Real Review 1

REAL REVIEW

Issue number 1 for Summer 2016

Real Review interviews Lord Palumbo Jack Self What You Should Think About Architecture Edwin Heathcote The Home is the Stage Upon Which We Act Out Our Lives Matteo Pasquinelli The Generation of Digital Austerity Rises Sam Jacob The Financialisation of History Jesse Seegers A Cybernetic Socialist Orgasm Oliver Wainwright Kim Jong-il’s Magnificent Monuments Franco “Bifo” Berardi In the Architectural Desert Supervoid Hyper-Connectivity as a State of Nature (Otium) Alfredo Thiermann What Does an Invisible Architecture Look Like?

Leo Hollis A City Built on Nothing but Imaginary Money Peggy Deamer It Was Always About Debt Pier Vittorio Aureli How to Become an Architect Ana Naomi de Sousa Campus in Camps: Architecture, Exile and Resistance Cassim Shepard Market Fundamentalism Effaces Vernacular Specificity Jack Self A Prosthetic City Manuel Shvartzberg On Finance and Democracy Nicholas de Klerk The Home That Bears No Trace You Were Ever There

“Understanding how we are programmed by architecture is vital to the pursuit of egalitarian social power models.”

Jack Self, page 16

“Lazzarato’s isn’t a view of history description of agency that empowers anyone – let alone artists.”

Peggy Deamer, page 80

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“Empathy is replaced by competition. Social life proceeds, now more frantic than ever: living, conscious organisms are unconsciously penetrated by dead mathematical functions.”

Franco “Bifo” Berardi, page 65

“A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes shallow.”

(Hannah Arendt) Supervoid), page 67

“In the 1980’s history, subject to the same ideological transformations as other economic sectors, became one of the new post-industrial products.

This was the privatisation of history.”

Sam Jacob, page 30

“The cult of the architect is a distraction, a parlour game for the top 0.1%.”

Leo Hollis, page 74

“This is the spirit of a generation that recognises itself as a casualty – of both the austerity regime and the digital economy.”

Matteo Pasquinelli, page 26

“Let us turn the whole country into a socialist fairyland!”

(Kim Jong-Il) Oliver Wainwright, page 50

“The way we experience space now changes much faster than the fabric of the spaces we occupy,“ (Patrick Keiller) Cassim Shepard, page 91

“I have nothing against artificial intelligence, except when it claims, with its universal calculation, to absorb all the other forms and reduce mental space to a digital one.” (Jean Baudrillard) Franco “Bifo” Berardi, page 60 “To remain temporary is to continue to resist...

“Architecture is suffering refugee camps embody the a chronic crisis in its right of return.“ professional identity.”

Ana Naomi de Sousa, page 87 Pier Vittorio Aureli, page 86

REAL REVIEW What it means to live today

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Previous page shows Mies' Mansion House Square project as seen from Threadneedle Street. Left is the view as seen from the Royal Exchange.

This page from the top, shows the creation of a new public and ceremonial space in the City, and the proposed tower in the context of the London skyline, circa 1984

THE SPECTRE OF MIES OVER LONDON Interview with Lord Peter Palumbo

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The great modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) only ever designed one project for Britain, and yet it remains one of his least known. The design for a mid-rise office tower and civic square was to be sited in the City of London, adjacent to the Lord Mayor’s Mansion House. After a string of public inquiries – and suffering vicious criticism from the Prince of Wales – the scheme was eventually halted by government order in May 1985, more than two decades after design work began. Its architect belittled as a communist and a German, Mies’ project was perceived as “past its time and neglectful of its place.” Mansion House Square became the focus for a sudden and radical shift in popular opinion against modernist architecture. The usurping ideology, which emphasised the imitation of historical styles, would later reach its apogee in Prince Charles’ own toy town, Poundbury.

The Real Review is proud to print here an excerpted interview with the project’s developer and patron Lord Peter Palumbo (to be published in full in REAL foundation’s forthcoming book on Mansion House Square).

We began by asking how and why Lord Palumbo came to be involved with Mies van der Rohe.

LORD PETER PALUMBO Originally there was no intention to create a large development. The gradual acquisition of sites near Mansion House was purely for investment. My father had some spare cash, about a hundred thousand pounds, and he asked me what I thought to do with it. We bought one site, and then the freehold became available on an adjacent property. In the 1960s it was actually quite difficult – and sometimes almost impossible – to acquire freehold titles, the owners were so reluctant to part with them. As more freeholds in the area sprung up, the possibility of a major development began to take shape. I remember my father and I both realising that it was a very prominent site. I knew it could be an exciting project, but because of how sensitive the site was I knew planning would not be easy and there would be lots of opposition.

As to how I selected the architect: Mies was Northern European. He liked grey skies. This made him a man ideally suited to London. He liked the weather patterns here and he didn’t like bright sunlight in particular; he was very sensitive to light conditions. The essence of the project, in my mind at that time, was all about light and classical architecture. So the choice really made itself, it was as simple as that. Of course, I made up my mind unbeknownst to Mies at the time.

mullion, a stone ashtray and a door handle with a note in his writing that said, “Is this what you had in mind?”

Did you know much about what kind of building could be built?

PP We knew the number of square feet, which was taken from the existing Victorian buildings and transferred directly into the tower to make it, I believe, one hundred and ninety-two feet and six inches − lest we forget the six inches! We had also done a very good survey of what lay underneath the ground level. It had been a major thoroughfare for several thousand years, at least since Roman times, when it was called the Via Decumana.

This street ran right through the site all the way to the Roman forum (the ruins of which can be seen today under Leadenhall Market). There were all sorts of things under the ground that made the engineering very complicated. We knew about, and had documented, the pitfalls of the site, which Mies didn’t like at all. After at least a dozen studies of alternative positions for the building he settled on a tower.

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Was Mies keen to build in London?

Yes. Although, he didn’t accept the commission before he was able to visit the site. On his way back from Berlin and the National Gallery to Chicago he stopped over. It was rather wonderful actually, because there was a huge swell of momentum. The Evening Standard – in its glory days – ran the banner headline “Mies Comes to London” on the front page.

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Real Review How did you go about getting in touch with him?

PP I wrote to him, and I got a reply saying just, “Come see me.” So I did, and there he was. It was early July in 1962 that I first went to Chicago. I remember it was boiling hot and I was rather nervous. But he wasn’t at all condescending, which I liked very much. It’s nice when older people aren’t patronising toward younger men.

And of course I knew a lot of his work, and his early work, so I think he quite liked that.

We got on well, and I asked him if he would be interested in the commission. I told him that there was one condition that couldn’t be circumvented: because of the complexity of purchasing the site – which was enormous actually, twelve freeholds and about two-hundred and fifty leasehold interests, each one of which had to be separately dealt with – it was unlikely that any building would take place within the next twenty-five years.

He was seventy-five at the time and he understood at once that what I was offering him was a posthumous commission. He was a bit noncommittal, and eventually asked, “Well, what do you want? A sketch on the back of an envelope, or what?”

I replied, “I want the whole kit and caboodle. I want everything: the mullions, the door handles, the ashtrays.

I would like you to prepare detailed plans, engineering, materials, even letter-chutes.”

He never formally accepted the commission but several months later I got a colossal package from America that weighed an enormous amount. When I unwrapped it I found a package of drawings, a section of bronze 7

During the visit, the Chancellor of Lloyd’s wanted to give a lunch for Mies. Can you imagine that? So Mies was brought round in his wheelchair to the front entrance on Lombard Street. All the directors had been marshalled into two lines that Mies was wheeled through, rather like a marriage or a military decoration.

It was absolutely extraordinary. I think Mies was rather unnerved by the whole thing; he wasn’t that sort of person at all. But the Chairman, the Vice President and the entire Board of Directors were all there. It was like a royal procession, in a way. And so Mies was given, by the LLC, by the City Corporation and by Lloyd’s Bank, every kind of consideration you could imagine.

Later he said, “Well, that was all very nice but actions speak louder than words. Let’s get on with this.”

Mies didn’t like hanging about; he didn’t like all that ceremony. He wanted to get the building built.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t do that though – because we didn’t have complete control of the site (I think we only had forty percent at that time). But we did get a planning permission outline from the City Corporation, which meant that as soon as we had full control of the site it was plausible enough that the building could be built.

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Can you imagine an architect triggering that type of news today?

PP No, not at all. He came to London and we booked him to stay at Claridge’s Hotel. I borrowed some paintings to decorate the room – he loved Kurt Schwitters, so I got two from the Marlborough Gallery and put them in his suite, to make him feel at home.

Yes, in those days it was possible to file permissions for land you didn’t own – a process eventually stopped after Cedric Price applied to change the zoning of Buckingham Palace to a children’s hospital.

PP We filed on land we didn’t own, that’s exactly what we did. And as soon as we got the sites, they implied they would give us full planning consent.

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I just can’t imagine a developer today ever having such consideration for an architect. Did you have a tenant lined up before the final design work began?

PP Yes, we had a tenant who wanted the whole building, lock, stock and barrel. As a family we had been banking with Lloyd’s Bank since 1924; my father was very close to them, and I became very close to them as a result. When we discussed the project they said they would take it for their Overseas Head Office. After waiting for 12 years, in the end they couldn’t wait any longer and had to drop their interest.

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Which was the moment they commissioned Richard Rogers. Presumably there is an alternate history in which Mies’ project goes ahead and Rogers’ building was never built. It’s almost as if Mies’ building was split across James Stirling’s No.1 Poultry and Rogers’ Lloyd’s of London…

How did the square evolve? There’s a prevalent myth that the square was criticised for being a potential site of protest, but this was not at all how it was conceived or perceived at the time.

PP No, not at all, on the contrary. It was initially created out of pure necessity. The shallow depth of the underground rail tunnels made deep foundations extremely difficult except at the western end of the site. If a tower was to be planned, all the floor area would go into that, which necessitated a square. But it was the historian John Summerson who understood this square for all its civic possibilities. We had lunch in Soho once and he spoke about Mies’ scheme. He said, “I like this building.

I like it because it’s so classical. There’s a lot of rubbish

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How long the project was under design?

It was under design for a long time. It began in 1963 and only ended a few weeks before Mies’ death in 1969.

On his second visit to London he wasn’t happy with the module from the first design. I remember wheeling him up and down Poultry and he said, “This scheme won’t do, because it doesn’t harmonise with the Lutyens building,” which was on the north side of Poultry. So he changed the module, made the canopy and proportions align with those of Lutyens, and that was the final design.

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on the site at present. Let’s photograph it in detail and take it all down, and put this up because it’s much, much better.” As he was leaving he said, “I think I’ll write a letter to The Times to kick things off,” which he did.

The letter was about the evolution of the city, and how Mies’ building would be a much better solution for the site. He argued the scheme with the square would provide much needed respite at a congested junction – where nobody had anywhere to sit, or anywhere to walk without danger of being run over. The ceremonial possibilities of Mansion House were quite limited, and he wanted to open that up. That letter set the tone for the square’s public perception as a gathering place.

This conception of the square as a ceremonial place presumably explains the later addition of huge flagpoles with English flags?

PP Yes! The flagpole took a long time to position. The very last thing Mies did on the project was to position the flagpole. It was narrowed down to two or three different positions and finally Mies decided on the precise location. He signed the drawings and died a couple of weeks later. But the project was executed to that amount of detail.

And you know, looking back I think the square would have been a wonderful spot for protests, but it wasn’t imagined for that. It was a ceremonial opening up of the land – clearing away congestion and creating a gathering place for the people (for civic and therapeutic reasons, not for political protests).

shift was such a mistake. The pendulum never centres, as John Summerson once said to me. He felt we should only keep what is wonderful, but get rid of the cheap buildings thrown up in the 1870s with bad foundations, where none of the floors and windows lined up. Just because a building is old doesn’t mean it has merit. On our site these Victorian piles were built quickly as pure speculation, and had little historical value.

By 1982, the Greater London Council (GLC) began to move the goalposts very rapidly. They denigrated Mies, saying that he was German, that he was a communist, that he was foreign. Then they said it was just a formulaic building; that Mies really had nothing to do with it at all.

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It would have been a site for public ritual in the city.

Yes, of course. Mies saw that. It sort of all fell into place with his positioning of the building, the ceremonial aspect of the square. Everything was opened up: the façade of Mansion House (though it’s not a particularly magnificent façade, but it has a symbolic function for the Mayor of London), and the views beyond to the Royal Exchange. There’s also the Edwin Lutyens building on the north side and John Soane’s Bank of England adjacent.

And of course there is St. Stephen’s church by Christopher Wren on the other corner. It’s a pretty good list.

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Of course, it seems somewhat contradictory to denigrate and ridicule the architect while simultaneously disavowing his connection with the building itself.

PP Well presumably, one would affect the other. In the 60s, “Mies Comes to London” was the banner headline.

By the eighties, people were asking, “Who the hell was he?” It shows how quickly people forget, or want to forget, to propagate their own plans.

In the end Lloyd’s Bank got fed up and said they couldn’t wait any longer, so they dropped out. We were left with a site that was losing money and we were still trying to acquire freehold titles. We got stuck. I mean, we couldn’t afford to go back and we couldn’t seem to move forward. We were sandwiched. And then, right at that moment, the Prince of Wales gave his carbuncle speech.

When Charles Correa was awarded the RIBA Gold Medal at Hampton Court in 1984, the Prince of Wales gave a lengthy, public and derogatory dispraise of the building. He picked out the tower as “a giant glass stump.” It was a horrible thing to say. And from that moment onwards the project sort of slipped away from us, because we were in the middle of a public inquiry and the Prince's comments just made things ten times worse. Of course, the opposition took full advantage of that.

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view they put their hands on my arm and said, “Not to worry, this will all blow over.” They wanted to be seen to be supporting me.

Do you think the Prince’s comment expressed a genuine concern for the fabric of London?

PP Oh, I’m sure he was completely sincere. He doesn’t like most contemporary buildings but the point is that it was not contemporary. I mean, it was contemporary in the sense that it was being built at the time, but for anybody who has any knowledge of Schinkel and the classical roots of Mies, it wasn’t. Mies really hated machine-architects and the glorification of the machine age. This was a hand-made building. It wasn’t the sort of thing that was just put up after ten minutes.

Mies put so much thought into every detail. If you asked him a question there would be silence, and he would stand there, and you would wait for the reply, and wait, and eventually you would stop talking; the conversation would end. And when the conversation was completely dead, he would come in with his reflection.

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At what point did you know the project was doomed?

Was it at the end of the inquiry? Or when Prince Charles made his statement?

PP No, we gave up the ghost of Mies when we heard the Secretary of State’s decision. He said the building was bad mannered, that it was out of context, and it impinged on the conservation area. The listed buildings to be demolished were of some importance and… well, et cetera, et cetera. He even mentioned that the view from the nineteenth tee at Sydenham Golf Club would not have been a satisfactory image − I mean come on! It’s unbelievable. He said, “But, if the developer,” and I think he said it because he was a friend of mine, “can come back with a scheme that is more in sympathy with the surroundings, we would be pleased to look at it.” So that was the lifeline that led to James Stirling’s project.

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Why wasn’t the project built?

PP It didn’t happen for the very simple reason that between when we got the planning permission outline and Mies’ death, public sentiment had changed. In the 1960s you could do whatever you liked, but by the 1980s there was a hangover from the postwar euphoria.

There was a very definite philosophical shift, and a popular idea that tradition had been lost. Mies was central to all this, in a way, with this building in the centre of London. It was symbolic of public feeling at the time.

Within twelve years of Mies’ death, there was a complete shift. Suddenly everything had to be preserved and conserved. Old buildings had to be repaired or reconstructed. It was extraordinary. I always thought that this

Do you think Prince Charles realised how much weight his opinion would carry?

PP Yes, I’m sure he did. When we had the dinner after the Gold Medal ceremony the Prince was at the next table. I asked him about the whole thing, and I said, “I had no idea you felt this way. Why didn’t we talk about this before?” And he said, “I just thought I would stir things up a bit!” I could hardly find words. I knew him quite well, we played polo together – we were on the same team!

I’ll never forget though, right after the ceremony every eye in the place was focussed on me, waiting for my reaction. Then Charles [Correa] and Richard [Rogers], starting from the other side of the room, crossed very slowly and deliberately over to me. In full

Despite the bitter loss of Mies, were you happy with Stirling’s building in the end?

PP Well, it wasn’t my first love. You know there’s something very important about your first love, you never quite get over it. Jim was very sympathetic to Mies because Mies had been very good to him when he first went to Chicago and didn’t get any real attention.

Mies took Jim under his wing and Jim never forgot it, the old paratrooper. He was a wonderful man too. God, he was terrific.

I remember the last time I saw Mies, he said, “I’ve done everything that I could possibly do for this site.

If you came to me in fifty years time – if we would both be alive – I might have a completely different solution, but this is as far as technology allows me to go at the moment and I’ve done the best for you that I can.” It was a rather nice final meeting we had. He just placed the flagpole and said, “There. I can’t do any more.”

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WHAT YOU SHOULD THINK ABOUT ARCHITECTURE Jack Self How do we judge if architecture is good or bad? What criteria do we use to think about what we’re looking at? And what do we understand as a result?

Most people in the world do not consider architecture very deeply, if at all. They keep their eyes fixed firmly on their immediate environment and its objects – the fridge and the milk bottle, the slippery front steps, the blue glow of a screen, the shoes of a colleague, the buttons in the lift, the faces of friends at dinner.

Everything close at hand demands our attention; everything beyond is a subconscious blur. As a result, popular situational awareness of architecture, or indeed of space in general, tends to be quite low. It is only when we are suddenly interrupted from our daily routines – often by a moment of unexpected beauty – that we see the spaces in which we live clearly. A sunbeam falls across the central hall of a train terminus, and we look up… But even in these situations we are unlikely to actively engage with space; we continue rushing on, and don’t analyse our reaction. Nothing sums up this passive engagement towards architecture better than the idle tourist meandering around some monument with an audio-guide headset. All extraneous noise is tuned out. At each turn they look where told, appreciate where appropriate, as they blindly traipse a trajectory through the space.

Our appreciation of architecture is almost always passive. “Oh,” we say, “how amazing, how inspiring, how elegant” (or, more likely, “hey that looks pretty cool”). We do not think: could this have been done a better way? Does this space make me more or less free as an individual? Does it represent our values as a civilisation? Who made this place, why and for whom? We only think about these questions when confronted with architecture of the past, because we play a detective game for clues. “That little door must have been installed so people could come and go from the castle without opening the whole gate,” we deduce, pleased with our powers of observation.

It seems funny to us – that little door – but why? Perhaps because the immense time that has passed since its creation speaks to the ultimate futility of human suffering. It is a material witness to extinct patterns of life, and the accidental nature of its survival reveals the truth that all social structures are essentially arbitrary (and universally based on violence). These spaces that belong to a dead past were once alive and

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highly contested. Many people were invested in their preservation; they were defended to the death, even as society evolved around them, beyond all recognition, to make them redundant. These places provide the perspective required to understand our own space-time as equally inconsequential and barbaric. We find the little door funny because we don’t know how else to react to the terror of something so utterly human and so completely alien. This is the power of the built environment. If there is any humour in architecture, it is black.

But in fact, we should be applying the same methods of deduction to the most banal and familiar spaces we inhabit today; we should be looking for clues about social power in even our own homes. Next time you’re preparing a meal or sitting on the toilet, imagine what objects and materials around you could last long enough to become a Pompeian ruin. With the benefit of archaeological forensics, ask yourself how the room reflects your society, how it forces particular patterns of activity. Does that mean it has limited your freedom? Who designed it to be that way, and why?

Architecture is assumed to be a finished and unchanging artefact. But it always remains a critical design object. Space – like music – bypasses reason, influencing our behaviour and opinions directly without our consent or awareness.

Because architecture is not a basic social necessity, general knowledge tends to be quite superficial, and popular categories remain extremely broad. “I like traditional architecture, but nothing too modern,” is the same as saying there are only two kinds of building.

