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NARRATIVE
ARCHITECTURE
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A
KYNICAL
MANIFESTO
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CRUZ GARCIA
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& NATHALIE
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FRANKOWSKI
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WAI
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ARCHITECTURE
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THINK TANK
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NAI010
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PUBLISHERS
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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . PART I: IDEOLOGY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
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PART II: CYNICISM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
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. KYNICAL
INTRO- MANI-
DUC- FESTO
TION .
TO .
. .
. .
. . 13
. .
. .
. .
. .
As you see, there isn’t .
a single building here, .
not a single comfor­ .
tably designed corner, .
only destruction, .
anarchy. This made .
philistines laugh, as .
if it were the extra­ .
vagant idea of some .
insane individuals, but .
in fact it turned out to .
be ‘a devilish intuition’ .
which is realized in .
the stormy today. .
. .
Vladimir Mayakovsky, .
A Drop of Tar, 1915 .
. .
. .
. . INTRODUCTION
. . Ideology critique stripped of humour is just Ideology resurrected in an alternative form. Without the capacity to
laugh about Architecture’s absurd claims—to make the world a better place without challenging social, economic,

. .
or political powers, to be critical without questioning the status quo, to create spaces for ‘the people’ while people
cannot participate in the process to think and make architecture, to argue for a sustainable architecture while
building more, to plan ‘smart’ cities that are ‘condemned to be stupid’, to pursue ecological architecture while
destroying the ecosystems at an unprecedented rate—Architecture remains stuck in its ideological impasse.
This book reconstructs in three parts (Ideology, Cynicism, Kynicism) the main events that led to the formulation
INTRO- of Kynical Architecture; Architecture that bites the Masks of Ideology away (like the Diogenesean Dog) and laughs
DUCTION

14
at the sight of the unveiled allegorical face of a deadly serious (and at times immovable) discipline.
As a cautionary tale (and before dealing with the three main parts of the book), these very short stories render
IMAGE through three archetypes—Courtyard, Wall, and Lantern—the latent threat of Architecture failing to: laugh about
A SORT OF INTRODUCTION TO THIS KYNICAL MANIFESTO 1/4 itself, reveal hegemonic powers, subvert the lies hiding behind the beautifully rendered alternative scenarios.
Manifestoes are as much about ambition,
dreams, and aspirations, as they are about
Manifestoes are compelling not just
because of the burning fervour of their
Against decades of misreading and mis-
conceptions, this manifesto forces the
Against the naïve
omissions, oppositions and eradications.
.
aims, but because of the scorching chal-
lenges their idealistic struggles presup-
continuation of the ‘miscarried dialogue’
about the Utopian pursuit of architecture
intention of solving
. pose. The history of manifestoes is not only against the fallacious foundations of its all of the world’s
problems with build-
. filled with daring declarations of intent and ‘post-modernist’ discreditors, rethinks
. bold statements of unyielding determina- architectural strategies of presentation as
.
.
tion; but with furious neglect, strategic
resistance and staunch antagonism.
conceptual projects rather than as mere
mediums, reconsiders the re-construction ings, and casting tons
.
.
.
After all, Mayakovski fuelled his radical
of history as a storytelling device against
the false pretension of established, arche-
of poured concrete
.
.
prose with his desire to throw the old mas-
ters ‘Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc. etc.
ological truths, and outlines the pitfall of
dogmatic seriousness, rejecting the para-
and welded steel as
. overboard from the ship of modernity’. David lyzing symptoms of a condition neutralizing the ultimate solutions,
this manifesto pro-
. Burliuk, Alexander Kruchenykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky, the power of architecture as a tool for
. Victor Khlebnikov, ‘A Slap in the Face of Public Taste’ ideological critique.
.
.
(1917). Malevich promised to free art (and
architecture) from the ballast of objectivity
.
This book proposes the creation of Kynical poses architectural
.
.
through the Black Square—a Suprematist
tabula rasa. Loos aimed to abolish orna-
Architecture (an Architecture of narrative
provocations, and practice as subversion),
strategies of pres-
.
.
ment from objects of daily use to embrace
a new form of cultural evolution. And
through the negation of the usual means of
architectural intelligence, calls to re-cre-
entation not as
. Complexity and Contradiction called for ate the Pool the fleeting avant-garde con- mediums but as
‘ends’ in themselves.
. the difficult whole in opposition to Purist, structed to swim upstream against the
. monolithic, Modernist Aesthetics. ideological current, allures to piss like
.
.
.
To be a Kynic is to live and practice a
Diogenes against the ideological wind.
. .
.
.
Manifesto—of resistance, ridicule, anger,
and laughter. To be a Kynic is to oppose
.
THIS .
.
.
ideological submission, to neglect its
power, and to subvert its influence. To be
IS
NOT
.
.
.
a Kynical architect is to question the status
quo, to challenge institutions, academic,
A
BOOK
.
A Manifesto is like a love letter to some- and professional organizations. To be a ABOUT .
.
thing that doesn’t quite yet exist. Its utopian Kynic today implies to deconstruct and BUILDINGS
scope is dialectical in ambition. On the retell history, to imagine the possibility .
one hand, it outlines pure desires; it aims
for a goal without accounting for prob-
of another history. To be a Kynic requires
to invent, alter, and propose alternative
While Pure Hardcore Icons is a manifesto
about buildings and form, this book is .
abilities, percentages, statistics. On the
other, it highlights the source of discom-
Narratives. To be a Kynic is to follow up
the Critique of Pure, Dialectical and Cynical
about form without buildings. This is a
book about Architecture in its Narrative .
fort, the attraction to destruction, the will
to challenge the status quo. After surviv-
Reason, with a Critique of Black, Queer,
Non-ableist and Intersectional Reason.
form.
.
.
ing the age of a generation disgusted with
them, the manifesto has made it all the way
To be a Kynic today is to question the
(always biased) images of the future we’ve
Against the naïve intention of solving all
of the world’s problems with buildings,
.
back to the subconscious of Architecture. been force-fed through generations. To be and casting tons of poured concrete and .
In order to achieve meaningful change, a Kynic is to imagine futures that may not welded steel as the ultimate solutions, this
Architecture craves manifestoes. include us. manifesto proposes architectural strate- .

A SORT OF INTRODUCTION TO THIS KYNICAL MANIFESTO 16 NARRATIVE ARCHITECTURE 17

gies of presentation not as mediums but as
‘ends’ in themselves. The manifesto rereads
fragments of the architectural script of the
twentieth century in search for the missed
opportunity of the strategies of presenta-
tion and representation (as the ideological
act of presenting something again usually
in a different format) in the plot of Mod­
ernism. A call for action, this manifesto
reflects its effects on architecture and the
city, not by devising design methodologies,
but by questioning the ideology behind the
means of architectural production. This is
not a book about buildings, but a manifesto
about the ideology behind buildings, draw-
ings, images, diagrams, publications,
masterplans, and cities.
. beyond professionalized execution; in their
Responding to a deep need of institutional
critique away from the established institu-
tions, this book is born out for the possibil-
ity—and necessity—of an architecture that
is not meant to end in real estate propa-
ganda posters, or as square footage for
the market trends. The book addresses an
architectural project devised to interrupt,
restructure, and reformat the triad of
discourse, presentation and practice and
its problematic relationship with social,
economic, and political power.
. buildings and urban spaces. Nigel Coates discusses
This manifesto focuses on a series of
projects, not because of their material
effects on the urban and architectural
historical fabric (although many have tried
to reduce their positions to urban and
architectural plans), but because of their
subtext as agents of subversion. The book
recognizes the field of ideas as a fertile
component for the germination of critical
forms of architecture. It scrutinizes archi-
tectural plans not willing to fit within the
footprint of the status quo, while denounc-
ing the impasse of their use-value as tools
for the consolidation of hegemonic ideolog-
ical discourse, and their reduction to mere
blueprints of (post)ideological projects.
A SORT OF INTRODUCTION TO THIS KYNICAL MANIFESTO
The subjects of this manifesto are defined
not by their outcome as architectural pro-
ductions of immaculate efficiency, coffee-
table books, marketable smartness and
seductive sustainability—they are not
so-called perfect acts of architecture—but
by their employment of architectural pres-
entations as ideological Molotovs, by their
use of critique as Narrative bombs gener-
ating disrupting explosions. The power of
these projects doesn’t lie in their potential
to be resurrected in the latest international
architectural or urban planning competition;
nor in the museological qualities of their
collages, images, drawings, montages and
films; but in the destabilizing lack of con-
cretized ambition; in their desire to subsist
capacity to operate beyond regulating
domains of quality and proficiency.
.
Unconcerned with the poetics of interpre-
tation and in complete indifference to the
allegorical qualities of completed buildings
and fully planned and executed cities,
this manifesto is not about the narratives
of Architecture. Narrative Architecture here is
used in sharp contrast with Nigel Coates' concept
of Narrative Architecture as a process or story tell-
ing device that can be found in drawings but also in
this type of architecture in his lecture ‘Narrativity
Equals Creativity’, Architectural Association, London,
Thursday 15 November 2012.This is a manifesto
for an architecture of literary texts, con-
crete poems, moving images, collages,
montages, and objects in search for the
blunt object of critique to knock architec-
tural ideology unconscious. A manifesto
not only for, but made out of the combi­
nation of Narrative prose, and subversive
critique. This is not a book about archi-
tectural representation (about ideology
WWpresented over and over again in a
different project), but a book as architec- CITY OF COURTYARDS
tural presentation. This is the Manifesto The City of Courtyards is devoted to the resurrection of Post-Modern ghosts. The Courtyard is both a clear
of Narrative Architecture. architectural manifestation defined by absolutist borders, and a void full of flexible programmatic potential.
Obsessed with cool architects from the past, a young generation of designers makes courtyards of many scales,
shapes, and forms. Since every architect designs different courtyards, in their amalgamation they create a
INTRO- City of Courtyards.
DUCTION
18
When they are not protecting an oasis between continents, these courtyards appear in geopolitical conflict zones.
Sometimes they border fresh water sources. Other times they encircle palm trees. Sometimes they act as border
IMAGE checkpoints. Other times they operate as internment camps. Each courtyard offers a new ‘solution’ to the problems
2/4 of the world. Each courtyard provides an answer to a paying client, to a political party, to a powerful corporation.
THIS
IS
NOT
A of presentation from the identity the gate-
(A)HISTORY
BOOK
. as a pure form of critique. Just like critical
In his futile attempt to render the ahistor-
ical defeat of the avant-garde, Manfredo
Tafuri denounces the construction of a
linear history and its ‘infantile’ search for
truth on the ‘rediscovery of mythical
origins,’ and its relationship to nineteenth
-century positivism. Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere
and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture
from Piranesi to the 1970s, trans. Pellegrino d’Acierno
and Robert Connolly, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987).
This book not only looks for the Positivist
origins of the heroic avant-garde, but uses
a linear timeline to explore the causalities,
events, strategies, and critiques that led
to the consolidations, ruptures, breaks,
attempts and failures that produced
Narrative Architecture.
. Europe and the Capitalist megastructures
A narrative manifesto for Narrative Archi­
tecture, the book unfolds in the form of
two parallel stories. One outlines the con-
struction and evolution of ideology, from
the foundation of the Modern Movement™
to the anti-climatic summit of Narrative
Architecture four decades later. The other
unfolds images and stories in search for the
‘thoughtful confrontation between concept
and subject matter’; between history as
evidence and history as construction,
between archival documentation as evi-
dence and archival creation as provocation.
While half of the book is concerned with
the chronological unfolding of identitarian
histories that have wrongly labelled these
projects as naively utopian or radically
indifferent; the other half presents purely
speculative reconstructions of history, that
in their critical dimension aim to expose
architecture’s relationship with ideology; of
architecture as a manifestation of ideology.
By swimming against the ideological
current, or pissing against the ideological
wind, the book aims to liberate strategies
keepers of history have given it. The book
pursues the emancipation of Architecture
theory strives to devise forms of human
emancipation in theoretical form, Narrative
Architecture is critical inasmuch as it helps
to reveal the political domain and ideologi-
cal constraints of architecture through
a praxis of Architecture.
. The Complete Diogenes of Sinope Collection, (True
In its so-called ‘infantile obsession’, this
book searches for the ‘mythical origins’
of Narrative Architecture through recon-
structed collages, quotes, and speculative
historical presentations and representa-
tions. The ruined Rome of Giovanni Paolo
Panini meets the legions of ‘ugliness’ of the
Rome of Le Corbusier, the Romantic land-
scapes of Jacob Van Ruisdael merge with
the optimistic architectures of post-War
of Jon Jerde, the Surreal architectures of
Madelon Vriesendorp subvert the already
subverted impossible floating, gridded, and
indifferent landscapes of a misunderstood
generation of architectural provocateurs.
The book is as much about historical retell-
ing, as it is about Post(Ideological) Cards
from a past that may never have happened
and a future yet to be fought for.
. an honest architecture.
. .
AGAINST
ABSOLUTE
SERIOUSNESS
. on the anecdotes attributed to him in a
Diogenes of Sinope laid out the blueprint
for the ultimate form of Critical Archi­
tecture. Admired by Alexander The Great
and regarded by Plato as ‘Socrates gone
mad’; the Kynic (spelled with a ‘K’ coming
from kyon or dog in Greek to differentiate
ancient Kynicism, or Kynicism that ‘bites’,
with modern cynicism) masturbated and
defecated in public in order to reveal the
experience of the corporeal to the masses,
and urinated on people as they called him
a dog. In order to understand modern cynism, Peter
Sloterdijk defines it as the moment when ‘the powerful
begin, for their part, to think kynically, when they know
the truth about themselves and, in spite of this, “go on
as before,” then they completely fulfill the modern defi-
nition of cynicism’. From Sloterdijk, Kritik der zynis-
chen vernunft (1983) translated into Critique of Cynical
Reason, trans. Michael Eldred, (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1987), 102.
Books, 2017).
The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and
its Legacy, ed. Robert Bracht Branham, Marie-Odile
Goulet-Caze, (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1997).Living inside a discarded clay wine
jar, he rejected material wealth, showed
contempt for fame, ridiculed architec-
ture, refused respect, parodied the stories
of gods and heroes, told Alexander that he
should get out of his sun, and roamed the
streets holding a lantern under plain day-
light searching for an honest man. Sloterdijk,
Critique of Cynical Reason, 102.
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers,
Vol. 2, trans. R. D. Hicks, (London: William Heinemann,
1925). More concerned with its role as
satire than its life as theory, Narrative
Architecture has been revealing its own
absurdities and impasses (enjoying itself),
lifting the proverbial lantern in search for
Occupied with challenging the flaws of
social currency by action and example,
Diogenes didn’t leave any texts and relied
number of scattered classical sources.
Like the ancient Kynic—in its effort to
unmask hegemonic discourse—Narrative
Architecture has, until now, lacked any text
declaring its intentions. This book gathers
up its anecdotes and referential sources.
The manifesto proposes to outline the
‘mythical origins’ of Narrative Architecture.
It narrates the Diogenesian roots of Kynical
critique. It tells the story of Narrative
Architecture as a Kynical Manifesto.
.
When Ludwig Wittgenstein affirmed that
a ‘good, serious philosophical book could
be written entirely out of jokes’, he should
have added that by missing the humour, a
project can produce the opposite effects
of its intended philosophy. Norman Malcolm,
Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, (Oxford: Oxford
Decades of misunder-
University press, 1958).
standings and oversimplifications, of
misreading and literal translations have
relegated the legacy of Narrative Archi­tec­
ture to the sterile monotony of the museum
wall, to irrelevance of the misleading
blogpost and the catchy soundbite of con-
temporary architectural media. Claims
of absolutist dogma have been unable to
grasp the subtleties of satire and the sub-
versive power of irony, transforming the
most explosive architectural jokes of the
twentieth century into austere housing
plans, competition proposals of endless
walls and the new aesthetic of ‘normcore’,
and ‘sober chic’.
.
.
STRUCTURE
.
The Manifesto of Narrative Architecture
shifts the attention from the image of the
project to the image as the project. It
resuscitates the critical potential of archi-
tecture not as building but as Narrative.
Instead of blown-up plans of grids and
oversized monuments, this manifesto tells
the story of an allegorical collage made of
blown-up impostures. The menacing return
of the missed joke, of the misunderstood
parody, is challenged by an injection of
irony and by magnifying the already
exaggerated characteristics innate to
architectural ambition.
.

A SORT OF INTRODUCTION TO THIS KYNICAL MANIFESTO 20 NARRATIVE ARCHITECTURE 21

The book recounts the development of an
architecture of critical alchemy; turning
Instead of blown-up
disillusionment into mockery and dis-
appointment into subversive critique. It
plans of grids and
focuses on the moment when the Kynic oversized monuments,
this manifesto tells the
drills the sharp edge of humour into the
ossified shell of hegemonic architectural
discourse. Focusing on three key periods
of the twentieth century, the book makes story of an allegorical
a Sloterdijkean Critique of Architectural
Ideology by summoning the collages,
collage made of
drawings, films, publications, events and blown-up impostures.
.
schemes in their role in the formation of an
ideology of Modernism; evolving into the
false consciousness of the Cynical archi-
tectures of post-Second World War; and .
reaching their Narrative Architecture form
just after the events of 1968. ‘Ideology critique,
.
having become respectable, imitates surgical proce-
dure: Cut open the patient with the critical scalpel and
.
operate under impeccably sterile conditions. The oppo- .
.
nent is cut open in front of everyone, until the mecha-
nism of his error is laid bare. The outer skin of delusion

.
and the nerve endings of “actual” motives are hygien-
ically separated and prepared’. Sloterdijk, Critique of
Cynical Reason, 3.
. .
.
1 IDEOLOGY .
.
Opening with the ideological foundations
.
and their multi-media manifestations, the
first part of the book focuses on the history
.
of the ‘origins’ of the Le Corbusiean brand .
.
of the Modern Movement™. This Modernist
ideology is anchored on positivist values,
Cartesian Grids, Architecture as a mani-
festation of the Engineer’s Aesthetics and .
the city as a machine for collective, hierar-
chical living. Ideology as the set of values .
that form Modernism, is not only shaped by
the Villas and Urban Plans, but by the mul-
. THE STORY OF THE WALLS
tiple strategies of presentation employed
by Le Corbusier continuously until the end
. The last decade saw a rise in the amount of Walls—architectural elements with more or less ideological content—
unified in the search for perpetual separation. After a series of coincidental events—the rise of populism, and the

.
eventual reduction of architecture to the ‘fundamentals’ in one of the world’s most important events—the Wall
of the Second World War. Publications and became a hot commodity in the repertoire of Contemporary Ideological Architecture. Sometimes the walls were
‘materialistic’: made out of concrete, steel, barbed wire, bricks, cinder blocks fabricated with robotic arms, 3D
manifestoes about architecture, the city,
.
printed in place. At other times the walls were ‘stylistic’: Parametric, Phenomenological, OOO, Post-Modern,
cars, airplanes, square angles, anthro- Post-Internet, Post-Digital.
In search of fame, access to projects, and to the required exhibition at the Museum of choice, many architects have
been creating the most beautiful, sublime, sustainable, tectonic walls Contemporary Architecture has to offer.
INTRO- These Architects—trained in the serious business of Architecture—misunderstood allegorical walls, (walls in
DUCTION

22
science fiction, and in children’s stories, walls formerly presented as jokes, cautionary tales and provocations),
as blueprints and gave these abstract manifestations of critiques of Ideology material form. Backed by populist
IMAGE nostalgia and colossal budgets, these Continuous Monuments serve the geopolitical separation of the even field
A SORT OF INTRODUCTION TO THIS KYNICAL MANIFESTO 3/4 into politicized landscapes of nation-states and free ruling multinational corporations.
pology, and painting, join his dogmatic
designs and concepts. Technology and
mass media for Le Corbusier are as fun-
damental to Modernism as his Five Points
for a Contemporary Architecture, his Four
Values for the Modern City, his falling in
love with Purism and the Machine Age, his
projections for the Contemporary City for
Three Million Inhabitants, the Plan Voisin,
and the Radiant City, and even the CIAM
as a platform to consolidate and project
his intentions. Ideology through the work
of Le Corbusier is seen as an all-encom-
passing system of drawings and maga-
zines, of images and visions of the future of
Architecture and the city (forever bundled
as one), and the forums deployed to turn
these visions into collective dogmas.
.
.
2 CYNICISM
.
If Modernist Ideology is the allegorical
building of a theory and practice of
Modernism, Cynicism is like ‘trying to
enter the old building of ideology critique
through a new entrance’. Sloterdijk, ‘Cynicism:
The Twilight of False Consciousness,’ op. cit. (note 4), 3.
It is through this ‘new entrance’ that a gen-
eration of architects, artists, historians,
critics, and urbanists put all their efforts
into breaking away from the methods and
strategies of Modernism—albeit without
the desired results. If Critical Theory looks
for ways to deal with the sublime object of
ideology from the safe haven of the theory
book, the academic classroom, the lecture
hall, the Cynic aims to challenge ideology
through a form of praxis.
.
The second part of the book sheds light
on the Modernist groundwork of simulta-
neous, but apparently dissimilar projects
not only by Team 10, Yona Friedman and
Constant, but by Victor Gruen, Minoru
Yamasaki, and Lucio Costa. Following the
Second World War, a series of projects
A SORT OF INTRODUCTION TO THIS KYNICAL MANIFESTO
are in a perpetual limbo between the ideas
of hardcore Modernism, and the desire for
‘Post-Modernisms’, between Megastruc­
ture as utopian desire, and Super­structure
as commercial achievement, between
avant-garde idealism, and après-garde
nostalgia. The era of the Cynics marks the
inability to perform ideological breaks, as
ideal cities become ideological bridges, and
anti-Le Corbusieanism is lost in perpetual
manifestations of a never ending (reincar-
nated) manifestation of Modernism.
.
.
3 KYNICISM
. IS
Starting with the events of 1968—riots,
coups, unrest, war—the third part of the
book delves into the generation of the
Kynics and their projects of Narrative
Architecture. After witnessing the collapse
of the Cynical bridge under the crushing
weight of Modernist Ideology, Archizoom
and Superstudio set out to outline the
fault lines of the (super)structural failures.
Rather than just articulate novel ways to
reimagine the city, with a series of stories
about Continuous Monuments, No-Stop
Cities, Fundamental Acts, and Cautionary
Tales, the book focuses on how the Kynics
repurpose architectural presentations
to highlight the incapability to make new
functional claims about Architecture and
the city. Kynicism exposes the urgency
of dismantling the impasse of heroic
approaches in architecture and urban-
ism, as drawings, collages, narrative texts,
and films turn Architecture into a mag-
nifying glass revealing the absurdities of
the monumental claims, not only made by
Modernism, but by the generations that
claimed to break away from its doctrinal
plans in order to offer ‘another’ new begin-
ning. Rather than suspending utopian
ambitions, Narrative Architecture uses
presentational strategies to exacerbate the
drive to reformat the city as a platform for
24
If Modernist Ideology the efficient accumulation of cultural,
psychological, and economic capital. As
is the allegorical a never-ending critical exercise, it reaches
the point of creating a critique of a critique
building of a theory of ideology. In this domain of critical cri-
and practice of
tiques, Exodus or the Voluntary Prisoners
of Architecture lifts the mirror to reflect
Modernism, Cynicism the critical claims of its Kynical contem­
poraries, just before coming full circle with
is like ‘trying to enter the ultimate critique of Modernist Ideology
inside a book long thought to be about
the old building of Delirious New York.
.
ideology critique .
through a new
THIS
entrance.’ NOT
A
. PRETTY
PICTURE
. BOOK
.
. Because ideology presents concepts as
.
their opposites—lies as truth; opportunism
as responsibility and social impromptu;
. self-consciousness as social conscious-
ness—it has condemned Narrative Archi­
. tecture to the anesthetizing beauty of the
art book, to the fleeting indifference of the
. internet post, to the disarming rubric of
conformist historicism.
. .
Narrative Architecture challenges the
. consumption of images as ‘pretty pictures’
.
and invites to rethink the role of images in
the possibility of critical Architectures—
. Architectures in search of emancipation.
.
. Narrative Architecture belongs on the
drawing board, on the flicking flashes of
. the computer screens, in the architectural
discussion, in the critical plan to change
. the world.
.
. However uncomfortable the discussion,
through irony and provocations Narrative
. Architecture calls out: the unfairness of
NARRATIVE ARCHITECTURE 25
a historically classist profession, the
intransigent conservativism of academia,
the crapstraction of graphs, rankings and
statistics used to justify the perpetual arbi-
trariness of the status-quo, the embedded
class struggle within Architecture, the
socio-economic fractures perpetuated by
Architecture, and the post-colonial, fem-
inist, and queer arguments left out of this
or that hegemonic Architectural Ideology.
For more on ‘Crapstraction’, a term coined by Art Critic
Jerry Saltz see Hito Steyerl lecture ‘Why Games? Can
an Art Professional Think?’ at Fundació Antoni Tàpies
(June 8, 2016).
.
Although it can be considered a historical
device, Narrative Architecture belongs to
the present, to the schools, to the prac-
tices, to the think tanks, to the collectives.
Narrative Architecture reveals the condi-
tion of the Zeitgeist, now.
.
If ideology is post-truth, the suspension
of criticality, and doublethink; Narrative
Architecture screams ‘down with Big
Brother!’
.
While ideology is watching you; Narrative
Architecture watches it back.
.
In a world driven by nonsensical state-
ments, the most absurdist of positions
becomes the clearest path.
.
When every pressing architectural
challenge makes Architecture stagnate;
Narrative Architecture keeps moving.
.

