, works, and finds bliss. The non-place, fictional, repeated throughout the world in the exact same way, each time, wearing out the uniqueness of each city, blending in to the big mass of nothingness. The mixture of transnationalism and globalisation result in the concept of ‘deterriotorialisation’, as explained by Ronaled Niezen: ‘’ the volume, pace, and reach of decontextualized culture is cutting people from their familiar moorings. The relationships between cultures and localities have become abstract, ‘’unnatural’’. People almost everywhere are subjected to intangibles, objects and ideas that lack a definite place or provenance. ‘’ (Adam, 2012) Identity, once attributed to people, in a stable world, is now taken for granted, resulting in the individual’s constant need of rein-

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surance of being in its possession. Falling into the fictional spiral generated by mass-media that leads him to believe that is identity can be found.

Unfortunately, in the era of technology where everything is digital and easily reachable, in which the velocity of communications create a potentially homogenized world, the identity of the self is lost.

In the globalised society of ‘means and ends’, where nothingness is the foundation of everything, and the identity of the individual is based on the city and established through the notions of sameness and difference, in the globalised world it is impossible to construct the self, as all is one, and one is none. The society of the spectacle in which ‘’ community becomes commodity. The desire for community is then fulfilled elsewhere’’ (Gil-Manuel Hernàndez, ?) through the spectacle. In this cultural ‘pick and mix’, it is ’’ more difficult to maintain a stable sense of local cultural identity, (…) as our daily life entwines itself more and more with influences and experiences of remote origin’’ (Adam, 2012 ), the non-place, the city, sold as the centre of all activity.

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CONCLUSION Growing up, as my interest for architecture grew, from time to time my mind kept replaying the day in which I was confronted by the brutality of those gigantic glass towers. As I learnt about architecture and all that it involved, such as the designing process, the concerns one should have regarding context, regarding the users, and regarding the impact a design can have in the area which is integrated in. I discovered the power possessed by architects. A power that should and cannot be used lightly, as it has the strength of influencing everyone it comes in contact with, and in the era of technology, of communication, of reproduction, it can reach every corner of the world, as it is explained by Adam, ‘’the global culture design is supported by architects who study what other architects are creating, no matter where. With fabulous photographs in slick magazines and professional journals, trend-conscious designers can scan and span the globe, sharing the high-style concepts rendered in stylish materials’’ (2012).

This epoch of illusion, of the generation of the soulless individual, the era of the human being with no identity, in which the space that should celebrate its users, alienates them, is either going to create a generation of artists and architects desperate to break the ever-going spiral of illusions, or one which is so embedded in this fictional world that will work to continue its expansion, further excluding the being from his own environment, and distancing the self from the society.

Thankfully, the revolt surrounding the future of London’s skylight, gives me hope to believe that years after living under the illusion,

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people are finally waking up. Like Christopher Alexander said ‘’the prospect that we may be turning the world into a place peopled only by little glass and concrete boxes have alarmed many architects too...’’ (1998), and according to the philosopher Mladen Dolar ‘’only rule in the development of the culture is the constant rejection of its essential values at any present moment’’. Hopefully we’re entering a new revolutionary age in which cities can be returned to their users, and in the reencounter of the city with the individual, the self can be found, once again.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Adam, R. 2012. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Borden, I. 1996. Strangely familiar. London: Routledge.

Croci, V. 2006. The new Europe. AD, Iss. 76.

Debord, G. 1994. The society of the spectacle. New York: Zone Books.

Foster, H. eds. 1983. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Port Townsend: Bay Press.

Frampton, K. 1983. Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance.

Hurst, W., 2014. Farrel Review. Aj, (239), pp.12 - 15. Magazine Hurst, W. and White, 2014. R. Leading industry figures back Skyline Campaign. AJ (239), p.08-09. Maazine Hurst, W. and White, R., 2014. Leading industry figures back Skyline Campaign. AJ, (239), pp.05 - 09. Magazine Moore, R. and Murray, P. AJ/Observer Skyline Campaign Koolhaas, R., Mau, B., Sigler, J. and Werlemann, H. 1998. S, M, L, XL. New York: Monacelli Press

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La Cecla, F. and O’mahony, M. 2012. Against architecture. San Francisco: Green Arcade/PM Press.

Lefebvre, H. and Goonewardena, K. 2008. Space, difference, everyday life. New York: Routledge.

Alverson, A., 2010. architectural context | Defy Rules. [online] Defy-rules.com. Available at: <http://defy-rules.com/tag/architectural-context/> [Accessed 11 Mar. 2014].

Moore, R. and Murray, P., 2014. AJ/Observer Skyline Campaign. AJ, (239), pp.32 - 46. Magazine Oxforddictionaries.com, 2014. context: definition of context in Oxford dictionary (British & World English). [online] Available at: <http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/context?q=context> [Accessed 13 Apr. 2014].

Saveourskyline.co.uk, 2014. Save Our Skyline - Residents concerned about King Street Redevelopment - Supporters - Petitioners. [online] Available at: <http://www.saveourskyline.co.uk/supporters.php?tab=supports> [Accessed 22 Apr. 2014].

Tschumi, B. 2004. Event-cities 3. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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IMAGE REFERENCES FRONT COVER

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