One type is inherently good – and this could encompass anything from mock Tudor (2000AD) to ancient Babylonian (2000BC), or from Victorian houses to Gothic cathedrals... the other is inherently bad, and that could include anything from Soviet housing slabs to Californian beach houses, or Bauhaus, or Koolhaas. What seems strange to an architect is not the arbitrary nature of the categories people seem to apply to architecture – but that the reasons for their creation never seem to be architectural. The “traditional” is really an expression of a fear of change, and thus a fear of death and loss of power (of oneself or one’s society). The “modern” is really a belief in the possibility of progress, and thus a desire for profit. Neither of these are architectural ideas.

If we forget everything we know – or think we know – about architecture, what do we do next?

Of course, buildings never exist in common) decision. Their handling a vacuum. To be able to interpret of truth is fluid and contingent, and architecture relies on navigating a they are dependent on the percepsocial language of complex refertion and information available to ences, allusions, frameworks and the decision-maker. theories. Some concepts are so Aesthetics is the ethics of style, specific that the designer is forced inasmuch as style literally means to explain them personally, and “a way of doing something.” Style these are normally highly architecis a manner or a methodology tural. However, some central ideas motivated by personal ethics. It is are so universal that they originated a procedure, but it tells us nothing in other disciplines altogether about intent. For example, a “casual (Marxism, environmentalism, style of speech” conveys familiarity humanism, democracy) and are and friendliness; it doesn’t tell us merely represented or translated why the speaker is trying to get on into architecture. our good side. In fact, style is just So what should you think about the “how,” never the “why.” The architecture?

British Museum in London was built You should analyse a building in a “classical style,” which was the through four key concepts. They architect’s response to the clients’ are: aesthetics, programme, funcaesthetic judgement – that is, their tion and form. No prior knowledge ambitions, their strategy, their is required to get inside these ideas; moral priorities for the building. In in fact it would be more helpful if architecture, aesthetics concerns you tried to put any preconceptions how particular interests and desires out of your mind. Try to imagine become manifest as spatial you are hearing the words for the strategies. Castles are the product first time. Broadly, they relate to of a feudal military aesthetic. They four questions. “Why did you build appear in many different styles that?” “How are people supposed according to the epoch in which to use it?” “What factors influenced they were built, technologies and the design?” and “Where did you get resources available, geography, that shape from?” topography, and so on. Similarly, the modernist house emerges as the product of a post-WW1 bourgeois Aesthetics aesthetic. The style of the Villa Savoye is merely one possible X response to this aesthetic, and the huge variety of competing styles at the time of its construction attest Y to this. When considering the aesthetics of a building, you have to ask who built it, why they chose to house these specific activities within it, and what was hoped to achieve by the whole project. If you Z want to understand the style of a building, you must first understand as much as possible about the Put simply, aesthetics is the study motivations of its initiator and the of beauty. But more correctly, it is era they occupied. the study of why we find something The final thing to say on this topic beautiful, and the philosophy of concerns ideology. An aesthetic is a whether beauty exists objectively. particular manifestation of a parThis makes it very similar to ethics, ticular ideology. In fact, aesthetic which is the study of right and makes ideology possible. Ideology wrong and the philosophy of good never exists in the abstract. It is not and evil. Both fields work hard a noun in this sense, but a to understand two things: how verb. Ideology happens. Or, more humans decide something is beauprecisely, ideology “takes place” (an tiful/good, and whether things like expression that properly describes ugly/evil could exist outside human its dual temporal and spatial perception. As Kant pointed out, qualities). You can’t point to capitalethics and aesthetics are one. They ism, or neoliberalism, or even both concern value judgements democracy. Like the perfect circle, and moral priorities. Unlike logic they don’t exist. Or rather, they exist and some other philosophies in their specific examples: the (language, for example) aesthetics parliament, the protest, the free is not rule-based. You can’t find a trade zone in Guatemala, universal formula for beauty; it is the business park in Vietnam, the not about crunching data through beaches in the Caymans… When we an algorithm (see section below on change the physicality of these “function”). Aesthetics and ethics places, we are also changing the are about balancing subjective ideologies at work there. Knocking and objective inputs and coming in the wall separating the House of to a personal (even if extremely Lords from the House of Commons

at Westminster would not just be a Programming is also where archiphysical act; it would fundamentally tecture and building can become alter the functioning of British separated. Since the 2008 crash we democracy. have seen the rise, particularly in Ideology influences our schools, of so-called “narrative” preconceptions about the world, architecture. This is the design of and thus our ambitions and sense imagined conditions, scenarios and of right and wrong. This political rituals – which may or may not and ethical position influences our have a building as their outcome. aesthetic judgement, which in turn They nonetheless have architectural we execute through our style. form, because they constitute an architectural attempt at programming space. The floorplan as a Programme drawing (see “form” below) describes activities through space X in a planar field. Programming does Y the same, but through time. Since Z drawings are static it is not possible to draw the programme of a building at anything more than one single moment. A mundane example of architecture without building would be this: a family comes to an architect and asks her to design an extension to their home. They have two teenage children, a boy and a girl, and their house only has two The second framework for thinking bedrooms. The architect responds about architecture is programme to the brief by saying: “Your daugh– all the imagined activities that ter will be in university in two years, take place within a building. Here and your son will be out of the programming is not a specialist house in four. You don’t need a new architectural term, and it means the extension, you just need a high-end same as it does in biology second-hand RV trailer parked in or computing. In the former it is the backyard.” So they buy one and the causes for a person or animal hook it up to water, sewage and to behave in a predetermined electricity, and the teenage boy way; in the latter, it is input for the plugs in his X-box and stays up late automatic performance of a task. playing loud music. Everyone is less Although this sounds vaguely stressed. This is an actual project I sinister, the idea that “all termites was involved with, although in are programmed to build nests effect architectural thinking in the same way” is conceptually through programme cost the firm identical to descriptions of how about $30,000. This is because fee humans organise their spaces and structuring in contemporary the movement within them. For all practice is mostly determined by their complexity and ability, humans construction cost. There is little are not a privileged species, incentive for the architect to think after all. Just as we can dictate the about architectural programming operations of a computer through (without building) in this way. Of its programming, we can predecourse, “narrative” architecture termine the possible behaviours of is simply a more exotic and extreme individuals and groups through interpretation of this strategy. The the designation and affordances important point is that architectural of space. This is not a moral programming of this problem did assertion: I’m not saying whether it not result in a building – not even a is right or wrong to force people to strategy that could be represented perform in particular ways, simply through drawing. that it is integral to understanding Programming is a scaleless qualarchitecture. Like any power, it ity: at the level of the city it is called can be used for either positive zoning, and at the dimensions of the or negative. One thing is certain: room it is often incorrectly called critical awareness of how the “function.” A bedroom, bathroom, design of space predetermines living room – these are all proour own responses – in other grammes, not functions. They words, understanding how we describe the intended activities of ourselves are programmed the space, as well as the qualities by architecture – is vital to the and furnishings that make these pursuit of egalitarian social power activities possible. In some models. Marx, Lefebvre, Foucault, instances, like a shoe factory or a Baudrillard – their work teaches server farm, the programming is so us to see the chains in which we specific that it makes other forms are bound. They provide excellent of life there completely impossible. and indispensible critique; Alternatively, it can be purposefully however, the proposition must vague to maximise possible come from the architect. activities, like a hall or stadium.

Even when expansive, programming space that can accommodate cookspace is almost always about ing. We could equally cook outdoors, limiting possibilities through specific or in any space with the required form. In the public realm this tends infrastructure or amenities. to focus on efficiency: optimising Because function in architecture communication and civic services, has been distorted so far from as well increasing the production describing a performative action it and circulation of commercial would be better to say cooking is goods. In the private sphere the programme of the kitchen, not programming can be more sinister. its function.

The home is a factory for making The appropriation of function into better workers. This is why corpora- capitalist metrics stems from some tions like Ford or Cadbury took such of the first ergonomic experiments, keen interest in housing and the which involved attaching small health of the worker. They lights to workers’ hands and then depended on the home to make using long-exposure film to track more and better employees, their movement. The intensity and thereby increase their own of light in the resulting images production. The programme of the showed where inefficient actions home is fundamentally the act of were slowing down production. dominating, controlling and domes- These studies began as depictions ticating other humans. We must be of performance, but they also extremely critically aware of proprovided precise data. They were gramming here precisely because it quantitative not qualitative, allowing is in the home, not the public and for the functional parameters of a corporate realm, where society is specific action to be refined and designed and reproduced. manufacture sped up. Later, the same process was applied to the home, and suddenly the amount Function of time lost to “excess” movement and inefficient paths could be visualised. The kitchen in particular was redesigned around optimising the work of the housewife (Frankfurt Kitchen, 1926) to require less movement and greater access to foodstuffs. The elimination of “excess” allowed for the progressive reduction of space in the home down to minimum standardised dimensions. ƒ x=(z+y) z Today when we look at a building’s function we must think of all I said above that a kitchen was a the invisible parameters that cause programmed space, not a funcit to exist – not just those related tional space. It is true that function, to its occupancy (programmes). which comes from the Latin “fungi” Finance, planning, regulations, (to perform), would seem more standards and environmental appropriate for describing activity factors are all functional paramthan programme, whose etymology eters that influence programme is “pro graphein” (to write publicly). and form. For example, the terms However, the idea of function as and conditions of a building’s quite simply a performed action has finance – whether it is speculative long been overtaken by its modernist construction aimed at the mortgage usage. Functionalism is the study market, or long-term rent, or of ergonomic actions, and this communal housing or co-ownerinvolves measuring efficiencies and ship – have serious implications for tolerances. A function has become the architectural outcome. Just as purely metric, just as it is in mathethe kitchen houses cooking, but matics. As the great Italian architect cooking does not require a kitchen, Aldo Rossi so eloquently put it, we function never directly dictates can no longer use function except a design (in the sense that it never as “a function of.” In mathematics, directly determines a plan or the algorithm always ties two or an aesthetic concern). Rather, more terms together – X is always a it only sets the conditions and function of Y. Accordingly, to parameters, which when combined describe the kitchen as a functional determine the creative limitations space would be to assert the for the project. kitchen is a function of cooking.

Functionalism is the belief that This obviously makes no sense. space can be designed around Cooking is the algorithm for all the accommodation of “functions” possible parameters implicated in (programmes). This stands making meals – storing food, again Rationalism, which is design preparing it, exposing it to a flame through abstracted ratios often or heat or some other transformative divorced from anthropomorphic process. The kitchen is merely one dimensions. Le Corbusier described

architecture as frozen music, which sounds purple. But at the time, it was practically self-evident; the ratios believed to produce the most pleasing dimensions were literally harmonic. The harmonic mean of two lengths (b = 2ac ÷ (a+c)) is an important Palladian proportion, lifted from the musical scales. For example, the harmonic mean of 12 and 6 is 8, where the mean (8) exceeds the smaller length by one third (8/6 = 11⁄3) while the mean is itself exceeded by one third to the longest length (8/12 = 2⁄3). Some architects, particularly those influenced by Palladio, can be quite supercilious about employing the correct proportions. In opposition, the early Dutch modernist architect H.P. Berlage felt it doesn’t really matter what ratio system you use – it makes no difference whether you base your design on the Golden Mean or the 3:4 television screen.

But what is perceptible to the eye is whether a structure is internally consistent. The origin of your proportional measure can be irrational, but it must be rationally applied to produce accord.

a kind,” from mono) but repeatable iterations founded in a deeply historical process. We call this evolutionary form a typology.

The taxonomy of typologies, as with the classification of genera and species, is open to debate. For example, one lineage of the hotel evolved from the guesthouse of monasteries. Even if the programming, function and aesthetic have changed significantly over time, it is still possible to see the monastic form of life in the hotel.

But there is another lineage, in which the hotel evolved from 15th century Parisian aristocratic mansions, which in turn came from country estates and the villa. The villa as a typology is concerned with control of territory and agricultural production; but it is also designed to dissimulate the work required to support the estate. A villa is designed to give the impression that rural life is bountiful, pure and effortless. This is where the hotel gets its expression of luxury and leisure. The modern hotel is a product of the collision of what were previously two different typologies, which in turn evolved from other, more distant typologies (some Form extant). The convergence and divergence of typologies, as well as their interbreeding, is far from straightforward. During this process form can accumulate junk DNA, from ritual redundancies (urban = = fireplaces) to outright skeuomorphs (electric chandeliers).

Vy Vz Vx No form is virtuosic. Every form has an origin, even if it cannot be known precisely. The very best forms never seek to break with history completely – rather, they are the adaptation of an existing form The final framework is form, which to a new role. This reminds us (naturally) follows function. that all forms are inventions, and Throughout the other three sections there is nothing like a “traditional” we’ve slowly eliminated several form. Every generation reinvents species of design jargon. Style is the past to suit the future. the product of aesthetic. Function The American interest in classicism, doesn’t mean what it used to, for example, can seem strangely and is better represented today anachronistic to many Europeans. by programme. Meanwhile, actual But this obsession occurs only functions are merely metric amongst the middle and upper algorithms and parametric interreechelons, and is an attempt on their lations. So what is left for form? part to preserve elitist social Form in architecture is first of class relations. Classical architecall the plan drawing. Form is the ture is a weapon in class structure spatial articulation of functions, and hierarchy. programme and aesthetic. It is often There are no innocent forms conflated with style, but the two are and no natural formal solutions: unrelated. As we’ve seen, style is an the modern kitchen was invented expression of ethics, and therefore in 1926 by Margarete Schüttenot intrinsically spatial. Form is only Lihotzky; the single-person about space. The best way to think bedroom was invented by Henry about form is as the DNA of design. Roberts in the mid 19th century; the And as with evolution, each gencorridor was a 17th century eration produces mutations, some invention. Every aspect of your of which will respond better to new home, and every building you have environments, and some which ever seen, is the product of millennia will become rapidly redundant. of formal design iterations.

The new, successful forms are not That’s what you should think monsters (literally meaning “one of about architecture.

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The home is the stage upon which we act out our lives Edwin Heathcote

forward far beyond the lifetime of the house and giving perspective to the tiny sliver of time we have inherited on the surface of the earth – while hinting at the unknown future so far beyond human habitation.

The drama is set by seemingly momentary glimpses into lives. A woman stands in a room wondering what it was she came in for. An elderly couple reminisce about their life together. A young couple seem already estranged in their determination to avoid each other’s gaze. A murder seems to take place, as does a rape, many years before the house was built. And there are moments of grief – a funeral bier, or the onset of a father’s dementia observed by his son. And there is play.

The parallel dances of myriad generations, Twister, blind man’s buff, charades, dolls, Christmas. Slowly, a seemingly listed canvas begins to reveal an entire spectrum of existence, the formative moments of life – together with the boredom and ennui of a Sunday afternoon or an interminable summer holiday. Here reveals the home as the stage upon which we act out our lives.

There are precedents of course. Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s manual (1978) is an obvious one, the entire compendium not only of urban lives but of literary styles set against a single Parisian apartment block – or his An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (1975) which sees the author observe the city from a single point, the background unchanging, the flow of people subtly different as the days, weeks and months pass by.

Equally, Will Eisner’s wonderful comic strips – New York, The Building, City People and Invisible People are more conventional in style, but similar in intent.

And there are descendents; Chris Ware’s magnificent Building Stories, in which the lives of residents are revealed in slow, exquisitely rendered scenes, interior monologues and sparse conversations – a book about urban loneliness. The current publication is a reworked and completely redrawn version of an earlier 1989 comic strip of the same name – one Ware described as having more impact on his work than any other single influence.

In Here, McGuire (one-time bassist for New York post-punk band Liquid Liquid) has produced a new typology, a synthesis of art and life in which the home becomes not just a framing device or background but a character. There is no suggestion of psychogeography, of the house absorbing events or atmospheres, yet simultaneously the primitive in us seems to demand some kind of reflection of our lives in the fabric of the architecture. It is almost as if it is difficult for us as rational beings to accept that this house could be so neutral, so temporary, so uninterested in what happens within its walls. So much is written about architecture, although so little of it actually makes us think about the way we inhabit – about what the house is, and what part it plays in our lives... and yet this one book, almost wordless, readable in half an hour, tells us so much.

Sometimes you get a book through the post. You open the padded envelope with a degree of excitement – new books are always tinged with anticipation. Then you look at how many pages it has. You think of having to read it. Understand it. Take a position. Then it’s still not over, you have to review it. It’s a lot of work... more than enough to counter the tingle of anticipation, and slightly increase the weight on your shoulders.

Even if you love reading, this thing you are holding in your hands has just slightly soured the experience for the next God-knows-how-many-hours. Those are hours when you could be reading literature, essays, papers, mags – things you enjoy. Book reviewing slightly soils the idea of reading.

But, just occasionally, a book drops in that’s such a delight it does the opposite. And even more occasionally, it’s a book full of pictures, with hardly any reading to do at all. The irony, of course, is that these seemingly flimsy books, these books with hardly any of the words that make a proper book a book, might manage to say far more about architecture, about society and about ourselves than shelves full of the kind of verbiage that is the inevitable result of the expectation that academics should publish – regardless of whether they have anything to say, or whether they can write. And here is that book. Or rather, Here is that book.

The dust jacket (and the cover beneath it) shows a banal window set into a wall of grey. There’s more than a hint of Hopper here – in the strong diagonal of the shadow which falls across it, the folds of the curtain, the curious flatness and impenetrable darkness inside.

Perhaps there’s even an intimation of Hitchcock, or Rear Window and its protagonist's irresistible voyeurism.

There is a sense of something having happened, or of something about to happen inside that window.

And that is exactly what the book is about. Richard McGuire takes a corner of a suburban house and, jumping through time – but not space – gives tantalising glimpses into moments of its inhabitation. The graphic style is rather flat – blocked colours, figures as if pasted from indistinct photos, whilst windows on the scenes allow McGuire to overlay figures and scenes from different eras onto the same space. The figures themselves are a little haunting, occasionally only sketchily drawn, occasionally looking like snapshots from faded family albums. The background, meanwhile, changes colour and tone – carpets and curtains, wallpapers and pictures appear and disappear from one page to the next, only to pop back again a little later. Then, occasionally, a wrench: an open field, a house under construction, a distant future landscape of strange skies and sedimented earth, or a plain, or a forest roamed by dinosaurs or deer. This book is a time machine, jumping back and 19

Here by Richard McGuire, Pantheon Books, 304pp, £15 December 2014, 978-0375406508

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“The Internet of Things will complete a vast social ‘machine’. Its analytical power alone could optimise resources on a scale that significantly reduces the use of carbon, raw materials and labour.

Making the energy grid, the road network and the tax system ‘intelligent‘ are just the most obvious things on the task list. But the power of this emerging vast machine does not lie solely in its ability to monitor and feed back. By socialising knowledge, it also has the power to amplify the results of collective action.“ Mason does acknowledge “the prophets of postcapitalism” and the generation of “beautiful troublemakers,” the social struggles and radical thinkers that anticipated such theses: from Alexander Bogdanov to the Italian Autonomia, from André Gorz to the hacker movement. Mason recomposes the family album of the European left and avoids sectarianism: there is no need to play one political school against the other (as youngsters still do, imitating sects established

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The waveform economy is the hyperobject that Paul Mason tries to capture in his book Postcapitalism.

Mason follows the motley curves of capitalism’s history like a philosophical rollercoaster, though without bypassing the frontlines of global conflicts he often covers as reporter for Channel 4. This futural book is vertiginously anchored to history, opening with a reality check in the most surreal country: on the banks of the river Dniestr, looking at both sides, “between the free-market capitalism and whatever you want to call the system Vladimir Putin runs.” From the limbo of Transnistria the carriage accrues momentum, before a zero-gravity plummet into the steep abstractions of casino capitalism, and through the adventurous history of the radical left that we all seem to have forgotten.

