Architectural Object

Definition

The architectural object names the building conceived as a self-referential, "non-referential" (Olgiati) entity — a private, isolated piece removed from functional, economic, or social context and included in the city "through its own exclusion." In Bismarck's account it is the conceptual apparatus that inscribes architecture in the rules of the private commission and the neoliberal market: a "machine-à-privatizer" that converts property into asset, housing-as-social-right into housing-as-eternal-debt, and functions as "the fundamental apparatus for the making of the indebted man." It is opposed to the project, which organized architecture's relation to the public, state-planned city.

Key Thinkers

• Pedro Levi Bismarck — the object/project distinction in the context of financialized urbanism.
• Manfredo Tafuri — the genealogy of the autonomous object (the "architecture dans le boudoir").
• (Related, not yet paged: Valerio Olgiati — Non-Referential Architecture; Georg Simmel on the "blasé" metropolitan object.)

Related Concepts

• Neoliberal Metropolis — the city that the object territorializes.

• Indebted Man — the neoliberal subject produced by the object as "the fundamental apparatus for the making of the indebted man."

• Autistic Architecture — Kaika's corporate building form; the object's concrete manifestation as the footloose transnational elite's serial, self-absorbed tower.

• Star Architecture — the commissioning context and the architect-as-entrepreneur who produces objects.

• Iconic Architecture — the image/spectacular register of the object.

• Critical Architecture — the critical refusal of the privatized object (project, commons).

• Architectural Autonomy — the autonomous object as the built form of autonomy.

• Objecthood — the perceptual register of object-talk (Erdman, via Fried): "When discussing the architectural whole, we are effectively talking about degrees of 'objecthood'" — a graded, experiential sense explicitly distinguished from Speculative Realism/OOO, and a different meaning of "object" from the financialized object this page theorizes (Bismarck's "machine-à-privatizer"). The two meet in the icon economy: the fully integrated object (interior/exterior, structure/skin) is the developer's unit, while alteration's partial, episodic objects-with-degrees are the practice's (alteration, interiorized-object).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Architecture of the City (in the Age of its Financial Reproducibility)
• Changes are Coming (Eisenman interview)
• Modernity's Opiate, or the Crisis of Iconic Architecture
• What is Iconic Architecture?
• The Discrete Turn: A Reconsideration of Architecture's Ontology
• The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How Contemporary Architecture Became an Instrument of Control and Compliance
• Architecture and Capital in the 21st Century: An Interview with Matthew Soules
• Altered (e)states (Erdman 2018) — the objecthood register (via Fried, against OOO): the architectural whole discussed as "degrees of 'objecthood'"; objects as "fully integrated entities" in the tradition vs alteration's fragmentary, nested, and collective objects; and the developer-side echo — environments "intentionally and architecturally unresolved" by multi-designer risk-spreading. See objecthood, alteration.
• source-notes/willis-1995-form-follows-finance

Related Syntheses

• Financialisation of Architecture — the architectural object as the built mechanism of financialisation.

Open Questions

• Can the "project" be revived as a critical category in the financialized metropolis, or does it inevitably collapse into the "public rhetorical form" Bismarck criticizes?