LANTERN
An Architect found the blueprints for a lighthouse building in the shape of a Lantern. ‘Diogenes Lantern for the
Swimming Pool’ could be read in the old documents. The old Swimming Pool was known to be now part of the
permanent collection of a very important Museum. Decommissioned since its acquisition, the Pool was the
INTRO- centre of attraction of the curatorial department that dealt with ‘failed utopian enterprises’.
DUCTION

26
The Architect—not understanding the ‘origins’ of Diogenes Lantern—decided to transform the old lighthouse
(with its trendy austere aesthetics) into luxury penthouses. Meanwhile, in the basement of the Lantern a secret
IMAGE organization of Architects dressed in robes read a Kynical Manifesto about the evolution of Architectural
A SORT OF INTRODUCTION TO THIS KYNICAL MANIFESTO 4/4 Ideology and the strategies developed to destabilize it.
. .
. .
. .
. IDEO-
. LOGY
. .
PART .
I .
. .
. . 29
. . cities. New cities have of the machine age
. . always in the course as manifested in its
. . of time replaced old thought, its methods
. . ones. Today, at last, of production, its
For a man’s possi-­­ . a new type of city general equipment,
bi­lities, plans, and . can be born, the city and hence in its
feelings must first . of our modern times, dwellings and cities.
be hedged in by . filled with happiness, .
prejudices, traditions, . radiant with the es- Le Corbusier,
obstacles, and . sential joys. Academic La Ville Radieuse
(The City Radiant with Joy),
bar­ri­ers of all sorts, . architecture has had Radio Speech
like a lunatic in his . its day. Architecture .
straightjacket, and . has a new purpose .­
only then can what- . which is the re- .
ever he is capable of arrangement and .
doing have perhaps . coordination of all .
some value, sub- . the developments .
stance, and staying . of today. Let us talk .
power. . no more of style, .
. The time has come whether modern or .
Robert Musil, for great architecture. traditional. Style is .
The Man Without Qualities And there can be no the thing itself—to .
. new architecture paraphrase a famous .
. without a new urba­ French saying: archi- .
. nism—that is, new tectural style is no .
. principles of planning more than the society .

PART I—IDEOLOGY 30 NARRATIVE ARCHITECTURE 31

. but an instrument of
. economic production
. and, as such, only an
. element of artistic
. creation, like any
. other, similar to a
. window, a cloud,
The heavenliness of a mirror, or a path,
the moonlight in etc. Everything else
poetry has been amounts only to a
superseded by the newly coined animism
heavenliness of the that is arbitrary,
cinema, the airplane, morbid, decadent.
the radio, or which- .
ever other quasi- ­Cesar Vallejo,
‘futurist’ smack you Aesthetic and Machinism
please. So mistakenly .
wander today’s poets .
who make the machine .
a goddess, like those .
who before them .
made a goddess out .
of the moon, sun, or .
sea. Neither deifica- .
tion nor heavenliness .
of machines. This is .
DREAMS
Modernist ideology is like a dream—of volumes, mass, surfaces, white villas, and cruciform skyscrapers—that
PART has been implanted in the collective mind of Architecture in the twentieth century. Le Corbusier orchestrates its
I

32
inception in three phases: initially through painting, then through architecture, and eventually through the city.
In the 1920s Le Corbusier is not the only one planning to concretize ideological dreams. While the Surrealists
IMAGE devise an almost mechanical method to simulate the content of dreams, Le Corbusier dreams first of Purist
PART I—IDEOLOGY 1/10 content produced by the Modernist method.
MODERNISM If to write about Le Corbusier pre- The City is Ideology as unleashed
. sents a complication, what about ambition. Modernist desire as the
. Modernism? Has the relationship immaculate triad of plan, collage and
. between the Modernist architect diagram. Modern Architecture is ide-
. and the Modernist city tainted any ology in the parts. The Modernist
. possibility of neutral scrutiny? Is the City is ideology in the whole.
. problematic figure of Le Corbusier Modernist Architecture is a small
. responsible for the fate of the sample of the Modernist city. The
. ‘legacy’ of the Modern Movement Modernist city is the total assembly
. and everything it implies? Hasn’t of Modernist Architecture.
. Modernism suffered a similar fate .
. under the scrutinizing gaze of critics For Modernist ideology to achieve
. jumping on the opportunistic band- its impulse of world domination, it
. wagon of ‘post’ Modernist nostalgia? needs, first, a problem to address
. Wasn’t Pruitt-Igoe the tombstone of globally; and second, a remedy to
. Modernism’s allegorical death? The ‘solve’ this problem. With the advent
. crumbling failure of the heroic period of the industrial revolution and the
. of architecture? One of the living catastrophic effects of the Great
. manifestoes of the End of History; War, Urbanism, the discipline
. the fiasco of the universal project of responsible to design the future
. collectivity? of the city becomes the medium
. . through which the ideology of
. Can a theory of architecture in the Moder­nism not only can be formed
. twentieth century address the and distributed, but justified, con­
. Modern Movement after announcing solidated, and hegemonized.
. its premature defeat? Can enough .
. evidence prove Modernism’s alter-­­ .
. nate fate? What if, after all, Modern­ IDEOLOGY
. ism overcame the impasse of fin de .
. siècle nostalgia? What if after all Emblematic images have often
. these years Modernism, rather than forced Architectural critique to oper-
. lying in the graveyard of failed Move­ ate in the realm of the superficial. By
. ments, achieved the ultimate victory? pointing out miscarried housing pro-
. What if Modernism implant­ed around jects announcing the expiration date
. the globe a consolidated system of of Modernism, it has time and time
How to write about Le Corbusier sorts? What if after all, we have been again failed to recognize that ideol-
after everything that could have modern all these years? ogy operates in spheres beyond the
been said about him has been said? . realm of poured concrete and glass
How to describe his work in relation­ . windows, beyond rentable square
ship to ideology after the obsession CITY footage and physical buildings. An
with his persona has extinguished . ideology has been consolidated
and exploited every single detail The City is the collective concretiza­ once it has penetrated every sphere
about his life and work? After all, tion of ideology. Ideology concretized of architectural thinking and pro-
didn’t he keep a lifetime of ‘evidence’ in the collective. duction, every tool of presentation
so that his life could be preserved, . and analysis. Hegemonic discourse
dissected, reconstructed and memo- If Modern Architecture consists of maneuvers on the landscape of
rialized in retrospective exhibitions, a set of building instructions, the ideas as long as a force of equivalent
monographs, and a whole universe City is where these guidelines are or greater magnitude is unable to
of referential paraphernalia? Is it tested, implemented, projected. alter its path. Hegemonic discourse
possible to separate the man from The city is the ultimate test ground remains disguised behind pseudo-­
the work, precisely when ideology is for Modernist experiments. If archi- rational justifications as long as
what brings coherence to his oeuvre? tecture presents ideology in small nobody is able to lift the ideological
How to focus on the ideology behind samples, urbanism allows for the mask. Already in place as an immov-
his projects when historians keep development of ideology on a soci- able ideological block, the Modern
pointing to his naked pictures, corre- etal scale. A petri dish of Cartesian Movement is indifferent to the crum-
spondence and trails of gossip to talk and positivist values, with its grids, bling pieces hammered down by
about his ego, and morale, and spec- social strata, and advanced modes political, economic, and aesthetic
ulate about his life events to unearth of transportation, the Modernist city forces. The life of Modernism goes
his so-called fascist, paranoid or is ideology expressed as a system of beyond ruin porn, and post-modern-
antisocial inclinations? universal strategies and methods. ist longing. Ideology is what makes
DO MODERNISTS DREAM OF THE MACHINE AGE?
If his urban plans allow Le Corbusier to let the Grid ‘hang out’, it is in his manifestoes, books, journals, lectures,
and more than forty publications created in over fifty years where he can outline a vision of the world where the
Acropolis, grain silos, automobiles, aircrafts, and steamboats share ideological space with Cartesian skyscrapers,
PART highways, and urban gardens. In a Cadavre Exquis of Modern(ist) concepts, Purism meets the Grid, meets the
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34
steamboat, meets the thermodynamic turbine to create an ideological creature of the Machine Age. If the first
Le Corbusiean dream, was a dream of purist forms and white architectures, the second dream is hardcore tech-
IMAGE nological and machinistic. If the first one wonders if Modernists dream of Purism? The second one questions if
PART I—IDEOLOGY 2/10 Modernists dream of the Machine Age?
Modernism outlive the announce-
ment of its own demise.
. twentieth century also displays the
When buildings collapse, ideology
carries on the values of Modernism
from generation to generation.
When a city becomes dysfunctional,
a replacement urban plan projects
the drive for efficiency and exponen-
tial growth by means of Cartesian
grids and hierarchical subdivisions
of classes. Ideology is at its strong-
est when the opposition struggles to
overcome it with completely alter-
native models of presentation and
production. Ideology is a system of
beliefs shaping and conditioning
a whole discipline into believing that
the only way to get rid of Modernism
and its ailments is to invent its ‘post’
antidote. Rather than a solid con-
crete block, ideology gives the
Modern Movement malleability and
flexibility to turn its doctrines into
books, layouts, speeches, paintings,
academic curriculums, architectural
strategies, and urban plans. Ideology
is the gas breathed once the solid
has melted into air. Once it has been
‘killed’ by post-modern historians
and aestheticists in search of im­
mediate glory, ideology allows
Modernism to resurrect in the forms
and methods of the projects of its
detractors. Ideology is the eternal
victory of Goliath coming back after
David prematurely celebrated his
victory.
. Surrealism is the architecture of fall-
Ideology persists both as material
infrastructure and immaterial super-
structure. Ideology is the perpetual
reincarnation of architecture in a
different plan, in an alternative
form of urbanism. Ideology is a
Brasilia sprouting from the jungle for
every Pruitt-Igoe imploded. Ideology
is a flood of Modernist publications
in bookshelves around the world for
every Post-Modernist manifesto
written. Ideology is the Modernist
genetic code evolving into Brutalist
and Metabolist projects for every
anti-Modernist attempt to demate-
rialize architecture into a historicist
pastiche. Ideology is more ‘simple’
and straightforward ‘heroic plans’
for every call for Complexity and
Contradiction.
. by which one proposes to express—
PART I—IDEOLOGY
As with its bellicose, technological,
and ecological developments, the
evolution of Modernist Architectural
ideology and the multiple failures to
secede from its symbolic, linguistic,
and stylistic characteristics. Just
like nuclear bombs, penicillin, and
indus­trial deforestation shaped
the world of war, medicine, and
development, Modernism (as the
Architectural critique of the perpetual
and destructive process inherent to
modernity) irreversibly transfor­med
architec­ture. In their unaccomplished
anti-oedipal desire, new forms of
architectural discourse and produc­
tion inadvertently reproduced power
and aesthetic relations, making the
ideas of Le Corbusier explicit even
(and specially) in the projects that
most fervently rejected his norma­
tive procedures and stylistic con­­-
straints. In a paradox of philosophical
propor­tions, wherever anti-Modern­
ist dogma rules, Modernist ideology
thrives. Modernist ideology is like
a dream that Architecture cannot
wake from.
. weight of industrial production,
. thermodynamic power and struc-
DREAMS
. .
Modernism and Surrealism are
entangled in a decades-long schism.
The story of Modernist ideology is
the dream of architecture falling in
love with the machine. The story of
ing in love with dreams. Modernism
is seduced by the poetry of ‘tedious’,
‘meticulous, passionless, impassive’
statistics. Le Corbusier, Urbanisme (1929),
published in English as The City of To-Morrow
and its Planning, tans. Frederich Etchells (New
York: Dover, 1987) 107. Surrealism
loathes
the ‘mediocrity, hate and dull conceit’
of the realistic attitude of positivism.
Andre Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’ (1924)
in Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans.
Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, (Ann Arbor:
The
The University of Michigan Press, 1969), 6.
Modernist architect-poet leaps ‘into
the future and unknown although
his feet remain planted on the solid
groundwork of figures, graphs, eter-
nal verities’. Le Corbusier, Urbanisme, 107.
The Surrealist artist delves into ‘psy-
chic automatism in its pure state,
verbally, by means of the written
word, or in any other manner—the
actual functioning of thought’. Breton,
‘Manifesto of Surrealism’, 27.
.
Sharing more than just the pipe at
the end of Vers une architecture,
both Modernists and Surrealists are
developing a greater plan to justify
their ideology. For the Surrealists,
Freud brings against empirical real-
ity ‘his critical fantasies to bear
upon the dream’. Breton, 'Manifesto of
Surrealism', 10. For Modernists, har-
mony is achieved ‘by the law of
Economy and governed by mathe-
matical calculation’. Le Corbusier, Vers
une architecture (1923) published in English as
Toward an Architecture, trans. John Goodman,
(Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2007), VII.
The Surrealist artist imagines the
aesthetics of dreams. The Modernist
architect dreams of Engineer’s
Aesthetics. In the landscapes of
the Surrealists, architecture floats
free from technological constraints,
human logic and Newtonian physics.
In the landscapes of the Modernists,
architecture is anchored by the
tural steel.
Full of potential, Modernism thrives
in the sheer dissatisfaction of the
present moment. For the Surrealists
‘the mind of the man who dreams is
fully satisfied by what happens
to him’; ‘the agonizing question of
possibility is no longer pertinent’.
Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’, 13.
Surrealism floats its buildings and
melts its clocks with the ‘psychic
automatism’ of the subconscious.
For the Modernists, ideology implies
the subconscious integration of
mathematical methods as a ‘purely
abstract point of view’ that allows
taste to follow a ‘sure, certain path’.
The work of the Surrealists fetish­izes
the content of dreams. The Modernist
dream is the fetish of automobiles
and aircrafts, of thermo-electric
turbines and steamships.
.
In the Surrealist plan literature,
painting, and film take the place
of the harsh post-War reality; ‘the
“colossal abortion” of the Hegelian
system’. Breton, ‘Second Manifesto of CARTESIAN GRID
In order to become one of the most influential figures of the Modern Movement™, Le Corbusier outlines a clear
plan to be accepted, followed, imitated, altered, consumed, reproduced, presented, and represented. On this quest,
PART and in order to fulfil his ideological dream, he develops three urban plans he presents to a generation of architects
I
36
with the task of transforming the world between wars. At first sight the plan displays a maze of gardens, arches,
skyscrapers and highways. A second look reveals the underlying genetic code of Le Corbusiean Modernism:
IMAGE an urbanism of Cartesian Grids, a concrete poem of Right Angles. The Cartesian Grid is the base of his plans.
3/10 The Cartesian Grid is the underlying principle of his three ideal cities.
 The Modernist
Surrealism’ (1930), 140.
plan proposes to master mass, sur-
faces, contour, and profile to use
architecture to avoid a revolution.
Surrealism performs dreamlike
stages at the scale of the mind.
Modernist ideology operates with
dreamlike efficiency at the scale of
the city. Under Surrealism art is not
a submission, but a conquest ‘of the
subconscious’. Axel Madsen, Malraux a
biography, (New York: Morrow, 1976). Under
Modernism the Engineer ‘produces
architecture’ with mathematical
precision.
. solving the
Surrealism dreams of ‘following no
set plan’. Modernism dreams of
solving the world’s problems with
plans, plans and more plans.
. lems with
.
PLANS
. scale of the building the plan turns
In the kingdom of Modernism the
plan reigns supreme.
.
A model of ideological organization,
the abstract character of the con-
ceptual plan turns the Modernist
architect into the ultimate planner—
of buildings, schemes, cities, life. For
Modernism the plan is the generator.
But the plan is not a drawing. The
plan is a strategy, a method to pro-
ject into the future. If the plan as a
drawing allows for the abstraction of
the multiplicity and improbability
of human activities on the surface
of the Earth, the plan as a strategy
reduces ideas and concepts under an
all-encompassing rubric: the rubric
of Modernism.
. .
Plans give form to ideology. Not
only does the plan call for the ‘most
severe discipline’, the plan challenges
the sensation of ‘shapelessness, of
poverty, of disorder, of willfulness’.
Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, 36. In
its Cartesian exactitude, the plan
determines ultimate execution; it is
‘what determines everything’, ‘it is
the decisive moment’ that leads to
expression, rhythm, mass, coherence
and to ‘infinite modulation’. Le Corbu­
sier, Toward an Architecture, 36-37. The plan
precedes abstraction and repetition.
The plan originates Modernist con-
trol over matter.
PART I—IDEOLOGY
Surrealism The abstract character of the plan
(key element of Modernist reduc-
dreams of
tionism) leads the revolution behind
a tool with paradoxical manifesta-
tions; on the one hand, the free plan
‘following aims to give precision at the archi-
tectural scale, while on the other, the
no set plan’. programmed plan aims to liberate at
the scale of the city. With its flexible
Modern­ism
objectives and rigorous characteris-
tics, the plan is the ultimate stealth
device of ideological Modernism. Not
dreams of only does the plan provide the max-
imum level of adaptability in a build-
ing (Maison-Dom-i-no), but it allows
the simultaneous programming of
world’s prob-
levels of intellectual and industrial
production as an urban condition.
With the Cartesian grid as plan,
architecture becomes a field of open
possibilities, and the city a closed
plans, plans system for dwelling, working, trans-
portation, and recreation. If at the
and more
Modern Architecture into a machine
for living, at the urban scale the plan
plans. turns Modern Urbanism into a
machine for production, distribution,
. and consumption.
.
.
Because it has no predetermined
form, the Plan as an ideological
.
device appears as drawing, building,
diagram, scheme, and city. The plan
as ideology is what is left after the
. city has been scrapped out of green
foliage, after the skyscrapers and
.
housing blocks have been reduced to
an urban diagram of uses and demo-
.
graphic statistics; after the highways
and overpasses have been reduced
to vectors and coordinates. Ideology
is what allows the plan to assume the
form of new cities, new places, new
.
buildings, new diagrams, new books,
new congresses, and new presenta-
.
tion devices.
.
Between 1922 and 1929 Le Corbusier
. develops ideological plans in the form
of cities, providing his followers with
. the blueprint of the Modernist city
and his detractors with the formal
.
substance of their critique. The first
plan introduces ideology as a grid.
The second one presents ideology
. as a superimposed collage. The third
plan establishes ideology as a model
CONTEMPORARY CITY
. of universal modernization.
. Ideology has the most potential when it shows itself purely benevolent, without displaying a threat. Modernist
Ideology is the most appealing when it can draw abstract plans to be consumed, internalized, and repeated
without the looming menace of erasure, without the violence inherent in Tabula Rasa.
Le Corbusier creates a Contemporary City for Three Million Inhabitants as a Cartesian Grid without a city.
PART With ‘Twenty-four skyscrapers containing between 10,000 and 50,000 employees each’, city dwellings with
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38
more than half a million inhabitants quartered in ‘indented’ or ‘close’ subdivisions, and more than 2,000,000
inhabitants in the Garden Cities at the periphery, Le Corbusier devises an Urban plan as ultimate potential.
IMAGE Total ideological supply awaiting Modernist demand. The only thing that the Modernist Contemporary City
4/10 needs is Three Million Inhabitants. The only thing three million inhabitants need is the Contemporary City.
PLAN I:
GRID
. wealth accumulation. A modernist
In 1922 Le Corbusier presents the
first of his ‘ideal’ cities.
. A large-scale greenhouse for the
The Ville contemporaine de trois
millions d’habitants (Contemporary
City of Three Million Inhabitants) is
a proto­type. Its plan is an urban
layout of cruciform skyscrapers,
housing slabs, and a carpet of parks
intersected by juxtaposed grids of
car infrastructure. The study intro-
duces with a form of technical sur-
realism, the ‘miraculous world of
imminent certainty’; an urban organ-
ization so rational that no technical
argument could combat it; ‘so differ-
ent from what exists that the mind
can hardly imagine it’. Le Corbusier and
Pierre Jeanneret, Oeuvre complète Volume
1: 1910-1929, ed. Willy Boesiger and Oscar
Stonorov (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1990).
. potential. A city that is nowhere, can
The Contemporary City operates in
a form of surreal balance. A diagram
of Modernist efficiency, it intro-
duces an idealistically harmonious
mixture of architecture and land-
scape; of buildings and infrastruc-
ture; of working class and the elite.
Siteless, the city is a maze of low-
rise, high-density blocks, a pattern
of square angles, a rectangular
layout of skyscrapers. The periphery
is sparse, green, evenly distributed.
In it, monolithic blocks house the
working class. These ‘Garden Cities’
host the majority of the population
(two million and counting). Close
divisions of the city dwellings house
more than half a million. At the city
centre, twenty skyscrapers welcome
between ten to fifty thousand
employees. The towers are vertical,
iconic. Flowers in the middle of the
Garden. At their base, a massive
plinth anchors the towers with luxury
shops, office space for white collar
workers, leaders, and bureaucrats.
. together.
Full of abstract potential, the plan
with its decongested city centre,
enlarged means of circulation,
expanded landscape areas and clear
division of social classes, is an ide-
alized form of ideological urbanism:
the city as a mat of parks and gar-
dens evenly covering a classist field
PART I—IDEOLOGY
of Cartesian reticulation, gridded The grid not only organizes but
plots of urban subdivisions, and divides.
.
plan as social structure. The grid turns the ground plane
. simultaneously into a continuous
network and into subdivided,
growth of speculative ideology, the semi-autonomous lots.
city introduces the archetype of the .
Modernist City as a sample ready for Each street on the grid is a potential
transplantation. The Contemporary ideological wall.
City of Three Million inhabitants is an .
invasive species raised in isolation. The grid breaks a potential continent
The old city of congested, crowded into the fractured islands of a
streets and lack of hierarchical Modernist archipelago.
order is the top soil where Modern .
Architecture ‘should flourish’. .
. PLAN II:
. COLLAGE
SPECULATION .
. In 1925 Le Corbusier presents his
The Contemporary City renders second urban plan.
Modernist ideology as a form of .
urban expectation. Its lack of spec- If his first scheme is an urban sug-
ificity fills the city with speculative gestion on an abstract site, his
second project intervenes on the
be anywhere. city with surgical precision. Where
. the Contemporary City is imagined
The Contemporary City is a theoreti- devoid of the tension of any form of
cal plan but: urban confrontation, with the Plan
. Voisin Le Corbusier operates on the
Three million people could poten- city by removing ‘damaged’ urban
tially live in the Contemporary City. organs. If the City of Three Million
. Inhabitants is conceived as urban-
Three million is the population of ism of new origins, the Plan Voisin
Paris in 1922, the year Le Corbusier’s presents urbanism of substitution,
city was presented to the public. replacement, and superimposition.
. .
Three million could also be the popu- While the Contemporary City and
lation of New York or Buenos Aires. the Plan Voisin are two plans of the
Is the Contemporary City about an same Modernist ideology, each pres-
intangible future or the cities of the entation strategy brings a different
time? set of conceptual references. On one
. side, the city floats on the imaginary
Is the Contemporary City universally greenery of nowhere. On the other,
abstract or hyper specific? the Plan Voisin (named after the air-
. plane manufacturer) comes crashing
. down in Paris. In the Contemporary
CONTRADICTION 1 City, the plan drawing creates the
. perfect tabula rasa condition for the
Ideology is the invisible glue that speculation of a new urban situation.
holds incompatible contradictions The Plan Voisin implants with its col-
lage a surrealist method to obtain
. the ‘desired suddenness from certain
The grid in the Contemporary City associations’. Breton, ‘Manifesto of
connects and creates forms of Surrealism’, 41. If in the Contemporary
mobile continuity. City the plan provides the overall
. concept for speculative land occu-
The grid also acts as the separation pation, in the Plan Voisin, the collage
of building types and social classes. announces a new type of Surrealist
. takeover.
PLAN VOISIN
Three years after looking for a potential site, Le Corbusier ‘inserts’ the Cartesian Grid of the Contemporary City
at the centre of Paris. The Plan Voisin overlooks the Eiffel Tower with 200-meter-high cruciform skyscrapers with
roof-gardens ‘planted with spindleberries, thuyas, laurels and ivy’, and ‘with beds of tulips or geraniums and the
PART herbaceous borders of bright-eyed flowers that wind along their stone-flagged paths’. 1 At the centre of the city,
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40
air taxis and airplanes carry ‘our hearts above mediocre things. The airplane has given us the bird’s-eye view.
When the eyes see clearly, the mind makes a clear decision’. The Plan proposes the removal of the damaged parts
IMAGE of the city because: The city is ruthless to man. / Cities are old, decayed, frightening, diseased. / They are finished. /
5/10 Pre-machine civilization is finished. 2
Originally rendered as a genesis of Plan Voisin tests its site-specific lation ‘so enormous that the hurried
bucolic landscapes and spaced out application, the Radiant City un­- observer cannot measure its reality’.
buildings within the park, in its leashes Modernist urbanism passing Le Corbusier and Jeanneret, Oeuvre complète
second iteration the ideal Modernist universal hesitation as a global Volume 3: 1934-1938. With the Radiant
city obliterates the old city fabric. transformation. If the Contemporary City Le Corbusier invents a model
While the Contemporary City intro- City is the ideological blueprint, and of a potentially endless, repeatable
duces urbanism as plan, the Plan the Plan Voisin develops an ideo­lo­ floating city.
Voisin develops the strategy as gical operation, the Radiant City .
action. The Contemporary City displays ideology in its unleashed, Modernist ideology is effective as
announces a premonition of Mod­ total ambition. long as it can project its capacity
ernist Urbanism. The Plan Voisin . for global domination; as long as it
marks its official arrival. Just like the If the Modernism of Mies is in the can provide a universal answer to
Contemporary City turns a Cartesian god of details, and the one of Loos a world-wide question. If the cities
grid into a plan for class division, the can be found in his crime against around the world suffer from the
Plan Voisin implements a collage as ornament, Le Corbusier’s can be same symptoms, the Radiant City
a strategy of urban occupation. found in the plans of the Contem­ is Modernist ideology’s unitary anti-
. porary City for Three Million Inhab­ dote. Not only is the Radiant City
. itants, in the collage of the Plan anti-Paris, the Radiant City is anti-
CONTRADICTION 2 Voisin and in the diagrams of the Buenos Aires and anti-Manhattan.
. Radiant City. A scale to measure its If the Contemporary City avoids the
The paradox of Modernist ideology ambition, the VR-8 diagram ‘shows confrontation and the Plan Voisin
consists on its desire to promote the astonishing contrast between reaches a form of urban compromise
Universalist forms of urbanism while the newly-acquired spaces in the (how else to explain the remaining
searching for site specific opportuni- residential quarters of VR (Ville parts of Paris?), the Radiant City is
ties to anchor its projects. Radieuse or Radiant City) and the the ultimate form of Modernist ideol-
. atrocious narrowness of our pres- ogy; urbanism as universal Cartesian
For every plan as abstract specula- ent cities (here Paris, New York, tabula rasa.
tion, Modernism looks for specific Buenos Aires)’. Le Corbusier and Pierre .
locations to project its intentions. Jeanneret, Oeuvre complète Volume 3: 1934- .
But, does specificity contradict 1938. TheRadiant City is equal times DREAMS 2
Universality? Contemporary City and Plan Voisin, .
. abstract and specific—it performs The Radiant City is Le Corbusier’s
Can a generic plan and contextual two simultaneous operations, exe- dream to solve the urban nightmares
scheme merge to develop and diffuse cuting universal, indifferent, pre- of the ‘old, decayed, frightening,
the same Modernist ideology? scribed architectural forms, with diseased’ city, because ‘pre-machine
. site-specific, urban conditions. civilization is finished’, and because
Are these urban contradictions really . cities are ‘ruthless to man’. Le Cor­
contradictory? The strategy of laying out a com- busier, Avions (1935), translated as Aircraft
. pletely new city on an ideal land- His
(London: Trefoil Publications, 1987), 78.
. scape (Contemporary City) or plan for the city is a culmination of
PLAN III: replacing a segment of the old Paris a decade of searching for Modernist
UNIVERSAL (Plan Voisin) with a new plan, found strategies to carry on its ideology
MODERNIZATION its apotheosis with the invention of a around the world in urban form.
. city with buildings resting ‘on ground The Radiant City marks the peak of
In 1930 Le Corbusier is working on floor columns’, ‘putting 100% of the Modernist urban ambition. Urbanism
his third urban plan. ground area at the disposition of has no longer to adapt to the condi-
. pedestrians’, and proposing a ‘defi- tions of the old city, but it will erad-
If his first city was nowhere, and his nite separation of automobile from icate any evidence of the past. The
second one was somewhere (Paris), pedestrian’. Le Corbusier and Jeanneret, new urban grid of the Radiant City
his third city is his Masterplan for Oeuvre complète Volume 3: 1934-1938. No obliterates the old irregular footprint
everywhere. longer does the Modernist city need of the city—New York, Buenos Aires,
. an immaculate tabula rasa, nor to Paris.
Disguised as a city, the Ville Radieuse coexist with the old European city, .
(Radiant City) plots the ideological but around the world a mat of build- The dream of Modernism is the
‘conquest’ of multiple cities at the ings floats above the debris of the dream of abstraction and repetition;
same time. past. The Radiant City consummates the dream of a formulaic city of
. the plan and the collage devised in romantic architectural views taking
While the Contemporary City for the first two iterations of Modernist over the world; a hygienic dream for
Three Million Inhabitants is presen­ urbanism with the third and ultimate a city cleansed from the debris of
ted as the urban prototype, and the step: a diagram of an urban instal- the past. As a dream, the Radiant