Few authors have managed to carve such a robust synthesis of the present. Specifically, Mason’s argument is centred on the role of information technologies behind the 2008 economic crisis, recapitulating the development of the 20th century in this way. Mason draws a red thread connecting young workers at an internet café in a Manila slum with the theory on economic cycles by the Russian Marxist economist Nikolai Kondratieff (who was executed by firing squad on Stalin’s order in 1938). Thanks to Kondratieff’s cycles of technological innovation, the current stagnation is explained as an effect of the zero-cost regime engendered by information commodities and cognitive labour.

How to couple labour and technology into one diagram? “The waveform is beautiful,” writes Mason, introducing Kondratieff.

The book is generous with historical accounts that Mason collects according to four main economic cycles. Each cycle is associated with specific technological innovations: each cycle peaks and crashes, followed by economic depression with related social conflicts. Mason recognises labour as the source of value, but technology emerges as the main catalyser and amplifier of such economic waves peaking and collapsing. The four cycles are identified as follows: the first factory systems with steam-powered machinery (1790-1848); the age of railways, telegraph and ocean-going steamers (1848-1895); the introduction of scientific management, electric engineering and telephone (1895-1945); the age of transistors, synthetic materials, factory automation and digital computers

(1945-2008). Periodisation is always tricky, and not surprisingly Kondratieff’s theoretical clockwork seems to break after the fourth wave: for it cannot quite explain the “long disrupted wave” whose symptoms of stagnation already started to become visible in the 1990s. Like surfers in the off-season, capitalists are left waiting for the missing fifth wave.

Mason says that his thesis is not new: Marx in the Grundrisse had already envisioned the crisis of capitalism as due to the role of “general scientific knowledge” embedded into machinery as fixed capital (and against which labour value would increasingly become marginal). Yet Mason remains one of the few to stress the devalorisation effect of information technologies behind the current stagnation.

Central to this is the idea of disruption, which Mason translates from the entrepreneurial lexicon into the agenda of political transformation.

As a consequence, this represents a shift from the positions of anticapitalism to the programme of postcapitalism – from struggle to planning and from labour organisation to technology organisation.

The book hits the sore point of a historical riddle for which nobody has a clear solution: the issue of the reappropriation of technology or reappropriation of fixed capital, as Antonio Negri would phrase it. The following is one of the most visionary passages, one that captures the controversial transformation of traditional subjectivities into a benevolent cybernetic apparatus.

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The Generation of Digital Austerity Rises Matteo Pasquinelli

in Paris forty years ago). Rather, financial speculation and, on the there is a need to open new bridges other hand, of mass surveillance. It between different archipelagos. is the global precariat, left behind The idea of injecting complexity, by the Dot-com Crash and turned long-period analysis, infrastructure into an army of baristas with planning, basic income and a bit of PhDs – those that support Assange technological Prometheanism into and Snowden, Podemos and Syriza the agenda of the Left is also (also, Yanis Varoufakis’ DIEM25 addressed by Nick Srnicek and Alex manifesto seems oriented at mergWilliams in their book Inventing the ing both social blocs).

Future. Mason has the merit of Mason’s final proposal is called providing a more realistic monetary Project Zero: “because its aims are framework for the program of “fully a zero-carbon energy system; the automated luxury communism” (as production of machines, products Aaron Bastani once phrased it). and services with zero marginal However, the issue of labour autocosts; and the reduction of necesmation brings the same question to sary labour time as close as possible old and new generations alike: to zero.” He suggests to first run whose are the robots? “an open, accurate and comprehenIf the ownership of “fixed capisive computer simulation of the tal” – machinery, infrastructures, current economic reality”, to engineer platforms – is not resolved, full the state form (a sort of wiki-State), automation in large companies and to promote collaborative business basic income without welfare sermodels (like the Mondragon co-op vices will mean a further accumula- in Spain), to suppress monopolies, tion of capital and inequalities. to nationalise the central bank and Mason himself appears closer to socialise finance, and to pay everythe North-American debate (and one a basic income. The emphasis even to the New Economy language on cooperatives, sustainable at times), where technopolitics is business models, coworking and addressed as grassroots and the maker movement is strong. large-scale cooperativism (see the Mason envisions an exit from primer by Trebor Scholz after capitalism that requires a robust the successful conference Platform political engineering. Will the generCooperativism organised at The ation of digital austerity be able to New School in 2015). build the Great Machine, to transWas life (and politics) different in form the power of the digital code the pre-digital world? Not really. As into a new progressive legal As McKenzie Wark recalls in his code, to transform cognitive labour book Molecular Red, in 1908 the into new visionary political instituRussian revolutionary Alexander tions? This is a new dialectics of Bogdanov wrote a sci-fi novel called constituted and constituent power, Red Star in which he imagined a in which a normative power seems scenario similar to the network to be finally recognised as technosociety – without having ever seen a logical, global infrastructures single computer. and platforms, rather than only as political institutions. Will technopol“The hero – an organiser in the itics change the old normative Russian Bolshevik party – gets game? For Mason it already does. taken to Mars on a spaceship. He finds the Martian factories modern and impressive but the most stunning thing is what he sees in the control room: a real-time display provides an hourly snapshot of Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our labour shortages in every factory on Future by Paul Mason the planet, together with a summary Allen Lane, 368pp, £12, July 2015 of sectors where there is a labour 978-1846147388 surplus. The aim is for workers to move voluntarily to where they are Inventing the Future: needed. Since there is no shortage Postcapitalism and a World Without of goods, demand is not measured.

Work by Nick Srnicek There is no money either.“ and Alex Williams Verso, 256pp, £12.99, September According to Mason, Bogdanov 2015, 9781784780968 prophesised the age of information workers that are connected by Platform Cooperativism: something “subtle and invisible”.

Challenging the Corporate Sharing Today, Mason certainly captures the Economy by Trebor Scholz spirit of a generation that recogRosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 32pp nises itself as a casualty – of both January 2016 the austerity regime and the digital economy. We could call it the gener- Molecular Red: Theory for the ation of digital austerity, one that Anthropocene by McKenzie Wark witnessed the promise of the interVerso, 304pp, £9.99, April 2015 net turned into an apparatus of 978-1781688274

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The Financialisation of History Sam Jacob If this text were a documentary film, we would begin with a shot of the green-brown water of the river Thames lapping against the alginated stone embankment outside the Houses of Parliament. We would zoom out, while fading to spliced footage of two boats on the river. One, a grainy video, would feature a punk band. The other, more professionally produced, an heir to the throne. The editing would make you feel that these two boats, though distant in time, were somehow occurring in concert. That these two Thames trips were speaking to each other. That the Sex Pistols Jubilee year jaunt, and Prince Charles’ “Vision of Britain” were part of a continuous flotilla that began in 1977 and ended in 1988. Or rather, a period bookended by these voyages that continues to shape us.

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The 80’s revival endures into its 3rd decade, with no sign of its wheel spinning any slower. With every rotation dizziness blurs any real relationship to fact. Instead, its very repetition becomes the thing that is repeated.

Its signs and symbols continue to spin on an ahistorical Catharine Wheel, spewing coloured sparks into the night. That the 80’s, above all decades, should remain in this perpetual state of re-performance is no accident.

It is the moment where culturally and politically the idea of the past-as-future emerged. Between John Lydon’s searing scream of “No Future” in the Sex Pistols God Save The Queen, through to Prince Charles’ “Vision of Britain” and Francis Fukuyama’s essay, “The End of History” (published in 1989) something very strange happened to history, perhaps to time itself.

In the late 1970’s and early 80’s a new form of radical Conservatism emerged. Part of its radicality was the sheen of nostalgic ideas about England. Thatcherite Conservatism promised two things: That everything would change, but that everything would also stay the same.

Britain would be entirely remade according to free market principles, deregulation and privatisation, and in doing so, Britain would re-enact itself as a Great-again nation.

The political landscape was defined by the dream of a frictionless, efficient private sector future, freed from the postwar social settlement. But this futuristic dream was simultaneously festooned with the imagery of the past.

The future, under Thatcher, became a complex and contradictory idea. No longer the futurist white-hot heat of Harold Wilson, but a supercharged dream of the past.

The defining moments of the era – the Falklands War, the Big Bang and the Miners’ Strike were all washed with the flickering glow from the perfect screen nostalgia of Merchant Ivory and Brideshead Revisited.

This obsession with history, greatness and nation is in part explained by Thatcher’s own obsession with Churchill. History, Churchill tells us (and her), is written by the victors. But he would say that wouldn’t he, as both victor and historian. Churchill’s obsession with history was a primal force in the way he manufactured his own present, drawing on the past as a guide, as a source of intelligence, comfort and warning.

But Churchill’s historiographic view of the world began, after his death, to consume the world. Once Churchill had become history himself, the image of him as wartime leader assumed a new significance.

Churchill – the Churchill of bulldog spirit, of fight-themon-the-beaches, of a Britain that was both victorious and still imperial – was raised as the ghostly muse and protector of British Conservatism. This ghost of Churchill was recruited most clearly in the Falklands War. Thatcher, many argued, manufactured the conflict just so she could appear Churchillian: a real battle acting as a re-enactment of an occult sacrifice to raise the spirit of history within her.

Nowhere more was this contradiction at the heart of Conservatism between history and the future played out

that in the establishment of the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission in 1983 (soon more snappily renamed and now simply called Historic England).

The National Heritage Act did two things. It first consolidated the various heritage functions of government into a single, smaller, more “efficient” entity. Secondly, by establishing it as a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation (“quango”), it also became a commercial entity, producing its own revenue streams. Instead of primarily being concerned with preservation, as it had been, English Heritage was dedicated to the commercial exploitation of state-owned historic properties. In broad terms, this was the privatisation of history.

“History” in the 1980’s was subject to the same ideological transformations as other economic sectors. As the heavy industries that had defined Britain since the Industrial Revolution closed, history became one of the new post-industrial products.

In place of industry and manufacturing, Britain became a pioneer in the post-industrial products of finance and history. We didn’t sell things any more but ideas, concepts that took the form of financial services and historical experience. History was re-imagined as a commodity that could be mined, refined and traded.

Heritage became a resource, a function of financialisation.

And just as the transformation of financial services through privatisation, deregulation and the Big Bang had created strange immaterial financial products – derivatives, futures and other instruments that liberated capital from their bounds – meaning and value became increasingly dislocated.

Financialisation equally transformed history. This newly imagined idea of history began to do more than simply narrate. Instead, the fantasies of historical England began to merge with its real artefacts. Real castles became historical theme parks where fictions merged with history. Bejerkined out-of-work actors dressed up as knights and friars at abbeys and palaces.

Visitors could participate – churning butter in the kitchen, holding out an arm for a hawk to sit on, firing an arrow – in ways that made them feel that history was coming alive even as it became theatre. History shifted from fact to experience, entertainment and engagement. Across the country, historical sites became scenographic, where the big-screen fantasies of historic England could be collectively performed.

As these remakes and re-enactments played out across the country, nostalgic fantasy became rooted too in the heart of Government. Performing rituals of nostalgic Englishness became far more than play, much more than fantasy. Re-enacting myths of nationhood acted as a very real mechanism of radical ideology.

In this new idea of what history was and how it could be used, architecture found itself centre stage.

Architecture became factory where new historical product could be manufactured. Its fantastical theatre of

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history a way to cement and solidify the new myths of old England - its performance simultaneously a way of making real the its fiction.

Architecture was even deployed to reshape the centre of power as Margaret Thatcher appointed neo-classicist Quinlan Terry to remodel the interiors of 10 Downing Street. The project transformed what was essentially a pretty average Georgian terraced house into something that appeared much more like the interior of an 18th century palace. This was nothing less than a manufacturing of the historical, a remaking of the present in the image of the past, erecting a scenographic synecdoche at the very centre of power.

Across Britain, versions of this history-nouveau played out. In developer housing with appliqué Georgiana, in giant supermarkets with fibreglass clock towers, in culde-sacs of developer-built executive homes with names like “Henley.” And, fuelled by blue blood and a personal horror of modernity, Prince Charles played out his own “Vision of Britain” in a Dorset Village.

If this essay were a documentary, right now the following sequence of mages would play to suggest how seemingly dislocated events were actually part of continuum: The Cold War and new urbanism, death in the South Atlantic and neo-Regency, unemployment and nostalgia, civil unrest and faux-vernacularism.

Doric columns made from the kind of expanded foam that means you could pick them up with one hand. These are the real call signs of the 1980‘s. The plasterwork curlicues in Quinlan Terry’s new Downing Street ceilings might as well be the arcing turn of the General Belgrano heading out of the exclusion zone, while frothy tracery marks the vectors of the torpedoes headed toward it.

On the eve of all of this, on the day of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977, with the county covered in Union Jack bunting and with Thatcher still Leader of the Opposition, the Sex Pistols took to the Thames. The (aptly named) Queen Elizabeth set sail from Charing Cross pier, steamed up and down the Thames, until outside the Houses of Parliament the Pistols finally let rip with “Anarchy in the UK”. They kept playing: “No Feelings”, “Pretty Vacant”, “I Wanna Be Me”, then “No Fun” as the police boats circled (“one of the best rock’n’roll moments EVER. I mean EVER” wrote Jon Savage). And that was it. The boat pulled over, the crowed cleared, Malcolm McLaren and Richard Branson were arrested. Like most Pistol moments, its hard to know how much of it was sincere and how much of it was a stunt.

Eleven years later, we find the Queen’s own son and heir on the river too, also armed with a camera and an eye on publicity. He’s filming for his BBC TV special, “A Vision of Britain”. As he sails upstream he tells us: “All around me is what used to be one of the wonders of the architectural world, London” before arguing how terrible its all become despite “so many Londoners who felt powerless to resist”. What’s strange here is that 31

the Prince casts himself as powerless. He tells us that conspiracies of money and power have wreaked havoc on the landscape (and society), that “modernity” (in the form of planners) has destroyed the organic fabric of the city and instead erected an alternative.

1977-1989 is a period that provides us with three future-free alternatives. The first is Rotten’s: “Aint no future / in England’s dreaming” where he suggests either that England’s dreams of the past mean it is unable to imagine a future. Or that in England’s dream there is no future. Instead we retain a figurehead monarchy that performs her role “cause tourists are money” and that history itself had become a “mad parade”.

The second is the neo-conservative End of History, whose Thatcherite manifestation was historical re-enactment as shock doctrine.

The third is Prince Charles’ “Vision of Britain”, a re-enacted history whose vernacular promised to heal the scars in both land and time left by the twin talons of the Luftwaffe and Modern Architects.

Punk sold out (if there even was anything to sell out of in the first place). Thatcherism became so entrenched in British culture that decades later, long after she left ours, we are still living in her world. For Fukuyama, history as a living breathing battle of ideologies became fully resurrected – driven by fundamentalism, nationalism and neo-primitivism – erupting violently out of the apparently placid lagoon of post-history (even if this historical return was a zombie-historical). Prince Charles’ Poundbury produced no prelapsarian restoration but an even more synthetic hybrid.

“We’re the future, your future” said Rotten. But the future after the 1980’s had become a complex proposition. Any idea of the future could now only be a radical composite construction made of pasts. The End of History had become the End of Future.

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A Cybernetic Socialist Orgasm Jesse Seegers

The Prince, the Architects and New Wave Monarchy by Charles Jencks, Rizzoli, 56pp, £1.90, July 1988 978-0847810109

What would a socialist internet look like? Historian Eden Medina’s thorough historical study Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile, recounts an illuminating story of how a government, a cybernetician, multitudes of civil servants, designers of many media, and the general public came together to imagine a new relationship between technology and politics, and how technologies could be designed or used to enact or embody a political goal. In this case: the potential for a technologically-empowered socialist future for Chile.

The Cybersyn project was a forward-thinking endeavour undertaken in Chile by the democraticallyelected socialist president Salvador Allende, from July 1971 to September 1973 – a project abruptly halted by Allende’s death in the US-backed military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet. Shortly after Allende was sworn into office in November 1970, he quickly implemented La vía Chilena al Socialismo (the Chilean Path to Socialism). This included nationalisation of key industries and companies, including copper mining and banking. Geopolitically hemmed in by both American and Soviet influences, Allende “proposed a political third way, something different from the politics and ideology of either superpower.” While Fidel Castro visited Santiago for an extended visit in 1971, Allende was reportedly wary of top-down Soviet models or military coups.

Yet even though Allende sought to retain democratic representation, his political leanings clashed with US foreign policy in Latin America during the Cold War. In an example of the perceived magnitude of the threat this seemed to pose to American capitalism, a meeting between President Nixon, Pepsi Chairman Donald Kendall, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and Chilean-connected capitalists gave CIA Director Richard Helms covert instructions and “$10 Million – more if necessary” to “make the [Chilean] economy scream,” by enacting an “invisible economic blockade” and attempting multiple covert CIA coups d’état.

While most of the military coups were blundered, the economic blockade created a very real dearth of investment capital, and would hamper efforts to accurately model and analyse the Chilean economy later on, in project Cybersyn.

Around the same time as Allende’s rise to power, a British cybernetician named Stafford Beer

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used his keynote address at a conference held by the American Society for Cybernetics to lay out a theory for a futuristically-named “Liberty Machine.” Beer observed that governments were “elaborate and ponderous” machines that have such “immense inertia” that changing them seems to require “destroying the machinery of the state and going through a phase of anarchy.” However, he contested that while government institutions needed to change, this did not have to go along with the chaos of destroying the state. To quote GilScott Heron: “the revolution would not be televised,” though, in this case it may come spitting out of a telex machine.

Cybenetic Revolutionaries goes into a granular level of research and detail. Using interviews with key protagonists, Medina illustrates how these two trajectories of Beer and Allende – on totally different sides of the globe – became intertwined serendipitously. This was largely due to Fernando Flores, a 27-year-old engineer. Allende appointed Flores as third in command of the Corporación de Fomento de la Producción (CORFO), the State Development Corporation, charging him with nationalising Chilean industry. In an auspicious turn of events, Flores had been trained in operations research while working as – what we would call today – an intern, in Chile’s steel industry. In the mid 1960’s the industry had consulted with Science in General Management (SIGMA) where Beer had been working, and Flores had read Beer’s Cybernetics and Management (1959). When visiting a former professor at MIT in 1968, someone serendipitously handed Flores a copy of Beer’s Decision and Control (1966). The management theories espoused by Beer, based on biological analogies, uncannily resembled Allende and his party’s ambition to transform the Chilean economy into an adaptive, evolving organism within the context of the Chilean approach to democratic socialism: finding a balance between centralised control and individual freedom.

Medina notes that in their attempt to achieve this aim, they identified the problem that would require a “network connected the vertical command of the government to the horizontal activities that were taking place on the shop floor… the network offered a communications infrastructure to link the revolution from above, led by Allende, to the revolution from below, led by Chilean workers and members of grassroots organisations.” This balance between centralised directive and distributed decision making was central to Cybersyn. On a

and, through this act of play, expand their intuition about economic behaviour and the interplay of price controls, wages, production levels, demand, taxation policies, foreign exchange reserves, import and export rates, and other factors.”

D. The Operations Room, or Opsroom, a manifestation of Beer’s earlier concept of The Liberty Machine, a central control room which would become “the iconic image of Cybersyn and the symbolic heart of the project.”

larger scale, the tension between itself – women took to the streets consolidated control and decentral- protesting food shortages, and a ised autonomy is one that continues stern police response led to 99 to shape our attitudes and relationpeople being injured. This crisis ships to the technological and served as both a canary in the surveillance systems that increascoalmine for increasing social unrest, ingly regulate our daily lives – be it a and a call to urgent action for Beer government, a social network, or an and his team. By March 1972, when on-demand delivery app.

Beer returned to Santiago, the Revolutionary change usually basic parts of what would become involves some kind of direct popular Cybersyn were in place. action, folk politics, or military force.

However, it became apparent to The overall Cybersyn project had Flores that “the Chilean revolution four constituent parts: would not take place with empanadas and red wine. But perhaps it A. Cybernet, a network of telex could be managed with cybernetics machines on factory floors around and computation.” the country.

