Alex Bala Conflict of Agency

CONFLICT OF AGENCY

Alex Bala, PhD

Modernism sought to extend architecture’s agency towards fulfilling political and socioeconomic goals; those that were, by and large, aligned with utopian visions. It believed that architecture would be the catalyst for political and socioeconomic change. This conviction was most forcefully expressed in Le Corbusier’s rallying cry: “Architecture or Revolution.”

The choice is clear, either architecture fixes society’s ills or people will revolt.

This conviction was short-lived, however, as Modernism was co-opted by neoliberal forces that continued the status quo of capitalist expansion in the twentieth century. Manfredo Tafuri points out that Modernism was used to accelerate the growth of capital, which in turn led to increased social and economic inequality. As a reaction, Postmodernism understood that any form of direct agency was misguided. It retreated into negative critical/rhetorical modes that abandoned the question of agency altogether.

In our contemporary condition, architecture needs to find a middle-ground, one that resides between Modernism’s over-extension of architecture’s agency into extraneous domains and Postmodernism’s non-agency through negative practice. The challenge today is to reclaim architecture’s agency in its own right; to locate where it has existed all along; and to adapt it to meet our present and future needs.

I propose that, as its primary axiom, architecture adopts a dialogical model based on subject-object relations. Such a model excludes all extra-disciplinary concerns, such as those that Modernism sought to take on. At the same time, it retains empathy for the human experience, as opposed to Postmodernism’s treatment of architecture as a critical/rhetorical game that is indifferent to the subject or to any referent existing outside of its own self-imposed rules. Such a model leaves the relationship between the perceiving subject and the architectural object as the only legitimate frame of operation. It recognizes that architecture is an artistic practice, not a political, economic, or technological one. Unlike music or sculpture, though, architecture is the permanent backdrop of our daily lives. It cannot be avoided. Due to the persistency of its effects, architecture’s true work, its agency, often goes unnoticed and is therefore unappreciated. The subject-object model focuses on how architecture physically positions the subject in space and how it affects our existential being in the world. Likewise, it focuses on how the subject assimilates architecture into its daily experience as a sense-making device. As Jeff Kipnis suggests, this model relates to the way that architecture works on our lives, not in our lives.

From the subject-object model, architecture can venture into other domains while being aware of its own limitations, by what it can and cannot do. It forms the basis of architecture’s disciplinarity. Only in pedagogical environments (e.g., the university), can architecture’s agency be preserved and applied to external circumstances to help meet society’s needs at any given point, as effectively as it possibly can.