RADIANT CITY
PART In his third plan, Le Corbusier corrals inside his ideal city the failed, chaotic, congested Urbanism of New York.
I

42
His ideological Grid is this time presented as an alternative to New York. New York is not Modern(ist) enough.
The skyscrapers of New York are too small and there are too many of them. They are proof of the new dimensions and
IMAGE the new tools; the proof also that henceforth everything can be carried out on a new general plan, a symphonic plan-
PART I—IDEOLOGY 6/10 extent and height. 3 New York’s skyscrapers are ‘out of line’ with the rational, Cartesian skyscrapers.
City is a repeatable urban model
of parks and architecture for ‘mil-
lions who wish once again to walk
with their feet in the green grass
of nature; who wish to see the sky,
clouds against blue; who wish to
live with trees, immemorial com-
panions. Millions!’ Le Corbusier, Quand
les cathédrales étaient blanches (1947) trans-
lated as When the Cathedrals were White, trans.
Francis E. Hyslop, JR., (New York: McGraw-
A dream where millions
Hill, 1964), 173.
have been ‘grouped together facing
a shattered dream’, as ‘nature melts
away under their feet; it is covered
by houses, roads, stations and gro-
cery stores’. Le Corbusier, When the
Cathedrals were White, 173. The Radiant
City is flexible enough to expand ad
infinitum. Ambitious enough to con-
quer the planet. Dogmatic enough
to be replicable.
.
Like in a Freudian tripartite—another
Surrealist hint—the Radiant City
(Superego) completes the ideological
aspirations initiated by the Plan
Voisin (Ego) and the Contemporary
City of Three Million Inhabitants
(Id). In its unconscious desire, the
Radiant City is ‘neither European nor
American. It is human and universal.
It represents an urgent task’. It is a
plan to ‘replace the brutality of the
present, the misery and stupidity’,
by what Le Corbusier has called
‘the essential joys’. Le Corbusier, When
the Cathedrals were White, 34. ‘Dream!
Freud!’ Le Corbusier, When the Cathedrals
were White, 147.
. his ideals. Through these publica-
If the Villa Savoye represents a
model for the five points of archi­
tecture with its free plan, pilotis,
garden roof, horizontal window, and
the free composition of the façade,
the Radiant City is the ideal catalog
of (almost all) the modernist design
elements at the urban scale. The
Radiant City is the city within the
park (a colossal garden roof); the
free plan of the city enhanced by the
restrictively liberating grid; the free
façade of the Cartesian skyscraper;
the whole city suspended over
pilotis.
.
If the five points are the plants of
Architecture that grow in the great,
green garden of the Radiant City,
PART I—IDEOLOGY
mass media is the forced pollination
that allows Modernism to conquer Over forty
publications
other gardens.
.
.
MEDIA
. developed in
The history of Modernist ideology is
the history of architectural publishing.
.
over fifty
years make
While cities and architecture display
Modernist characteristics through
Le Corbusier
form and space; publications are the
media that enforce the consolidation
and diffusion, the production and
consumption of ideology.
.
the avatar of
Modernist
Throughout the twentieth century,
magazines, paper manifestoes,
books and journals are the only mass
media in which text, analysis, and
media.
statistics can share spreads with
fetishistic icons of the machine age, .
.
where architecture can share paper
space with masterpieces of classical
and contemporary art. They provide
a platform where Architecture and
Urbanism can develop a conceptual
.
and aesthetic relationship with cars
and airplanes, bags and turbines, .
.
dams and grain silos, sculptures and
paintings.
.
.
Over forty publications developed
in over fifty years make Le Corbusier
the avatar of Modernist media.
Over forty publications allow Le .
.
Corbusier to frame and shift his
intentions, declare war on his oppo-
.
nents, refocus his aim, and restate
tions he constructs positions on art
and architecture, on technology and
aesthetics, on society and culture. .
.
These publications provide a platform
to announce the future of urbanism
.
and denounce the failures of the
cities of the past. They allow to fan-
tasize about Modern Architecture
and ridicule premodern styles. They
give him the opportunity to align .
with functional arts and distance
himself from decorative arts. These .
.
books and pamphlets and manifes-
toes empower him to prophesize
about new lifestyles while disqualify-
ing antiquated ways of living. Aware
of the intrinsic relationship between .
media and technology, Le Corbusier
creates a publication for every ideo- . MODERNIST PROVOCATION NO. 1:
THE FLOATING MEGASTRUCTURE
Le Corbusier not only dreams of Purism, and Modernism, he also dreams of Floating Megastructures that haven’t
PART yet left the ground. Once inverted, the Contemporary City for Three Million Inhabitants becomes the Floating
I
44
Contemporary City for Three Million Inhabitants. The Cartesian skyscrapers—long thought to be pillars at the
centre of the city—are instead colossal pilotis supporting the ideal urban cloud above the untouched ground of
IMAGE the historical city or the empty countryside landscape. The mat of buildings and urban gardens is inverted into an
7/10 extended network for the free circulation of people, high above the debris of history, and the need for a tabula rasa.
logical construction, for every iter-
ation of Modernism, for every new
ambition. In order to create and
maintain an audience, Le Corbusier
constructs through publication after
publication a hegemonic discourse
of Modernism. During half a century
Le Corbusier prolifically publishes
the forms and aspirations, ambitions,
challenges, and platforms of Mod­
ernism. Le Corbusier is the master
of books, and books tell the story of
Modernism.
. and La Peinture Moderne. While L’Art
Because there is no ideological
battle­ground Le Corbusier won’t
confront, he uses books to engage
with fighting fronts where he can
anchor Modernist flags of ideological
conquest. Every book is a declaration
of intent. Every book is confrontation
with a fleeting moment of the past.
. Peinture Moderne are Modernist
In 1912 Le Corbusier publishes his
first book. A study on the decorative
arts in Germany, Etude sur le move-
ment d’art decoratif en Allemagne
provides with a combination of
aesthetic, and social critique the
blueprint of publications as the for-
mulation of Modernist ideology.
. Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, he ‘invents’
Six years later, Le Corbusier pub-
lishes Après le Cubisme (After
Cubism) to join Kazimir Malevich,
Marcel Duchamp, Theo Van Does­
burg and Piet Mondrian in getting rid
of the ballast of representation. The
publication sets the framework for
a new aesthetic of composition freed
from the decorative characteristics
of Cubism. Après le Cubisme is ideol-
ogy as plastic doctrine.
. banisme is Modernist ideology as
In 1923, with the publication of
Urbanisme, Le Corbusier shifts the
attention to his urban ambitions,
states the problem of the city and
presents his speculative plans as
certain and absolute solutions.
Urbanisme introduces the Con­
temporary City for Three Million
Inhabitants. Urbanism is Modernist
ideology as theoretical framework
for urban design.
. .
Two years later with the Almanach
d’architecture moderne, Le Corbu­
sier outlines with the pilotis, the
garden roof, the horizontal fenestra-
PART I—IDEOLOGY
tion, the free plan, and the free com-
position of the façade the stylistic
interpretation of an era of techno­
logical and aesthetic advancements
in architecture. With the five points
Le Corbusier creates the instruction
manual to assemble Modern Archi­
tecture. The Almanach d’architec-
ture moderne is Modernist ideology
as architectural ‘kit of parts’.
. age, is Modernist ideology as the
That same year, Le Corbusier pub-
lishes L’Art decorative d’aujourd’hui
decorative d’aujourd’hui opposes
conventional decorative arts on a
manifesto for an art of utility, La
Peinture Moderne declares the con-
dition of Modern painting to be less
interested in the imitation of nature
than on its own plastic value. L’Art
decorative d’aujourd’hui and La
ideology as positions of Modern Art.
. a series of incriminating observa-
In 1930 Le Corbusier presents his
series of lectures and observation
on South America in Précisions sur
un état présent de l’architecture et
de l’urbanisme. In his projections
for Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Sao
the ‘continuous monument’ of
Mod­ernism (later explored in the
Plan Obus of 1933) with a highway
with the ‘big architectural beltline
carrying it’. Le Corbusier, Précisions sur un
état présent de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme
(1930), translated into Precisions on the Present
State of Architecture and City Planning, trans.
Edith Schreiber Aujame, (Cambridge: MIT
Précisions sur un état
Press, 1991).
présent de l’architecture et de l’ur-
South American expansion.
. ture, and art, and delves into the
In 1933 with Croisade ou le crépus-
cule des academies (Crusade or
the Twilight of the Academies), Le
Corbusier goes after countries under
the orthodox siege of conventional
architectural institutions. Croisade
ou le crépuscule des academies is
Modernist ideology as academic
reform.
In 1935 Le Corbusier publishes
Avions (Aircraft) and the Ville
Radieuse (Radiant City). Aircraft
reveals with the technological luxury
of the bird’s eye view the ‘frightening
and overwhelming’ spectacle of the
chaos of the contemporary city. Le
Corbusier, Aircraft, 5. The Ville Radieuse
presents the solution to this chaos by
way of an omnipresent grid always
clearer when surveilled from ‘high
enough, up there in the sky’. Le Corbu­
sier, Aircraft, 6. In an indictment of the
city, the Aircraft, symbol of the new
aerial view of the problem. The Ville
Radieuse is Modernist ideology as
urban projection for the aerial enjoy-
ment of the solution.
.
In 1937, upon his return from offer-
ing a series of conferences in New
York, Le Corbusier publishes Quand
les cathédrales étaient blanches a
journey to the land of timid people
where ‘skyscrapers are greater
than the architects’. Le Corbusier, When
the Cathedrals were White, 218 . Offering
tions on the chaotic and unsuccess-
ful planning of New York—‘a kind
of snorting monster, bursting with
health, sprawled out at ease’—the
publication justifies the prescription
of the Radiant City as an antidote to
all the ailments of Manhattan. Quand
les cathédrales étaient blanches
is Modernist ideology against the
chaos of New York. Le Corbusier,
Aircraft, 111.
.
Because ideology is not only about
content but about the form and
method of delivery, Le Corbusier
publishes thirty books in the next
thirty years with machine-like effi-
ciency. Through the following three
decades, his publishing repertoire
reaches beyond the city, architec-
realm of the poetry of right angles
(Le poème de l’angle droit, 1955), the
rules of anthropometric reconcep-
tualization (Le Modulor I and II) and
the documentation of new horizons
to be conquered by Modernism (Le
Voyage d’Orient). His books allow for
Modernist ideology to shape not only
cities and buildings, but the bodies
that inhabit them and the experien­
ces taking place in them. The history
of Modernist ideology is inseparable
from the history of books. MODERNIST PROVOCATION NO. 2:
. THE CONTINUOUS EARTHSCRAPER
Modernism is impregnated with the strategies of its successors. Ideology reaches its potential when it can be
repeated, reappropriated, represented. On his Brazilian corollary, Le Corbusier devises the potential—fully
PART functional(ist)—Continuous Monument. With his Continuous Earthscraper, Le Corbusier presents
I
46
Modernist Ideology as a Kynical prologue.
‘At Rio de Janeiro the operation connects the different bays of the city without disturbing that which constitutes
IMAGE the present condition of the city’. ‘To overcome the curves of the hilly plateau of Sao Paulo, one can build
8/10 horizontal expressways carried on ‘earthscrapers’. 4
Because Books are a fundamental instrument
of Modernist Ideology.
.
Modernism in the state apparatus, in
the commissions of the government.
.
ideo­logy is .
CIAM
In 1933, the CIAM conceives the
Charte d’Athènes (Athens Charter),
not only about .
In 1928 Le Corbusier cofounds the
a universal remedy for the symp-
toms of the old city. The Athens

content but Congrès internationaux d’archi-

tecture moderne (International
Charter provides an analytical lens
to look at the urban chaos from

about the form

Congresses of Modern Architecture the ‘immense disturbances’ pro-
or CIAM). duced by the ‘advent of the machin-
. ist era’. ‘Programme du 7éme Congrès CIAM’,
and method Capping a decade of Modernist
urbanism, the CIAM is the ideal plat-
The Athens Charter in Practice (Bologna, 1948)
cited in Pedret, ‘Dismantling the CIAM Grid:

of delivery, form to legitimize the concepts

behind the design of his cities.
.
New Values for Modern Architecture’, 253.
Like the Contemporary City, the

Le Corbusier
In a span of thirty-one years a roster
of serious gravitas including Sigfrid
publishes Gideon, Josep Lluis Sert, Walter
Gropius, Hannes Meyer, Ernst May,
Plan Voisin and the Radiant City, the
Athens Charter proposes a new form
of city because ‘most of the cities
studied present an image of chaos’,
and because ‘they do not correspond

thirty books in Max Cetto, Lazlo Moholy Nagy,

Hugo Harring and Gerrit Rietveld
in any way to their ultimate purpose’
of satisfying ‘the basic biological and

the next thirty

gives a collective voice to the singul­
arities within the Modern Movement.
The CIAM becomes a global referent
years with of Modernism. A legitimate platform
to diffuse a unified Modernist ide-
physiological needs of their inhabit-
ants’. The Athens Charter outlines a
plan for an urbanism divided into four
functions: dwelling, recreation, work
and transportation.

machine-like ology. The CIAM was an ideological

who’s who of Modern Architecture.
.
If the Athens Charter is the plan in

efficiency.
. the form of a written manifesto, the
Born between world wars, the CIAM CIAM Grille is the plan as diagram-

.
is a utopian enterprise. Its mission to matic materialization; as frame and
change the city on a global scale can graphic speculation. A ‘modern tool
only by achieved through complete for planning: a tool for analysis, of

. organization, political influence, and

peaceful collaboration, especially in
synthesis, of presentation and of
reading of a theme’, the Grille rein-

.
a time of potential cataclysmic con- troduces the grid not only as an
flicts and bellicose destruction. The instrument to outline the form of

.
CIAM is an open manifesto that blurs the city, but as guideline to shape
the boundaries between architecture the way to look at the city. Just like
and urbanism, ‘the disposition of dif- the grid is a fundamental part of the

. ferent premises and places to shelter

the development of material, senti-
design of the Modernist City, the
Grille is a fundamental element to

.
mental, and spiritual life in all of its analyse the ailments of the old city.
individual and collective manifesta- .

.
tions’. Congress Internationaux d’Architecture The CIAM Grille is an ideological
moderne (CIAM), ‘La Charte d’Athenes or The tool of presentation that each group
in the Congress must do well ‘to

.
Athens Charter’, 1933, trans. J.Tyrwhitt, Paris,
France: The Library of the Graduate School of accept, in a spirit of friendly and
It declares
Design, Harvard University, 1946. necessary discipline, the role that

. dwelling, working, and recreation

as the three primary functions of
is assigned to it, and not request
its modification, except in a case

.
urbanism, and the ‘occupation of the of absolute necessity’. ‘Programme du
ground, the organization of traffic 7éme Congrès CIAM’, 253. If the Radiant
and legislation’ as its main concerns. City depicts the grid from bird’s-eye

. In its political agenda, the CIAM calls

for the influence of the Modernist
view, the Grille organizes with the
grid from the planner’s perspective.

. Architect in the formulation of public

opinion; and the infiltration of
The CIAM Grille is a universal tool
of analysis for a universal form of
CIAM GRILLE
Ideology works best when it can be consumed and represented (when it can be presented time and time again)
PART by the collective. After all, what’s an ideology if only prophesized and believed in by one? In the same way that
I

48
books and other publications aided the construction of and ideology of Modernism, the CIAM gave (in the form
of a collective, international approval) the ideal gravitas to the conceptual and strategic principles pursued by
IMAGE Le Corbusier. The CIAM Grille is the quintessential tool of Modernist Ideology: adopted by the collective, with
PART I—IDEOLOGY 9/10 a Cartesian Grid, with four points of emphasis, abstract and repeatable.
urbanism, the Grille to ideologically
constrain the designers of the Grid.
.
.
ICON(OCLAST)
.
Too late to be its inventor, Le
Corbusier settled for creating one
of the strongest brands of the
Modern Movement™. His repertoire
of strategies and treatises from the
Aesthetics of the Engineer, to Purism,
the Five Points, the Athens Charter,
the CIAM Grille, the Contemporary
City for Three Million Inhabitants,
Plan Voisin, Radiant City, his odes
to the car and the airplane, and the
poetics of Béton brut and ineffable
space are essential parts of his all-
encompassing Gospel of Modernism.
.
While declaring that ‘styles’ are lies
that architecture ‘has nothing to
do with’, Le Corbusier creates an
ideological superstructure for
Modernism supported by a stylistic
straightjacket of Cartesian Grids,
cruciform skyscrapers and infra-
structural monuments to fast mobil-
ity. Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, op.
cit. (note 6), 15, 67. Behind decades of
self-promotion, piling mountains
of publications, paintings, furniture,
buildings, and master-plans, and
even the CIAM as a platform to pro-
ject his intentions, Le Corbusier
became a Modernist hero, an avatar
of the Modern Movement, a loved
and hated icon of Modernism.
.
But, how to survive as an icon in an
era of iconoclasm? How to make an
argument in defense of the CIAM
as it is subjected to attacks by the
opposition? How to defend the
Modernist city after it ‘failed’ to
save the world?
.
The paradox of Modernism following
the Second World War lies in the
dialectical relationship between
Le Corbusier and his detractors.
.
In order to remain an icon, Le
Corbusier needs an opposition.
. THE KYNIC BITES
To rebel against Modernism, the Once Le Corbusier consolidates his Ideology as the hegemonic discourse of Modern Architecture™, his figure,
opposition needs Le Corbusier. ideas, concepts, strategies, speculations, and positions pose as targets for the opposition without suffering any
. meaningful setback, without losing any hegemonic space. If Le Corbusier claims that ‘Style is a lie’, its detractors
reclaim new styles without really challenging the legacy of his forms. If for Le Corbusier ‘Man walks in a straight
line…’ while the ‘pack-donkey meanders along’ zigzagging in ‘order to avoid larger stones’, the challengers of
Modernist ideology feel accomplished by proposing cities as Zig Zags avoiding straight lines. If for Le Corbusier
Modernism is a clearly defined Ideology of Cartesian Grids, and the balance of work, dwelling, recreation, and
PART leisure, for a generation of architects, urbanists, artists, and thinkers upset with his legacy the future of the city
I

50
consists of diagrams of planned informality, of playful layouts, of the abolishment of work, and the expansion of
recreation and leisure. A generation of Cynics plans to rework on the blueprints already outlined by Le Corbusier.
IMAGE On the periphery of the ideological territory, a Diogenesian Kynic surrounded by dogs awaits, knowing that in
PART I—IDEOLOGY 10/10 order to challenge Modernism, its critique has to bite.
. .
. .
PART .
II .
. .
. CYN
. I
. CISM
. .
. . 53
. The avant-garde has . pyramid of which
. decided: the mother . Rio was the summit,
. must die so that the . and this summit was
. child may live! . crowned with fire-
. . . works. How powerful,
. The Avant-Garde is Undesirable! . beautiful, and stirring
The avant-garde of (Tract of the Situationist
International)
. is my pyramid of
today, the one that . . American trophies!
does not repeat the . . This voyage became
fashionable mystifi­ . My head is still full of a mission.
cations, is socially . America and till this .
repressed [that is, . morning (I embarked Le Corbusier,
put down]. The move- . yesterday) there was American Prologue
ment that is desired . no European infiltra- .
by society is the one . tion in that powerful .
it can buy: the pseu- . mass of American .
do-avant-garde. The house is like a sensations and sights .
European culture is machine? No! The that, because of my .
a sick, pregnant, old mechanical is ugly. itinerary and the pas- .
hag who is going to The rule is the worst sage of the seasons .
die. Should we try to thing. You just want (first the Argentine .
save the mother or to break it. spring and then the .
the child? Some . tropical summer of .
would try to rescue Oscar Niemeyer Rio), succeeded, .
the mother, even if it . staged, were super- .
meant killing the child. . imposed, as in a .