Following a letter of invitation from Flores in July 1971, Beer B. Cyberstride, a statistical writes: “I had an orgasm,” describsoftware model for economic maning the intellectual thrill of being agement, essentially a computer invited by the Chilean government simulation of the Chilean economy, to implement his ideas for a cybereventually renamed Cybersyn netic socialist economic system. (cybernetics + synergy). It used Stafford Beer first arrived in Chile a single IBM 360/50 mainframe on November 4, 1971, the eve of and the Cybernet network of telex Allende’s first annual state of the machines as the communications union address – symbolically held in network. a stadium full of the people, rather than to the congress as was cusC. CHECO (CHilean ECOnomic tomary. By December of that same simulator), “a medium with which year the first discontent with economists, policy makers, and Allende’s management manifested model makers could experiment,

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of technologically-advanced countries?”

Medina’s fascinating account makes the important distinction that technology was neither the success nor the failure of the Cybersyn project, but that the politics imbued within the system ultimately succumbed to more physical forces (a military coup) that the abstract models of the Chilean economy could have never predicted nor controlled. A consistent lesson in Cybernetic Revolutionaries is how the design of a technological system is never politically neutral, that there are always values consciously or unconsciously prescribed in to interfaces and the models that underpin them.

On the opposite page are Guy Bonsiepe’s initial sketches for the Cybersyn Opsroom, while the realised configuration and control chair are shown above

The symbolic image of the project, the Opsroom, featured a circular arrangement of fibreglass swivel chairs, with something like a customised television remote control in the armrest. They sat in an octagonal room with screens of data and 1 Medina, Eden. Cybernetic systems diagrams on the walls.

Revolutionaries: Technology and The Ulm-educated Gui Bonsiepe, Politics in Allende's Chile. lead designer with his Interface Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. p 3 Design Group at Chile’s Institute of 2 Ibid, 45.

Technological Innovation, said of the 3 Ibid, 150. project in retrospect: “There was no 4 Ibid, 68 precise briefing, only, ‘oh, we simply 5 Ibid, 88. need a room with ten chairs, a table, 6 Bonsiepe, Gui. "Re: Cybernetic a screen for projections and a Revolutionaries." 23 Dec. 2015. device to hang-up some graphic E-mail. “It would be fair - and charts with economic data.’ That not only fair, but necessary - to give was it – at the beginning. As it credit to the design group at the turned out, the issue was more Institute for Technological complicated than putting a table in Innovation in Santiago de Chile: a room with ten chairs.” At one point Interface design: Design Group, the Opsroom even included Institute of Technological a kitchenette dedicated to making Innovation, Chile, 1972/1973.”

Pisco Sours, which was sadly 7 Popper, Nathaniel. (2015, April scrapped for budgetary reasons.

29). Can Bitcoin Conquer In October 1972, Beer returned to Argentina?. The New York Times Chile to see a completed Ops Room Magazine. Retrieved from www. and a functioning Cyberstride, nytimes.com running on the Cybernet telex sys8 Bonsiepe, Gui. “Re: Cybernetic tem. A truck-driver strike put Beer’s Revolutionaries.” 23 Dec. 2015. theory and system to the test: to E-mail. survive the strike, the government turned to the Cybersyn telex network, which simultaneously provided relief trucking while exposing the weaknesses in the system design.

What can we learn today from this dead medium, this proto-internet?

Can it serve as a productive foil for our contemporary technologydriven society? One theory might be that, as with Chile's attempt in the early 1970’s, the rise of Bitcoin in Argentina suggests that locations where traditional economic and social structures are failing are the ones most useful in which alternative systems can be viably tested. Bonsiepe notes that he encountered a kind of colonial thinking, “sometimes the whole project has been considered an offence and outright crazy: how could some people in a peripheral, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: so-called underdeveloped country, Technology and Politics in Allende’s dare to face a project that due to Chile by Eden Medina MIT Press, its advanced theoretical character 344pp, £15.95 January 2014, was considered [the] prerogative 978-0262525961

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Kim Jong-il’s Magnificent Monuments Oliver Wainwright

Dressed in his trademark zip-up leisure suit and Cuban heels, with his anorak flapping open in the breeze, a 20-metre-high bronze statue of Kim Jong-il stands at the top of Mansu hill, surveying Pyongyang with a cheery grin. His father, Kim Il-sung, stands to his right in a business suit and long flowing coat, the beaming duo flanked by a pair of billowing red granite flags held aloft by crowds of devoted bronze workers. They look out across a vast stone plaza, down the hill and over the Taedong river to a point 2km away where three gigantic stone fists stand in a circle, holding a hammer, sickle and calligraphy brush, as if frozen in a communist game of rock, paper, scissors. Regimented rows of buildings step down in symmetrical formation either side of this setpiece axis, the entire city bowing in deference to the dear leaders’ gaze.

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“The leader’s statue must be erected in the best part of the heart of the city… and play the leading role in the architectural formation of the city,” wrote Kim Jong-il.

Surrounding buildings must be arranged, he added, so as to “remind us of an impressive picture of all the Korean people looking up at the leader and cheering, and give us the feeling of their single-hearted unity behind the leader.”

It is one of the key tenets set out in his 160-page treatise On Architecture, published in 1991, which tackles everything from the location of statues to the finer points of underfloor heating in Korean homes. Written with the same thundering polemic as Le Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture, mixed with the moralising tone of Ruskin’s Seven Lamps, it is a fascinating manual of the “Juche” position on architecture – the national ideology of self-reliance developed by his father, the eternal president – which still guides the nature of construction in the Hermit Kingdom today.

The text runs the gamut from urgent imperatives directed at the singular design genius – “Architects must make strenuous efforts to create masterpieces” – to musings on public participation – “We must adopt various methods such as the masses’ joint evaluation or assessment of draft design plans and make it a rule to assemble their opinions, analyse them, sum them up and incorporate them in architecture.”

In between, there is much guidance on the creation of monuments (N.B. “The magnificence of monuments is expressed, first of all, through unusually large size and vast numerical quantity”) and the dramatic choreography of grand urban axes. But rising above all else is the emphasis on an eternal quest to define a specifically national style. And it’s not hard to see why.

Pyongyang was utterly flattened by US bombing during the Korean War and had to be entirely rebuilt from scratch from 1953, a process that relied heavily on Soviet help. The city was conceived as a version of Moscow in miniature, structured around a series

of imposing squares linked by grand axial boulevards terminating in hefty structures of a distinctly Stalinist flavour. Rows of steroidal columns marched along the fronts of imposing porticoes, apartments were equipped with Russian-style pechika heating stoves, and the country was overrun, as Kim puts it, with “Europeanstyle buildings… which did not accord with our people’s customs and sentiments.”

“In the difficult days after the war,” he writes, “the sycophants, dogmatists and anti-Party counter-revolutionary elements that had wormed their way into the capital construction sector adopted foreign designs mechanically, asserting their erroneous views.” Such imperialist meddling was not to be tolerated.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which plunged North Korea into mass starvation, any whiff of foreign influence had to be entirely expunged. “An architect who is convinced that his country and his things are the best,” writes Kim, “will not look upon foreign things or try to copy them, but make tireless efforts to create architecture amenable to his people.”

Walking the streets of Pyongyang today, the results of the Kim dynasty’s drive for a Korean style are clearly visible in the form of improbable structures pumped up with nationalist hubris – but often wrought with a surprising level of originality.

The World Festival of Youth and Students, a kind of communist Olympics held here in 1989, spawned some of the country’s most ambitious architectural concoctions. The most daring is the gargantuan May Day stadium, allegedly the largest such arena in the world, which stands on an island in the river, its silvery arches bulging like a parachute coming to land. Then there’s the national ice rink, an expressive concrete wigwam that could have come from the hand of Oscar Niemeyer, along with the sports campus of Chongchun Street, home to a weightlifting gymnasium shaped like a pair of dumbbells and a badminton hall modelled on the arc of a flying shuttlecock. With a theme park recently adorned

with a “dolphinarium” in the shape of a whale, Pyongyang reads like Robert Venturi’s ultimate “duck” dream writ large.

Kim Jong-il writes approvingly of such symbolic structures, picking out the capital’s maternity hospital as a major triumph of didactic representation. It is a complex whose form “reminds us of the benevolent features of a mother who embraces in her arms… twin babies that have just begun to find their feet,” he says. “A mere glimpse of it is enough to see that it is for women.” But woe betide any architect who takes the symbolic approach too far: “The practice of clinging to fantastic symbolic shapes out of a subjective desire will invite ‘expressionist architecture’, a school of bourgeois formalism.”

In the Kim worldview it is always a fine and blurred line between audacity and excess. Variety and originality are both continually held up as “essential requirements of architecture”, yet the maverick urge for wilful shape-making is something to be avoided at all costs.

“Architects must guard strictly against the tendency to form external shapes contrary to the structural and compositional systems, on the excuse of creating a variety of architectural shapes.” The result, Kim says, will be a waste of large amounts of labour and materials.

But such extravagance can be tolerated when directed towards national ends – particularly when the whole world is watching. Along with the spectacular stadia, the 1989 world festival bestowed the city with its most ambitious avenue. Running for 4km west of the city, Kwangbok Street stands as a deserted six-lane highway, lined either side with gigantic showcase apartment buildings, enough to house 20,000 families. But rather than the usual Soviet model of marching slabs, the blocks of flats take on an elaborate range of forms, from serpentine S-shapes to clusters of cylinders and great stepped ziggurats.

“To ensure variety in the formation of a street, the street must be formed in three dimensions,” writes Kim, describing Kwangbok as being carefully composed

to “give the feeling of magnificence through the overlapping rows of buildings, and stimulate modern tastes by means of openness and depth.” The effect is utterly crushing, giving the impression of a street made for giants, down which the visiting sports teams were duly forced to process as insignificant specks.

While Kim’s architectural principles are followed to this day, they are increasingly cross-fertilised with influence from China, where much of the investment driving Pyongyang’s unlikely skyward growth is coming from – and bringing with it synthetic cladding materials in ever more lurid shades. Curvaceous residential towers are sprouting along the waterfront, dressed in orange and green stripes. Built to house university academics, they are accordingly designed in the shape of an intellectual’s calligraphy brush.

From plans revealed so far, the country’s present leader Kim Jong-un looks set to follow in his father’s footsteps. “Let us usher in a great golden age of construction by thoroughly applying the Party’s Jucheoriented idea on architecture,” he recently declared, unveiling grand plans for specialised science cities and coastal tourist resorts, all modelled with a distinctly sci-fi air and rendered in pastel shades of pink and baby blue.

“Let us turn the whole country into a socialist fairyland!”

But it is a fantastical fairyland as thin as a Disney World stage set, behind which the rest of the country still festers in extreme poverty, subjected to chronic food shortages and lack of access to education and healthcare. Still, at least there are omnipresent effigies of the Kims, to “help people to look up at the leader’s image at all times and inspire them with the pride and consciousness that they are happy in the leader’s embrace.”

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On Architecture by Kim Jong-il University Press of the Pacific 170pp, £12, Jan 2003 (1991), B00I53BZ6C

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In the Architectural Desert Franco “Bifo” Berardi

Paris, 1986

According to Baudrillard, simulation transforms the subject-object relation, forcing the subject into the subaltern position of being subjected to seduction.

The agent is the object rather than the subject, and the whole question of alienation, repression and the uneasiness they produce thus fades away, to be replaced by the “desertification of the Real”.

Needless to say, architecture – as an activity of spaceshaping – is a case in point of this trend.

In the much-cited Postscript on Control Societies, written during the last years of his life, Deleuze appears to put into question the entire theoretical construction based on Foucault’s notion of discipline, and to move in the direction that Baudrillard had taken since the early 1970s.

Mexico, 1990

Autoportrait, 1999

“The real grows like a desert. Illusions, dreams, passions, madness, drugs, but also the artifice and the simulacrum, all used to be natural predators of reality. But they’ve all lost their energy, as if hit by an incurable and insidious disease” Jean Baudrillard

Vaucluse, 1992

Luxembourg, 2003

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Similarly we might say that in the Seminaries that Foucault delivered from 1979–1983 (particularly The Birth of Biopolitics) he abandoned disciplinary methodology, and embraced the methodology of pre-emption and pre-formation (in terms of biopolitical modelling of the social field). The theory of simulacra and the theory of desire certainly stood as two monolithic markers in the philosophical landscape of the 70s – but by the last two decades of the century they had a tendency to meet.

In the short text titled Architecture: Truth Or Radicalism Baudrillard describes the evolution of architecture as the proliferation of spatial simulacra – architectural clones shaping the space as a projection of virtuality: …”there is something attractive in this for architects themselves: to imagine that the buildings they construct, the spaces they invent, are the site of secret, random, unpredictable and, in a sense, poetic behaviour and not merely of official behaviour that can be represented in a statistical terms. Having said this, we are confronted in our contemporary world with quite another dimension. A dimension in which the issues of truth and radicality no longer even arise, because we have already passed into virtuality.”

Fronteira, 1992

The post-modern shift of the 80s was the general framework for the transformation of architectural practice from the dimension of territorialised inhabitation to the dimension of post-territorial dwelling. The disappearance of the “locus” of identity is accompanied by the virtual generation of pre-formatted space. Beware. Baudrillard is not reclaiming a nostalgic comeback to the authenticity of the local. He knows this would only be a retrospective illusion. He actually writes:

Toronto, 1994

“(I have nothing against artificial intelligence, except when it claims, with its universal calculation, to absorb all the other forms and reduce mental space to a digital one).”

In these words we can see Baudrillard’s refusal to fall into the ideological trap of the restoration of use-value in the production process. Nevertheless, it is useful to remind ourselves that in the second half of the 1970s he was acutely aware of a sort of turning point in the perception of the territory, and of its coming disappearance. In Kool Killer” (an article republished in Symbolic Exchange and Death, 1976) he speaks of metropolitan graffiti – which at that time were spreading across many cities of the world – in terms of “insurrections of signs”.

Las vegas, 1996

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“There is a horizontal and vertical expansion of the city in the image of the economic system itself.

Political economy, however, has a third dimension where all sociality is invested, covered and dismantled by signs. Neither architecture nor urbanism can 60

do anything about this, since they themselves result from this new turn taken by the general economy of the system: they are its operational semiology.”1 The bizarre insurrection that exploded in many areas of the world in the years around 1977 was a semiological insurrection, an aesthetic insurrection, in many ways.

In the years 1976 and 1977 I was engaged in the Italian experience of the autonomy movement. The Italian political landscape was marked by social conflicts and cultural upheavals: students and unemployed young people occupied universities all over the country, and a wave of squats and protests took place. The most interesting thing, however, was the process of collectivisation of daily life – the sharing of living spaces. Solidarity and sharing were two aspects of the same social transformation: the emphasis on togetherness was simultaneously a lifestyle and a political programme.

Foucault was an important reference for the movement in those years. In his early works (particularly Madness and Civilization and Discipline and Punish) he outlined a methodology for understanding the relationship between modern capitalism and the processes of disciplining social life as embodied within the main institutions of modernity: the school, the prison, the psychiatric hospital and so on. Reading his books, we were led to understand that the revolution we were talking about in those years was not so much a reversal of the political machine of the State, as it was our emancipation from institutions. These institutions were those that during the modern age had implemented an economic and cultural domination of capitalism, imposing the condition of survival onto salaried labour and imposing exploitation onto human work. In the process of the capitalist subjugation of daily life, an important function is played by the privatisation of urban space, and consequently by the privatisation of consumption.

The point that is questioned in the Foucault methodology is the genealogy of the salary, of salaried work, and the assumption that survival has to be linked to the daily alienation of time. This link is not a natural given – it is the effect of a long lasting process of the privatisation of dwelling, and therefore of consumption. Since the beginning of the bourgeois revolution, consumption has been transformed in a private act, so every person is obliged to think in economic terms about her own life and is led to consider the objects necessary to survival as objects of private property.

Privatisation, so crucial in the neoliberal strategy and vision of the world, originated with the dissolution of the community (the village, the extended family) that accompanied the modern age. This process evolved through the spread of the nuclear family after the Second World War, and eventually led to our current digital age – an age of total individualisation, loneliness, precariousness and all-encompassing competition. When our 61

Alentejo, 1993

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Brugges, 1997

relationship to other people is translated into a virtual connection, the city is turned into a recombinant space in which individuals meet punctually and interact functionally, while communication turns into mere info-exchange without bodies.

In the years around 1968, this dominant trend toward privatisation was somehow questioned, and also reversed. The movement that flourished in the 1960s and 70s was not only, and not essentially, the coalition of ideological groups in a common protest against war and authoritarianism. It was mainly a process of collectivisation of daily life spaces. The widespread experience of “communes” and collective houses may be viewed as the material pre-condition for social autonomy: sharing the spaces of sleeping, cooking and studying was perceived as a condition of richness, not as a sign of scarcity, or an unfortunate obligation. Sharing the rent, sharing food, the expenses for electricity, and all the other services, reduced the need for money – and therefore the dependence on the blackmail of the salary.

This is why those antiauthoritarian decades somehow stopped the process of the privatisation of life, and even reverted the tendency – at least for a relevant part of the population in the West.

Then things changed, as we know. The decades of social solidarity have been transfigured in the collective memory, and now they tend to be perceived in retrospect as an age of aggressiveness and chaos. In fact, the neoliberal counterrevolution was prefigured by a sort of criminalisation of solidarity. In an interview with the Sunday Times Thatcher said: “What irritates me about the whole direction of politics in the last 30 years is that it’s always been towards the collectivist society. People have forgotten about personal security. And they say: do I count, do I matter? To which the short answer is, yes. And therefore, it isn’t that I set out on economic policies; it’s that I set out really to change the approach, and changing the economics is the means of changing that approach. If you change the approach you really are after the heart and soul of the nation. Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.” 2

Sainte Beuve, 1987

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Michel Foucault in his 1979–1980 seminary, published under the title The Birth of Biopolitics. The trends that Foucault foresaw and described are how individual activity has been subjected to the spirit of economic enterprise, and how human activity has been recoded in terms of rentability and profit. Competition has been inserted in the neural circuits of daily life.

Not only the pursuit of economic profit, but the cult of the individual as an economic worrier, the harsh perception of a fundamental loneliness of humans, the cynical concession that war is the only possible relation among living organisms in the path of evolution: this is the cultural intention of the neoliberal reformation.

Margaret Thatcher also says: “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first.”

(Thatcher, 1987) The concept expressed here by Thatcher is interesting but not accurate. Society is not, in the end, disappearing: sociability is dissolving, not society. But our relations with others have been turned into daily war, and society is turned into a sort of blind system of inescapable obligations and interdependences, a prison-like condition of togetherness, in which empathy is cancelled and solidarity is forbidden.

Social space was to be transformed into a worldwide system of automatic connections, in which individuals could not experience conjunction, but only functional connection with other individuals. The process of cooperation does not stop – it is transformed into a process of abstract recombination of info-fractals that only the Code can decipher and transform into economic value.

The mutual interaction is not cancelled, but empathy is replaced by competition. Social life proceeds, more frantic than ever: living, conscious organisms are unconsciously penetrated by dead mathematical functions.

Paris, 1985

Rio, 1995

1 Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death Theory Culture & Society (London: Sage Publications, 1993), pp.77 2 Sunday Times, May 1981 www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104475

The final goal of Thatcher’s revolution was not economic, but political, ethical – almost spiritual we might say.

The neoliberal reformation was finally intended to inscribe competition into the very soul of social life, up to the point of destroying society itself.

