Critique of Architecture: Essays on Theory, Autonomy, and Political Economy

228 Pages·2021·9.284 MB·English

by  Douglas Spencer

Bauwelt Fundamente 168
Edited by
Elisabeth Blum
Jesko Fezer
Günther Fischer
Angelika Schnell

Douglas Spencer
Critique of Architecture:
Essays on Theory, Autonomy, and Political Economy
Bauverlag Birkhäuser
Gütersloh · Berlin Basel
The Bauwelt Fundamente series was founded in 1963 This publication is also available as an e-book
by Ulrich Conrads; it was edited from the early 1980s to (ISBN PDF 978-3-0356-2164-8)
2015 jointly with Peter Neitzke.
Supervising editor of this volume: Angelika Schnell © 2021 Birkhäuser Verlag GmbH, Basel
P.O. Box 44, 4009 Basel, Switzerland
Layout since 2017: Matthias Görlich Part of Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
and Bauverlag BV GmbH, Gütersloh, Berlin
Front cover: Fulton Center Metro, Manhattan, New York.
Grimshaw Architects, 2014. Photo: Douglas Spencer,
2016
Back cover: Hyatt Regency Atlanta, Portman Architects,
1967. Photo: Douglas Spencer, 2017
Printed in Germany
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020950291
ISBN 978-3-0356-2163-1
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Contents
Acknowledgements .................................................... 8
Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Introduction ........................................................... 18
Section 1.
Architecture, Deleuze and Neoliberalism .......................... 29
1 Architectural Deleuzism: Neoliberal Space, Control and
the ‘Univer-City’....................................................... 30
2 Habitats for homo economicus: Architecture, Design and
the Environment of ‘Man’............................................... 61
3 Personifying Capital: Architecture and the Image of Participation ........ 78
Section 2.
Autonomy: Architecture and the Politics of Depoliticization ... 101
4 Less than Enough: A Critique of the Project of Autonomy ............... 102
5 The Limits of Limits: Schmitt, Aureli and the Geopolitical
Ontology of the Island ................................................. 114
6 Out of the Loop: Architecture, Automation and Cognitive
Disinvestment ........................................................ 130
7 Architecture after California ........................................... 138
Section 3.
Reckoning with Theory .............................................. 149
8 Going to Ground: Agency, Design and the Problem of Bruno Latour ..... 150
9 Returns on the City: Detroit and the Design of Late Fordism ............. 163
10 Enjoy the Silence: On the Consolations of the Post-political ............. 176
11 Architecture’s Abode of Production: Beyond Base and
Superstructure ....................................................... 189
12 On Allegory, the Architectural Imagination and Radical
Disillusionment: In Conversation with Miloš Kosec ..................... 209
Note on the Essays ................................................... 226
For Cem Dursun
Acknowledgements
I write from stolen land, from Des Moines, Iowa, the traditional, ancestral, un-
ceded land of the Báxoˇe or Ioway, Sauk and Meskwaki (Fox) peoples. I recog-
nize that my presence here is the result of the ongoing exclusions and erasure
of Indigenous peoples, the original stewards of this land.
The essays in this book were written over the course of the past decade,
during which time I have been supported by too many friends, colleagues
and comrades to mention here. Their invitations for me to speak, to write, to
share, to travel, to teach and to learn with them have been invaluable. You
know who you are.
I want to make special mention here, however, of Deborah Hauptmann, for
her support of me as an academic and a friend. I thank David Cunningham,
not only for writing the foreword for this book, but for being the most intellec-
tually inspiring figure I have ever had the good fortune to study under. I thank
Miloš Kosec, not only for the probing discussion of my work prompted by his
questions, but for being a long-term, insightful and stimulating interlocutor. I
want also to thank Angelika Schnell for her editorial support and guidance in
bringing this book to fruition. Without Neil Brenner, who first suggested, and
then so generously provided his help and guidance in realizing this project,
it would not have happened. Neil, you are a comrade of the highest order.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge the love, support and patience of Becky
Beckett, my fellow traveller and constant companion on a journey that has
taken some strange and unexpected turns.
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Foreword