PART II—CYNICISM 54 NARRATIVE ARCHITECTURE 55

APRÈS-GARDE However linear its history seems The après-garde is cynicism after
. to be narrated—all Modernisms ideology.
. are equal but some Modernisms .
. are more equal than others—the .
. avant-garde is undeniably full of its CYNICISM
. own contradictions, mishaps, and .
. missteps. In order to exist, the Cynicism occupies the space
. avant-garde relies on its incongruous vacated by the initial avant-garde.
. condition of being both fundamen- .
. tally ‘with’ time while also being If the avant-garde gives form to the
. ‘ahead’ of its time. A conceptual ideology (in the form of Architectons,
. palimpsest overwriting its past with floating cities and Cartesian sky-
. a ‘new’ history, the avant-garde can scrapers), Cynicism is all that is left
. only survive by maintaining the after the ideology has been absorbed
. fragile balance between present and accepted, after the form has
. problems and possible future been reappropiated and the formula
. solutions. has been incorporated. Cynicism
. . tries to contest dogmatic doctrines
. All about contextualizing the perfect by repeating (sometimes inadvert­
. timing to render its ambitions, what ently) its strategies and ideas.
. happens when the avant-garde goes Cynicism is all that is left after
. out of sync? When its solutions are Modernism has been twisted, turned
. overlooked for being too premature, upside down, collaged, and mon-
. or ridiculed for being delayed? What taged. Cynicism is what remains
. happens when ideology and form are after its cities have been reorgan-
. transferred and exchanged one for ized, and reformulated, after its
. the other? How to call the return of principles have been reinterpreted
. the avant-garde after its original and its tales retold.
. ‘failure’? If the avant-garde is the .
. sacrificial icon that leads a failed Cynicism is heroic utopianism chal-
. revolution, will an après-garde better lenged by other forms of heroic uto-
. explain the reincarnation of its ideas pianism. Always trying to make the
. in a similarly utopian body? world a better place, albeit with
. . failed approaches, the cynic oper-
. In the twentieth century, the avant- ates behind Sloterdijkean masks of
. garde is the victim of two untimely ‘enlightened false consciousness’.
. appearances. In the first one, its pro- Peter Sloterdijk, Kritik der zynischen
. posals arrive too early, the world is vernunft (1983) translated into Critique
. taken aback by its brazen ambitions, of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred,
. by the audacity of its delirium, by the (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
. heroism of its plans. Cubo-futurists, 1987), 5. Cynicism proposes a grand
. Rayonnists, Suprematists, and Con­ plan where other grand plans
. structivists assemble with radical haven’t succeeded with the same
. ideology Black Squares, Projects for grand plan disguised as an alterna-
If the history of Architecture during the Affirmation of the New, spiraling tive. Cynicism devises other forms
the first half of the twentieth cen­tury towers, and Cloud Hooks, all crushed of universal modernization where
is the history of the avant-garde, under the weight of iron fists and Modernism couldn’t reach. Cynicism
what follows it is a tale of succession, neoclassical kitsch. The multiple aspires for Global automation, new
replacement, overwriting, palimp- faces of Modernism echo the tale forms of grids, parallel types of opti-
sests. Too invested in the search for of its Architecture: a heroic symbol mistic architecture, alternate ver-
radical changes and political up­­hea­ target of collective attacks. sions of ideal cities, and other forms
vals, the avant-garde is the sacrificial . of ideological colonization. Cynicism
collective risking it all in search for In its second coming, the avant-garde expects a different result through
new beginnings. Its tales of Victories is too late. Its forms, strategies, the same method.
Over the Sun, Universal Moderni­za­ plans, ambitions are on a futile mis- .
tion Plans, Radiant Cities, cars and sion of trying to invent a programme .
planes, paintings and Mas­ter­­plans, that already exists. The après-garde DIALECTICS
Skyscrapers and Bridges are only wants to imagine a new beginning of .
part of the story of its utopians, the new beginning. The après-garde Ideology is what results after the
idealists and visionaries. is the avant-garde as afterthought. ‘ontological inflation of dialectics’ CIAM IS DEAD!
In a Zarathustran revelation, Team 10 announces the death of the CIAM (Otterlo 1959). At the very same moment,
Modernism’s ideological foundation serves to anchor the analytical instruments and Megastructural projects of its
PART cynics. The ideological landscape of the late 1950s is filled with distortions, twists, and representations of the tools
II

56
and strategies initially presented by Le Corbusier since the 1920s. The pilotis, the city of productivity, the Grille, all
providing (super)structural support for the après-garde. Could it be possible?! The après-garde with its city in the
IMAGE air, with its Brutalist Architecture, with its (dis)belief in planning, with its Utopia of the present has not yet heard
PART II—CYNICISM 1/10 of it, the CIAM is dead!
as the ‘greatest system-construct
reaches a point from which a back-
lash becomes unavoidable’. Sloterdijk,
Critique of Cynical Reason, 370 In the world
of dialectics, ideology contains the
critique of itself. In its dialectical
nature and with a plethora of media
devices at its disposal, the avant-
garde has always been impregnated
with the après-garde.
. device.
The avant-garde died with the bomb.
The après-garde was born out of its
ashes. The illusion of a world starting
anew, the Dadaesque obliteration of
the world as it is known, the nothing­
ness inside the Black Square, the
apotheosis of technological advance-
ment joining the threat of ultimate
destruction, the gravitational pull
of the real, imminent tabula rasa—
rendered the dreams of the avant-
garde dangerously untimely.
. gles in its desire to refute to align
After witnessing the destructive side
of modernization (of warfare), the
social and economic conditions at
the end of the Second World War put
under harsh scrutiny the urban plans
aiming to bulldoze history away. The
love for the old city (object of vehe-
ment rejection of Modernism) is
politically reinforced by the nostalgia
of collective memory. Tabula rasa,
the recipe for hardcore Modernist
urbanism, is achieved by means of
hellfire and blitzkrieg. Complete
cities are razed to the ground by the
forces of modernization. Rotterdam,
Dusseldorf, Cologne are destroyed,
reduced to rubble by the same tech-
nological and machinistic drive that
promised to carry humanity to a har-
monious future. The machine age is
also the machine-gun age. Progress
is seen as potential annihilation, as
technological advancements shift
from hope to fear.
. of the consolidation of Le Corbusiean
The Modernism of cars and air-
planes, of highways and glass sky-
scrapers, is a product of the same
modernity of nuclear destruction,
gas chambers, tanks, and concen-
tration camps. The qualities of Albert
Speer are what allow him to switch
from designing the plan of Germania
to leading the Reich's armament and
war production. The praised effi-
ciency of the Engineer’s Aesthetic
PART II—CYNICISM
With a world faces its afterlife as a dehumanizing
threat to humanity. The nuclear
torn into
plant, the electric turbine, the
steamboat, and the aircraft are all
militarized war machines—poten-
pieces by the tial weapons of mass destruction.
Even mass media, the quintessen-
apocalyptic tial instrument for the diffusion of
ideology is exposed in its propagan-
effects of total
distic facet, in its role as hegemonic
.
war, a young With a world torn into pieces by the
apocalyptic effects of total war,
generation of a young generation of architects,
designers, and artists willing to con-
architects,
tinue to explore the possibility of a
new, better, more efficient beginning
do everything in their power to dis-
designers, and tance themselves from the urban
visions of Le Corbusier. In this rejec-
artists willing tion of the Modernist canon, the
après-garde in its cynical role strug-
to continue
with the Modern Movement and its
promise of heroic grand scale solu-
to explore the tions. After the Second World War,
the après-garde tries to reimagine
possibility of what it is to render the future of the
city on their own terms, and with it,
a new, better,
conceive a form of Universal mod-
ernization that goes ‘beyond’ the
more efficient
promises of Modernism.
.
.
beginning do 1956
.
everything in
In 1956 several distant but simul-
taneous events irreversibly affect
their power
the fate of the après-garde for the
remainder of the twentieth century.
With Modernist roots sprouting in
to distance the ideological soil around the world,
a series of projects in Europe and
themselves
the Americas highlight the afterlife
of Modernist Ideology. Previously
from the urban
understood as isolated events, these
projects are key to the development
visions of Le Modernism not only as model but as
ideological target. The era that
Corbusier. follows the construction of Mod­
ernist Ideology is the era of (anti-
.
Modernist) Cynicism. If Le Corbusier
is the ideologue, the après-garde are
the Cynics.
. .
By 1956 Le Corbusier has already
. casted the hegemonic discourse of
Modern Architecture in the STEALTH MODERNISM
After the ‘death of the CIAM’, Modernism makes a comeback as an ideological ghost. In a stealth display of
Modernist proportions, Robin Hood Gardens (1972) by Alison and Peter Smithson (Team 10) blends in perfectly
PART with the resurrected image of the Ilot Insalubre No. 6 by Le Corbusier (1936). One of the missing links in the
II
58
evolution of Modernist Ideology, this Brutalist episode displays the strategies of the Le Corbusiean City potenti-
ally slipping into the forms of the après-garde. Or, are the strategies of the après-garde a premonition announced
IMAGE in previous hardcore Modernist forms? Is the Robin Hood Gardens project Stealth Modernism? Or is the Ilot
2/10 Insalubre No. 6 an ideological ghost?
solid concrete of ideology. In their
iconic status, his plans, publications,
essays, manifestoes, drawings,
buildings, schemes, and paintings
provide his detractors with the fuel
for their critique. Through their new
plans for alternative ideal cities,
anti-Modernist opposition attempts
to melt his doctrines into air using
Modernist dogma as combustible.
. the theoretical framework left by
Trapped in a predicament, the après-
garde wants to carry on the project
of the avant-garde without any of
its shortcomings. But how to break
away from Modernist ‘tradition’,
when the projects of the après-garde
support their grand schemes on the
pillars of Le Corbusieanism? How to
propose a new beginning after half
a century of starting all over again
causes a dead-count of millions of
bodies? How to criticize Le Corbusier
and the so-called ‘failures’ of his
Modernism while re-using his strat-
egies, plans, ideas, media? How can
the après-garde create a Utopia over
the ruins of another failed Utopia?
How can a new generation of archi-
tects, urbanists, artists create a new
vision for the future of the city over
the debris of Modernist Urbanism?
. Team 10 puts forward the House,
. Street, Relationship, District, and
DUBROVNIK
1956
. streets for fast, efficient car mobil-
In 1956 a group of architects organ-
izes the tenth meeting of the CIAM.
Already an icon of Modernism, Le
Corbusier doesn’t attend that meet-
ing. In that event, Team 10 (as the
group of architects called them-
selves) announces the death of the
CIAM, and thereby declares an inter-
national organization of visionary
architects defunct. Team 10 goes on
to meet as an international organiza-
tion of visionary architects. During
its life, Team 10 has its own dialec-
tical struggle. On the one hand it
despises Modernism, on the other it
cannot avoid repeating its strategies.
. isolation of arbitrary sections of the
Like the CIAM, Team 10 is also inter-
ested in a Utopian project for archi-
tecture and the city. If the CIAM
wanted a Utopia of the future, Jaap
Bakema, Georges Candilis, Giancarlo
De Carlo, Aldo Van Eyck, Alison
PART II—CYNICISM
and Peter Smithson, and Shadrach
Woods strive to establish a ‘Utopia
of the present’.
. Inhabitants as a clear diagram for
Team 10 does not want to theorize
but to build because ‘only through
construction can a Utopia of the
present be realized’. Alison Smithson, ed.
Team 10 Primer, (London: Studio Vista, 1968), 3.
Against theory, Team 10 is left with
the CIAM. Team 10 comes ‘together
because of mutual realization of the
inadequacies of the processes of
architectural thought which they had
inherited from the modern movement
as a whole, but more important, each
sensed that the other had already
found some way towards a new
beginning’. Smithson, Team 10 Primer, 3.
Like Le Corbusier, Team 10 pub-­
lish­­es books, designs architecture,
plans cities, searching for a ‘new
beginning’.
. Team 10 outlines buildings on diag-
The CIAM has its Grille. Team 10 has
the ‘Urban Re-Identification Grid’,
‘Lost Identity Grid’, and ‘Habitat du
plus grand nombre Grid’. Where the
CIAM Grille proposes four values of
the city based on dwelling, working,
recreation, and transportation,
City as the main urban categories.
Where the CIAM Grille promotes
ity, the streets of the ‘Urban Re-
Identification Grid’ are occupied by
the play of children. Where the taxo-
nomic nature of the CIAM Grille aims
to quantify the city as a close system
of fixed, measurable characteristics,
the diagrams of Team 10 aim to form
an open matrix of connections and
relationships.
. .
Just as the Modernist City pre-
scribes the Cartesian Grid to cure
the problems of the past, Team 10
rehabilitates the present with ideo-
grams of human relations. When
Le Corbusier proposes the ‘rigid
total community’ both in the archi-
tectural scale, with the ‘Unité’ or
in the urban scale with the city of
class-divisions, Team 10 argues for
the creation of ‘non-arbitrary group
spaces’ as the ‘primary function of
the planner’. Smithson, Team 10 Primer, 3.
As Le Corbusier introduces the
Contemporary City for Three Million
the efficient and simplified occupa-
tion of the land (by cars, buildings,
people), and the Athens Charter
as a ‘functional hierarchy’ of the
city, Team 10 introduces an order
of ‘human associations’ ‘woven into
a modulated continuum’. Smithson,
Team 10 Primer, 78. Where there’s a Le
Corbusiean Poem to the Right Angle,
Team 10 displays with a Play Bubrek
Diagram a ‘constellation with differ­
ent values of different parts in an
immensely complicate web crossing
and recrossing’. Smithson, Team 10
Primer, 3.
.
Unable to alter Modernist ideology,
Team 10 goes after Modernist style.
If Le Corbusier builds his housing
blocks following the Cartesian Grid,
onal patterns. To free the land for
pedestrian use, Le Corbusier lifts
the Radiant City on pilotis over parks
and gardens. In ‘order to keep ease
of movement’, Team 10 imagines a
‘multi-city with residential ‘streets-
in-the-air’. Smithson, Team 10 Primer, 76, 78.
.
After criticizing the arbitrary isola-
tion of the so-called communities
of the Unité d’habitation built with
Béton brut by Le Corbusier, Team 10
comes up with a ‘new brutalism’.
Reyner Banham, The New Brutalism,
With the col-
(Architectural Press, 1966).
lages of the Plan Voisin, Le Corbusier
eliminates the evidence of the old
city. With the collages of the Golden
Lane, Team 10 renders an almost
invisible scaffolding that keeps the
remains of the present city intact.
When Le Corbusier retreats to swim
at the coast of Cap Martin, Team 10
keep his ideology afloat.
.
.
MOBILE
1956
.
In 1956 Yona Friedman addresses
the tenth Congress of the CIAM.
Uninterested in Team 10’s approach
to build a Utopia of the present, PLAY BUBREK
For Le Corbusier, the city was a Cartesian playground for Modernist adults in search for more efficiency, hygiene,
Friedman speculates about the productivity. The Modernist script for a joyous life consisted of work, dwelling, politics, cars, shopping, boats,
airplanes, clean air, and bright skies. For Team 10, the city marks the return of the playground for children. The city
of the après-garde is for child’s play. Play Bubrek outlines a ‘constellation with different values of different parts
PART in an immensely complicated web crossing and recrossing’. 1 The zigzagging plans of the cities of Team 10 are
II
60
a theatrical re-creation of children playing in the streets-in-the-air. Like many other forms of ideological kitsch,
Play Bubrek ‘causes two tears to flow in quick succession’, the first tear saying: how beautiful to see children
IMAGE playing in the streets, the second tear saying: how nice to be moved, together with all mankind by seeing children
3/10 playing in the streets. 2
scientific achievements, emanci­
pating town planning from the archi- . clouds of
. Yona Friedman
tect of the future. While the CIAM
and Team 10 desire a new beginning,
with his Manifesto de l’Architecture
Mobile (Mobile Architecture Mani­
festo), Friedman designs the ‘last’ . Architecture
beginning. In his new city the ‘sole
task left open to architecture . is what is
. continuously
consists in developing temporary
techniques of construction that will
bridge the gap between traditional
construction (i.e. static buildings
that leave a ‘footprint’) and future . moving.
systems inclining toward the pure
sciences’. Yona Friedman, ‘Programme for . .
While mobility .
Mobile City Planning: An Update’, in Exit Utopia:
Architectural Provocation 1956-76, Martin van

happens in .
Schaik and Otakar Macel, (Munich: Prestel
2005), 13-14.
.
While mobility happens in the
Mod­ern­ist City, either as a pedes- the Modernist .
City, either as .
trian in a maze of parks under float-
ing buildings or inside a car, or in an
airplane, and in the cities of Team
10 by walking on a multi-layered city
with streets-in-the-air: in the scaf-
a pedestrian .
folding clouds of Yona Friedman
Architecture is what is continuously in a maze of .
parks under .
moving. A manifesto for a city as
an open framework of social mobil-

floating build- .
ity, Architectural infrastructure is
devised as a form of ‘indeterminate
city planning’ with convertible forms
and methods of construction, and
convertible land through a system ings or inside .
a car, or in an .
of space ownership.
.

airplane, and .
Where the Athens Charter and the
CIAM Grille call for an urbanism of
functional specificity, Yona Friedman
and the GEAM write the script for
an Indeterminate Town Planning. in the cities .
of Team 10 by .
Modernist specificity works through
dwelling, circulation, and recreation.

walking on a .
Town Planning Indeterminacy looks
for the conciliation between a city
for isolated individuals and a city
dedicated to public life.
. multi-layered .
Against Modernist Urbanism with
its city designed as open network by city with .
streets-in- .
means of controlled architectural
elements, the GEAM proposes an MATT URBANISM
enclosed city controlled by regu- Once the sublime object has been abstracted, reduced to its ‘abridged’ version, stripped to its essential features,
lating the climate of entire regions,
countries, and continents. Friedman, the-air: in the . an Ideology can transform, adapt, shift-shape, appropriate other contexts, occupy other spaces, take other forms
of (re)presentation. 3 Once an Ideology has been accepted and reinterpreted, new formal manifestations can be

scaffolding .
generated and regenerated without diverging from the initial ideological strategies and concepts. Because of this
‘Programme for Mobile City Planning: An
co-relation, the more ‘radical’ the projects of the après-garde (Yona Friedman, Team 10) aim to be with their new
Update’, 13-17. Floating above agricul- formal and programmatic strategies, the more they start to resemble the latest projects by Le Corbusier. Once
Architecture stops threatening to replace the historical city—once the destruction left by World War II made
tabula rasa an unpopular approach—and instead floats entire building-cities above the ground, a new form of Mat
PART Urbanism connects buildings like ideological clouds. If by stealth the Modernism of Le Corbusier blends in with
II