During the same period Baudrillard (in books like In The Shadow of Silent Majorities and Simulation and Simulacra) was anticipating the effects of the new postsocial power that was emerging under the umbrella of neoliberalism. He was particularly aware that it was taking the form of a network, rather than the old form of the hierarchical pyramid. The cultural intention inscribed in the neoliberal turn was also analysed by

Architecture: Truth or Radicalism by Jean Baudrillard Semiotext(e), 39pp, $10, March 2014, 978-1584351368

Bastille, 1998

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Hyper-Connectivity as a State of Nature (Otium) Supervoid (Benjamin Gallegos and Marco Provinciali)

“domestic” scale and form. Otium is a domestic device that introduces a radical discontinuity within the field, a sudden clearing, and a new form of private space. By going inside it you are not just entering a separate space, you are actually leaving the hertzian space.

When in place, these devices constitute an archipelago of private spaces fluctuating through time and the city.

A light curtain which functions as a Faraday cage shields the body of the occupant from the electromagnetic field, leaving them in a new condition of silence, the noisy multitasking is left outside. In a rather unfashionable praise of idleness, Otium reclaims our “right to be lazy”4 within our domestic space. It is a reservoir for unproductiveness.

“A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow.” 1 Hannah Arendt

1 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1958 2 Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Design Noir. The secret life of electronic objects, August/Birkhäuser, London/Basel 2001

What does an invisible architecture look like?

Alfredo Thiermann

The blurring and impoverishment of concepts like home, domesticity and the private sphere have become a fundamental part of our generation’s life experience, and in some ways we are forced to positively engage with them. Since effectively challenging the very forces that drive these changes is beyond our reach as architects, we feel that we should rather address the way in which we experience their spatial consequences.

Unfortunately, we still have a very partial understanding of the complexity of the spaces we inhabit – for we still largely focus on traditional spatial paradigms and relationships. As we move through time we don’t just move from room to room, from inside to outside, from public to private, but we are also constantly moving through a human-created electromagnetic field: the Hertzian space.2 Hertzian space is defined by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby in their seminal book Design Noir, the secret life of electronic objects as the invisible carrier of all information. Even though we cannot directly experience it through our senses, it still influences our form of life in a radical way. Published in 2001, at a time when the electronic landscape was still a place where much had yet to be discovered, and for sure our experience of it was not as normalised and austere as it is today, this text gives us an incredibly articulated insight of the present and future manifestations of Hertzian space and of the narratives it silently involves. At the same time Dunne and Raby argue that “real human needs” are different little or no relationship with how we from designed and product-related dwell in it. As Supervoid we argue needs, and focus on the mysterious that a planning of this uncharted gap that opens between the regulandscape is not only challenging lated and predictable behavior of for architects, but might become the world of electronic devices and necessary. its transgression and subversion.

Pour Le Corbusier, c’était facile This is the space of critical design, – pas de wi-fi.3 as the beautiful title Design Noir In a time that sees filters, suggests. It is a refreshing tale set spatial sequences and perceptional in the adventurous early electronic thresholds dissolving, hyper-conworld – so different from the only nectivity has become by all means a apparently innocent and joyful new “state of nature” for our society, and as for any environmental consphere of corporate tech giants we dition some among us will sooner live in today. or later seek shelter from it, at least Hertzian space is largely militatemporarily. rised and privatised, but quite Starting from Dunne and Raby’s paradoxically it is at the same time rather uncomfortable Faraday an un-designed landscape – or Chair, we borrowed its principle at least it is not designed by and brought it to a much more architects, for our projects have

Otium is a project by Supervoid, a web-based practice founded in 2016

by Benjamin Gallegos and Marco Provinciali (www.supervoid.xyz)

Above, an image showing radio waves interacting with buildings, from Design Noir. The secret life of electronic objects. The top image is of the Otium proposal by Supervoid

There is no doubt that we live in the age of radio. In the Andes Mountains – at 5000 metres above sea level – the Chanjnantor plateau is colonised by an array of futuristic objects, all pointing toward the same direction.

Together, the several dozen antennas form the world’s largest astronomical telescope, a radio-apparatus that makes an impact even on the overwhelming Andean landscape. The half-invisible telescope reflects the fact that radio is the very medium through which we try to understand the world today – and that we do not just use electromagnetic frequencies to relate to each other, but to explore far beyond the scale of our planet.

Mark Wigley’s book Buckminster Fuller Inc. Architecture in the Age of Radio is one of the first, if not the first, theoretical account acknowledging the impact of radio in architecture’s discourse and practice.

Through a close reading of Buckminster Fuller’s archive, the book revisits and rewrites the history of “arguably the single most exposed designer of the last century” establishing the – surprisingly overlooked – connection with the ether. For Wigley, Fuller’s work can be summarised in “a single long and remarkably consistent speech from 1927 to 1983” developing basically one important idea, and apparently nobody got it during Fuller’s own time.

The book portrays Fuller in relation to his life-long obsession: radio. Reframing Buckminster Fuller’s work today proposes not so much an explanation of how architecture, and the architect, incorporated the technology of radio into their practices and discourses. Rather, it questions the role of the building in an age where the historic solidity of architecture was radically challenged by the introduction of the ethereal medium. And by doing so, it projects the same question into our own times, asking what the status of the building really can be in our increasingly hyper-connected world, dominated by an apparently ubiquitous and invisible presence.

Fuller advanced the liberating potential of radio far beyond anything his contemporaries could even perceive. Through radio, Fuller attempted to redefine domestic space – and by doing so, the entire set of human relations and attachments – to established forms of collective society. Fuller’s famous Dymaxion House was conceived as both a broadcasting house and a receiver. By having the capacity to broadcast and receive information, the Dymaxion House proposed nothing less than the liberation of architecture from the “regressive concept of land property.” That is an imaginative, radical, politically subversive and extremely contemporary aspiration.

In light of the new image of Buckminster Fuller proposed by Wigley, one is confronted with a different set of human-thing relations. To put it in simple words, radio

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3 paraprhased from the famous LC quotation “pour Ledoux, c’était facile – pas de tubes”, as found in: “A home is not a house” by Reyner Banham, Art in America #2, 1965 4 Paul Lafargue, The Right to be lazy and other studies, Charles Kerr and Co., Chicago 1883 (quite ironically the text was written from the involuntary confinement of the author inside a prison cell)

appears as a technique and not just as a technology.

In Fuller’s work, the potential of radio is too narrated and too social to be exclusively technological. If the technology of radio is apparently invisible, Fuller’s project appears as the relentless exercise of making it visible through the techniques of radio. Then, Fuller’s famous “houses” and domes should be thought of as illustrations of the intersection between bodies and the ether.

The techniques of radio are present throughout the book, manifested in Fuller’s constant speculations on the powerful and transformative potentials of the new ethereal medium over bodies and collectivities.

Architecture is portrayed as the prosthetic device that allows bodies to interact with the wide spectrum of radio frequencies. For Fuller, radio could turn human kind into a new form of nomad; it could turn the planet into a “world floating university”; it could turn the bathroom into an extension of the body, and therefore it could turn the “house into a ship” (where attachment to the ground becomes a threat rather than security.

But one might fairly ask the question: Why is it relevant to rethink Fuller’s project, if today practically all buildings are, in fact, radio-emitting and receiving devices without having experienced any significant change in their historical evolution? And why do we need to listen to that history? The fantasy of hyper-connectivity became real and global, and yet we are more and more dependent on the traditional structure of the city. This is true to the point that the demand for urban land is higher than ever before, and we are nowhere liberated from concepts of land ownership and monetary debt.

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A City Built on Nothing but Imaginary Money Leo Hollis

Opposite page shows the geodesic Expo 67 Sphere under construction in 1966 and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile. Above are images of Buckminster Fuller photographing a helilift in North Carolina, 1954

influence seeps into the DNA of the city, even if his name has been forgotten.

Barbon was a child of the English Urbanism does not need architeccivil war of the 1640s. He was born ture. Or, as Dr Nicholas Barbon in London, the son of a firebrand framed the argument in 1685: Baptist preacher, Praise-God “To write of Architecture and its Barbon, who, in 1653, was one of several parts, of Situation, the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell’s Platforms of Building, and the qual- most puritanical supporters. ity of Materials, with their Barbon senior was at the head of a Dimensions and Ornaments: To brief, Godly revolution that discourse of the several Orders of attempted to establish a republic Columns, of the Tuscan, Dorick, following the execution of Charles I. Ionick, Corinthian, and composit, In the puritan tradition, Barbon with the proper inrichments of their junior was given an horatory name, Capitals, Freete and Cornish, were and the future speculator was to transcribe a Folio from Vitruvius burdened with the moniker: If-Jesusand others; and but mispend Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thouthe Readers and Writers time.”

Wouldst-Be-Damned-Barbon.

Little has changed. In the current When the Restoration came in 1660, debate over what share of all buildand Charles II returned to England ings are devised by architects, to reclaim the crown and the repubfew are bold enough to suggest lican experiments collapsed with more than one in ten. As the the death of Cromwell, the father American architectural theorist was arrested as a traitor and the Keller Easterling has pointed son escaped to Holland. When out, the cities of the future are more he returned, having changed his likely to be the result of architectonic name to ordinary Nicholas, it is operating systems regurgitating suggested that he may have been replicable forms across the urban a doctor during the plague of plain, not individually designed 1665 – one of the few physicians dwellings in an organised who stayed to help the desperate of landscape. the city. Yet it was not until after “It was not worth his while to deal the Great Fire of 1666 that he turned little; that a bricklayer could do”, his hand to “projectioning.”

Barbon claimed. How many of When he was at his pomp, the London’s builders agree with him? leading builder-speculator of 1680s Today we live in Barbon’s city; when London, Barbon was described by we look at the London skyline, the lawyer Roger North as living in why do we continue to consider this grandeur in the family Crane Court, scene the creation of starchitects rebuilt after the Great Fire. North like Viñoly, Foster, Koolhaas reports that Barbon would keep his and Rogers, when the actual archicreditors waiting in the drawing tects of the city are Land Securities, room, then arrive, wrapped in broBerkeley, large tech companies, cade. Having bamboozled his guest, universities, government initiatives he always found a way to rush them and enterprise zones founded on out of the house, unpaid, but with complicated financial instruments? promises of future fortunes. To aid This is how the work of city this financial chicanery, he kept an making is occurring – for better or office of “clerks, attorneys, scriveworse. The cult of the architect is ners and lawyers” on hand to keep a distraction, a parlour game played him out of trouble. He operated in front of the top 1% of the 1%, beyond the reach of the legal courts, while the real business of transkeeping one step in front of the forming our urban environment “police architectonic”, in particular goes on elsewhere. the Surveyor of the King’s Works But if you were to look for the Sir Christopher Wren, who History work of Dr. Barbon himself within records as the architect who made the fabric of the current city, modern London. you will find little trace. The search So, in one instance, at Essex will only turn up a Barbon Alley, House by the Strand, a street that near Devonshire Square, and a ran along the north bank of the Barbon Close by Great Ormond’s Thames between The City of Hospital. A couple of his houses London and Westminster, Barbon can be found standing on Bedford was able to purchase the land Row, but few of his original plans against the King’s wishes. Here remain. The streetscape that he stood a series of old aristocratic developed on Essex Street, by the palaces that had fallen out of fashTemple, and Newburgh Street, ion and were ripe for redevelopment. the main thoroughfare in Chinatown, Without delay, Barbon knocked follow the same lines Barbon down the old buildings, and meandevised, but most of the houses while silenced the neighbours with themselves have been replaced. offers of new works. He skilfully Nonetheless, you see his legacy neutralised the local opposition by wherever you go in London. His setting tenants against each other,

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The book confronts us with the question of the status and role of the building within this oversaturated world, suspended in endless connectivity and flows of information. By listening again to Fuller’s words, one might conclude that the actual role and potential of architecture under these parameters is precisely one of disconnection. In the age of radio, architecture should probably propose new forms of retreat, disconnection, and hermeticism. With the help of this book, we could easily read Fuller’s work as built and articulated techniques for tuning in and out of the world.

The book triggers a particular kind of thinking, one that situates Fuller’s project in relation to the tradition of the aesthetics of retreat. It elaborates on the enigmatic character central to Reyner Banham’s tradition of the “Second Machine Age,” and moves closer to our own virtually mediated world. It is a call for reaction – not in relation to connectivity, transportation, social media, and so forth, but to the potential of new prophylactic forms, establishing boundaries and limits. “Architecture in the age of radio might have little to do with radio. Indeed, it might be a form of resistance to it, a new form of disconnection.”

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pursuing a policy of “divide and rule”. After that, he set out and developed a whole new street of “houses and tenements for taverns, alehouses, cookshoppes and vaulting schools”, a garden and a wharf. He operated so swiftly that when he was inevitably taken to court, he was able to complete the whole scheme before the judge ruled that he had been in breach of the agreement and fined. In a last gesture of chutzpah, Barbon passed the court’s fine to the new owner of the lease and went on his way.

One can admire this rascally behaviour at three hundred years remove, but it is not so amusing when it happens today. But perhaps we have got this wrong. To criticise developers for searching for the shortest route between investment and profit is as ridiculous as punishing a dog for sniffing another dog’s arse. It’s what they do; and they always have. We are making a mistake by thinking that.

Is there a difference between how Barbon went about turning a profit at Essex House and how the latest Nine Elms development in Vauxhall is currently emerging out of the ground in South London?

Initially the developers estimated the value of the new Vauxhall Sky Garden (a new development of 239 flats) at £612 ($870) per sq ft.

The council’s assessors suggested that this was too low by at least £10 per sq ft. Also there were other sources of revenue for the developer that had not been added into the figures. However, following talks it was agreed that only 17% of the units should be reserved for affordable rents.

Nevertheless, while negotiations were underway, the developer’s agents started to sell the units offplan. The first phase was launched from the Four Seasons Hotel in Canary Wharf; there were two further offices opened in Hong Kong.

The final sum that all the flats were sold for - £126 million ($180m) – was £10 million more than the original estimates 10 months before. In the end only 18 flats were reserved for social housing: less than 13% of the total.

Barbon’s Apology for the Builder was a plea to be left alone and allowed to get on with it. The state should not get in the way of building and profit. Construction made the city safer and richer. By the 1680s, however, there were few restrictions on what a builder could do. In 1685, the only planning laws that stood in the speculator’s way were local parish conventions and the 1667 Rebuilding Act. This document (the first of its kind in history) set out the basis for what to build and how, in the hope that the city never fall victim to

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fire again.

For Barbon, this document offered a template for his designs, yet he exploited every loophole and gap he could find in the regulations for his own ends. The rebuilding effort after the fire changed everything: what was built; how it was built, and where; who built it and who lived there; how it was financed. It was in these circumstances that the developer as an urban player arrived in the scene.

The desperate need to rebuild after the fire ripped up all standing labour rules about working inside the City. Anyone who was willing, not just those within the guilds, was enticed to come to London and make a play for the exploding construction economy. There was a fortune to be made out of the catastrophe. For a wily employer like Barbon, however, it means that he could strip down practises and regulations. Labourers were to be paid by the hour not the skill.

This reduced labour costs, but also encouraged new forms of production.

The new houses themselves were to be standardised, some of the main parts put together in a workshop and then fitted on site. The appropriately called “carcass” of the house was left bare for the new owner, who bought the barebones of the house and then adapted to fit their own tastes. This would become the mis en scene for bourgeois living, a blank canvas upon which the gewgaws and accoutrements of tasteful living were added.

This policy of anti-ornamentation began its life as a pragmatic choice, a means to turn a quick profit, rather than an aesthetic one.

Nonetheless it has echoed powerfully down the centuries, ending up as the grammar at the heart of Modernism.

This “Billy bookcase” of a house was the archetypal Georgian terrace. Yet even this new urban form was governed by the developer’s desire to improve their margins.

According to leasehold regulations, the speculator was encouraged to pack as many houses as possible along a street front, so as to collect as much ground rent as possible.

This forced the average house to have a thin frontage, to extend backwards as far as the lease allowed, and to be tall. This calculation was the algorithm in the architectural operating system that ran from the 1670s, all the way to within living memory. It influenced the English ideal of what a home is, a prototype that can be seen from the noble houses of Bloomsbury, the silk merchants homes on Fournier Street, Spitalfields, and the townhouses of Kensington, to the Victorian terraces of inner suburbs.

It Was Always About Debt Peggy Deamer

1 acre

1 square chain (66ft/20.12m)

4 rods per chain (16.5ft/5.03) Nicholas Barbon

And what about how the city is financed? Recently, Peter Wynne Rees, the former head planner of the City of London, noted that we were currently living through a second Great Fire moment. The fabric of the city was changing at a rate that had not been seen since the 1670–90s when ⅓ of the city was burned down and rebuilt within a generation. He is probably right – although Wynne Rees was not just concerned about the speed of change, but what shape the new city was taking. Instead of the historic fabric, he observed, London is becoming overrun with what he terms “safe deposit” towers: “many of dubious architectural quality, are sold off-plan to the world’s ‘überrich,’ as a repository for their spare and suspect capital”.

Wynne Rees’ remarks recombine the “what” and the “how” of urban development: the architectural form is indistinguishable from it’s financing. But where that money comes from has changed since the 1690s. Barbon gained his money from local merchants and friends.

He was also able to persuade the builders to invest in their own projects, rather than offer up his own cash as collateral.

He was a man who understood money. He set up the very first fire insurance office, the Phoenix. He also came very close to setting up a national land bank that would have acted as the Bank of England itself, gaining royal assent before collapsing. The scheme failed when Barbon was asked to raise £2.5 million for the government, and could only muster £2,100. Perhaps more significantly, in 1695, he got into an argument with the philosopher John Locke on the nature of money.

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Locke proposed that money’s intrinsic value was in its coinage; the silver determined the coin’s worth. Barbon pushed this aside, claiming that money was anything that the law said it was: “it is not absolutely necessary money should be made of gold or silver; for having its sole value from the law, it is not material upon what metal the stamp be set.”

Looking once again at the skyline of the neoliberal city, perhaps this is Barbon’s greatest legacy.

Long after he died, on the verge of bankruptcy, refusing to pay any debts but the cost of his wife’s funeral, this is what he really left the city. The idea that the city can rise on nothing but imaginary money.

Returning to the Nine Elms development, we see Barbon’s legacy.

Most of the flats within the development were sold before completion, often with foreign buyers putting down a deposit, and paying the rest of the price on receipt for the front door keys. However, over summer 2015, the real estate website Rightmove was doing a steady business on these imaginary residences. As one estate agent, interviewed by the Financial Times noted: “A lot of these buyers are effectively taking a financial position rather than buying a property.” It is not Barbon the developer that we should be most fearful of – it is Barbon the financier.

40 plots per acre

80 homes per 2 acre terrace

80 homes per 2 acre terrace

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The two recent Semiotext(e) publications of works by Maurizio Lazzarato are significant for being his first book-length texts translated into English. But the English-speaking audience will know Lazzarato from various essay translations, and as a respected activist in Italian politics.1 He is a principle intellect of “immaterial labour” and in his essay of this title,2 Lazzarato makes the case for aesthetic/communication/knowledge workers – a new class that doesn’t produce goods in the classical sense, and has heretofore been on the fringes of capitalism – to now control communication and screw up capitalism’s dominant hierarchies.3 In these Semiotext(e) publications, Lazzarato replaces immaterial labour, the previous dominant form of post-1970’s capitalism, with debt. Both books make the same argument – that the true economic relationship that structures subjectivity, society and the government is not production/management but debtor/financier. The Making of Indebted Man lays out the principles that “prove” this assertion, with neoliberalism its ultimate evidence; Governing by Debt elaborates on a critique Lazzarato makes toward the end of The Making of Indebted Man of Foucault’s notion of “governmentality”, allowing the Italian to rewrite neoliberalism not just via the lens of debt, but via a Deleuze/Guattarian view of debt’s subjectification.4 I will elaborate on the earlier book because in it, debt society is more completely conceptualised.