David Cunningham
It is widely accepted that, in the current marketplace of ideas, the stock of
‘critique’ could hardly be lower. Critique and its intellectual lineage is, to-
day, regularly dismissed from all sides as hopelessly outmoded, a cynical and
pointless activity of debunking and demystification best consigned to the dust-
bin of history. Critique has, as one of its most influential opponents has put it,
‘run out of steam’, exposed and destroyed by its own subjective hubris and will
to mastery, its own superior claims to know that which its objects do not know.
Irredeemably negative, critique functions not as a facilitator of praxis or so-
cial change, creativity or construction, but as a blockage and obstacle, an end-
less and self-indulgent theoretical loop of melancholic refusal that can only
bathe in its own repeated articulations of failure. To the ‘No’ of critique must
be opposed the ‘Yes’ of building, composition and construction. To the elitist
and know-it-all scepticism of critical reflection and interpretation must be op-
posed the humility and pragmatism of description and care.
Such a ‘post-critical’ position has rapidly assumed the status of doxa, even as
it continues to present itself as a plucky David to critique’s Goliath, and is one
shared by a range of theoretical trends over the last two decades, from ‘affect
theory’ and ‘object-oriented ontology’, to ‘actor-network theory’ and ‘surface
reading’, to a variety of post-Deleuzian ‘new materialisms’. But perhaps its
most ubiquitous poster boy has been the French anthropologist and philoso-
pher Bruno Latour; principal subject of one of the final essays included here.
As Latour argues, in a 2010 essay first published in the journal New Literary
History, summing up the contemporary renunciation of critique: ‘With a ham-
mer (or a sledge hammer) in hand you can do a lot of things: break down
walls, destroy idols, ridicule prejudices, but you cannot repair, take care, as-
semble, reassemble, stitch together’.1 Leaving aside the point that one can in-
deed ‘repair’ and ‘assemble’ with a hammer and a bag of nails (if not perhaps
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a sledge hammer), the argument is clear enough: critique can destroy or ne-
gate, shatter or destabilise, but it cannot build or construct, nor can it improve,
repair or add to what is already there.
The appeal of this to architects is obvious, and has been widely met with a
mix of relief and glee. Having delivered ourselves from the miserable paraly-
sis of critique and negativity, from the dreaded clutches of Marx or Adorno or
Derrida, we can now get on with some real, positive work of building (even
if it turned out, in the meantime, that there wasn’t actually that much work
any longer for architects to do …). If criticality is a ‘disease’, in the words of
Jeffrey Kipnis, stopping architecture from fulfilling its proper vocation, the
cure lies in an unabashed embrace of an architectural practice ‘based on the
productive, the positive, the mobile, the new’, as Sanford Kwinter described
it.2 Plenty have agreed.
The effort to recover a critical theory for architecture at a time when it is rou-
tinely denounced and dismissed as both arrogant and futile, both naively ad-
olescent and insufferably world-weary, could then scarcely be more difficult
than it appears today. Yet, cashing out the promissory note of the conclusion
to his first book, The Architecture of Neoliberalism (2016), titled simply ‘The
Necessity of Critique’, this is precisely what Doug Spencer intends in the col-
lection of essays you have before you. More than this, and here is where one
might hope it could have its greatest impact upon the field, he does so, without
nostalgia, by seeking to interrogate and challenge the normative idea of cri-
tique as sheer negativity and non-productivity held by ‘post-critical’ thought
itself.
As Critique of Architecture reminds us, it is bracing to consider for just how
long this renunciation of critique has been culturally dominant in architec-
tural discourse now – and how remarkable, in some respects, its blithe sur-
vival (like neoliberalism itself) through the ongoing capitalist crises of the
late 2000s has been. As Spencer traces in various of the essays comprising
this collection, if such a renunciation finds its pre-history in strands of post-
war cybernetics and systems thinking, the California ideology of the Whole
Earth Catalog, Buckminster Fuller and Richard Brautigan, and the paeans
to flexibility and openness of the Independent Group, Reyner Banham and
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