CHAPTER IV

Architecture of Neoliberalism
OBJECTIVES
1. Determine how architecture became an instrument of control and compliance;
2. Identify functions of architecture in the modern-day advancement.

INTRODUCTION
The contemporary world has revolved around the precepts of neoliberalism.
Through its claim that a development of a culture and its citizens would only be
achieved through neoliberalism. Without the aid and guidance of neoliberalism a certain
civilization ‘s would only be left in the sticks and remain trapped in the cage of
deterioration, with no chance of progress.

THE NEOLIBERALIST ARCHITECTURE

In De Architectura, the Roman architect Vitruvius claims that architecture ought
to adhere to principles of composition: fitness and arrangement, as well as ‘proportion,
uniformity, consistency, and economy’. The dwellings constructed thereof ought ideally
to possess ‘strength, utility, and beauty’. Thus, it is given that buildings not only reflect
but help reproduce the type of society that erects them, and that the sort of buildings
erected help shape the kinds of behavior in which the inhabitants of a society engage. It
follows that contemporary architecture expresses something of our mode of existence:
its dominant ideas.
Spencer contends that contemporary architecture is of a piece with the lofty
tenets of neoliberalism, the ‘form of our existence’ that he clearly disdains. He claims
that it forms its ‘spatial complement’. In spatial terms, the effect is to render the
occupant of the metropolis an exploited individual; connected, plugged-in, bustling
rapidly between the myriad venues of business and consumption. They encourage the
blending of the subject into the existent situation by ensuring the most efficient
‘participation, circulation, informality and access to information’ possible. It based itself
upon a radical rejection of all previous forms of architecture and insisted that buildings
and architecture have to be created anew according to rational and scientific principles.
Neoliberalism in architecture involves the captivation of the subject to ‘material
immediacy’; ‘to keep perception trained on what is in front of it, untroubled by questions
of meaning or interpretation’. The fluidity and patterning of architectural design valorizes
the unthinking diffusion of the masses into the transitory realm of the marketplace,
where ‘the imperatives of neoliberalism are spun into the positive-speak of choices and
freedoms. Functionality and efficiency, high rise, streamlined, glass and concrete
structures, and a disregard for the past and for context, have all become its trademark.
It has sought to reflect, celebrate and entrench the dynamism of industrial modernity
through the rational, scientific and technical construction of built space.
This concept is not that surprising, since economic considerations today take
priority; they are the first order of government business. Because money and markets
are the central planets around which life orbits, economic ideology tends to dictate the
priorities and motivations for human behavior. It is for this reason that neoliberalism
diligently proliferates that the emancipation of an individual would be achieved.
Part of the process towards the emancipation of the individual is his liberation
through the space that he is in. This involves the affectual captivation of the subject to
‘material immediacy’; ‘to keep perception trained on what is in front of it, untroubled by
questions of meaning or interpretation’. The fluidity and patterning of architectural
design valorizes the unthinking diffusion of the masses into the transitory realm of the
marketplace, where ‘the imperatives of neoliberalism are spun into the positive-speak of
choices and freedoms. And, to avoid becoming a deserving loser, the individual must
now become an ‘ongoing project’ besieged by worries over performance. It is constantly
‘tracked, measured and rated. It is to present itself as flexible, adaptable,
communicative and enterprising…’ Above all, it must be productive and market-driven.
Yet the ‘folded’, ‘pliant envelopes and organic contours’ of architecture ignore this
condition of economic servitude, occluding ‘any suggestion of internal contradiction or
struggle’ between the de-politicized jargon of neoliberalism and its reality.
Neoliberalism must, in the end, vitiate any suggestion that the market doesn’t
express a mystical ‘self-regulating order’. To this end, architects have expressly emptied
architecture of any overtly political or critical dimension, drawing on fashionable notions
of ‘complexity’ and ‘self-organization’ in order to project a post-ideological, purely
‘material’ progressive order. Especially useful in attempting to purge architecture of
politics is actor-network theory, which posits the existence of various human and non-
human ‘actors’ helplessly caught up in non-hierarchical ‘networks’; and ‘flat’ ontologies
which discount the possibility of ‘a larger totality, such as capital’. At bottom, these
theoretical co-optations preclude any need for architecture to partake in the tiresome
work of critique or political agency, which would after all detract from its subservience to
the demands of society as it is given.
One of the profound ironies of modern life is its incorporation into modes of
existence initially believed to be liberating but which turn out to be incarcerating.
Neoliberalism’s interactive penitentiary advocates not reflective interpretation or critical
distance on the part of the subject, but unthinking immersion into whatever is going. But
one can perhaps dimly foresee its end. Political evidence is emerging of a crisis of
confidence in its injunctions, and climate change threatens to foreclose on its banalized
conception of what it is to be ‘fully’ human. Its aspirational, ‘meritocratic’ myth of
entrepreneurial emancipation and self-glorification; of private interests maximizing
profits, purchasing experiences, accruing cultural capital, looks farcical, existentially
untenable, ethically inept.

REFERENCES
Spencer, D. (2016). The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How Contemporary Architecture
Became an Instrument of Control and Compliance (Bloomsbury Academic), 240
pp.
Smith, N. (2019, June 28). Neoliberalism. Retrieved November 23, 2020, from
https://www.britannica.com/topic/neoliberalism