The argument in The Making of the Indebted Man is that the debtor/financier relationship has always been the fundamental aspect of human relationships, but has only revealed itself fully and come to fruition with neoliberalism. The text consists of three chapters plus the “Foreword,” “Conclusion,” and a translated “Introduction to the Italian Edition.” The first chapter considers how debt is the basis of social life because it is both a fundamental characteristic of all human relations and because neoliberalism proves the teleological historical project of debt-driven capitalism. It is not the case that the “real” economy (based on production) has been taken over by the “virtual” economy” (based on leveraging debt); rather, the virtual economy has always structured finance. The a-symmetrical relationship of debtor/financier is more fundamental than the traditional Marxist-described one of exchange, and therefore more fundamentally damaging to subjectivity than has heretofore been realised.

The second chapter traces a “history” of debt and the indebted, using first Nietzsche and then Deleuze and Guattari as guides. Nietzsche, in the second chapter of The Genealogy of Morals, points out the basis of ‘debts’ (Schulden) in ‘guilt’ (Schuld); he also describes how moral concepts such as guilt, blame, and bad conscience are fundamental to a debtor/lender relationship 78

How to Become an Architect Pier Vittorio Aureli

A. What do we learn about the truth of capitalism? For all the insights Lazzarato offers, his analysis of debt society conflates two views of debt: that it has always been the major engine of the economy and that it only now is revealed to be the engine of the economy. These two beliefs can co-exist in an emergent view of history – i.e., it’s always been about debt, but we haven’t been able to see it so clearly as now – but it makes Lazzarato’s main argument – that the neoliberalism of the 1970’s is entirely new and requires new conceptual metric – clunky. It would be one thing to declare that he is making a historiographic observation (history is different than what we thought) or another to declare, à la Hegel and Marx, that history has revealed a new truth. When conflated, there is, on the one side, a heavy-handed and depressing teleology that sucks everything in capitalism’s wake into a manifestation of debt. And on the other side we have a depressing finish to history and a pitch that capitalism is in its death-throws and may soon pass. When Lazzarato says ”Fewer than twenty years after the ‘decisive victory over communism’ and just fifteen years since ‘the end of history,’ capitalism has reached an historical dead end… it is on its last legs. At best, it

C. How, as architects, artists and designers, are we supposed to react? Lazzarato’s isn’t a view of history that ends well, or a description of agency that empowers anyone – let alone artists. Having abandoned the optimism that shines through his work on immaterial labour – an optimism that places immaterial labour at the heart of a new communications chaos that outstrips capitalism – Lazzarato also abandons that focus on creatives that are central to that constituency. Likewise, the displacement of labour by debt as capitalism’s driver makes those of us trying to convince fellow designers that we indeed DO labour (and do labour that matters) rather sad. To be fair, Lazzarato’s emphasis on debt does not ignore labour; it just puts labour at the service of debt. “(Debt) forces us to shift our perspective from labour and employment in order to conceive a politics at the level of Capital as ‘Universal Creditor’.”7 The shift this causes in our identity, from creative communicators to people carrying debt, is not without resonance. The majority of us have indeed borrowed money for our education, our house, and our business and the ongoing need for financial risk-management indeed makes us wimpy subjects. But we have lost of a class-consciousness that speaks directly to our creative identity and struggle to identify the precise role we play in the 99%.

1 Lazzarato was driven into exile Condition (Intervention series 13; in France after the state-sponsored 2011), 164 6 Ibid., 168 demolition of Italian Autonomia 7 Ibid., 182 in the 1970s. He now resides 8 See Graeber’s “The Sadness as an independent sociologist, of Post-Workerism, or Art and philosopher, and political theorist and has studied, in particular, Immaterial Labour Conference: the labourers of Ile-de-France.

A Sort of Review” (Tate Britain, 2 See www.e-flux.com/wpSaturday 19 January, 2008). It has content/uploads/2013/05/2.been noted by other reviewers that Maurizio-Lazzarato-ImmaterialGraeber’s book, Debt: The First Labor.pdf 5000 Years, unacknowledged by 3 He writes, “Immaterial labour Lazzarato, would be an appropriate constitutes itself in immediately companion book for those collective forms that exist as reviewed by Lazzarato. networks and flows. The subjugation of this form of cooperation and the “use value” of these skills to capitalist logic does not take away the autonomy of the constitution and meaning of immaterial labour.

On the contrary, it opens up antagonisms and contradictions that, to use once again a Marxist formula, demand at least a “new form of exposition.”

4 Lazzarato in the later book makes three specific antiFoucauldian observations about governmentaility: that liberal governmentality has never existed; The Making of the Indebted Man that capitalism can indeed be

by Maurizio Lazzarato deduced from capital when Semiotext(e), 144pp, £9.95 understood to be two sides of the October 2012, 978-1584351153 same coin; and that the assumption that there are stable, identifiable Governing by Debt governors and governed is naïve.

by Maurizio Lazzarato 5 The Making of the Indebted Semiotext(e), 280pp, £9.95, January Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal 2015, 978-1584351634

that made geometry consistent within the universal equivalence implied in the logic of commodity Between the 14th and 16th centuexchange. ries the European city developed The conflict between architecture from being the civitas to what archi- as science and architecture as tectural historian Manfredo Tafuri representation is at the core of the defined as a machine for the extrac- work and career of Baldassarre tion of surplus value. Politics and Peruzzi, one of the most extraordiideology did not disappear, but they nary architects of the early 16th became increasingly subservient century, and the subject of a excelto the reorganisation of urban space lent study by architectural historian for the sake of its economic Ann C. Huppert: Becoming an exploitation. The birth of the archiArchitect in Renaissance Italy: Art, tect as a distinct professional in the Science and the Career of 15th century parallels the advent Baldassarre Peruzzi. Virtually of capital as a leading force behind unknown to the general public, the rise of cities as centres of the Peruzzi is a cult figure among political and economic accumulation scholars focusing in Renaissance of power. It is not by chance that architecture. His building and drawcities like Florence, whose banking ing skills are legendary, and some of economy was one of the most powhis designs can be considered erful in Europe, became the place amongst the most sophisticated where the “professional” architect outcomes of early 16th century as we know it today came into architecture – particularly the Villa being. The authorial achievements Chigi (1506-12, known today as of Filippo Brunelleschi – such as “Farnesina”) and Palazzo Massimo the Dome of Santa Maria del Fiore alle Colonne (1532–36), both in Florence – only became possible in Rome. because an elite empowered him Born in Siena, Peruzzi began his to wrest control over the building of formation as an artist in close proxmajor public works from stonemaimity to Francesco di Giorgio, an sons and woodcutters. architect and painter known espeThese circumstances inspired cially for his military architecture, Leon Battista Alberti to theorise and whose mastery of engineering architecture as a design project, made him an essential figure in the whose disciplinary goal was to consolidation of architecture as single out the architect as a profesan applied science closely related sional figure clearly distinct from to geometry and mathematics. builders (whose craftsmanship was Although di Giorgio left his most increasingly downgraded and subimportant mark in the city of Urbino, ordinated to the architect’s design his collaborative and scientific and thus to the patron’s brief). What practice was influenced by the reinforced the architect’s leaderartistic ethos of a city like Siena, in ship was mastery of geometry and which commerce, the rational knowledge of ancient Roman archi- organisation of vital resources (such tecture, the latter a powerful source as water and warfare) prompted of legitimacy for patrons eager artists to become experts in matheto give a persuasive and “humanist” matics and engineering. It was with image to their rule. Yet geometry just such an advanced background and antiquarianism were sources of that Peruzzi moved to Rome at professional knowledge often in the beginning of the 16th century conflict with each other. While the and found himself in a place where mastery of geometry gave the archi- within very few square miles lived tect a scientific and rational way Bramante, Raphael, Michelangelo to organise the design and building and Antonio da Sangallo the process, antiquarianism required Younger – all working (and somethe adoption of forms taken from times ferociously competing) side ancient sources, which were often by side. Yet in spite of his unquesdifficult to integrate within new tionable skills, high reputation building programs. What became among peers, and great influence increasingly evident from the on subsequent generation of archiRenaissance onward was the contects (among them Peruzzi’s pupil flict between architecture as science Sebastiano Serlio, author of the (whose goal is the optimisation of most influential treatise of architecbuilding practices according to ture in the 16th century) Peruzzi did scientific and economic criteria) not achieve the fame of his contemand architecture as a form of repporaries. Among the many causes of resentation (whose goal is the this lack of recognition, his rather embodiment of a metaphysical ambiguous biography penned by tradition). Within this conflict, Giorgio Vasari may have played a geometry itself played an ambivarole. Vasari’s Lives of the Most lent role, as it was a discipline Excellent Painters, Sculptors and whose ordering principles had both Architects, was a book that – apart a cosmological (and religious) from becoming the foundation meaning, and abstracting power of modern art history writing –

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since that exchange presupposes imagined future failures. Deleuze and Guattari show that debt pre-exists labour and exchange since power, residing in the lender, structures both. It is a chapter that re-writes Marxism even as Lazzarato finds in Marx’s early writings proof that the author of Capital understood the fundamental nature of debt in the economy.

The third chapter discusses the fruition of the debt economy in the neoliberal project. Describing how the ascendancy of debt profoundly alters the exercise of power, Lazzarato uses and critiques Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism in his The Birth of Biopolitics. Leaning on Foucault’s categories of sovereign, disciplinary, and biopolitical power, he nevertheless declares that Foucault was unable to extract himself from an industrial model of power and therefore missed the true meaning of neoliberalism. Lazzarato argues that the debt economy has deprived the State of its key aspect, monetary sovereignty; has seen the rise of “the shareholder” over private enterprise (which is why there is no distinction between the “real” economy and the “virtual”/finance economy); and shifted biopolitics by “transforming social rights into debts” and “beneficiaries into debtors.”

By way of conclusion, Lazzarato says that we must annul debts, call for defaults, and leave “behind the debt morality and the discourse in which it holds us hostage.”5 We must all, using a term Guattari applies admiringly to Greece, become black sheep.

There are, I believe, three ways that we can evaluate these two texts: A. What do we learn about the “real” functioning of capitalism? B. What do we learn about Lazzarato’s intellectual proclivities? and C. How as architects, designers and artists are we to react?

reproduces itself, but only by frantically doing away with what remains of the social gains of the last two centuries,”6 it is hard to know what to think.

B. What do we learn about the intellectual proclivities of Lazzarato? For those of us for whom this matters, Lazzarato’s criticism of Foucault’s version of neoliberalism – which makes up the bulk of the third chapter of The Making of Indebted Man and is carried on as the framework of his critic of governmentality in Governing

by Debt – gives pause. It is one thing to re-examine the roots of neoliberalism – an era we are still experiencing and wrapping our head around – but another to one-up Foucault on biopolitics, biopower and governmentality.

It seems not exactly mean-spirited, but in any case very personal. Is it the desire to kill the father, given Lazzarato’s indebtedness to Foucault for drawing attention to the historical break in the 1970’s defined as neoliberalism? If so, the strategy helps mask Lazzarato’s own switch from an “immaterial labour” description of the 1970’s to one of debt, and overlooks Lazzarato’s own use of Foucault’s historiography that depends on epistemic breaks. Is it the allegiance to Deleuze and Guattari who have a more nuanced and more active notion of subjectivity than Foucault? This in itself is fine, but when combined with the enduring Foucauldian historicism, Lazzarato conflates incompatible ideas; he adheres to a view of history that makes agency difficult to identify (Foucault) while also suggesting that subjectivity and agency are the essential work of critical theory (Deleuze and Guattari).

David Graeber has pointed out that Lazzarato, in his immaterial labour phase (one that Graeber wholly dismisses), should not be seen as an enlightened grasper of economic reality, but rather as a prophet,8 a seer who reinterprets the past, labels the present, and speculates about the future. I think there is something to this for the Lazzarato of debt society, but I don’t think that is entirely negative. It is true that what Lazzarato offers isn’t economics (this can’t be compared to Piketty’s Capitalism) or sociology (extracting a universal subject from a European example would not count as social research) but prophecy might be an effective form for ideology critique. It makes us watchful of things we haven’t seen but are lying right under our nose. So scepticism about Lazzarato’s theory of debt is not in my case rooted in the sweep of history or the master narrative that comes with it. Rather, it is that, as prophet, Lazzarato fails to move us in the direction of prediction. If we want what he calls “a second innocence” that purges us of debt dependence and moves us to debt cancellation, a more persuasive narrative needs to be offered. The questions asked here, though seemingly random, identify inconsistencies at the level of history, subjectivity, and class – all major categories for a call to arms. Perhaps Lazzarato no longer believes in such a call, but then what is the use of a prophet?

contributed to the canonisation of ancient ruins to a database of forms the artist as a competitive and ready for use in new constructions. entrepreneurial individual focused As emphasized by Huppert, on the development of a recognisaPeruzzi’s drawings never indulge in ble ‘maniera’ (style). anything that is extraneous to archiAs noted by Huppert, what Vasari tecture itself, and they are driven by found disappointing about the a strict economy of graphic means. talented Peruzzi was the latter’s For example, Peruzzi represented timidity and modesty, indeed his monuments by paring down the lack of entrepreneurialism and drawings to their crucial features, self-promotion. According to Vasari, rather than duplicating repetitive this prevented Peruzzi from receivelements. This technique, which ing proper recognition and rewards anticipates the more scientific from his patrons. Contrary to architectural renderings of the Vasari’s rather ungenerous account, 18th and 19th centuries, gives to Peruzzi did well professionally, and Peruzzi’s graphic style a beauty he was never short of work or comand precision that has been rarely missions. Nonetheless, it bothered matched by other architects.

Vasari that Peruzzi never earned Although often executed free the astronomical wages of artists hand, Peruzzi’s sketches of ancient such as Raphael, Michelangelo (or ruins are always accurately measeven Vasari himself, who valued ured, and this is what made them courtly success greatly). For Vasari, extremely useful to him and other success – or what today we can call architects. For Peruzzi, drawing “stardom” – was not just an ego was a means of investigating, a way issue. It was the only way for the to study architecture. It is moving newly invented “free-lancing” artist to see how an architect, under so (devoid of guild protection) to survive much pressure from his job, never the precarious working conditions lost his curiosity about architecture of the liberal arts competitive ethos. as a form of research. If today What makes Huppert’s study interarchitects run their practices more esting is that the Renaissance as managers – or, at best, as critics architect (of which Peruzzi is a of the work done by their employparadigmatic case) is not just stud- ees – in Peruzzi’s time it was quite ied in terms of the work produced. different. Architects considered the The book also assesses the study of architecture itself as an conditions from which the architect essential component of their pracfirst emerged as a specialised tice, not just the design of buildings. professional figure, and how these In the 15th and 16th centuries the conditions deeply affected the knowledge of both ancient architeccultural reception of the architect’s ture and architecture in general was work. Another interesting aspect of heavily mediated by the authority Huppert’s study is its focus on one of architectural treatises, such as specific aspect of Peruzzi’s work: Vitrivius’s De Architectura Libri his drawings.

Decem. Yet architects were busy Peruzzi can be considered an to find consistency between the architects’ architect – much more so ancient author’s precepts and the than his built works (which were few extreme variety of ancient Roman in number), his influence stemmed architecture. By extensively studyfrom an impressive body of drawing ruins, both Bramante, and ings. Collectively they amount to later Peruzzi, bypassed the something like 500 sheets, which authority of Vitruvius and instead were carefully studied (and someapproached ancient architecture in times copied) by other architects as a radically empirical way. They both precious graphic resources. Unlike drew and measured ruins, and used many of his contemporaries, them as design material – not as Peruzzi often drew using orthogonal objects of nostalgic contemplation. projections (thus following Most Renaissance architects, Vitruvius’s and Alberti’s recommen- including Peruzzi, came from the dations who considered plan, secfigurative arts, especially from tion and elevation the most objecpainting. In her study, Huppert tive representation of architecture). insists on the importance of This means that Peruzzi’s relationPeruzzi’s learning in the field of ship to ancient monuments was not the figurative arts for his work as an so much moved by the “image” of architect. As it is well known, these monuments but by their scithe most important “revolution” that entific knowledge as artefacts, took place in 15th century painting which Peruzzi often rendered with was the emergence of mathematmathematical objectivity. ically constructed perspective.

In his famous letter to Pope Leo X, Nevertheless, the art of perspective Raphael advocated the survey cast a long shadow: its emergence and redrawing of ancient Roman in the Renaissance was only structures as a way to preserve their the latest development in a more memory. Against this, Peruzzi’s profound research tradition – one relationship to antiquity was that spanned from antiquity motivated by his desire to reduce through the Middle Ages – and

engineering and mathematics. This In other words, orthodox Vitruvian background is also what made architecture was seen to be the Peruzzi’s practice highly collaboramost tangible embodiment of orthotive and spread across different dox scripture. works and projects. Often Peruzzi Peruzzi’s radical empiricism is worked more as a collaborator or fully reflected in his design: consultant, rather than as autonohis architecture is both philologmous author focused on a ically accurate vis-à-vis ancient recognisable oeuvre. This, as precedents, but also surprising Huppert suggests, may be the and unprecedented in terms of its reason why, with his strong investformal inventions. This approach ment in research and extraordinary can be appreciated in works such graphic abilities, Peruzzi did Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne in not deliver an architectural treatise. Rome, to which Huppert unfortuInstead he left us with an overnately reserves only a very succinct whelming body of monuments, paragraph. In this building, Peruzzi surveys, graphic notations of details, masterfully adapted the typology and archaeological reconstructions of the palazzo to the curved profile of ancient complexes. Of course, of the Via Papalis (one of the most as Huppert notes, it may be that important streets in Papal Rome) Peruzzi produced many of these and the foundations of the Domitian drawings in preparation for a book. stadium. The result is de facto Although, it is also easy to believe the first convex façade designed that his radical empirical and inves- in the modern era. In this way, tigative approach prevented him Peruzzi remained faithful to ancient from arriving at the stable taxonomy monuments, while at the same of ancient Roman architecture time developing a new idea of the required for this task – he may well monumental façade; it was an idea have felt forced to recognise infinite that went beyond the merely frontal variety as the only way to underperspective of the viewer and stand this architecture. engaged with the dynamism of the Such an empirical approach to street and passer-by. As Huppert ancient architecture was revolution- emphasises, the attempt to capture ary, since it implied the irreducibility the dynamism of human perception of architecture – especially ancient in movement is also at work in architecture – to any stable canon. the few (but extraordinary) frescos This is something that would only executed by Peruzzi in Rome. become openly discussed Those that deserve mention are in the 18th century, with the rise of the famous ‘painted loggias’ that scientific thought as a leading Peruzzi executed in the Farnesina. cultural force within the arts. One Here the trompe l’oeil effect of has to realise the potential “heresy” the painted loggias was developed that such a position could have from a lateral point of view, thus evoked in the 16th century. Just a addressing the approaching visitor few years after Peruzzi’s death from the side enfilade. the strict ethos of catholic counterHowever, where Peruzzi fully reformation dictated that deviations displayed his versatility and masfrom the Vitruvian canon implied tery as an architect was on paper. deviation from the religious canon.

He drew precise drawings from

which is known among historians as the science of optics. At stake in optics was a problem that had both scientific and theological implications, and that could be roughly summarised in the question: How we can trust the appearance of phenomena? In other words, how can human sight – which is notoriously fleeting and deceptive – become the basis of a truthful knowledge of the world?

It was by properly answering this question that perspective developed beyond a means of representation to a topographical survey technique. Perspective thus became a way to measure cities, and their territories.

Painting would become a crucial site to test the efficacy of perspective as a way to create the “illusion” of depth on the two-dimensional surface of the painted image.

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However, it was the task of measuring real topographical situations, and the necessity of translating these measures into scientific notations such as plan and elevation, that would make perspective a fundamental design instrument.

Florence and Siena were cities in which surveying was a crucial tool to give spatial order to urban space, and its was here that perspective became the nexus of science, aesthetic, technology and economics. In cities where manufacture, commerce and financial trade were the leading economic forces, applied mathematics was an essential knowledge for any professional – including artists.