62
the streets-in-the-air of the Smithsons, Mat Urbanism renders the Free University of Berlin (1963), the Spatial City
(1957), and Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital (1965) indistinguishable. Was Le Corbusier re-learning the Modernist
IMAGE tropes through the urban ideas of the après-garde? Or was the après-garde a step ahead in the natural evolution of
PART II—CYNICISM 4/10 the Modernist City?
tural and industrial land, the pro-
gramme of these pixilated clouds
consists of ‘total climate control’ and
‘three-dimensional superimposed
structures within which the empty
spaces are freely usable’. Friedman,
‘Programme for Mobile City Planning: An
Update’, 17.
. randomized scaffolding, isn’t the
If the confrontational nature of the
Urbanism of the Modern Movement
is superseded by the new forms of
architecture that Team 10 proposes
to share with the actual ruins of the
city, with Mobile Architecture Yona
Friedman projects an Urbanism that
avoids any type of confrontation.
Rather than partially or completely
replacing the contemporary city,
and more in tune with the ghostly
rendering of the Golden Lane as a
non-intrusive scaffolding, Mobile
Architecture exists on a parallel,
horizontal plane. What started as
a city on pilotis of the Radiant City,
and became the streets-in-the-air
of Team 10, Friedman turns into the
‘technique of superimposition’, a plan
that consists ‘in the construction of
new districts above the existing city,
in such a manner that large-scale
demolition of the city is avoided, and
whereby the icy and its various quar-
ters will preserve their present day
character’. Yona Friedman, ‘Paris Spatial:
A Suggestion’ (1960), in Exit Utopia, 20, 23.
. Igoe the ‘precise moment in time’ of
In response to the ever expanding
generic urbanism of specific archi-
tecture of the Modern Movement™,
Yona Friedman proposes a form of
ever expanding infrastructure for a
very specific form of urbanism.
But, while Friedman declares that
Le Corbusier’s scheme for Paris ‘was
already obsolete by the time it was
drawn up’, aren’t the pilotis of his
Mobile Architecture anchored on
the principles of his Modernism?
Isn’t the superstructure of Mobile
Architecture a version of the
Cartesian grid in the air? Isn’t the
Spatial City a form of Radiant City
during an even higher flight? Is his
manifesto more than just another
ideal plan to ‘take over’ the city with
a ‘siteless’ programme? When Yona
Friedman proposes his plan for Paris
Spatiale, isn’t he suggesting a con-
tinuation of what the Plan Voisin
PART II—CYNICISM
started? Aren’t the Plan Voisin and
the Radiant City, the ideological
blueprints for a Parisian plan of
urban superimposition?
. Igoe architetcural or political?
Once Modernism’s monolithic body
of exposed concrete has been over-
laid by an indiscernible mass of
Cartesian network of buildings and
parks transformed into an inverted
form of Modernist Urbanism? As in a
Surrealist operation, isn’t the Spatial
City the same as a Contemporary
City for Three Billion Inhabitants
flipped upside down?
. in the park? How free is the ground
. after raising its buildings on pilotis?
PRUITT-IGOE
1956
. for a societal structure yet to be
In 1956 Pruitt-Igoe is finally com-
pleted. The Captain WO Pruitt
Homes and William L. Igoe Apart­
ments consists of 33 11-storey
buildings in St. Louis, Missouri.
A government-sanctioned racially
segregated project, in just a few
years Pruitt-Igoe is declared a
failure. By 1972 the buildings are
set for demolition.
. ern­ist delirium, a whole generation
Desperate to release architecture
from the stronghold of Modernist
ideology, Charles Jenks happily
announces with the fall of Pruitt-
the ‘death of modern architecture’.
Charles Jenks, The Language of Post-Modern
Architecture, (New York: Rizzoli International
But, did Pruitt-Igoe
Publications, 1977), 9.
fail because of its ‘purist language
at variance with the architectural
codes of the inhabitants’, or because
‘events and ideology’ determine the
‘success of the environment’? Jenks,
The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 9.
. deliberate kitsch, political failures
How can the failure of the social
policy that drove the development
to its implosion be blamed on the
formal appearance of its architec-
ture? As an ideological system, can
Modernism exist solely as a set of
buildings? What about the urbanistic
implications of a city tangled on the
threads of its hundred-year removal
from its slaveholding past? What
about racial segregation in housing?
What is truly Modernist about the
expropriation of black families to
force them into Pruitt-Igoe without
any form of support, nor long-term
investment? Is the failure of Pruitt-
.
If the dust of the architectural
destruction blurs the problematic
foundations of Pruitt-Igoe, the form
seems to confuse historians about
the questionable origins of its pro-
gramme and its questionable rela-
tionship with Modernist ideology?
Does Pruitt-Igoe really provide for
work, recreation, dwelling, and
transportation? Where is the city
If Modernism, like most of the pro-
jects of the avant-garde, is meant
created (the perennial new begin-
ning), how can its incompatibility
with a momentary socio-political
impasse be blamed on its doctrines,
grids and ineffable spaces? Can
a Universalist architecture exist
in a place that doesn’t believe in
Universalist values?
.
In its American-centric Post-Mod­
of architects, critics, and historians
jumped on the ideological band-
wagon to justify a movement that
either ‘speaks to other architects
and a concerned minority who care
about specifically architectural
meanings’, or ‘to the public at large,
or the local inhabitants who care
about other issue concerned with
comfort, traditional building and a
way of life’. Jenks, The Language of Post-
Modern Architecture, 9.
.
Aiming to replace Modernist ideol-
ogy with historicist pastiche or
are blamed on misinterpretations
and misappropriations of Le
Corbusiean urbanism. An aimless
profession and complicit academic
positions itself at the centre of the
world of architectural ideology. But,
if Pruitt-Igoe accurately embodies
the death of Modern Architecture,
what about its reincarnation in
other bodies? BATTLE OF MODERNISMS
. At one side of the ideological landscape in the Americas, Pruitt-Igoe, a housing project built under racist housing
laws implodes, filling the air with clouds of Post-Modernist excitement and historicist delusions. Its historical
. rubble sets Architecture in a spiral of confusion for decades. In a campaign of denigration, architectural theorists,
in their stubborn bias decide to ignore the politics behind the project to blame the Modern Movement for the
failure of Pruitt-Igoe.
PART At the other side of the landscape, Brasilia opens its ideological wings displaying the ‘afterbirth’ of Modernism
II
64
in the newest capital in the Americas. Lucio Costa designs for Juscelino Kubitschek a Pilot Plan anchored on
hierarchical divisions, clearly defined car infrastructure, a garden through the city, four points of dwelling,
IMAGE work, transportation, and recreation. 4,647 miles separate failure from success. By the beginning of the 1960s,
5/10 Modernist Ideology has taken over the Americas.
Challenging BRASILIA
1956
.
the Modernist
In 1956, Brasilia is under construc­
tion. The Brazilian president Jusce­
relationship lino Kubitschek orchestrates the
assembly of a new capital with the
between first government building by Oscar
Niemeyer, and with the ‘Plano Piloto
industrial
de Brasilia’ competition that Lucio
Costa won the previous year.
. Modernization plan?
produc­tion Anchored on a ‘virgin’ site, Brasilia
is the apotheosis of Modernist
and urban urbanism: a tabula rasa minus the
bulldozer running over the old city.
form, New
Brasilia is the Modernist dream of
empty lands awaiting the order of
the Cartesian Grid, the bucolic
Babylon uses openness of urban landscapes, the
efficient and fast mobility of avenues
automation and overpasses. Brasilia achieves the
desired epiphany where Urbanism
as the tour
meets economic and political sup-
port, where great urban ambition
meets great political power. Brasilia
de force of is a new beginning without the need
of erasure. Is Kubitschek the client
a new city Le Corbusier always wanted? Was
the Radiant City meant to be in
emancipated
Brazil all along?
. cities like weightless clouds. New
from the core
A first look reveals Brasilia’s Modern­-
ist points. The clear division of pro-
grammes, the plan of mobility and
values of Le use, the Airport in close proximity to
the city centre, the playful version of
Corbusiean
the organizing grid.
. of even remotely comparable size
Urbanism.
A second inspection makes the Mod­
ernist footprint even more ex­plicit.
Apart from Niemeyer’s con­crete
. monoliths and iconic government
buildings, the Le Corbusieanism is
.
displayed in its centralized govern-
ment, in its slender concrete slabs,
.
in its grid of streets and avenues; and
with the years—after all the vegeta-
tion and tress—with the park within
. the city. Brasilia reinforces the suc-
cess of the city of the four values. At
. the same time of the developing obit-
uary of Pruitt Igoe, Brasilia highlights
.
Modern Architecture in a Modernist
City. Brasilia is, after all, the prema-
turely announced defeat, a concrete
. victory for Modernism.
.
.
Was Lucio Costa Le Corbusier’s
Brazilian translator? Or, was Le
PART II—CYNICISM
Corbusier’s avant-garde dream
better suited for Brazil than Paris?
Was he imagining the Modernist
city somewhere where the collective
memory wasn’t as infatuated with
the past? Were his five points giving
him away all along—the pilotis, the
garden roof, the horizontal window,
all so fitting in the Brazilian capital?
After all, wasn’t the Urbanism of
the Modern Movement a Universal
.
.
NEW
BABYLON
1956
.
In 1956 Constant is working on the
ideas that will form his New Babylon.
While the first urban avant-garde
evaporated from post-War Europe
and re-launched as poured concrete
in Brazil, it was in the old continent
again that the après-garde sets its
second attack on the Modernist city.
.
Constant’s model for urbanization
comprises an ever-expanding,
ever-mutating network of sectors
hovering above the old European
Babylon is the après-garde version
of the Megastructures: colossal
complexes heaping up in one place
‘all the social facilities of a city’,
with a size ‘seen to almost crushing
advantage, with no other buildings
to compete with it for attention’,
giving the viewers and inhabitants
the experience of ‘plunging through
a vast urban structure’ that could be
developed ad infinitum. Reyner Banham,
Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent
The
Past, (London: Thames & Hudson, 1976).
spatial ‘plan’ of New Babylon con-
sists of suspended collective hous-
ing, extending over the whole town
and separated from traffic, which
passes beneath or above. New
Babylon is architectural plankton
accumulating in a ‘visionary’ urban
ocean.
.
Challenging the Modernist relation-
ship between industrial production
and urban form, New Babylon uses
SITUATIONIST PLAYERS
Members of the Situationist International (among them Asger Jorn, Armando, Constant, and Guy Debord), pose
in front of the Plan of Paris of Constant’s New Babylon. Against Urbanism, since ‘as it is understood by today’s
automation as the tour de force
professional planners, is reduced to the practical study of housing and traffic as isolate problems’ Constant provides
of a new city emancipated from (in similar fashion to Play Bubrek), an outline for a city for ‘explorers specializing in play and recreation’. 4
The Situationists propose a ‘unitary urbanism on the scale demanded by the society of the future’, without ‘falling’
in the ideological traps of Modernism, since ‘unitary urbanism is not a doctrine of urbanism but a critique of urba-
PART nism’. 5, 6 The desire for an Urbanism of endlessness is retaken by Constant who claims that ‘New Babylon ends
II
66
nowhere (since the Earth is round); it knows no frontiers (since there are no more national economies) or collectivi-
ties (since humanity is fluctuating)’. 7 Through meetings like this, Situationists implement Unitary Urbanism not as
IMAGE a ‘reaction to functionalism, but rather a move past it’, discussing how much they ‘wanted at the very least to build
6/10 cities, the environment suitable to the unlimited deployment of new passions’. 8, 9
the core values of Le Corbusiean
Urbanism. While recent models of
the Modernist City like Brasilia are
centralized, bureaucratic and pre-
dictably pre-programmed, New
Babylon doesn’t have a centre, pos-
sesses no cars, and its people need
no recreation, since there is no need
for work. Against the conception of a
‘ville verte’, the Le Corbusiean ‘green
town where well-spaced and isolated
skyscrapers must necessarily reduce
the direct relations and common
action of men’, Constant envisions
conurbation for the ‘direct relation
of surroundings and behavior to be
produced’. Constant, ‘Another City for
Another Life’ (1959) in Theory of the Dérive
and other Situationist Writings on the City,
Libero Andreotti, Xavier Costa eds., (Barcelona:
Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona /
ACTAR, 1996), 92. New Babylon not only
aggrandizes architecture to the point
where it absorbs the city, but it also
magnifies its numbers beyond math-
ematical logic—‘it should be noted
that in such a city the built surface
will be 100% and the free surface
200%’. Constant, 'Another City for Another
Life', 95.
. proposes a Mobile Architecture
Since ‘urbanism doesn’t exist’
because it is ‘only an ‘ideology’ in
Marx’s sense of the word’, with New
Babylon Constant creates the first
urbanism of nothingness. Attila Kotanyi,
Raoul Vaneigem, ‘Elementary Programme of the
Bureau of Unitary Urbanism’ (1961), in Theory
of the Dérive..., 116. In
this nothingness,
New Babylon rejects functional-
ism and somehow echoes the after-
births of Modernism in its search for
a space for ‘play and recreation’, a
space where Situationists will prac-
tice the dérive to create plans and
models of a ‘highly imaginative sort
that could be called architectural
science fiction’. Constant, ‘The Great Game
to Come’ (1959), in Theory of the Dérive..., 63.
. (pp.11-16), in Theory of the Dérive..., 84-85.
Product of Psychogeographical
processes (concerning ‘the study
of specific effects of geographical
environment, consciously or not,
no the emotions and behavior of
individuals’) New Babylon is the
apotheosis of the laissez-faire life-
style, an Eden for drifters. Interntational
Situationniste #1, June, 1958, (pp. 13-14), in
Theory of the Dérive..., 69.
PART II—CYNICISM
In New Babylon, even environmental
conditions like daylight are rendered
obsolete, giving the Homo Ludens
(human the player) a way of life that
‘responds to his need for playing,
for adventure, for mobility, as well
as the conditions that facilitate the
free creation of his own life’. Constant,
‘New Babylon’, Post-SI, 1974, in Theory of
In New Babylon, the
the Dérive..., 157.
Homo Ludens lives with total free-
dom to create his ‘surroundings
while exploring his own creation’ in
‘an uninterrupted process of creation
and re-creation’. Constant, ‘New Babylon’,
Post-SI, 1974, 157. In New Babylon, the
Homo Ludens is free to drift a la
dérive—the quintessential technique
of ‘transient passage through varied
ambiances’. Interntational Situationniste #1,
June, 1958.
. Not only do Friedman and Constant
. obliterate all signs of difference
NETWORK
. but in this accelerated manifestation
In their desire to disregard the
Mod­ernist city, Yona Friedman and
Constant work on two versions of
the same continuously changing
Mega­structural project. One
of superimposition, where Inde­ter­
minate Town Planning allows for
the ‘free exchange and recon­fig­
urations’ of the city. Friedman, ‘Paris
Spatiale’, 26. The other one foresees
a ‘unitary urbanism of very complex,
very changeable constant’ activities
in order to ‘construct moving
cities’. Constant, ‘Unitary Urbanism’, origi-
nal in Dutch, ‘Unitair Urbanisme’, unpublished
manuscript of a lecture held at the Stedelijk
Museum, Amsterdam on 20 December 1960,
trans. Robyn de Jong-Dalziel in Mark Wigley,
ed. Constant’s New Babylon: The Hyper-
Architecture of Desire, (Rotterdam: Witte de
With, 1998), 131.
‘Unitary Urbanism at the End of the 1950s’ in
International Situationniste #3, December, 1959
. series of buildings that—like New
If in the Mobile Architecture the
Cartesian grid provides the frame-
work for a Utopian structure of
ultimate flexibility, in New Babylon
the diagonals that make up so many
of the buildings of Team 10 reappear
as the structure for an urban con­
dition ‘technically feasible, desirable
from a human viewpoint and inevita-
ble from a social viewpoint’. Constant
‘Unitary Urbanism’, 132.
.
Hovering above the Modernist city,
both urbanisms rely on the unique-
ness of their plots, which, like form-
less black holes, absorb everything
into designed disorder. New Babylon
and Paris Spatiale not only are net-
works for the free movement of a
society yet to be born, but in their
striking similarities they create a
network of cynical projects of the
future city; a continuation of the
Modernist project on Urbanism
albeit as the apotheosis of the float-
ing version. After all, didn’t Le Cor­
busier remind everybody in 1956
about the fundamental condition of
the CIAM to safeguard the insepara-
bility of Architecture and Urbanism?
between the building and the city,
architecture is also infrastructure of
mobility. If the city of Le Corbusier
was for the fast, flexible mobility of
cars, the city of Yona Frieman and
Constant is for the fast and flexible
mobility of architecture.
.
Mobile Architecture and New
Baby­lon are Urbanisms that, in their
utopian struggle against Modernist
ideology, somehow manage to turn
their multipurpose networks and
endless connections into a hyper-
condition of Modernism.
.
.
SOUTHDALE
CENTER
1956
.
In 1956 Victor Gruen’s Southdale
Center, the first air conditioned,
enclosed shopping mall, opens to
the public in a Minneapolis suburb.
Southdale Center is the first of a
Babylon and Paris Spatiale—create
an artificially conditioned environ-
ment that liberates the users from
the complications of the city. A shel-
ter from crime, dirt, unemployment,
and any kind of socio-political or BATTLE OF THE MEGASTRUCTURES NO. 1
environmental problem, the shopping In this double clash of avant-garde (versus the European city) and après-garde (against its American antithesis),
two possible outcomes shed light on how to develop strategies for the unknown future. This episode with its
mall presents the ultimate achieve-
unique characteristics shows both sides of very precise moments in the development of ideology, ideology
ment of commercial architecture. critique, and the tools and strategies used to present and represent it. New Babylon (an anti-consumerist, anti-
functionalist Utopia) and Southdale Center (Commercialism slipped by stealth into a ‘building’) clash with the
ideological tension of potential failure and unexpected success. On one side, an Urbanism of Capitalism high-
PART lights the potential of the Shopping Mall as a Situationist prototype. On the other side, an experiment of Unitary
II
68
Urbanism imagines a Megastructure that Capitalism has already presented. Was Constant trying to invent a
Shopping Mall for the après-garde? Was Victor Gruen the Architect New Babylon needed? Is New Babylon a
IMAGE shopping mall for the homo ludens? Is the enclosed, artificially conditioned, potentially endless Shopping Mall
7/10 a megastructure for the après-garde?
The Modernist Southdale Center is the architectural
climax of consumer culture.
.
Friedman and the diagonal streets
of Team 10, Southdale Center as

city can’t fail

The Shopping Mall brings into exist-
ence a new type of facsimile reality.
where the Enclosed in a cluster of walls and
juxtaposed corridors, the flexible
the anti-New Babylon—reveal sim-­
ul­­ta­neous outcomes opposed to
the general perception of the role,
poten­tial, and limitations of the
post-war European après-garde.

Modernist existence of the Mall creates an

open-ended landscape of program-
These projects highlight a parallel
history of success and shortcomings

city never
mematic possibilities. Like the
promise of the Situationists and the
GEAM, these new programmematic
existed. mutations allow all kinds of uses,
from theme parks to museums,
of forms of a non-European(centric)
urban intelligentsia.
.
Once Le Corbusier steps away from
the CIAM, Modernist ideology finds

. housing, working, and recreation in

a kind of forced marriage between
equally faithful support and staunch
opposition at both sides of the

.
Le Corbusiean utopianism and New Atlantic Ocean. Deeply embedded
Babylonian dreaminess. in all forms of ideology critique, the
. reach of the doctrines of Modernism
. Was Victor Gruen with his fantastic
efficiency the architect New Babylon
has created one of the most misun-
derstood periods of architectural

. needed? Or is the New Babylon the

Shopping Mall of the après-garde?
history in the twentieth century.
In their failure to break away from

.
How can the ultimate capitalist
architecture of experience coincide
with the ultimate Marxist critique of
. urbanism? Was the post-war avant-
garde dreaming about what the
Modernism, or even ‘kill’ the Modern
Movement, the generation of the
après-garde with its cynical projects
produced five points that are key to
the urgency and need for a new form

. most commercial of ideologies was

already achieving? Or, was the com-
of critique of Architectural ideology:
.

.
mercial architect revealing a parallel .
form of urban avant-garde far away .
.
.
from the utopian orthodoxies of the
après-garde in Europe? .
. .
. .
LESSONS
.
.
.
. .
The struggle of the après-garde .
.
.
against Modernist ideology is the
struggle against contradiction, a .
struggle against the effects of plan- .
. ning for a specific type of change
and obtaining the opposite desired
.
.
.
effects. The plot of the aftermath of .
the CIAM is full of twists and turns, .
.
.
of strategies flipped upside down
and of a shared afterlife of values 1—Team 10 proposes other ‘forms’
and strategies. of Modernist urbanism due to its

. .
A series of urban aspirations—the
inability to break free from the doc-
trines of Le Corbusiean Modernism.

. plans of Team 10 as heroic contin­

uation of the Modernist city with
Bestowed with the responsibility of
carrying on with the legacy of the

.
diagonal streets-in-the-air, Pruitt CIAM, Team 10 is unable to break
Igoe as (post)Modernist proxy, Paris away from the original doctrines of
Spatiale as the anti-Modernist city the Modern Movement. Instead it

. of floating Cartesian grids, Brasilia

as a post-war Le Corbusiean, New
provides a form of additional flexibil-
ity—Cartesianism with angles—to
BATTLE OF THE MEGASTRUCTURES NO. 2
One Megastructure, Southdale Center, offers an ever expanding, artificially conditioned structure of anonymous

.
Babylon both as anti-Brasilia, and as
a hybrid between the floating city of
and pragmatic programmatic precisions: ‘Meet your friends at the exotic Garden Court—dramatic center of
a series of urban plans accused of
Southdale. At your table at the sidewalk café, you’re only a few steps from the gaily decorated stores and shops
limiting rigidity. along the colorful shopping lanes which open into the year-round springtime atmosphere of the Garden Court’. 10
The other Megastructure, New Babylon, speculates an unpredictable assortment of an ever-expanding, artificially
conditioned, fuzzy form of authoritarian Unitary Urbanism: In ‘New Babylon our ordered daily routine will no
PART longer exist. Our present routine of getting up in the morning, going to bed in the evening, having meals at regular
II

70
times: that whole order is based on the utility of the production unit’. In New Babylon the ‘climatic conditions
are no longer determinants. And in the enormous sectors of New Babylon I have eliminated daylight altogether,
IMAGE because people are breaking free more and more anyhow, especially from the rhythms of nature’. ‘A network of
PART II—CYNICISM 8/10 sectors will span the globe’. 11
2—Pruitt-Igoe can’t be the death
of Modernism, because Pruitt-Igoe
is not Modernism. Just because a
building ‘looks’ Modernist it does not
mean that it carries the legacy of the
Modern Movement. Modernism is
not just a style, but an ideological
system that aims to transform the
world with set parameters, strat-
egies, methodologies, and approa­
ches. In the inseparable connection
between architecture and urbanism,
Modernism can’t die just because a
series of buildings have been built
without the support of the com-
plementary factors and minimum
required programmes for them to
function (as a symptom of a social
condition). The Modernist city can’t
fail where the Modernist city never
existed.
.
3—Brasilia is a birthplace for
Modernism in the Americas, and it
works as the first grand-scale ex-­
periment of the doctrines advocated
by the CIAM. While Le Corbusier
didn’t accomplish on European soil
the plans envisioned in his three
urban models, Brasilia is the first
fully built and operational prototype
of a Modernist urban plan. While the
CIAM confronted a series of econo­
mic, social and architectural set-
backs in Europe, Brasilia is the
product of the ideal triad—politics,
urbanist, architect—that the Mod­
ernist Congress dreamt of. Brasilia
reinforces the Universalist qualities
of Modernist urban planning, and
with it proves that Modernism didn’t
die with Pruitt-Igoe.
.
4—The Principles behind New
Babylon align with the artificially
conditioned, moving urbanism of
Mobile Architecture, even if its
social model where ‘automation of
all useful, repetitive activities’, ‘col-
lective ownership of the land and
the means of production’ have freed
the masses from work and collective
timekeeping seem like a complete
rejection from the work-oriented
principles of Modernist planning
that evolved into the projects of the
après-garde presented in the tenth
meeting of the CIAM. Constant, ‘New
Babylon’, 156-157. In their incapability to
invent a new form of urbanism, both
PART II—CYNICISM
projects are preceded by their com-
mercial counterpart in America. The Modernism
lies in the anti-
après-garde, formed in part by the
European intelligentsia, also includes
a group of architects that not only
manage to complete the unfulfilled
dream of the avant-garde (with a Modernism of
new beginning), but that are able to
‘invent’ the forms of urbanism that the Cynics, as
Le Corbusiea-
were not even dreamt by them.
.
5—Megastructures are the Shopping
Malls of the après-garde, where
drifters wander aimlessly lost in their ness shows
incapability to overcome the con-
straints of the Modernist City. A crit- up uninvited
in the scaffold-
ical look at the events surrounding
the ‘invention’ of urban forms of
architecture following the year 1956
allows to reframe the question of
‘origins’ regarding positions and con-
ings of Mobile
struction of a critique of Modernist
ideology. With the possibility of Architecture,
in the floating
an American manifestation of the
après-garde formulating a true form
of alternative ideological architec-
ture, a generation of Cynics finds
itself using fragments and pieces
sectors of
from the Modernist project to create
an alternative model of the American New Babylon,
and the
‘Shopping Mall’. The Cynics are chal-
lenged by an American après-garde
zigzag­ging
with access to economic and cultural
capital as support for its means of
production. The Shopping Mall is the
product of a system robust enough
to confront the challenges facing the Cartesian
grids of
future of architecture and the city
without recurring to Modernist
Team 10.
ideology.
.
.
PRE-KYNICAL
. .
.
All these ‘discoveries’—the afterlife
of the Modernist City, the many
.
false deaths of Modernism, the birth
of the après-garde, the return of
heroic urbanism turned upside down,
the dia­lectical struggle between
Shop­ping Mall and Megastructure— .
not only highlight the pressing chal-
lenges of future forms of ideology .
.
critique in a post-Pruitt Igoe world
filled of post-Modernist nonsense,
but they emphasize their need to
address the rise of other potential
forms of urban innovation, ideas, .
and critique.
. . ZIGZAGGING GRID
Against the Cartesian Grid—one of the most emblematic signs of Modernist planning—the après-garde designs
cities challenging the reign of the Right Angle with dynamic rhizomes, acute and obtuse angles, and everything
PART but a CIAM Grid. Georges Candilis, Alexis Josic, and Shadrach Woods (members of Team 10 and heirs of the
II
72
CIAM), propose and build some of their streets-in-the-air zigzagging in Toulouse. An antagonist of the CIAM,
Constant renders in one of his visions of New Babylon a building in rhythmic resonance to Le Mirail (1974). In an
IMAGE encounter between Urbanists and Unitary Urbanists, between Utopians of the Present and Situationists, a new
9/10 Zigzagging grid promises to reformat Modernist ideology and the city ad infinitum.
Modernism lies in the anti-Modernism
of the Cynics, as Le Corbusieaness
shows up uninvited in the scaffoldings
of Mobile Architecture, in the floating
sectors of New Babylon, and the
zig-zagging Cartesian grids of Team
10. In their search for idealized forms
of freedom, these Megastructures
embody both a historical impasse—
with their capitalist counterparts
concretizing their desire in the
Shopping Mall—and the extreme
state of architectural ideology at the
ultimate stage of late-Modernism.
In the same way that Le Corbusier
hides the Manhattan skyscraper
behind the Cartesian towers of the
Radiant City and disguises New York
under the city in the park, the ide-
ological framework of the Modern
Movement camouflages one last
time into the playful diagonals, the
cities lifted on impossibly high pilo-
tis, and in the Psychogeographical
Dérive in a not-so-post-Modernist
Cadavre exquis.
.
If the Modernism of wide avenues,
garden towns, and elitist towers is
the ideological strategy, the après-
garde of Megastructures is the cyn-
ical farce. In its perpetual nostalgia
for a new beginning, Modernist
ideology evolves with the shaping
forces of cultural critique and tech-
nological advancements into ever
more ambitious all-encompassing
urban visions of futures shaped
by the (prescribed) power of
Architecture.
.
In the midst of an era of extremes
(destruction, consolidation, struggle,
disappointment, reincarnation), an
upcoming generation of architects,
designers, urbanists, thinkers, and
artists is confronted with Modernism
as a mature and adaptable form of
ideology, not only manifest in the
utopian dreams of urban specula-
tion, but as poured asphalt and cast
concrete. In order to overcome the
cynicism of an era unable to break
away from the urban programme of
Modernism, a new form of avant-
garde is forced to alter the goals,
strategies, and mediums of the
fighting front. Under the Cynical
pavement, the Kynical beach.
. POST-MODERNIST CLOUDS
Above the debris of the historical city, among the monuments to old regimes and urban plans, Constant and Yona
Friedman lift new cities with unlimited potential for expansion. On one side the ‘Situationists must take every
opportunity to oppose retrograde forces and ideologies’ by means of staggering sectors all across the map in search
PART for the homo ludens to take over the world. 12 On the opposite side, Yona Friedman lays out a spatial agglomeration
II

74
that ‘recalls a huge openwork slab or lattice with dimensions ranging from 300 to 1,200 meters’. 13 Like the Modernist
Plan for Universal Expansion, both approaches float like Utopian clouds above the fields of ideological architecture.
IMAGE Both plans offer an alternative form of urban scaffolding as anti-Modernist ideology. In the repetition of expansionist
PART II—CYNICISM 10/10 ambition, New Babylon and the Spatial City are Cynical re-presentations of the après-garde.
. .
. .
. .
. KYN
. I
. CISM
. .
PART .
III .
. . 77
. . . .
. . . .
. Every episode in a . .
. careful narrative is . .
. a premonition. . .
. . I live in my own place, .
. Jorge Luis Borges have never copied .
. . nobody even half, .
. . and at any master .
. . who lacks the grace .
. . to laugh at himself— .
. . I laugh. .
. . . .
. . Friedrich Nietzsche .
. . (Over the door to my house) .
. . . .
. . . .
. . . .
. . . .
. . . .
. . . .
. . . .
. . . .
. . . .
. . . .
. . . .

