Architecture or Techno-Utopia

Author: Felicity D. Scott (Columbia University) Year: 2001 (Grey Room 3, 112–126) Source type: article Raw file: raw/articles/scott-2001-architecture-or-techno-utopia.md

Summary

Scott excavates the 1970s "Gray/White" debate (inclusivism/exclusivism; Tafuri's "The Ashes of Jefferson" in l'Architecture d'aujourd'hui 1976, against Stern's "Gray Architecture") to ask how its particular return to "resemanticization" actually foreclosed alternative readings of modernism — namely the "experimental architecture" of the 1960s–70s (Archigram, Superstudio, Archizoom, Cedric Price, Michael Webb, Hans Hollein) that engaged technology and communications. She traces Tafuri's (and Rowe's) foreclosure of experimental/techno-utopian practice, and connects it to the contemporary "Deleuzian moment" of diagrams and asignifying regimes.

Key Claims

The Gray/White debate and resemanticization: both Grays (Stern: "Gray buildings have facades which tell stories") and Whites/Eisenman shared a project of "resemanticization"; Tafuri's reply: "nothing remains but to gather around the hearth to listen to the fables of the new grannies." The debate "foreclosed alternative reevaluations of modernism," the experimental architecture that sought "to experiment out of architecture" (Cook).
Rowe and Tafuri vs. the experimental avant-garde: Rowe collapsed commercial modernism and experimental practice; the New York Five's "autonomy" was "a new mythology" for Tafuri, whose "Post-Modern tight-rope walker" figures the architect's capture within a totalizing technical-commercial realm and loss of agency ("action without a subject"). Tafuri saw Archizoom/Superstudio/La Pietra's engagement with technology and communication as another "mass deception," resemanticization as "just another form of 'styling.'"
Suppression of techno-utopia: the debate "foreclosed" the experimental/techno-utopian investigations of the 60s–70s (Archigram, No-Stop City, Twelve Cautionary Tales) — practices that negotiated (even dystopically) the feedback/control of new communications technology (cf. Banham: "Megastructure … was obviously close kin to Big Management").
The contemporary Deleuzian moment: Scott notes the recent recovery of Deleuze & Guattari (diagrams, asignifying regimes, "circuit breakers," "vacuoles of noncommunication") with experimental architecture, warning this "Deleuzian moment" risks "the same depoliticization … that occurred at the hands of Tafuri and Rowe" — "we have come full circle." "architecture is the least likely instrument with which to accomplish the revolution" (Drexler).

Connections

Concepts: Critical Architecture · Ideology · Noopolitics · Parametricism Authors: Felicity D. Scott · Manfredo Tafuri · Rem Koolhaas · Michael Webb — named (with Archigram) among the experimental 1960s–70s practices the Gray/White debate foreclosed; now paged, with his "Inside out" chapter supplying a first-hand specimen of that experimental corpus Debates: Critical vs. Projective Related source notes: The Fate of Critical Architecture (synthesis) · Architecture, Critique, Ideology (Wallenstein) · Flows of Capitalism (Gough) · Inside out (Webb 2018) — Michael Webb, whom Scott names among the foreclosed experimental architects, gives his own account of the practice: the Drive-in House and the perspectival "ice core" (see drive-in-house) · From ambient environments to sentient spaces (Gattegno & Johnson 2018) — the contemporary practitioners who read Scott's book as their own genealogy: their chapter draws on her account of Ambasz's "anti-object" position and "active critical participation" (p. 126), the environments as "an ensemble of interrelated processes" refusing "to adopt a fixed shape," and the domestic realm's introduction of "forms and scripts" from the public realm — the foreclosed experimental lineage claimed, sixteen years later, as the operating programme of sentient urban installations (see sentient-spaces, microevent-microenvironment).

Direct Quotes

"[N]othing remains but to gather around the hearth to listen to the fables of the new grannies." (Tafuri, as quoted)

"Gray 'buildings … have facades which tell stories.'" (Stern, as quoted)

"[T]he rise of interest in asignifying regimes and nonsemantic organizations is being forged through a new articulation with communications technology."

"Creating has always been something different from communication. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control." (Deleuze, as quoted)

Open Questions

Does Scott's recovery of "experimental architecture" offer a way beyond the Gray/White (and critical/projective) impasse — and how does the contemporary "Deleuzian moment" (diagram, parametricism) risk repeating the very depoliticization Tafuri and Rowe effected?