As described by Huppert, this milieu empowered Peruzzi with a background that would make him at ease working across diverse fields such as painting, architecture,

Left is a plan of the Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne, while above is an image of an exquisite painted vault in Farnesina

ancient monuments – but he also and sketches. Notwithstanding the executed beautiful renderings of his lengthy design process, the project own designs. Among these, the two eventually remained unbuilt. There most spectacular are the perspecti- is one drawing in which Peruzzi val section of his proposed extendrew specific formal solutions for sion of the 14th century San the nave piers by simultaneously Petronio basilica in Bologna, and calculating their costs. This is the cut-away, bird’s eye view of his an extraordinary document of proposal for the reconstruction of how – from its inception – “design” St. Peter’s in Rome. Both drawings is not simply an act of creative can be considered the starting invention, but also an instrument points for one of the most consoliof economic optimisation. Here we dated traditions in the history of see how intimately the concrete architectural representation: the art abstraction of commodity exchange of “rendering”. Different from both enters into architectural form and the technical drawing (in which makes formal variation itself an the goal is to control the measures index of economic optimisation. and the constructive logic of an Peruzzi’s infinite design process, artefact) and the study drawing (in in which every detail is studied which the architect develops the in several iterations, shows how formal idea of the artefact), the autonomous formal invention “rendering” is instrumental for and economic optimisation of explaining a design to patrons or a form were phenomena far from wider audience. The rendering is being antithetical to each other. thus the “public” presentation of This stands against much of architecture, before architecture what modern and contemporary gets built, and often the only public historiography has led us to believe. existence of architecture (when the The way in which Peruzzi correlates rendered artefact is not executed formal variation with economic as built fabric). This was the case feasibility anticipates contemporary with the two designs by Peruzzi forms of building optimisation (like mentioned above; Huppert BIM and REVIT), in which design recounts how these designs show is immediately connected to the Peruzzi’s awareness of the drawing’s financial apparatus that governs the effect on the viewer. By combining building industry. section and perspective (in the case For this reason, Huppert’s book of the San Petronio drawing) and is much more than just a monosection, plan and elevation (in the graph on a brilliant and elusive St. Peter drawing), Peruzzi provides Renaissance architect. It is also all the design information in one (and I would argue especially) image. Huppert’s main focus on this an extraordinary archaeology of extraordinary architect is on the architectural design, its politics enormous body of drawings left by and its technologies. I hope that Peruzzi. These demonstrate above Becoming an Architect in all how drawing itself (even more Renaissance Italy will be a text not than building) came to be the limited to historical scholarship, but medium that defined the profesa provocation to us as architects to sional identity of the architect as a rethink the historical circumstances figure clearly distinguished from the of how we became architects. At a master-builder. time when architecture is at the It is not by chance that between peak of its mediatic success, but the 16th and 20th centuries there suffering a chronic crisis in terms its is a strict relationship between the professional identity, this book increasingly prestigious role of is a vital tool to understand the the architect as “author” and the structural potentials and limits of architecture itself. importance of drawing in architecture. The first fully “professional” architects – Di Giorgio, Sangallo the Younger and Peruzzi – left an impressive body of graphic material whose legacy has even overshadowed their built output. In spite of its artistic merits, in the hands of these architects drawing was a medium that not only “rendered” the form of architecture, but also correlated architecture itself to its financial control. In this sense, one of the most interesting projects

by Peruzzi is his design for the Becoming an Architect in Italy: reconstruction of San Domenico Art, Science, and the Career of in Siena after a fire had destroyed Baldassarre Peruzzi part of the church in 1531. Huppert

by Ann C. Huppert, Yale University describes how Peruzzi proposed Press, 240pp, £45, May 2015 a plethora of variations, all documented by measured drawings 978-0300203950

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Campus in Camps: Architecture, exile and resistance Ana Naomi de Sousa “Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.”

Edward W. Said Sandi Hilal (Palestine) and Alessandro Petti (Italy/ Palestine) are architects and researchers, based in Beit Sahour, a small, hillside town near Bethlehem, in the occupied West Bank. From here, their work often explores ways to challenge, resist and subvert the Israeli occupation through architectural practice and discourse.

They are perhaps best known for the DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency) studio, founded with Israeli architect Eyal Weizman. For the last five years they have been engaged in Campus in Camps, an experimental educational programme that began at the Dheisheh Refugee Camp, Bethlehem.

Around 750,000 1 Palestinians in the West Bank live in built refugee camps, established initially as part of an emergency response to the forced displacement of Arabs when Israel was created. Their “right to return” home, still unrealised, has been recognised by the United Nations since 1948. Almost 70 years later, the sites Palestinians have come to inhabit “in the meantime” are now the oldest refugee camps in the world, whose populations include the fourth and fifth generations of displaced families. Here, a distinct and “permanently temporary” Palestinian identity has emerged, resisting assimilation or emigration.

Today, the Palestinian refugee population continues to grow. Beyond the political ramifications this has had on diplomatic attempts to “resolve” the Israeli occupation, it has also affected the urban and living conditions of the camps themselves, with over-population putting further strain on already inadequate infrastructure. The Israeli army frequently invades the camps, causing excessive and deliberate destruction when it does. Parts of some camps (such as Jenin) have been rebuilt over and over again. But historically, official construction projects have been understood as an attempt to make the camps more permanent, and have faced opposition.

And whilst the grim conditions – what Hilal has referred to as “architectural misery” – that result, are portrayed as proof of the lack of agency of Palestinian refugees, it is the opposite that is true: to remain temporary is to continue to resist. Palestinian refugee camps are “an embodiment and an expression of the right of return”, explains Alessandro Petti, and precisely “the prolonged exceptional temporality of this site has, paradoxically, created the condition for its transformation: from a pure humanitarian space to an active political space”.

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Working on the premise that the temporality and political exceptionality of the camps provides a unique laboratory for social and spatial practice, Hilal and Petti started Campus in Camps, conceived of as the first university in a refugee camp. Based in Dheisheh (one the West Bank’s nineteen camps), this “island on an island” aims to provide “an educational program that activates critical learning and egalitarian environments in order to overcome decades of social exclusion, political subjugation and apathy”. With Campus, they ask what the role of architecture can be in Palestine’s refugee camps without undermining the right of return.

Their students are refugees from various camps who attend a two-year programme starting with a process of “unlearning” - a decolonisation of knowledge through readings, seminars, lectures and debates, including a rigorous inquiry into language (see, for example, the Collective Dictionary on their website).

The aim is for this critical approach to allow students to explore the representation of camps and refugees “beyond the static and traditional symbols of victimisation, passivity and poverty”, whilst emphasising the importance of learning from lived experience, and combining knowledge with action. The architects cite as inspiration for Campus in Camps, the clandestine classrooms of the First Intifada: when the Israeli military shut

This page and last, the Concrete Tent in the Dheisheh Refugee Camp (Palestinian Territories) represents a permanent impermanence.

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1 UNRWA has never yet been allowed to undertake a total census of its refugee population

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Market Fundamentalism Effaces Vernacular Specificity Cassim Shepard

his professional life as a Bartletttrained architect, before turning his attention to cinema around 1979.

The year is probably no coincidence: much of his oeuvre can be seen as Patrick Keiller is a hero of mine. an extended critique of Twelve years ago, at the beginning the London and the England (but of my attempts to fashion a career oddly never the UK) of Margaret at the intersection of experimental Thatcher and John Major. In the filmmaking and serious investigafilms, he makes this argument tion into the built environment, his obliquely, often humorously and body of work offered one of the always whimsically, structuring only models. I watched him present each as a narrated tour with plenty at a conference at Cambridge of detours and digressions. The tour called “Filming Cities,” where he guide is ostensibly a fictional shared some of his initial findings of character named Robinson, an a research project into the “actualieccentric academic whose musings ties” of early cinema: non-fiction and rants are recounted by an film reels often of a single shot of unnamed narrator, his erstwhile some significant event. His paslover in the first two films (voiced by sionate enthusiasm for a particular, Paul Scofield) and the director of minute-long actuality film depicting a research organization that discova public gathering in Ealing in 1902 ers the scholar’s abandoned reels of was such that he literally almost films in the third (voiced by fell off the stage. Was it a celebration Vanessa Redgrave). Robinson is of the Second Boer War, he wonthus doubly invisible: not only offdered? A Whitsun parade, welcoming screen and unseen, but also the coming summer? No, his transmitted by an off-screen and research had concluded, it was a unseen third-party interlocutor. public demonstration of the electriRobinson is the conceit, but the fication of the streetlights on the protagonist is the landscape in Uxbridge Road. front of Robinson’s (and Keiller’s) I wanted to be like him when I grew camera. Robinson’s journeys are up, no matter the fact that no one attempts to wrestle with “problems:” back home in the States knew his the problem of London, the problem name. The sadly shrink-wrapped, of England. To do so, the films bring wrong-format DVDs I bought at the us to the homes and haunts Southbank BFI gift shop, unfortuof some handpicked figures from nately, did not prove to be enough cultural history (writers, painters, to provoke a trans-Atlantic rescientists, aristocrats). We see examination of his vital importance shopping malls, amusement parks, as an artist. Then, as now, he may commercial ports, all framed in have been just a little too film for elegantly spare cinematography: architects and a little too architecstatic shots that immobilise the ture for filmmakers. Worse, he may structures they capture, only to be a little too English for both, underscore the fragility of vernacular despite the fact that the defiant architecture in an era of acceleratparochialism of his films is, in fact, ing spatial homogenisation. a brilliant vehicle for his exploration Meanwhile the narration nameof global themes – especially the checks a diverse array of intellectual pernicious way that market fundaantecedents from Apollinaire to mentalism effaces vernacular Warhol. And it responds to current specificity. events both real (like an election When I learned of his recent or the queen’s birthday) and book The View from the Train, imagined (like Robinson’s abrupt which collects some of his essays dismissal from an advertising from over the years, I entertained agency contract that was bankrollhope that it would enable him to ing his documentation exercise). reach a wider audience and claim Beneath the studied erudition, his rightful place in the central field the playful subtlety of Keiller’s of the Venn diagram of the canons of exploration and denunciation of the both cinema and urban landscape.

Tory strain of neoliberalism are The book may not accomplish assets to his films: they allow the that goal, but it certainly provides visual evidence of his finely honed indispensible insights into the sinshots and elliptical, supporting gular mind and specific methods of voiceover to reveal how the systema highly original thinker and artist atic dismantling of the social whose work collapses boundaries welfare state is reflected in the built between astute political environment. The same sensibility analysis, experimental documentary is apparent in The View from the production, cultural history, and Train. In many of the essays, Keiller urban exploration. chronicles some of the impulses Keiller – best known for his trilogy and methods behind his films; in of essay films, London (1994), others, he fleshes out some of the Robinson in Space (1997) and research behind particular scenes Robinson in Ruins (2010) – began without mentioning the films at all.

down Palestinian schools and universities in the late 1980s, and banned public gatherings, parents, pupils and teachers responded by organising underground networks of learning and knowledge-sharing.

Shunning conventional pedagogies and traditional hierarchies, Campus encourages self-organisation and communal learning among students and with the wider refugee communities, and provides the conditions and support for them to undertake architectural or urban interventions within the camps. In one intervention, a public square was constructed in the Al Fawwar camp; others are more about the actual process of experiencing, producing knowledge and speculating about new futures for existing sites, such as a Roman-era water pool; a bridge; a garden.

With its experiment in “Emancipatory Education”, the project also seeks to influence the conventional practices of the universities and institutions with which it interacts – the Campus in Camps “Consortium” includes universities based internationally (Goldsmiths (UK); Mardin (Turkey) and KU Leuven (Belgium)) and locally (Birzeit University; the International Art Academy (Ramallah); and Dar el Kalima (Bethlehem)), who collaborate on lectures, courses and workshops.

Importantly, and in contrast for example with many NGO/humanitarian-led projects in the camps, Hilal and Petti say that these “radical transformations have not normalised the political condition of being exiled”.

After decades of being defined by the architecture of exile, refugees with Campus in Camps are reinventing their present futures by daring to speculate – and carving out the potential for new spatial, social and political practices to those far beyond their borders.

But what serves as a nuanced, towards the homogenisation of built associative form of cinematic poetry form, the widening of inequality, onscreen comes across as baldly and the destruction of the biosphere. explanatory as it meanders across If you don’t get all this in the films, the printed page. The essay-film the book makes it plain as day. doesn’t translate quite so well Yet, to my mind, Keiller’s writing as an essay. is stronger when he’s explaining his The essay-film is a form pioneered craft as a filmmaker – his thoughts by the sui generis genius Chris on cameras, lenses, editing Marker. Perhaps the most famous technique, the materiality of 35mm example is his 1983 masterpiece film (which he has continued to use, Sans Soleil, which consists of an unfashionably, even in the 2010 intricate sequences shot primarily film) – than when he’s enumerating in Japan and Guinnea-Bissau, the intellectual reference points among several other locations that inform his worldview. He is around the world, and the voiceover clearly motivated as a thinker and narration of an unnamed woman an artist by philosophical conunrecounting letters she received drums inherent to architecture from the fictional cinematographer. and the contemporary experience (In the best essay in The View from of place. For example, in “The the Train, “Architectural Robinson Institute,” he reflects Cinematography,” Keiller mentions on the different rates of change seeing Marker’s influential 1962 in technology and dwelling, such film La Jetée as an architecture that, “The way we experience space student.) Keiller expands on now changes much faster than the the essay-film tradition in signififabric of the spaces we occupy,” an cant ways, not least his application observation that might account of Marker’s order of operations – for what he views as the decline shoot first, compose the text later, and marginalisation of domestic, in response to the sequence of everyday spaces. Yet he is equally shots, rather than the reverse – to passionate about the integrity of the politics immanent in landscape. the film image and the history and Certainly, cinema, architecture uses of cinema on their own terms. and urbanism have long shared When divorced from the moving references in common, from 1920s image, his writing may lack the expressionism to Walter Benjamin’s poetry of his films, but there are over-cited arcades and the some lines in the book that resound Situationist dérive. All of these show powerfully, such as when he up in The View from the Train, but describes his initial stint in London so do many more: the ‘60s BBC as an architecture student in 1967: drama Z Cars, the fiction of Edgar “It was a time when I was managing Allan Poe, the prefabricated sumon very little sleep, which no doubt mer home of Charles Dickens. The exacerbated a euphoric experience book’s essays – many of which have of the landscape that might have appeared elsewhere, as exhibition produced photographs, worthwhile catalogue texts or commissioned or not, had it occurred to me to take articles for architectural monographs a camera.” Or when he’s reflecting and scholarly journals – traverse a on the predilection of the earliest rich terrain of the observations, films in the late 19th and early 20th inspirations, and allusions that centuries to depict the views from characterise Keiller’s singular contrains: “Both cinema and the railway tributions to cinema, to urbanism, offer more or less predetermined and, crucially, to their intersections. and repeatable spatiotemporal As such, the book provides an continuities, so that it is perhaps essential supporting argument for not surprising that railways crop people like me who share his convic- up in cinema as often as they do.” tion that film can offer more to And perhaps the most salient of all architecture and urbanism than is a statement that telegraphs the merely representing physical artereasons why Keiller’s work, even facts or illustrating social conditions. though it is so thoroughly rooted In the hands, eyes, and mind of in a specific era and a specific Keiller, film can operate as a form of culture, will hopefully continue to research, an open-ended inquiry exert a strong influence on how into how the built environment we interpret and represent the reveals, when you look closely, the spaces we occupy: “Architecture political priorities of the day. is increasingly seen as a process Robinson’s petite bourgeois structured in time. In films, one can nostalgia (an identity and orientaexplore the spaces of the past, in tion Keiller makes explicit in his order to better anticipate the spaces writing) for the withering landscapes of the future.” of English Romanticism, for example, or authentically bohemian café culture evolves, over the course of The View from the Train the trilogy, into a searing, if idiosyn- by Patrick Keiller cratic, indictment of how economic Verso, 228pp, £6.99, June 2014 globalisation is structurally inclined 9781781687765

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A Prosthetic City Jack Self In the summer of 1914, Louis-Ferdinand Céline was one of the first Frenchmen to march toward the German enemy. He arrived at the front so early the lines hadn’t been drawn and no trenches had been dug. What he found as he advanced through this newly militarised landscape was a rural bliss and an overwhelming silence: “I was only twenty at the time. Deserted farms in the distance, empty wide-open churches, as if the peasants had all gone out for the day to attend a fair at the other end of the county, leaving everything they owned with us for safekeeping, their countryside, their carts with the shafts pointing in the air, their fields, their barnyards, the road, the trees, even the cows, a chained dog, the works. Leaving us free to do as we pleased while they were gone. Nice of them, in a way.

“Still,” I said to myself, “if they hadn’t gone somewhere else, if there were still somebody here, I’m sure we wouldn’t be behaving so badly! So disgustingly! We wouldn’t dare in front of them! But there wasn’t a

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Several photographs by Michele Nastasi of L'Aquila, taken shortly after the 2009 earthquake

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soul to watch us! Nobody but us, like newly-weds that start messing around when all the people have gone home.”

Céline captures the eerie quality of this abandoned landscape, which comes from knowing that it is only so tranquil because it has been violently occupied. It is only at peace because it is locked in war. Nearly a century later, in the southern Italian city of L’Aquila, the churches sit in their own rubble; offices are strewn with papers; great stone houses are snapped and twisted at their bases; streets are completely deserted of any cars or people. These scenes of uncanny destruction are all bathed in the harsh midday sun, as if the solar apotheosis has frozen time itself. Michele Nastasi’s photographs, taken shortly after the devastating 2009 earthquake that rendered practically every building in the city uninhabitable, describe that same uncomfortable peace as Céline – a peace made possible only by the presence of extreme and meaningless violence.

Though perhaps only one scenario could be described as an act of God. In every street dozens of wooden frames with a starshaped form have been levered into the window openings.

In some cases these interventions are the only thing holding the window surrounds in place. In other cases they are the only sign of abnormality, even as their overblown form makes it impossible to open the panes and doors (where they still exist). The result recalls the pattern of Roman lattice grilles, lending a vaguely imperial air to the shattered façades.

After the initial surprise of this desolate scene one begins to see the technical qualities of the apparatuses.

Bolstered by wooden beams, lightweight trusses, steel staples and rods, bristling nail plates, even nylon cable ties, the stones of L’Aquila seem to be held together by will power alone – by the compression and support of a modern infrastructure better suited to precision engineering (bridge building or high-rise construction).

This territory is uninhabited, and obviously uninhabitable.

In Suspended City Nastazi has captured urbanism on life support.

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Giorgio Agamben, author of the remarkable texts Stasis: Civil War as Political Paradigm and The Highest Poverty (amongst many others) is unquestionably one of the most important living philosophers. In his short but amazingly precise introduction to the book he takes great care to make the reader fully aware of how significant he finds these images, “Nastasi’s pictures of l’Aquila are the vehicle for a political prophecy,” he tells us. They are prophecies of “the paradigm of the city as it is imagined by the ruling powers of the post-industrial, post-democratic, societies in which we live” This paradigm, he claims, extends Foucault’s disciplinary state to what he calls “the security state.”

This concept of the security state is the description of a society where the ideology of control has supposedly been removed from enforcement. This doesn’t mean that overt displays of population management have been replaced. We still have CCTV and highly visible (and increasingly well-armed) police forces. On the contrary, these policing agents have been reframed to instead signify our protection rather than our subjugation. The sight of an anti-terror squad is intended to reassure us, not terrify us. The world Agamben describes is the reality of post-9/11, a tiring condition of being perpetually alert. The strain of constant vigilance, he says, drives us to a frenzy – and that’s when we are most vulnerable.

Agamben is describing the role of perpetual crisis as a means to accelerate the accumulation of capital.