PART III—KYNICISM 78 NARRATIVE ARCHITECTURE 79

NARRATIVE If the 1920s are the formation years Architecture responds to the failure
. of Modernist ideology, and the 1950s of Post-Modernism to device a legi­
. is the era of the Cynical critique, the timate form of ideological critique.
. 1960s are highlighted by the allegor- It recognizes that no matter what
. ical lantern the Kynic uses to search historians, or theorists, or journalists
. for an honest architecture. claim, in its success Modernism
. . infiltrates all spheres of architectural
. While in the 1950s architecture and urban production. Narrative
. recovers from the total destruction Architecture lifts ideological masks
. of the War by dreaming of colossal to expose Diogenes Kynicisms.
. global reconstructions, with the .
. assassinations of Patrice Lumumba, .
. Martin Luther King Jr. Malcolm X, MAY
. and the Kennedys, the 1960s turn 1968
. into a sociopolitical nightmare. .
. Upheaval after riot, march after Upset with decades of utopian fail-
. protest, revolt after strike, the 1960s ures, 1968 marks an architectural
. are the decade of failed colonial inva- breaking point: with nostalgia, with
. sions and (potential) missile strikes, desire, with ambition. If the history
. the era of Black Power and Civil of Modern Architecture—and its
. Rights, the time of space conquest, ‘desperate afterbirths’—has been
. the war in Vietnam, the Prague the history for a search of utopia,
. Spring, and the Olympics in Mexico Narrative Architecture proposes
. City. a map to arrive at utopia. Narrative
. . Architecture presents Utopia as an
. The 1960s mark the (momentary) achieved goal. Narrative Architec­
. end of Architecture’s obsession with ture is Thomas More on steroids.
. ‘solving’ the city. In a Diogenesian Assembling fallen pieces of shat-
. state, Narrative Architecture refuses tered dreams, the prose of Narrative
. any form of pragmatic compromise, Architecture articulates histories of
. any form of social agenda, any form superlative proportions, gives voice
. of political assimilation. Narrative to unreasonable pretention, and
. Architecture is what’s left when the renderslandscapes of unfulfilled
. Grid has been exhausted as a func- expectations. The Architect in his
. tional tool, repurposed as a specula­ Kynical role produces Architecture
. tive model, and transformed into as a response to the inability to
. perpetual infrastructural and rep- provoke radical change by the usual
. resentation reincarnations. Narrative methods. The Kynic continues ‘the
. Architecture begins at the precise miscarried dialogue by other means’.
. moment when work, dwelling, ‘Ideology critique means the polemical con-
. recreation, and transportation refuse tinuation of the miscarried dialogue through
. to melt into air at the ‘end of history’. other means’. Peter Sloterdijk, Kritik der zynis-
. Narrative Architecture surges after chen vernunft (1983) translated into Critique
. the many failed attempts to kill of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred,
. Modernism, after its many mislead­ing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
. obituaries. Narrative Architecture is 1987), 15.
. the last resort of ideological critique .
. after the ‘rebirth’ of Modernism in Ostensibly anti-heroic, Narrative
. the shape of Supercuadras and Architecture rises up after the
. Governmental quarters, after its promise to absolve the city from
. resurrection in the streets-in-the-air, Modernist doctrines has failed.
. floating hangars, and clustered Narrative Architecture goes against
. sectors. the Kunderaesque kitsch of Post-
. . Modernism and its negation of
. Narrative Architecture lifts the shit—as the unacceptable in human
. masks of Post-war urbanism to existence. ‘Kitsch is the absolute denial
. reveal the CIAM lurking in the aerial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative
The birth of Narrative Architecture streets of the Smithsons and the senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything
marks the culmination of four dec- diagonal slabs and mat buildings of from its purview which is essentially unac- KYNICAL LANDSCAPE NO. 1:
ades of ideological struggle. Candilis, Josic, and Woods. Narrative ceptable in human existence’. Milan Kundera,
DIOGENES’ WATERFALLS
In the world rendered by Narrative Architecture, Kynical monuments drown in cascades of irony both, heroic
dreams of success and nightmares of colossal failure. The utopia of gridded urbanism, of parks in the city, of
PART megalopolitan buildings, of efficient social stratification becomes a tangible image of architectural delirium where
III

80
tragedy becomes farce and farce turns into tragedy. Continuous Monuments of radical indifference envelop the
world, rendering obsolete, decades of mechanical desires and poetic conjectures. The incessant noise of the bustling
IMAGE city is silenced by hardcore landscapes where the most pressing urban questions of the twentieth century turn
PART III—KYNICISM 1/12 into mist and evaporate like the solid that melts into air.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans.
Michael Henry Heim, (New York: Harper & Row
It rebels against
Publishers, 1984), 130.
an aesthetic ideal blaming a ‘style’
for Architectural failure—ignoring all
sociopolitical and economic factors—
in order to be superimposed with
another style. Narrative Architecture
observes how Post-Modernist kitsch
‘causes two tears to flow in quick
succession’; the first tear saying:
how terrible to see an architectural
style failing people; the second
tear saying: how nice to be moved,
together with all mankind by terrible
architectural styles failing people.
Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being,
130.Against Post-Modernist kitsch,
the Kynic assumes a comic rigidity
that develops ‘a sort of professional
callousness’, where the character
(the City) is so ‘tightly jammed into
the rigid frame of his functions
that there’s no room to move or to
be moved’ like the rest of human-
kind. Henry Bergson, Le Lire (1900) trans-
lated as Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of
the Comic, trans. Cloudesely Brereton and Fred
Rothwell (Maryland: Arc Manor, 2008), 84.
. plugs in a premonition of a physical
Instead of challenging dogmas,
Narrative Architecture magnifies
the hierarchical division of the elitist
city, accentuates the dehumanizing
character of monumental highways
and imitates the scalelessness of
post-industrial free space. In their
views, Kynical landscapes frame
Continuous Monuments, colossal
supermarkets, and endless park­ing
lots reflecting the absurd scenarios
driving architecture since the in­ven­
tion of Modernism. When playgrounds
for children of the war are inserted
in the city, Narrative Archi­tecture
creates endless playgrounds for
human-players emancipated by
automated freedom floating over
the urban debris of global bellicose
struggle.
. allows to ‘state what ought to be
Rather than reconfiguring the city,
the Kynics present a flawless city
to question the means of architec-
tural and urban production. If before
drawing existed as truth, now draw-
ing exists as irony. In the world
rendered by Narrative Architecture,
the universal grammar of Cartesian
obsession is typewritten as the
PART III—KYNICISM
coordinates of terminal abstraction.
If machines set humans free from
work, and future architecture mixes
dwelling, recreation, and circulation,
the Narratives of the Kynics draw,
with machinistic precision, ultra-
flexible space occupied by wandering
hippies and post-capitalist cavemen.
In these new scenarios the hyper-
functionalism of the Engineer
Aesthetic is finally consummated
in Aerodynamic Cities, plans of
lines and dots, and immaculate
Floor-Area-Ratio.
. simultaneously to two altogether
In the world of Narrative Archi­
tecture, the generic is turned into
the architecture of uselessness.
The Kynical project is the search
for nothingness in the project of an
architectural laughter, that, as Kant
affirms is ‘the result of an expec-
tation, which, of a sudden, ends
in nothing’. Bergson, Laughter…, 45.
The narratives, plans, grids, land-
scapes, and buildings of the Kynics
are Monuments to nothingness.
Infrastructure is reduced to an even
covering of the field and sporadically
internet. The competition proposal
and the International Congress is
transformed into self-commissioned
jokes, romantic poems, and post-
cards from post-industrial worlds.
The chefs-d’oeuvre: Twelve Ideal
Cities, Flagrant délit, No-Stop City,
a film about life in the Supersurface,
a Theory of Congestion as backstage
for the ultimate ideological critique.
. it ‘turns something to appear mean
. that was formerly dignified’. Bergson,
UNMASKINGS
. is a picture of total(itarian) ideolog-
In order to be an effective tool
against the seriousness of archi-
tectural discourse, Narrative
Architecture relies on a subversive
power that oscillates between
humour and irony. If irony is what
done, and pretend to believe that this
is just what is actually being done’,
then humour ‘describes with scru­
pulous minuteness what is being
done, and pretends to believe that
is just what ought to be done’.
Bergson, Laughter…, 62-63.
. impossible landscapes, and allegor-
. ical texts are real depictions mirror-
Narrative Architecture paints
cheeky portraits of the shortcoming
of ideology—turning disillusion into
mockery, disappointment into sub-
versive critique, pessimism into
Kynical reason. The project of
Narrative Architecture is the project
of the comical aspect of utopia,
achieved through the Bergsonian
triad of ‘repetition’ (where things
happen again and again); ‘inversion’
of the roles of this or that architec-
ture; and the ‘reciprocal interference
of series’ when a situation ‘belongs
independent series of events and is
capable of being interpreted in two
entirely different meanings at the
same time’. Bergson, Laughter…, 49-50.
.
Through ‘repetition’, ‘inversion’, and
the ‘reciprocal interference of series’
the Kynic deciphers and imitates the
‘artistic’, ‘poetic’, and ‘priest-like’
language of visionary architecture,
and with Diogenesian precision
‘shows the absurdity’ behind it.
For Diogenes ‘purpose is to show the absurdity
existing in human lives, there is no impropriety
or objection to our being seen imitating poets
or artists or, if need be, priests of purification
and to our striving to furnish illustrations and
examples from every source’. ‘Diogenes: The
Complete Collection’ in The Complete Works
of Dio Chrysostom, (Hastings: Delphi Classics,
2017).
Against
Bergson, Laughter…, 37-64.
seriousness, Narrative Architecture
transforms utopia into a laughable
matter by means of degradation, as
Laughter…, 61. Narrative Architecture
ical control by means of architec-
tural, economic, formal, and social
forces shaping the city. Narrative
Architecture is urban megalomania
without pretence. Its components
are exaggerated characteristics
innate to architecture. Narrative
Architecture is Architectural ambi-
tion freed from the pragmatic distor-
tions of selective inhibition.
.
Narrative Architecture is not Utopian
(Since Utopia has been Kynically
achieved). Its colossal monuments,
KYNICAL LANDSCAPE NO. 2:
CHESS ENDGAME
In 1969, just after the revolts in Paris, the Moon landing, the Prague Spring, and the colossal dreams of never ending
PART urban sectors-in-the-air, a series of pastoral landscapes summon radical forms of Kynical urbanism. Pavement
III
82
bricks, military tanks, and rioting masses are part of a historical chessboard surrounded by idyllic grass fields and
flocks of indifferent sheep. Against the predictability of the après-garde’s naively utopian moves, the Kynic attacks
IMAGE ideology like a chess endgame where surrealist actions, Vriesendorpian speculations, dynamic histograms, and
2/12 marble and granite plinths, are all pieces of tactical provocation.
ing the absurd scenarios imagined
by architectural discourse. Narrative
Architecture is a Lacanian mirror
for architecture to reach its critical
maturity while checking itself and
its enlarged ambitions. Narrative
Architecture implies the sublime
autonomy of theory. It is pure theory
under a magnifying glass.
. the disguising masks of social im-
The Kynicism (‘kynisch’) in the
Narratives is what allows Archi­
tecture to imagine the possibility
to ‘live in spite of history; to maintain
‘irony about politics; mistrust toward
“plans”’, and perform ‘existential
reduction’. Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical
Reason, xxvii, xxix. It is Architecture as
‘endless supermarket’, ‘continuous
monument’ and ‘voluntary imprison-
ment’. Narrative Architecture is the
product of failed struggles and lost
wars. It recognizes its inability to
‘win’ the fight against ideology. It
feeds from past, present, and future
failures. Because it learned that
Team 10, Yona Friedman, and even
artist-turned-unitary-urbanist
Constant couldn’t break free from
the Modernist discourse of urbanist
ambition and the instruments
deployed by its ideology, Narrative
Architecture turns the tools of ideol-
ogy against themselves.
. all of these come up with patterns, and risk
If Modernism uses every medium
available—publications, architecture,
urban plans, even the CIAM as a
screen to project its intentions—to
shoot down the opposition, Narrative
Architecture points the ideological
cannons back at Modernism (and
whoever joined its ideological army).
When an architectural position tries
to climb to the pedestal of ideology
and avoid ‘coming voluntarily to the
table of negotiation’ with its oppo-
nents, subversive architecture
summons the Kynical properties of
Narrative to re-establish the con­
versation and expose the lies. If
architecture promises a city made
of glittering cement, Narrative
Archi­tecture casts the whole world
in reinforced concrete. If architec-
ture renders buildings behind curtains
of densely green foliage, Narrative
Architecture depicts a universe con-
tained in a forest of skyscraping
trees. If architecture decides to surf
PART III—KYNICISM
the waves of economic and social
indifference, Narrative Architecture
washes the world away with the
crushing force of a neoliberal
tsunami.
. .
Narrative Architecture tackles every
form of ‘enlightened false conscious­
ness’ and reveals what lies behind
promptu and urban reconstruction,
of the intoxicating greenery of cer-
tified sustainability and neo­liberal
social philanthropy, of the aesthetic
fantasies turned urban oversimplifi-
cations of parametricism and other
momentary fashionable trends, of
the dangerously negligent histori-
cal inaccuracies of contemporary
‘story-tellers’ in their whitewashed
worlds of privilege and kingdoms of
status-quo, of the abstract generic
nonsense of awards and rankings
and other forms of ‘crapstraction’,
of the perverse reductionism of
cartoonish diagrams and immacu-
lately clean renders. ‘How does the NSA
distil patterns from randomly collected data?
Crapstraction? How are academic ranking
scores calculated? Crapstraction?
How does Google know whether you’re a robot
or not? How does contemporary biology, eco-
nomics, computational science, social network
analysis, art investment consultancy, how do
analysis, and reputation scores? Is this maybe
Crapstraction?’ For a more detailed description
of Crapstraction, a term coined by Art Critic
Jerry Saltz, see Hito Steyerl’s lecture ‘Why
Games? Can an Art Professional Think?’ at
Narra­
Fundacio Antoni Tapies (June 8, 2016).
tive Architecture doesn’t shoot down
the banners and slogans of archi-
tectural propaganda; it reads them
aloud against the ideological wind
so as to reveal in the reverbe­rating
echo their evident absurdity. Against
alternative facts and alternative
utopias, Narrative Archi­­tec­ture
performs ideological unmasking to
expose the inner workings of power
structures and their relationship
to Architecture and Urbanism. The
Method of Unmasking as a Kynical process is
borrowed from Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical
Reason, 22-75.
. contradictions’. Archizoom, ‘No-Stop City’,
. 178. In its hyper-utilitarian nature,
. No-Stop City is reduced to the
. hyper-programming of architectural
UNMASKING I:
NO
STOP
CITY
1969
During 1969, Archizoom is working
on a project of Narrative Architec­
ture. In the plans for ‘City, Assembly
Line of Social Issues: Ideology and
Theory of the Metropolis’ that even-
tually develops into ‘No-Stop City:
Residential Park, Universal Climatic
System’, a series of texts, drawings,
collages, models, and installations
that introduce the ultimate abstrac-
tion of the functional, abstract,
Modernist grid, the final reduction
of the plan, and the consummate
‘singularity’ of the programme. Once
identified as the principal drivers of
the City, the Factory model (of pro-
duction) and the Consumption model
are integrated into a Supermarket,
the ‘new model of the future city’,
with its ‘homogeneous utopian
struc­ture, private functionality,
rational sublimation of consump-
tion’. Archizoom Associati, ‘City, Assembly
Line of Social Issues: Ideology and Theory in the
Metropolis’, (Casabella Magazine: No. 350-351,
July-August 1970) in Andrea Branzi, No-Stop
City: Archizoom Associati, (Orleans: Editions
HYX, 2006), 173.
.
In the new programme of No-Stop
City ‘the factory and the supermar-
ket become the specimen models
of the future city: optimal urban
structures, potentially limitless,
where human functions are arranged
spontaneously in a free field, made
uniform by a system of micro accli-
matization and optimal circulation
and information’. Archizoom, ‘No-Stop
City: Residential Parkings Climatic Universal
Sistem’, (Domus Magazine, No. 496 March
The
1971) op. in Branzi, No Stop City… 178.
con­tradiction of the city as the
represen­tation of a system of values
is cancelled, since ‘the city no
longer “represents” the system, but
becomes the systems itself, pro-
grammed and isotropic, and within GROUND UNIVERSAL MODERNIZATION PILOT PLAN
it the various functions are con­- After each of the Cynical projects of the après-garde—with their floating sectors, sky lattices, and zigzagging streets-
tained homogeneously, without in-the-air—fails to break away from the straightjacket of Modernist (idealist) ideology; after the Modernist City is
‘reborn’ in Brasilia, and Southdale Center efficiently embodies a Capitalist Utopia in a Megastructure, a generation
of Kynics seek to deal with ideology with a different approach. Each of the Kynical Universal Modernization Pilot
Plans—named after kyon, the Greek word for ‘dog’, since they are devised to bite the ideological masks away, and
piss over ideological pretensions—consists of unfiltered, enhanced forms of Architectural ambition ad absurdum.
The first of the plans—too large to be called ‘Architecture’—lays indifferently over meandering rivers and green
pastures. Too heavy to move, this very big box (one of several) contains a Universal Modernization Pilot Plan of office
partitions, bed cubicles, and supermarket stalls. At this scale ‘the metropolis ceases to be “a place”; to become a
PART “condition”: in fact, it is just this condition which is made to circulate uniformly, through consumer products in the
III
84
social phenomenon’. 1 This box is all an interior—a Metropolitan condition as Megastructure without Architecture.
The first No-Stop City. Exposed through the transparencies on the ground plan, a Supersurface—highway for the
IMAGE efficient travel of communication and energy—lurks as a continuous charging device, a battery to recharge the
3/12 colossal volume and all the programmes taking place in its interior.
and urban space, since ‘Production
and Consumption possess one and
the same ideology, which is that of
Programming’. Archizoom, ‘No-Stop
City’, 178.
. regarded as a new invention that
In the drawings of No-Stop City, the
regulating lines of the hyper-func-
tional ‘Programming’ take over
the surface of the Earth with Le
Corbusiean indifference. The City
(or planet for what it matters) is the
product of the mechanic reproduc-
tion of a new form of Cartesian Grid.
The ‘Diagramma abitativo omogeneo’
(Homogeneous Living Diagram) with
its typewritten dots and X’s repre-
sents urbanism as ultimate abstrac-
tion. Architecture as a Pilot Plan for
Concrete Poetry:
X……..X……..X……..X……..X……..X……
..X……..X……..X……..X……..X……..X……
..X……..X……..X……..X……..X
…………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………
…………………
. meaning­less coordinates, points
In its Wittgensteinean understanding
of the limits of language as deter­
mi­nant of the limits of the world,
Archi­zoom identifies, deciphers,
and imitates the language of ideol-
ogy. Through hardcore abstraction
and hardcore repetition, they create
a model of Narrative Architecture
based on both literary and graphic
terms by using ‘classical written
language and a graphic language,
more specific’ to the discipline (and
ideology) of (Modernist) Architec­
ture. Archizoom, ‘City, Assembly, Line of
Social Issues’, in Branzi, No-Stop City, 157. The
result is language that in its extreme
reduction represents a different form
of ‘Utopia’ of ‘optimal communica-
tion’ (cleansed from allegory or
symbolism) that is ‘solely instrumen-
tal’, as it ‘represents itself’, ‘not a
prefiguration of a different Model of
the System (which does not exist as
a working-class Metropolis), but as
a critical Hypothesis related to the
system itself’. Archizoom, ‘City, Assembly,
Line of Social Issues’, 157.
. “functions” which are complemen-
Resisting the many variations of
the Post-War après-garde with its
Mobile Architecture and super­
structural Sectors, No-Stop City
stands in stark contrast with the
PART III—KYNICISM
search for a better future. The uto-
pian goal lying behind every idealistic
enterprise is substituted by a lack of
solutions, providing instead urbanism
as diagnosis. No longer is the ‘plan’
overwrites the set of instructions as
outlined by Modernist ideology in its
multiple manifestations, No-Stop
City is a Rorschach test in which the
urban form of Modernist delirium is
manifest in Narrative inkblots.
. urbanism (city of production) for
The statistics and analysis of the
Modernist City gathered in the CIAM
Grille are accelerated to the condi-
tion of the city as accumulation of
data. If the city is a ‘bath every 100
meters or a computer every 40’,
No-Stop City provides floor plans
with the ‘quantifiable data making
up’ the city. Where Le Corbusier
proposes the Radiant City as an
abstract grammar for the Modernist
City, Archizoom reduces urbanism
to an intelligible vocabulary of
spreading ad infinitum on an empty
surface.
. dots and lines, and with it the victory
No longer interested in ‘creating a
metropolis which is more humane
and better organized’, Archizoom
aims for ‘understanding the objective
laws which control the shaping of
the urban-architectural phenome­
non’. Through Archizoom’s abstract­
scapes, Narrative Architecture
presents a form of urbanism as a tool
for the demystification of ideology
and its programmatic, formal, and
spatial implications. In No-Stop City,
work, recreation, transportation and
dwelling are abstracted as a hybrid,
homogeneous, and sterile landscape
occupied by dwelling, office space
and supermarkets.
. insomuch as it is a formal structure’.
The ultimate reduction from ideolog-
ical values (programme) to produc-
tion space is performed after Society
is organized within a ‘Production
Plan’, in a system where the ‘sole
action is the distinction of different
tary, but homogeneous’. Archizoom,
‘City, Assembly, Line of Social Issues’, 161. This
homogenization pushes work, dwell-
ing, recreation, and transportation
(together with the posterior cynical
takes on the role of recreation as
a factor in the World post-war and
post-work) to its extreme ‘when
the working class “overlaps” with
Society itself by way of the plan’,
and ‘Capital sees its calling to Unity
“confirmed”’ attenuating the ‘ethi-
cal tension of Culture as a potential
duty-to-be’ since there ‘is no longer
any “other” reality on which to be
projected’. Archizoom, ‘City, Assembly, Line
of Social Issues’, 161. In this Supermarket
culture to exist it ‘must become a
“productive” function, a category
striving to produce quantitatively’.
Archizoom, ‘City, Assembly, Line of Social
Archizoom performs the
Issues’, 161.
Kynical method when it reconsiders
and exploits the original intention
of the Modernist city by pushing it
to its uninterrupted, unobstructed
apotheosis, not just as ‘place’, but
as ‘representation’. Archizoom pre-
sents No-Stop City taking over the
VR-8 diagram of Le Corbusier, with
its original plan to conquest New
York, Paris, and Buenos Aires, this
time overwritten by the spreading
of an urbanism of ‘pure quantity’ over
‘urban typologies, traffic’. No-Stop
City is the Radiant City of Radiant
Cities. A sort of terminal distillation
taking over the Modernist plot of
urbanism as abstract climax.
.
By recognizing the Le Corbusiean
premise (as clearly manifested in the
CIAM) that architecture and urban-
ism are indiscernible one from the
other, No-Stop City stands as a
‘metaphor for a refusal of the figu-
rative role of architecture and the
modification of its structures of use’,
where the ‘problem becomes that of
freeing mankind from architecture
Archizoom, No-Stop City, 179. Archizoom
puts into practice an architecture-
less urbanism, making the city and
architecture one and the same. In
this condensation of concepts, the
hyper-efficient city renders archi-
tecture redundant at the moment it
loses its character and importance.
The result is a city without archi-
tecture, or—announcing the obso-
lescence of the Megastructure in
this system—a city as architecture.
FLOATING UNIVERSAL MODERNIZATION PILOT PLAN
PART Another colossal volume, more or less the same size as the very big box anchored on the ground, floats above
III
86
an open landscape. This time the volume has unbearable lightness. Weightless like a New Babylonian cloud,
the mirrored surface of the structure reflects a form of ideological Architecture—a previous desire to change
IMAGE the world. This Megastructure is pure Architecture—it has no interior, no programme, offers no lifestyle,
4/12 gives away no Ideology.
No-Stop City is Urbanism minus
architecture. Its endless urbanism is
an anti-Megastructure.
. the world rendered uniform by
If the diagrams and section drawings
of the No-Stop City highlight the
mechanical reduction of the city—
always displayed as a system indif-
ferent from the particularities of the
human condition—with their façade-
less boxes and colossal garden roofs,
the models and exterior images
reveal that within the apotheosis
of the Modernist city even the Five
Points for a Contemporary Archi­
tecture are excessive luxuries that
can (and should) be purged. In the
world rendered by Archizoom, where
the Machine Age has reached its
full potential, Le Corbusier would be
unnecessary. In its path to unleashed
Machinistic potential, the theory of
Quantitative Existence pushes for a
radical overhaul of representation,
removing the architect from the
process of designing the future city
and leaving instead its Diogenesian
imitation. No-Stop City renders
a Modernist apotheosis minus Le
Corbusier.
. and humanity doesn’t need archi-
. tecture—or the city—to respond to
UNMASKING II:
IL
MONUMENTO
CONTINUO
1969
. .
In 1969 Superstudio is also working
on a Narrative Architecture project.
Il Monumento Continuo (The
Continuous Monument) consists
of storyboards and images of land-
scapes with an inertly predetermined
form of architecture. In these land-
scapes ‘Monuments’ consisting of
megaliths, walls, and blocks with
mirrored façades and (sometimes)
reticulated grids appear on open
fields, above and within historical
cities, parallel to transportation
infrastructure, or in place of theo­
logical monuments of historical
gravitas. Always indifferent to their
contexts, these Monuments show
an architecture of total, radical
‘otherness’. The Monuments never
‘blend-in’ with their contexts. Their
contexts are always indifferent to
their architectures.
PART III—KYNICISM
The Monument, a ‘form of archi­-
­tec­ture all equally emerging from
a single continuous environment:
tech­nology, culture, and all the other
inevitable forms of imperialism’,
retakes the obsession of the Mod­
ernist City with the development
of new technologies and cultural
artefacts. Superstudio, ‘The Continuous
Monument: an Architectural Model for Total
Urbanization’, originally ‘Il Monumento
Continuo’ (1969), in Superstudio: Life without
Objects, ed. Peter Lang, William Menking,
However,
(Milan: Skira Editore, 2003), 126.
if the car, airplane, and the electric
turbine justified the functionalist
form of the urban plans of Le Cor­
busier—and the nuclear relays and
artificial conditioning the plans of
Friedman and Constant—the Con­
tinuous Monument is rendered
obsolete once technology has
reached the point where programme
is emancipated from the urban pro-
cesses linked to production. Like in
the New Babylonian dream of auto-
mation, the Continuous Monument
presents the outlook of an architec-
ture once work has been abolished
any functional value. The Continuous
Monument is a form of hyper dis-
functional architecture. A monument
to the emancipation of work from
any form of human activity.
If in No-Stop City the city is reduced
to Programming, in the Continuous
Monument the city is dissolved into
programmeless architectural form.
The Monument makes evident the
primary act of architecture as a
‘closed, immobile object’ leading
nowhere but to itself and to reason.
The Monument is the ultimate arti-
fice of rational efficiency, technology,
sacredness, and utilitarianism. The
Continuous Monument renders the
future of the city after its mere exist-
ence has become redundant. The
Continuous Monument is what is left
after the city—as a centre for the
accumulation of production and
consumption of capital—has been
abolished.
. Monuments of Superstudio are as
In this demostrato per absurdum
(demonstration of the absurd),
Superstudio projects a condition of
architecture without the city. In
these landscapes, shape-shifting
behemoths mostly have no pro-
gramme, serve no purpose, and have
no other form of relation to humanity
than the ideological relationship
humanity can have with inert objects.
The Monuments are Pure Modernist
form liberated by the extreme appli­-
cation of Modernist dogma. Like
Hardcore Modernism, these Monu­
ments are the response to a ‘time
when cities where built with no
single plan’. Superstudio, ‘The Continuous
Monument’, 145.
.
While Archizoom exploits in No-Stop
City the hyper-functionalism of the
Modern Movement, with the Contin­
uous Monument Superstudio exposes
the terminal state of the heroic
ambitions; not only of its urbanism,
but of its afterbirths in the projects
of the Cynics (Team 10, Yona Fried­
man / GEAM, Constant). Each
Monument, with its colossal scale
and gridded façades Kynically laughs
at the Cartesian skyscrapers and
the CIAM Grille, at the Golden Lane
and Free University, at Paris Spatiale
and New Babylon. The Monument
‘repeats’ ad infinitum the strategies
of Modernism until reaching the
plateau of senselessness; ‘inverses’
the role of architecture as the
city—nothing happens in these
architectures: no production, no con-
sumption, just ‘existence’—and per-
forms the ‘reciprocal interference
of series’ by opening (and eventually
creating) a Pandora’s Box of sym-
bolic references.
.
The Continuous Monument not only
Kynically connects with its subjects
of critique, but by adhering to the
legacy of ‘black stones, rocks fallen
from the sky, or erected in the earth:
dolmens, obelisks, Cosmic axis, vital
elements’; it welcomes the history
of architecture to participate in the
demolition of the Modernist project.
Superstudio, ‘The Continuous Monument’, 126.
What results is an ideological smack
down of historical proportions. In
its post-ideological character, the
programmeless as Stonehenge or
the Pyramids in Giza are in today’s
METROPOLITAN UNIVERSAL MODERNIZATION PILOT PLAN
The third very large box is a dialectical structure—a combination of fulfilled expectation at the Megastructural
scale, and a homogeneous layout of individual totems of unaccomplished desire. Crossing over Manhattan, as
‘the superstructure passes over the Hudson and the point of the peninsula joining Brooklyn and New Jersey’, it
PART exposes a series of cruciform skyscrapers as a reminder of the time New York motivated an Urbanism of a ‘single
III
88
plan’. Facing New York, the Cartesian skyscraper is introduced as laughable delusion—a ‘Modernist Magician’
hiding in the ‘black velvet pouch of his speculative universe’ the American Skyscraper to pull out the ‘Horizontal
IMAGE Skyscraper’. 2 Long misunderstood as ‘another Utopia’, the Continuous Monument is laughter as illusion—
5/12 Urbanism as an all-encompassing building. 3
society. In a future where the city
has been rendered obsolete since
technology has emancipated human-
ity from every ‘functional’ necessity,
architecture turns into Pure Hard­
corist form, or the potential platonic
container of projected meaning.
.
With the Continuous Monument and
No-Stop City, the Kynics explore ad-
absurdum the ‘what if’ as suggested
by Le Corbusier through his plans
and his techno-fetishist publications.
Both Kynical Narratives reveal, under
the light casted by their Diogenesian
lanterns, an architecture honestly
representing the terminal stage of
functionalism and technological
achievement. If with No-Stop City,
Archizoom exploits the hyper-func-
tionalism of the Modern Movement
in its infatuation with ‘programme’,
with the Continuous Monument,
Superstudio exposes the ultimate
state of the heroic ambitions of its
urbanism as monument.
.
The forced marriage between
architecture and the city—where
architecture becomes the city—is
addressed by the Kynical removal of
architecture from the city (No-Stop
City) and by the ironic elimination
the city from architecture (the
Continuous Monument). In No-Stop
City urbanism is reduced to a system
of unobstructed functions to the
point where the city doesn’t need
architecture. In the Continuous
Monument, architecture is reduced
to a system of sublime form to the
extreme where architecture, in its
hyper-objective status, renders the
city obsolete. In a Kynical operation,
the problem of form and function
(wherever form follows function or
function follows form) is solved, in
one case by removing the problem
of form (Archizoom), and in the other
by eliminating the need for function
(Superstudio).
.
Across the dots, lines, cubicles, and
stalls of No-Stop City, the theory of
the free plan as universal doctrine
enhances the relationship between
productive society and its functional
programme—office space for work,
beds for sleeping, supermarket for
consumption, and the universal park-
PART III—KYNICISM
With the ing lots as monuments to transpor-
tation. The Continuous Monument
Continuous
fills the gap between ‘rationality and
the unconscious’ with geometrical
apparitions in the forms of cubes,
Monument or ‘long continuous lines’, devoid of
any function. No-Stop City and
and No-Stop The Continuous Monument explore
by Kynical means two potential
City, the
outcomes of technological hyper-
development. In No-Stop City, work
covers every aspect of life—since
Kynics explore production has taken over every
space—depicting a city that adapts
ad-absurdum to this hyper-productive condition
where culture is transformed into
the ‘what if’
a series of ‘quantitative functions’.
For Superstudio work—as the means
of production—is nowhere to be
as suggested found, making the disappearance
of the city—as the centre for the
by Le production and accumulation of
capital—imperative, and rendering
Corbusier
functional programmes—in their
relationship to production—obsolete.
.
through his Like Modernism in its purist version,
the Continuous Monument reflects
plans and the idea of a ‘single design’, a con-
cept that like the Radiant City,
his techno-
Paris Spatiale, and New Babylon,
‘can be transferred from one area
fetishist
to another, remaining unchanged’.
Superstudio, ‘The Continuous Monument’, 131.
The Continuous Monument doesn’t
publications. engage with the city and infrastruc-
ture, but it becomes the volume
.
previously occupied by them. While
Archizoom creates a blueprint for
.
unlimited expansion by retaking the
plan as a drawing to outline a form
of universal urban homogenization,
. Superstudio retakes the collage as
a strategy of superimposition every
.
time its radically austere monuments
are plastered on top of pre-existing
.
conditions. Archizoom draws a
no-stopping abstract plan of endless
city in detriment of architecture.
. Superstudio collages post(ideologi­
cal) cards of radically neutral Archi­
. tecture as the ultimate substitution
of the city.
.
.
THE MIRROR STAGE
The Continuous Monument is not A Kynical ‘Skyline becomes a diagram of the natural accumulation which has taken the place of capital itself’,
an alternative model for Modernist displaying two different states of Architectural being: everything and nothingness. 4 One is Aerodynamic City,
. urbanization, but rather the ultimate
model for Modernism after urbani-
the logical step after the city, the supermarket, and the factory have been fused into one large space for
Programming—for the planned condensation of Production and Consumption. Aerodynamic City is an optimal
.
urban structure, potentially limitless, where human functions are arranged spontaneously in a free field, made
zation. Instead of solving the city as
uniform by a system of micro-acclimatization and optimal circulation of information. Aerodynamic City predicts
a platform for production, the city is today’s Photovoltaic, Windmill, Thermonuclear, Fracking, Parametric, Green, Smart City. Next to Aerodynamic
City stand a Supermonument and a Supermirror. The Lacanian structures reveal the Mirror Stage of Narrative
Architecture: where Grids (Supersurface) are displayed in their programmatic uselessness, and Monuments project
PART their Superindifference and the Supernothingness in their lack of ambition. If for Modernism the Grid organizes the
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90
plan for all the activities taking place on the surface of the Earth, the Continuous Monument is just a gigantic, omni-
present, shape-shifting Grid where Acts may happen but nothing is ever planned. If the Plan foresees everything
IMAGE happening in the Superproductive Urbanism of pure ‘function’ of Aerodynamic City, in the Continuous Monument
6/12 the mirroring Grid reflects its lack of plan.
abolished together with the need
for its utilitarian functions. Like
No-Stop City, the Continuous
Monument presents the landscapes
of the sublime victory of ideology.
The Continuous Monument is pure
ideology minus dialectic. It offers
no urbanism, only architecture.
. ‘the horror of us and our surround-
Through ‘repetition, inversion, and
reciprocal interference of series’
the Kynic once again magnifies the
blatant oversimplification of ide-
ology. Against the perpetuation of
the status quo by means of elabo-
rating alternative behaviour models,
the Continuous Monument takes
Modernist ideology and its ‘pro-
cesses to their limit, showing per
absurdum their falsity and immoral-
ity’ Adolfo Natalini, “Inventory, Catalogue,
System of Flux … a Statement”. Lecture at the
AA School of Architecture on March 3, 1971,
in Superstudio: Life without Objects, 164-167.,
their ‘enlightened false conscious-
ness’. Like No-Stop City, the Con­
tinuous Monument lifts the masks
that hide the ideology.
. conquest and biological control
. (Fourth City: Spaceship City).
UNMASKING III:
TWELVE
CAUTIONARY
TALES
AND
FUNDAMENTAL
ACTS
1971
. Production Conveyor Belt), it is
Two years after the Continuous
Monument, Superstudio produces
two more Narrative Architectures.
Twelve Cautionary Tales for
Christ­mas and Fundamental Acts,
com­plement and continue the
Kynical critique of the Diogenesian
Monuments beyond their ‘original’
anti-Modernist objective.
. progress (Brazilian Positivism under
Once the ‘original’ Kynical act has
been achieved and Purist, Hardcore
Modernism has been exposed in its
ideological objective, Twelve Cau­
tionary Tales for Christmas renders
other forms of critique and ideologi-
cal superstructures. With meticulous
precision, Twelve Cautionary Tales
brings back the city to the critical
foray and injects programmes back
into architecture through texts
PART III—KYNICISM
and montages, revealing the thin line
between ambition and oppression,
between architecture as utopian goal
and urbanism as collective night­
mare. As a form of warning, each
latent environmental, technological,
or sociological scenario is occupied
by an architecture complicit with
ings’, with cities displaying the
dangerous moment when ‘the logic
of the system’ ‘becomes rigorously
logic’. Superstudio, ‘Twelve Cautionary Tales
for Christmas’ (1971), in Superstudio: Life with-
out Objects, 161.
. programmed conditions. If the
Presenting the footprint of Kynical
narrative as multidirectional critique,
when Twelve Cautionary Tales for
Christmas is not alluding to the
destructive optimism of projects
like the Cubo-Futurist opera Victory
Over The Sun, with the story of a
‘smart cube laying over the ruins of
post-apocalyptic New York’ (Third
City: New York of Brains), it narrates
the suspiciously dangerous bio-tech-
nological alliance between cosmic
Superstudio, ‘Twelve Cautionary Tales for
Christmas’, 150-161.
. the Continuous Monument renders
When the Narrative is not addressing
the city as manifestation of the per-
petual cycle of consumption and the
psychological pressure on its inhab-
itants (Seventh City: Continuous
working to reveal the dangers of
systemic population control in a Le
Corbusiean-like City-Machine where
if detractors ‘get off the obligatory
routes, they will inevitably get
crushed by its machinery’ (Ninth
City: the Ville Machine Habitée).
When the Kynical plot is not exposing
the underlying violence of order and
military rule?) in the story of a city
that has ‘apparently, nothing strange
about it’ but where the long seating
mayor comes with the idea of ‘suiting
the inhabitants to the city’ instead
of trying to ‘suit the city to its inhab-
itants’ (Tenth City: City of Order), it
is questioning the reader’s level of
complicity with the ‘game’ of the city
as a form for the consolidation of
power, for the construction of ideol-
ogy, and for the structuration of the
oppressing, all controlling system.
Superstudio, ‘Twelve Cautionary Tales for
Christmas’, 150-161.
.
A year later, Superstudio produces
part of their narrative Five Funda­
mental Acts: Life, Education,
Cere­mony, Life, and Death. If the
Cautionary Tales warn about twelve
different ways Ideology infiltrates
the city as an ideologically pro-
grammed instrument, Fundamental
Acts delves into the condition of
archi­­tec­ture as infrastructure for
Cautionary Tales explain what
happens to life in the City, the
Funda­mental Acts explains life
after the City.
.
The Fundamental Acts imagine life
after the promise of technology to
release life from the constraint of
form has been fulfilled. In a future of
extreme technological development,
the four points of the Modernist City
are instead substituted by ‘the great
themes, the fundamental themes
of our lives’. Superstudio, ‘Fundamental
Acts: Introduction’, Graz, 6 July 1973. From
While
Superstudio: Life Without Objects, 177.
programmeless architectures as
functionless forms, the Fundamental
Acts present autonomous program­
mes enhanced by formless hyper-
functional architectures. The world
of transactions of No-Stop City
where the city is the infrastructure
for living, consuming, and working,
finds parallel in the natural pro-
cesses in Five Fundamental Acts,
where infrastructure allows for the
redefinition of primary actions.
.
In the same way that the Funda­
mental Acts calls for the removal
of all architectural form (and all
forms of architecture) since the
Supersurface barely interacts with
Life, Education, Love, and Death,
Kynicism calls for ‘the removal of all
archimanias’ and their connotations UNDER THE PAVEMENT, THE GRID
of ‘cosmetic, environmental pollu- In the tradition of May 68, the Kynics reveal under the pavement laid out by the après-garde (Team 10, Yona
tion, and cosolatrix afflictorium’. Friedman, Constant) to cover the tracks of Modernist Ideology—with streets-in-the-air, Spatial lattices, and
Superstudio, ‘Fundamental Acts: Introduction’, colossal playgrounds—the flawless Grids, Machine-Age coordinates, and the 0 0 0 0 0 ((((0 0 0 0 0Z Z Z Z Z 0 0 0 0 0
In the Kynical arena of the Funda­
177. of an Immaculately abstract Typewritten Urbanism.
Monuments and Grids (both fundamental instruments of Modernist Planning) address the Universal question of
mental Acts, no ideal is sacred, and
homogeneous Modernization via the ultimate form of generic Architecture. In the Archetypical Kynical scenario,
the Architect—accomplice to the old history is confronted with new history. Mythological post(ideological) cards render old ritualistic searches for
elementary solids where ‘clouds may come to Earth or where clouds are born, then to generate geometrical, long-
awaited apparitions’, which, like other monuments—dolmens, menhirs, bridges, walls, aqueducts, motorways,
PART pyramids, sacred black stones—produce ‘architectural models of total urbanization’. 5
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92
The juxtaposition of old, expired monuments as memories of previous programmes, and new, useless Monuments
with no programme, is the product of ‘the logical extrapolation of “oriented history” from Stonehenge to the VAB,
IMAGE to the Continuous Monument’. 6 With a ‘single form of architecture capable of shaping the earth’ Superstudio
7/12 shows the power of Architecture to remain both, omnipresent and powerless, after the city has been eliminated.
machinations of the system—is as Modern Movement and its desperate untary architectural in­mates. At the
much to blame for Architecture afterbirths’, Exodus or the Voluntary residential sites of industrial work-
(always ‘at the edge of our life’) as Prisoners of Architecture collages ers, baths, and ceremonial squares
the avant-garde (filling ‘one of the with historical debris a subversion stage the performance of communal
most rigidly fixed roles’ like a ‘young about (Architecture’s) hedonistic architectural scripts.
lover in plays’.) Through a ‘tentative idealism. Presented as an entry for .
anthropological and philosophical Casabella’s competition ‘The City Highways, flyovers, and round-
refoundation of architecture’, the as a Meaningful Environment’, and abouts—elements of Modernist
Fundamental Acts explores reductive final project at the AA, Exodus alchemy—become impossible esca-
processes as Narrative Architecture, focuses on both the object and the lators, marble plinths, and concrete
and a Kynical subversion of the role form of previous Kynical critiques. walls. The Megastructure turns into
of the avant-garde architect in this Through an all-encompassing scru- a Mega-Narrative. The architecture
process. Superstudio, ‘Fundamental Acts: tiny, the Diogenesian subversions of programmatic remedy turns into
Introduction’, 177. of Archizoom and Superstudio the architecture of psychological
. are subjected to the same Kynical stimuli. The brutalism of architec-
. method as the progressive monu- tural welfare and social impromptu
AA ments of the Modern Movement, morphs into the ‘hedonistic science
1971 Team 10, Yona Friedman / GEAM, of designing collective facilities
. and Constant. Through texts, pho- which fully accommodate individual
In 1971 Superstudio lectures at the tography, drawings, and collages desires’. Koolhaas, Exodus, 236-253. The
Architectural Association in London. doeveloped in collaboration with Homo ludens of the New Babylonian
In the lecture, Superstudio denounces Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp, playgrounds is exchanged for per­
Architecture as one of the ‘super- and Zoe Zenghelis, Exodus projects petual tourists, futuristic wanderers,
structures of power’. The lecture a multidirectional critical revision and voluntary prisoners of archi­
is a form of Kynical Manifesto. of architectural ideology. Exodus is tecture.
Against its role as a tool for ideology, Narrative Architecture as an ontol- .
Superstudio calls for the end of ogy of Kynical critique. Whereas life in the Modernist City
Architecture. . is performed under the foliage of
. Exodus collages are equally formed public parks, or behind the sober
‘If design is merely an inducement by pasting Kynical and ideological austerity of glass and concrete walls,
to consume, then we must reject landscapes. The project is the Berlin in The Strip every symbolic and psy­
design; if architecture is merely the Wall as Architecture, transplanted cho­lo­gical act takes place behind
codifying of the bourgeois models into ‘the behavioral sink of a city spiralling lines of barbed wire;
of ownership and society, then we like London’, to create a ‘strip of under an ‘overdose of symbols’ and
must reject architecture; if archi- intense Metropolitan desirability’. in a ‘continuous state of ornamen-
tecture and town planning is merely Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis with Madelon tal frenzy and decorative delirium’.
the formalization of present unjust Vriesendorp and Zoe Zenghelis, ‘Exodus: Or Koolhaas, Exodus, 236-253. Surrounding
social divisions, then we must the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture’ (1972), The Strip, a Berlinesque checkpoint
reject town planning and its cities … in Exit Utopia: Architectural Provocations injects a militarized script on an
until all design activities are aimed 1956-76, ed. Martin van Schaik and Otakar indifferent fragment of the (dis)
towards meeting primary needs, Macel, (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2005), Continuous Monument. The most
until then, design must disappear. 236-253. While New Babylon and radical form for unresponsive archi-
We can live without architecture…’ Architecture Mobile hover their tectural iconography is returned
Natalini, ‘Inventory, Catalogue, System of Flux new cities over the historical urban to its perpetual state as the ‘guilty
… a Statement’, in Superstudio: Life Without fabric in a Chagalean flight, Exodus instrument of despair’. The Wall,
Objects, 164-167. anchors The Strip on London with introduced by Superstudio as an
. the unbearable weight of Kynical inconsequential element of radical
At the AA Rem Koolhaas introduces being. In The Strip, the tiered pro- indifference able to ‘cancel’ the
their work as a ‘kind of empty pro- grammes of Modernist urbanism programme of architecture, is turned
ject’. Rodrigo Vidal Interview with Rem turn into architectural episodes for in Exodus into a ‘very graphic
Koolhaas, Rotterdam, 20 November 2002. actions and desires of non-hierar­ demonstration of the power of archi-
. chical intensity; the elements of tecture and some of its unpleasant
. its subversions are re-appropriated consequences’; a suggestion that
UNMASKING IV: to create the ‘new architecture of ‘architecture’s beauty’ is ‘directly
EXODUS collective monuments’. Koolhaas, proportional to its horror’. Rem
1972 Exodus, 236-253. Where Cartesian Koolhaas, ‘Field Trip: A(A) Memoir (First
. skyscrapers of glittering glass and and Last…)’ (1993), in Koolhaas, Bruce Mau, INSIDE THE STRIP, THE ACTS
Instead of continuing the ideological reinforced concrete welcome bureau- S,M,L,XL, (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995), Once the solid superstructure of Modernist ideology has been melted into the laughing gas of Kynicism, once
Continuous Monuments, and Supersurfaces, and Pilot Plans of Functionalist Programme, and Aerodynamic Cities
demolition of the ‘authoritarian and crats and politicians, an Institute for 214-232.
have revealed the Cynical relationship of Architecture with the Sublime Object of Ideology; once its permutations
hysterical’ architecture of ‘the Biological Transactions invites vol- . and futures-to-come have been turned into Post(ideological) Cards, Exodus inserts the Berlin Wall in the ‘beha-
vioural sink of a city like London’. 7 Inside the Strip, the Wall—a masterpiece oscillating between horror and
beauty—is returned to its ‘utopian’ power (to control, distil, alter life). A former weapon of separation, violence,
PART and aggression, the Wall is transformed into a shelter where the Fundamental Acts—Life, Education, Ceremony,
III