Nastazi’s photography shows such immense patience and precision, and each of the 95 frames are rich with detail, nuance and power. The calm with which they capture the evidence of violence is deeply unsettling. One of the few images to include people shows a small wedding taking place in half a church. Its colossal piers are wrapped like a Christo artwork. At the edge of the destroyed roof an almost seamless junction continues the ghost form in a lightweight polycarbonate screen (as if somehow Lacaton and Vassal had been commissioned to restore the building). The total indifference of the happy couple to the brutality of their environment suggests a perverse normalisation.

As Agamben writes, “[In L’Aquila] the disaster is carefully prolonged and preserved, the emergency turned into normality, the city is the place where it is impossible to live: this is the lucid, implacable message that Nastasi’s lens conveys in such a masterful way.”

Suspended City: L'Aquila After the Earthquake by Michele Nastasi Actar D, 128pp, £23, September 2015, 978-1940291673

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On finance and democracy: reviewing the first real estate index Manuel Shvartzberg It is no secret that over the last 40 years our cities and lives have become ever more ‘financialised’ – but just how much, and in precisely what ways, appears to be as difficult to say as finance is (in all its ubiquity) utterly opaque. There is, however, a measure of finance that betrays this alleged opacity: real estate development – from gentrified neighbourhoods to foreclosed apartments, and from home-flipping reality TV shows to property comparison apps – it seems to have constituted itself into the very skin of our time, the way we interface with both ourselves and the city.

The reason for this growth of real estate is associated with two broader historical dimensions of financialisation: the rise of information technologies on the one hand, and a shift in governance predicated on pervasive economisation (“pricing everything”, all aspects of life), on the other. Each dimension brings significant and varied consequences, but they come neatly together in the way they have facilitated real estate’s securitisation – that is, uprooted space from its concrete locality as a “hard asset”, to be traded as a highly liquid security in the capital markets. This is illustrated, for example, in the massive growth of Real Estate Investment Trusts (corporations that own and manage real estate, and whose shares can be traded in the financial markets) over the past forty years – from an overall market capitalisation of $1.5 billion in 1971, REITs were worth $900 billion at the end of 2014; a 16% compound annual growth rate – about double that of the S&P 500 in the same period.

Such exponential growth driven by securitisation is directly tied to the growth of market devices like financial indices, which provide the technical and informational foundations for global capitalist competition. The first publically available real estate financial index was born in the early 1980s to give investors relevant snapshots and benchmarks of the real estate market’s performance. Today there are indices for measuring not just property sectors and regions worldwide, but also the performance of REITs themselves. While the inner logics and datasets of contemporary indices are proprietary and thus carefully guarded (a defining feature to which we will return), reviewing the history of the first index not only shows IT and economisation emerging in full swing,

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it also gives us a rare glimpse into the opaque techno-political world such an artefact engages and engenders. Opaqueness here is not the smokescreen of a conspiratorial plot. Rather, it is the result of quite mundane business logics and institutional arrangements with, however, intensely political implications.

The first conversations to begin formulating an industry-wide, public real estate index in the US began in the mid-1970s with the strategic alliance of 14 real estate organisations – pension funds, banks, and large financial firms, supplemented by professional associations, private practitioners and leading academics – later united as the National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries (NCREIF). Subdivided by location, property- and investment-type categories, the NCREIF Property Index (NPI) was conceived as a vehicle for expanding interest in real estate as a security by providing evidence of the “historical real estate rates of return that would allow for comparison of property as a distinct asset class with other investment alternatives.”

Their first hurdle was finding a stable calculation model for valuations that could apply to different types of properties across territories – a capitalisation formula providing a way to calculate the value of a property as a ratio of risk/ return over time. According to a 1975 report they commissioned from Charles B. Akerson, a prominent professional in the field, proper assessment and computation of these variables would provide “fundamental” values – prices for properties reflecting the current market sector in terms of supply and demand, expected risks and returns, and competitive operating costs. Crucially, this calculation depended on a view of the risk involved in the market as a whole – a total view – from which the particular property’s performance was benchmarked. But as the benchmark was a ratio of co-dependent variables (a speculation on the self-referential relation between commodity and market where both affect each other; a basic principle of financial risk modelling since the 1950s), and not to an external, stable source of value-evaluation, it constantly demanded newer and more accurate information, as well as forms of cross-referencing, in order to “see itself” more accurately and objectively.

For this, new ways of accumulating data were necessary. Having established general capitalisation protocols, the alliance in 1982 commissioned Frank Russell Company, a financial services firm, to implement the index (technically and

organisationally). A vast number of “price of goods and services paid technical issues quickly arose on by urban consumers and wage how exactly to capture, calculate earners” or “change in rate of and articulate the heterogeneous employee compensation for private sources of data compiled by each white collar, blue collar, and service alliance partner into a single, coher- workers, industry and occupation ent real estate index. To help, tabulations”. It also featured strikNCREIF enlisted in 1983 an emiing demographic data correlated to nent real estate academic to conwildly broad metrics, such as “age duct a parallel research report to by sex and race, relationship to address the questions on data, head of household… population data calculation, and commensurability – education, occupation, income, opened up by the fabrication of the citizenship, vocational training… index. James A. Graaskamp, head Housing items include air/condition, of one of the country’s most prestig- value, age, water, sewage and ious real estate programs at the heating, monthly owner costs…

University of Wisconsin and a pioneer survey of kitchens, heating units, in developing advanced models electrical systems. Costs of mortof feasibility analysis for real estate, gage payments, real estate taxes, sought to achieve a harmonisation property insurance, utilities, garbage between the different existing collection… Estimates of employquantitative databases, their calcu- ment-unemployment of the general lation modes, and other potentially labor force and subgroups.” All useful qualitative information they this disaggregated socioeconomic contained. This entailed two main data could be correlated with the steps: disaggregating the various fabricated geo-rationalised grid, the datasets into “common building study concluded, by re-aggregating blocks” by, firstly, determining a it in the form of two codes: one rationalised geographic layout into according to property location, and which they could neatly fit, with another according to property type. no ambiguities and redundancies; These codes would then form the and secondly, determining the basis for the index values that could appropriate socioeconomic variabe monitored and re-calculated bles of value compatible with such throughout regular periods for differgeo-rationalised “building blocks”. ent investment categories, providing If constructed appropriately, a certain rate of return in each case. the report suggested, this financial Observing such a degree of geo-rationalised “grid” would data promiscuity and zeal raises become the granulated “universe” questions around the stark out of which the correct weighting inequality involved in this work of of part-to-whole relationships – the categorisation and translation. The basis of risk/return ratios – could decision to include a category or not be ascertained. is often outside the purview of those Furthermore, as Graaskamp being categorised; in this case, noted, incorporating socioecofor instance, the translation nomic data would not only give establishing an inherent differential managers a competitive edge between a racial group and a parin their more accurate valuations, ticular part of town. This inequality but would also create a competitive is not based on the capitalisation advantage for the index itself, as formula or any quantitative relait was marketed to the financial tionship, though it is instantiated services industry. Such imperatives by them. It is based on the power drove the index to become everto decide itself. This foundational more data-hungry, methodically injustice – an injustice universally sucking up all kinds of property-reinherent, though in hugely lated information from computer varying degrees, in every relation of tape sources including the NCREIF (political) representation – must be members, university databases, reckoned with. and a long list of government However, the index’s hyper-acinstitutions: “the U.S. Bureau of cumulation of data was not primarily the Census, the U.S. Bureau ideological, nor was it decided by of Economic Analysis, the U.S. a singular, (super-)human agent.

Department of Commerce, the Rather, it was a function of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, aesthetic-political device that made the Department of Labor and the the field intelligible – a function of Environmental Protection Agency.” the way an apparatus like the index Each dataset provided quantitative reconfigures a field of perceptibility and qualitative information that to correlate qualitatively different could be translated into properthings – race and value – according ty-specific, income-related, to a universalised logic of accumuinformation to be fed into the lation. At stake in this power master index. The information correlation is not just how certain collected ranged from “ambient air properties are construed, a priori, quality data and trends” for pricing as more valuable than others, but neighborhood desirability, to more how the socio-technical devices detailed socioeconomic data like that make such calculations

possible are themselves designed and distributed. In other words, this entails a consideration, no less, of how finance and democracy technically configure each other.

The history of the first index points to two related dimensions of this co-configuration: the extension of a logic of pricing over everything, and the uneasy mode of governance it requires. These aspects are systematically in tension – its resolution was the very limit that the index had to overcome as a properly governmental device.

Ultimately, it is rooted in the displacement of a “positive state” with recourse to democratic bargaining substantiated in rights and high levels of taxation and spending, to a neoliberal “regulatory state” in which the state’s chief role is that of ensuring the transformation of all aspects of life into privatised markets. However, this “regulatory state” – like all markets – does not completely undo the tension between pricing and governance; it just makes it more complex by partitioning and distributing things in ever more granulated and incestuous arrangements – particularly between “the private” and the “public”. Its penchant for pricing everything demands ever more information, which, as we have seen, often comes directly from governmental (that is, “public”) sources, for the benefit of “private” investors.

On the other hand, the necessarily collective effort of data gathering and pooling by private firms and institutions torques the logic of competitive property rights in extreme configurations.

The index study was composed of a series of private entities (corporations, industry lobbies, and others) that had to achieve

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The home that bears no trace you were ever there Nicholas de Klerk

Seven A.M. by Edward Hopper. The artifice of a commercial vitrine struggles to escape the darkness of the forest and its threat of chaos. a balance between their own competitive advantages, and the competitive advantage of their market as a whole. The institutional environment of real estate is a complex geopolitical field: capitalist competition between firms is fought in territorial terms, over spheres of influence, and institutionally – through the zealous protection of proprietary managerial processes and techniques that justify their marginal competitive advantages. Thus, the index was designed to strike a difficult balance between accuracy and anonymity. This not only maintained institutional peace at the level of the competing companies, it also created and maintained a distance between renters and owners; those who used the index and those who were used – or foreclosed – by it.

What would a democratisation of these socio-technical arrangements look like? Having actual political discussions, not private economic inquiries, about what imperatives, what metrics, and what data determine financial indices and their impacts on cities, would be a start.

But more substantially, the means of production that underpin the indices – academic training and discourses, rating agencies, financial analysis firms, industry lobbies, processing machines, and governmental organisations – and which constitute both their symbolic legitimacy and their technical effectiveness, should be socialised.

Democracy today should demand an agonistic and fair contest over the full implications – social and historical as much as technical and architectural – of econometric modelling. Our cities, and our skin, would be better for it.

Early in March I was preparing for a trip to Berlin – a short, three-day, two-night trip to attend a conference on hotels. A 5am start on Monday morning, followed by a slow drift through the still dark streets of southeast London, and then a faster run down the M11 in the now frosty dawn.

Stansted, once a dream of seamless travel where the line of sight from entrance to departure gate was designed as uninterrupted, is now a meandering, grindingly slow bureaucracy made flesh. A cathedral of cheap ceramics, carpet tiles, Plexiglas, timber veneer and a cold, unblinking fluorescent glare which seems to induce the people passing through it (at a glacial pace) into a state of lobotomised suspense. The amount of programme crammed into this border is staggering – the concurrent rise of statelessness and nationalism has found material form here, and it is a deeply dispiriting sight. If your sole aim in this space is to get to the plane as quickly and efficiently as possible, you’re clearly doing it wrong.

Joanna Walsh’s Hotel, published in 2015 as part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series, occupies spaces like this, mostly hotel lobbies, terraces and bedrooms – spaces designed for people to stay, even if the purpose of being there is ultimately to pass through – or is it the other way round? Collectively, these spaces are set against their idealised other – the home – or at least the idea of home. Part of what makes the book compelling is that it is never clear whether it is the home or the hotel that is the ideal state. Homes are messy, complicated, have history, accretions and waste, none of which hotels appear to have. Of course hotels have all these things, only it requires complex, putatively invisible infrastructures to make it so.

The mimetic tension between the home and the hotel is a constant thread in the book; it emerges and then disappears, only to re-emerge in a changed shape. Hotel was once a word for house, but at some point the term took a turn. A few hotels, wishing to be more homelike, installed nervous “lounges” and “libraries” in their lobbies… In these pictures of homes that looked like hotels, there were no guests. The rooms were ready; only they were absent.

A hotel diary itemises the elements that come together to form a hotel – the lobby, library, switchboard, stairs (elevator), the corridor, the door with its key, the bedroom, the en-suite and the restaurant. This is an incomplete list, some spaces are deliberately listed as omitted, and the events that take place in or through them are disconnected snapshots, episodes and vignettes. The hotel changes shape and refuses to cohere – this dream-like structure is no accident, and indeed one of the elements of the hotel is dreamwork itself. In a cast of characters that includes Mae West, 102

Katherine Mansfield, Oscar Wilde and Heidegger, it is Freud and Dora that figure most prominently.

If the book is as broad and ambitious as its title is concise, then its implications and potential for extrapolation are too. The home and the hotel converge in the ballooning rental sector, “homes” in which your tenancy is secure for short periods of time, at the termination of which you are obliged to pay more to extend this precarious sense of security or forced to uproot yourself and move on. On leaving, the “home” must bear no trace you were ever there, as if you had just checked out of a hotel.

Freud himself left Vienna at an advanced age, in traumatic circumstances, and attempted to recreate elements of his Vienna home in Hampstead with precise arrangements of furniture and artefacts. Living there for only a year, he may as well have been a guest in his own home – as if it were a hotel, which is now a museum.

In Berlin, my hotel room contains some curious signifiers of a presumed home. Pot plants, a non-working record player (accessorised with a vinyl album sleeve), magazines entitled Companion and (unsurprisingly) Home. The shower and the basin are in the darker recesses of the room, in a compact labyrinthine black-

mosaicked arrangement with only the WC closed off.

There is no wardrobe; my clothes visible hanging off a wall-mounted open shelving system, an attempt to personalise the room. Heading back from the conference – two and a half eighteen-hour days of fairly constant discourse about technology and authenticity – and my immune system fails me. Back to Stansted and London with a cold, these few days of alternate reality are extended into a period of feeling unwell at home, which will not feel like home until I am recovered.

The metaphor of illness is pertinent here, where the hotel stands for a mode of living in which one is constantly ill at ease. Walsh invokes Freud’s concept of Das Unheimliche and Heidegger’s notion of dwelling, noting that “In English, dwell is an unheimlich word, a word that contains its opposite.” This neatly, but not reductively, sketches a relationship between the twin archetypes of the hotel and the home and how the ability to secure a space of your own, however precarious the tenure, underscores the very question of living, indeed of existence under conditions of late capitalism. We stay in hotels; we live in our homes. The artist Gillian Wearing asked her architect “for a bedroom that looked like a hotel”1. The rise of co-living and the Private Rental Sector reduces personal space to the bedroom and bathroom, with all other spaces – living, kitchen, workspace – reimagined as shared and social (at a fee); not unlike a hotel.

Technology platforms such as AirBnB offer us the opportunity to turn our own homes into hotels, even just for a night.

Walsh’s Hotel is a small book of huge ambition, which I will return to repeatedly for its openness, humour and intellectual curiosity – a book that has that rare quality of prompting you to think without ever once telling you what to think. It seems that right now we could do with thinking a little more about homes and how we live.

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thespaces.com/2016/02/24/how-i-live-artist-michael-landy

Editor: Jack Self Executive Editor: Shumi Bose Art Direction & Design: OK-RM (Oliver Knight & Rory McGrath) Design Assistants: Seb McLauchlan Maxime Woeffray Production Editors: Emma Capps Julia Dawson Cover Illustration: Nishant Choksi Editorial Assistant: Ushma Thakrar Media Partner: ArchDaily Printer: Push Print, London Published by The REAL foundation www.real.foundation Subscription service: For our full range of subscription offers www.real-review.org You can also subscribe by email or post at the details provided below subscribe@ real-review.org The Real Review 2/49 Heath Street London NW3 6UD United Kingdom

page 1 Drawing Matter collections Copyright Estate of the Architect page 20 – 21 Copyright Richard McGuire, 1989 page 27 – 28 HRH The Prince of Wales, taken at Buckingham Palace, London Copyright Allan Warren, 1971 page 32 (from top) Maiden House, Buttermarket and Wadebridge Street Poundbury Copyright Sibbett Gregory page 35 – 37 With gratitude and permissions from Gui Bonsiepe page 39 – 54 Copyright the author page 55 – 67 Copyright Jean Baudrillard page 69 Otium project image Copyright Supervoid page 70 Image from Design Noir. The secret life of electronic objects (Birkhauser, 2001).

Copyright Dunne+Raby page 72 & 74 Copyright the Buckminster Fuller Estate page 73 Copyright the author page 77 Nicholas Barbon, public domain page 85 – 86 Copyright Yale University Press page 89 – 90 Copyright DAAR page 97 – 98 Copyright Michele Nastasi

Above, images by the author of an uncanny hotel interior

Hotel (Object Lessons) by Joanna Walsh Bloomsbury, 176pp, £8, 978-1628924732

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page 102 Edward Hopper Copyright the Artist’s Estate

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From the Editor

“From housing crises to masssurveillance,” I wrote in the blurb for The idea of launching a printed reviews our crowd-funding campaign, “we magazine in the digital era might bring you insightful, engaging seem like an anachronistic vision. reviews on architecture, exploring It may even appear nostalgic – not how design shapes society.” helped by the fact the word "review" With great pride, allow me to introliterally means "to look back." duce you to the Real Review, a On the contrary, the review is a publication that does exactly that. profoundly optimistic genre that Our Kickstarter campaign was a possesses an incredible versatility. triumph, and I wanted to use this It looks back in order to look forward; space here to say how thankful I am it surveys the past to understand to those directly involved: Shumi its relevance for the future. A review Bose (who appeared in the video is not groundless (like an opinion). alongside me), Henrietta Williams Rather, it has to argue its case (behind the camera), Hugo Williams through the evidence available. (on sound) and Heather Delaney Half a century ago the review was (who advised us about how primarily understood as an academic Kickstarter actually functions). format, used to summarise the While mid-campaign Shumi and I significant developments in a given were fortunate to win the competition field over a certain time period. Texts to curate the British Pavilion at the with scintillating titles like A Review Venice Architecture Biennale of the last Decade of Neuroscience (with our colleague Finn Williams). or A Review of Napoleon's European This is perhaps the most prestigious Campaigns were commonplace. architectural exhibition in the world, Today, the review tends to be and an incredibly opportunity wound up with big data, commerce – although delivering both projects and the operation of algorithms that simultaneously has meant delaying recommend related products. Userthe launch of the Real Review to generated reviews create aggregate the opening of the exhibition, titled ratings for everything from hotels Home Economics. Like us, we hope to hats and phones to pharmacies. you think it was worth the wait.

In between these two extremes It is also important to recognise the there lies the literary review. This is a hard work and dedication of our kind of critical discussion of a cultural designers OK-RM and our printers work – a book or film or a piece Push (both based in London). They of ballet – and it explores the subject have gone above and beyond to supmatter and themes in an engaging, port the Real Review, and are even entertaining way. Sadly, committed to its long-term success. when this type of review is done badly 711 individuals from every part it can end up as simply a synposis of the world pledged £26,305 collecor description of the content. This tively (resulting in almost exactly should be avoided. £23,000 clear) to make this The review is perhaps the most publication possible. This issue is undeservedly underappreciated form dedicated to all those people of writing, and it has the ability to who showed solidarity and enthusiasm encompass an entire epoch, a whole to unite behind a common project. field of research, an object, either a We are immensely grateful. cultural or a commercial product, and even a basic instinctive response to an event or stimulus. Most of all, irrespective of length, it is a text rooted in reality. It speaks about a subject – but it also speaks through its object. This is to say, the review always starts from something already existing in the world, which could be an author's work or a discipline's progress.

As to the role of print in our epoch – there is nothing intrinsically outdated about paper publications.

However, there has been a huge shift in audience expectations about immediacy and ease of access.

This has not necessarily changed the type of content people want to read. Moreover, it is the financial models that once supported magazines that have become problematic, not the concept of the magazine itself.

The subscription model that supports the Real Review means it wil be available as long as it has a readership.