94
Love, Death—are hedonistically enhanced into the ‘creation and recycling of private and public fantasies’. 8
The Strip welcomes the Kynic to masturbate, and piss against the ideological wind. The Strip Kynically challenges
IMAGE ‘high theory’, with a ‘low theory’ of the corporeal. 9 The Strip is a form of mea culpa: the final acknowledgement
PART III—KYNICISM 8/12 of the authoritarian impulse of Architecture as a tool for self-indulgence and pleasure.
The dialectical element, eliminated
in the unidirectional rhetorical blows
of No-Stop City and the Continuous
Monument, is brought back to Exo­dus
by means of the belief in an archi-
tectural element as ‘unforget­table
(not to say final) proof of the “less
is more” doctrine’ of Mod­ernist ide-
ology. Koolhaas, ‘Field Trip’, 214-232. Like
theoretical shrapnel in a Kynical
war, Exodus performs the ‘reciprocal
interference of series’ as the sharp,
explosive edges of critique land on
the many (super)surfaces, (contin­
uous) monuments, desires, and
dreams of architecture since the
invention of the Modern Movement™.
Exodus executes a multidirectional
critique of unidirectional critiques,
and with its Diogenesian lantern
reveals honesty back in architecture.
. In one of the squares, The Captive
Although a taxonomic reconstruction
of Narrative Architecture in the
twentieth century puts the project in
the same domain as the critiques of
Archizoom and Superstudio, the uto-
pian possibility of architecture turns
Exodus into a Kynicism of Kynicisms.
Modernism, long objected to as the
symptom of a systemic condition, is
both culprit and source of optimism.
The hope in architecture that drives
Modernist production of ‘authori­
tarian and hysterical’ monuments is
the same hope that serves the ‘con-
nection between importance and
mass’ on its way to liberate archi-
tecture and lets it oscillate from
the ‘absolute, the regular, to the
deformed’, as an ‘unexpected mani-
festation of a formless “modern” of
contradictions—strong and weak,
imposition and residue, Cartesian
and Chaotic’. Koolhaas, ‘Field Trip’, 214-232.
. .
A polemic against dreamy utopias
and ‘megastructures made of sugar
cubes’, Exodus also presents a cri-
tique of Narrative Architecture and
its agenda against Utopia. In its
ambiguous dialectic, the Kynical
Narrative exposes the delirium
behind architectural ambition while
surveying the raw power inherent
in the most basic of architectural
forms. If for both of the Kynical pro-
jects architecture is reduced to a
system (No-Stop City) and an object
(the Continuous Monument), Exodus
PART III—KYNICISM
bases its critique on the power of
even the most ‘banal’—even absent in
some cases—element of architecture
to transform the conditions of human
inhabitation and social interaction.
The Wall (‘a masterpiece’), ‘originally
no more than some pathetic string
of barbed wire abruptly dropped on
the imaginary line of the border’ has
powerful ‘psychological and symbolic
effects’, in a way recalling the desire
of the heroic goals of the Modern
Movement™; the ‘utopia of the pres-
ent’ of Team 10, and the post-auto-
mation utopianism of Yona Friedman
/ GEAM and Constant. Koolhaas, ‘Field
Trip’, 214-232.
. same direction, which is the rein-
In The Strip, each of the eleven
squares is a chapter of an anti-
Narrative Narrative Architecture.
Globe reaches the anti-climax of
Kynicism. Its plinths and buildings
in ideological tension mark the
epitome of a decade of Narrative
Architecture, and almost a century
of avant-garde struggles. Outlining
the stage of the ultimate Kynical
Critique (until now), the Captive
Globe announces a new Kynical
battlefront. The final unmasking
taking place as an ideological
struggle to ‘conquer’ New York.
. DELIRIOUS
. 1978
AA
1976
. New York. Disguised as a retroactive
In 1976 Koolhaas returns to lecture at
the Architectural Association. With
‘Salvador Dalí, The Paranoid Critical
Method, Le Corbusier, New York’,
he presents the contents of the first
chapter of his upcoming publication.
Koolhaas opens the presentation by
stating that the lecture ‘is not a direct
attack on anybody’. Rem Koolhaas, ‘Sal­-
va­dor Dalí, The Paranoid Critical Method, Le
Cor­busier, New York’, AA School of Archi­tecture
He fol-
Lecture, London, 18 December 1976.
lows with: ‘Dalí’s nemesis is really
Le Corbusier, but he’s rational enough
to kind of mention him; but I sense
that Le Corbusier’s nemesis is also
Dalí, but he’s too diseased to ever
mention him.’ Koolhaas, ‘Salvador Dalí,
The Paranoid Critical Method, Le Corbusier,
New York’.
After speculating with more or less
reliable information on this recip­
rocal obsession, for the next 90
minutes Koolhaas presents Dalí
(after researching his life as a
rational development) as the pro-
ducer of a paranoid critical method
(or the ‘fabrication of evidence for
things that do not exist’ with the
ambition to ‘discredit the world of
reality’) and diagnoses Le Corbusier
(through projects, quotes, anec-
dotes) with clinical paranoia (that in
its Lacanian expansion includes ‘all
the phenomena where through inter-
pretative activity … becomes like
a magnetic field all pointing in the
forcement of one’s original kind of
delusion’.) Koolhaas, ‘Salvador Dalí, The
Paranoid Critical Method, Le Corbusier,
New York’.
.
‘Dalí is an example of somebody,
a sane and rational mind that has
insinuated himself into the process
of paranoia; I think Le Corbusier is
a clinically paranoid person that tries
to pretend that he’s rational.’ Koolhaas,
‘Salvador Dalí, The Paranoid Critical Method,
Le Corbusier, New York’.
.
.
UNMASKING V:
.
In 1978 Koolhaas publishes Delirious
Manifesto for Manhattan, the publi-
cation is Koolhaas ultimate project of
Narrative Architecture. Rather than
serving as a blueprint for a ‘Culture
of Congestion’, Delirious New York
is a masterpiece on the Culture of
Kynicism. Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York:
A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, (New
York: The Monacelli Press, 1978), 125.
.
While Exodus constructs a Kynical
critique of the critiques of Moder­
nism, Delirious New York roams
through a ‘simulacrum of Manhat­
tan’s Grid’ to return to Le Corbusier EXODUS FROM THE STRIP
—the original object of ideological Assembled with pieces of both ideological architecture and critiques to ideological Architecture, the Strip
critique. Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 11. provides the fuel to light Diogenes’ Lantern. Its contents are like a consummated bucket list of Kynical provoca-
If Exodus questions the premises tions: Polemic political context, check. Contradictory artistic references, check. Visual connection to other forms
that Archizoom and Superstudio of Narrative Architecture, check. Latent suggestions of projects to come, check. Ambiguous friction between
historical moments, check. A deep sense of disbelief and a lack of hope on the ‘megastructures made of sugar cubes
use to expose the extreme excess
to universal approval of grinning Archigramesque teachers’, check. 10 Ironic summoning of other forms
and reductionism of Modernist of Ideology Critique, check.
Exodus isn’t just an allegory to a problematic form of Architecture at the precise moment that Architecture struggles
between idealist dreaming and Kynical provocation. Exodus provides a checkpoint between Ideology Critique and
PART the media used to construct its Kynical arguments. Exodus is the Kynical Singularity, it marks the moment Narrative
III
96
Architecture becomes self-aware. Exodus is the departure from the storyboard and the entrance to the Historical
Narrative. Exodus is the point where a critique of Ideology joins a critique of the critique of Ideology. Exodus is Berlin
IMAGE meets London, meets the Continuous Monument, meets No-Stop City, meets Utopia, meets Historical Materialism,
9/12 meets idealism, meets disillusion.
If Exodus urbanism, Delirious New York digs
into the unconscious ‘to reveal’ Le
questions the
Corbusier’s delirium.
. the paradoxical territory between
Self-declared initially as Manhattan’s
premises that ghost writer, Koolhaas becomes
the ultimate incarnation of the
Archizoom Diogenesian Kynic. With Delirious
New York he shifts the critique from
and Super­
the ideological methods, mediums,
and platforms to the ideological
author and Modernist Mastermind.
studio use to Rather than positioning the Kynical
critique once again on an Ideology
expose the of Modern Architecture, Delirious
New York ‘frames’ the Modernist
extreme
Architect as a delirious ideologue.
Kynical laughter is redirected from
the architectural ambitions of
excess and Modernist Ideology, to Le Corbu­
sier’s pretence to ‘acquire the
reductionism right to invent his own New York’.
Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 263. Once
of Modernist
Diogenes’ Lantern has casted the
light of Kynical ridicule on the
Modernist City—New York already
urbanism, exists!—Koolhaas shifts its light
to Le Corbusier’s failure to fulfil his
Delirious ‘all-consuming ambition to invent
and build the New City commensu-
New York
rate with the demands and potential
glories of the machine civilization’.
digs into the
Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 249-251.
. Architecture:
While establishing Manhattan as the
unconscious ‘Capital of Perpetual Crisis’, the book
underlines Le Corbusiean Modernism
‘to reveal’ Le
as the perpetual object of Kynical
criticism. Manhattan as a ‘theatre of
Corbusier’s
progress’ is in reality the background
to showcase Delirious New York as a
‘platform for Kynicism’. In its twofold
delirium. Kynical unmasking, Delirious New
York needs to: first, create a mythol-
.
ogy about New York—both already
Modern and ‘antimodern’—as an
.
‘ideology-proof’ fortress to resist
the attacks of the Modern Movement;
and second, in its anti-oedipal char-
.
acter, focus on the effects of this
resistance to Le Corbusier ‘so
. obsessed with the exterminating
principles of his urbanism’. Koolhaas,
.
Delirious New York, 268.
. Le Corbubu, Le Corbi, Le Corba,
Like any other manifesto, the book is
. both self-serving—‘in 1623, 30 fam-
ilies sail from Holland to Manhattan
.
to plant a colony’—and a collective
necessity: can a new avant-garde
PART III—KYNICISM
exist without taking shots at the ‘old’
avant-garde? Koolhaas, Delirious New York,
17. Its foundations are anchored on
the Culture of Congestion (another
modernism), and the culture of
decon­gestion (Le Corbusiean Mod­
ernism). Con­structed with fragments
of real architectural material and
fictitious narrative speculations,
Delirious New York not only ‘des-
cri­bes a theoretical Manhattan, a
Manhattan as conjecture’, but deliv-
ers with this mythical construction
the last blow of the Kynical elegy of
Modernist Ideology. Koolhaas, Delirious
New York, 11.
.
With the chapters Coney Island, The
Skyscraper, and Rockefeller Center,
Delirious New York shows the ‘per-
mutations of Manhattanism as an
implied rather than explicit doctrine’.
With ‘Europeans: Biuer! Dalí and
Le Corbusier Conquer New York’,
the book makes explicit the Kynical
unmasking of its critique of Le
Corbusier. Koolhaas, Delirious New York,
235-281. Delirious New York anchors
its Kynical critique on three funda-
mental axioms that are as relevant
to the contents of the book as they
are to the development of Narrative
.
1—Le Corbusier desires New York.
‘Night or day, at each step in New
York I find pretext for reflection, for
mental construction, for dreams of
extraordinary, cheering tomorrow
near at hand….’ Koolhaas, Delirious New
York, 269.
.
2—New York Loves Dalí. ‘New York:
why, did you erect my statue long
ago, long before I was born, higher
than another, more desperate than
another?’ Dalí, ‘New York Salutes Me!’,
quoted in Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 265.
.
3—Dalí (the provider of the Paranoid
Critical Method Koolhaas uses to
explore Le Corbusier’s Paranoia)
hates Le Corbusier. ‘Le Corbu, NARRATIVE OF THE CAPTIVE GLOBE
Plan Voisin is the trait d’union between acontextual speculation (Contemporary City of Three Million Inhabitants),
Le Corbo dead, Le Corbusier died and targeted ambition (Radiant City). The Square of the Captive Globe connects the generic, multidirectional
by drowning. Yes! Yes and yes, he
sank like a Stone, the weight of his
critique of Exodus, with the Kynical apotheosis of Delirious New York.
The university of the Strip—the Square—is a miniature New York where different forms of ideology and ideology
critique battle each other. The Square is Metropolitan congestion as ‘incubator of ideologies’. 11
own reinforced cement pulling him
‘The Metropolis strives to reach a mythical point where the world is completely fabricated by man, so that it
down like a masochistic Protestant absolutely coincides with his desires.’ 12 The Captive Globe is the subconscious representation of this mythological
impulse. Born as a square in The Strip, the Captive Globe grows to the scale of Manhattan. Inside—on top of ‘solid
blocks of granite’—await different forms of ideological collapse: a theory that didn’t work, a mania that sticks to
PART long, a lie that never becomes truth, a dream that ends abruptly. 13 The indifferent Histogram (Kynicism) faces
III
98
the idealism of the Architecton (Suprematism), while the Architectonic Angelus (Surrealism) melts across a
Cartesianly erect Horizontal Skyscraper (Modernism). In this City all artificial conceptions compete for the atten-
IMAGE tion of the Globe (or is it the other way around?). All icons strive to conquer the City. All, speculative ejaculations
10/12 produced by the ‘Eureka’ of Diogenesian masturbation.
Swiss Cheese.’ Salvador Dalí, Dalí by Dalí,
trans. Eleanor R. Morse, (New York: Harry N.
Abrams, 1970).
. with New York is ‘in fact, a 15-year
In his Kynical drive for total ridicule,
Koolhaas shows Le Corbusier’s frus-
tration with his ‘journey to the land
of timid people’, in the wasted years
he spends trying to reinvent the sky-
scraper of New York. Le Corbusier,
Quand les cathédrales étaient blanches: Voyage
au pays des timides (1947), translated as When
the Cathedrals were White: A Journey to the
Country of Timid People, trans. Francis E.
Hyslop, J.R., (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).
‘Against New York’s skyscraper
we erect the Cartesian skyscraper,
limpid, precise, elegantly shining
in the sky of France.’ Le Corbusier, ‘La
Ville Radieuse’ quoted in Koolhaas, Delirious
New York, 259.Le Corbusiean nostal-
gia is magnified ad absurdum as the
incomplete project of New York—
‘not a finished or complete city’—
turns into a potential bait that,
feeding from previous failures,
perpetually seduces him to start
all over again.
. individual Diogenesian provocations.
‘Well, we didn’t get it done properly.
Let’s start over again!’ Le Corbusier,
When the Cathedrals were White, 36.
. city as a pretext to make a compre-
‘New York has such courage and
enthusiasm that everything can be
begun again, sent back to the build-
ing yard and made into something
still greater, something mastered!’
Le Corbusier, When the Cathedrals were White,
36.Delirious New York shows that
Le Corbusier loves New York, but as
usually to be expected with the city
and the avant-garde, his love is not
reciprocated.
. Once freed from the crushing weight
‘To acquire the right to invent his
own New York, Le Corbusier spends
‘15 years proving that Manhattan
is not yet Modern’ with an identikit
of perfectly framed images display­
ing its ‘criminal urbanistic features’.
Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 263. In order
to ‘deconstruct’ Le Corbusier,
Koolhaas gathers evidence of his
madness with a series of perfectly
framed Manhattanist failures in his
Kynical identikit. Le Corbusier pub-
lishes When the Cathedrals were
White as an anti-Manhattanist call
to action. Koolhaas publishes
PART III—KYNICISM
Delirious New York as an anti-Le
Corbusiean Manifesto. If Le
Corbusier’s passionate involvement
long attempt to cut an umbilical
cord’, Koolhaas’ Kynical critique of
Le Corbusier is, in reality, the culmi-
nation of half a century of ideological
anxiety. Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 253.
In the same way that Le Corbusier
uses New York to invent his ideal
Modernist City, Koolhaas (and the
Kynics) feed from Le Corbusier to
power the ultimate Kynical critique.
. zeitgeist. In its search for an ideal-
. ized form of architecture, the avant-
POSTSCRIPT
. ruthless simplicity—‘an enclave of
If the Kynical projects of Archizoom
and Superstudio open the last
chapter of the saga of Modernist
ideology, Delirious New York is the
postscript as ideological alternative
media. Published a decade after the
events of May 1968, Delirious New
York alters the format of the Kynical
project of Narrative Architecture and
turns into a book what used to be
Instead of creating stories about the
city as a critique of Le Corbusiean
Modernism, the manifesto uses the
hensive critique of Le Corbusier. If
the Kynical projects of the 1960s
render the apotheosis of generic
architectural and urban manifesta-
tions to reveal the shortcomings of
the ideological systems behind them,
Delirious New York chronicles a spe-
cific form of city to systematically
expose the ‘originator’ of Modernist
ideology.
. .
of Modernist ideology, the appendix
of Delirious New York ventures
into new and post-Le Corbusiean
Narrative Architectures. No longer
concerned with Modernism’s ideo-
logical Goliath, Koolhaas (in his role
as Kynical David) proposes to recon-
struct New York through its own
‘specialized architecture, one that
can vindicate the original promise
of the metropolitan condition and
develop the fresh traditions of the
Culture of Congestion further’.
Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 293. The
City of the Captive Globe (with its
direct connection to Exodus), Hotel
Sphinx, New Welfare Island, and
Welfare Palace Hotel move past Le
Corbusiean misfired approaches on
the city to engage with ‘the arduous
task’ to ‘deal with the extravagant
and megalomaniac claims, ambitions,
and possibilities of the Metro­polis
openly’. Koolhaas, ‘Appendix: A Fictional
Conclusion’, in Delirious New York, 293-311.
.
In the last of the Narratives, The
Story of the Pool highlights the
ideological tension of the Kynical
garde creates a floating pool of
ideological purity in contaminated
surroundings’. Koolhaas, ‘The Story of
the Pool’ (1977), in Delirious New York, 307.
Swimming away from an ominous
political situation during the years
of institutionalized Stalinism, by the
time these Constructivists arrive in
New York—their aimed destination—
they are confronted with an equally
outsized form of institutionalized
system of horrific uniformity, ‘crude-
ness, lack of individuality’. Koolhaas,
‘The Story of the Pool’, 308. On the shore,
Architects ‘ignoring the spectacular
decline of their profession, their own
increasingly pathetic irrelevance,
their desperate production of flac-
cid country mansions, the limp sus-
pense of their trite complexities, the
dry taste of their fabricated poetry,
the agonies of their irrelevant
sophistication’ resist any form of
Kynical provocation that will ques-
tion their status quo. Koolhaas, ‘The
Story of the Pool’, 310.
In their rejection and disappoint-
ment, the avant-garde sets to swim
again, towards a new ideological
goal. In their perpetual upstream
search for utopia, Constructivism
(as a form of Hardcore Modernism)
reveals an unfolding allegorical
tale with no shore to dock in sight.
On their way out of New York, the
Pool crashes against the Raft of
the Medusa. In this ideological
crash—‘optimism vs pessimism’— LE CORBUSIER CAN’T CONQUER NEW YORK
the pool is left unscathed; the raft ‘Since their whole country is man-made, there are no “accidents” for the Dutch. They plan the settlement of
is destroyed. In its speculative Manhattan as if it is part of their fabricated motherland.’ 14
On his way to land one last Kynical blow, Koolhaas plots in New York his last Narrative Architecture. New York
unmasking, The Story of the Pool
(already ‘invented’ by the Dutch) is reimagined both as the birthplace of Narrative Architecture, and as the tombstone
traces the potential route of future of Le Corbusiean Modernism. If the first European Narrative (Exodus) dissects the stories of the Kynics (with a critique
of critiques), the American Narrative (Delirious New York) marks the arrival to an idealized land powerful enough to
expose all of Modern Architecture’s shortcomings. The true potential of New York lies in its indifference to the most
PART radical and seductive ideas (Modernist, Cynical, or Kynical). Le Corbusier can’t conquer New York since New York
III
100
challenges the European avant-garde with a hyper-functionality of its own making. The island, ground for archi-
tectural speculation controlled by an even stronger form of ideological apparatus, not only confronts the Pool, the
IMAGE Welfare Palace Hotel, and other Narratives with multiple episodes of idealistic shipwrecks (the Raft of the Medusa),
11/12 but presents the Culture of Congestion as the iceberg to sink the Titanic of Le Corbusiean Ideology.
forms of Narrative Architecture, as 1­—Write a subversive story about 7—Rise like a Kynic. In its dog philos­
new forms of Kynical avant-garde architecture and the city. Expose the ophy, the Kynic (kyon, dog in Greek),
swim towards the ideological sys- system behind buildings and zoning is not so interested in the ‘high
tems ‘they want to get away from’. laws; behind Redlining, and gentrifi- theory’ of argumentation, but in the
Koolhaas, ‘The Story of the Pool’, 308. cation, and whitewashing and smart ‘low theory’ that carries ‘practical
. crapstractions. Reveal the accumu- embodiment to an extreme’. To rise
Now, more than four decades after lation of wealth and its relationship like a Kynic, one must realize all the
the crash of the Pool, in the midst to form, matter, and space. experiences, signs, sensations, ways
of architecture’s complicities with . of living, ways to imagine the world
unchecked power, aware of the 2—Construct a philosophy of jokes that the hegemonic discourses of
redundant cyclicality of orthodoxy, without being facetious. Reveal ‘high theory’ overlooked. Sloterdijk,
exhausted by the institutionalization through humour whatever is wrong Critique of Cynical Reason, 102.
of conventionalities, weary of the with Architecture, from education to .
collective rejection of constructive practice. From concrete execution, 8—Light the fire inside Diogenes’
criticality, tired of hiding behind ide- to abstract speculation. Remember lantern. Tear the pages of all those
ological masks, upset with the ero- that ‘an essential aspect of power is history books that ignored the com-
sion of the public realm, ostracized that it only likes to laugh at its own plexities of life and use them to ignite
by ideological preservationists hiding jokes’. Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, a critical fire.
inside ivory towers, antagonized by 103. .
the sequestration of collective intel- . 9—Hold the lantern up in plain day-
ligence by uncritical media, an anx- 3—Piss against the ideological wind. light. Determine the limits of your
ious generation questions the means Philosophically urinate in the market- ideological surroundings. Be ready
of architectural production and the ­place—in the public domain, show to raise looks of suspicion.
imperative of its positions, of its ‘contempt for fame’, ridicule archi- .
opportunistic and uncritical relation- tecture, refuse respect, parody 10—Reveal an honest architecture.
ship to power, of its strategies and the stories of gods and heroes; tell And if you can’t find it, write your
methods of discourse and ideological Alexander the Great that he should own subversive story about architec-
representation. get out of your Sun. Sloterdijk, Critique ture and the city.
. of Cynical Reason, 103-104. .
With new forms of ideology outlining .
menacing grids, and diving walls, 4—Lie evidently as to reveal the truth
prisons, and internment camps, a and make truths out of all the lies.
new generation of Kynics awaits to Challenge the idealism that justifies
construct critical stories to lift the social and world orders. Invert the
masks of ideology and fulfil the ten content of faux historical narratives.
points of the Kynical Manifesto of Subvert colonialist thinking by reap-
Narrative Architecture: propriating historical narratives. Lie
. to the history-tellers like they have
. been lying to you.
. .
. 5—Sleep inside an allegorical wine
. jar. Strip architecture of every un­-
. necessary baggage. Repudiate the
. excesses of self-serving decadence.
. ‘“Vegetate” like a dog, but live, laugh,
. and take care to give the impression
. that behind all this lies not confusion
. but clear reflection’. Sloterdijk, Critique
. of Cynical Reason, 104.
. .
. 6—Continue by other means the
. miscarried dialogue. Hegemonic
. powers hate to come to the table
. of negotiation voluntarily. Force SWIMMING IN THE DIOGENESIAN POOL
. them to sit down. Create Narratives Once anchored in New York, the Pool—a Kynical devise of a potentially strayed avant-garde—is confronted with
. that call their attention. Images that Architects ignoring the ‘spectacular decline of their profession, their own increasingly pathetic irrelevance, their
. reflect their images of themselves. desperate production of flaccid country mansions, the limp suspense of their trite complexities, the agonies of their
. Make a book about the history of irrelevant sophistication’. 15
. subversion. Create a guide of Kynical After many years of swimming against the current, this ‘rusty salmon’ of ideology critique becomes a piece of
the collection of one of the main ‘art’ institutions in the City it once hoped to disrupt. Sponsored by the same busi-
. provocations. nessmen in ‘Brooks Brothers suits’ who initially swamped the craft in brute rush ignoring the instructions of the
superintendents, the Pool is then re-used to surf the waves of ideological indifference.
A cautionary tale about overlooking the Kynical criticism, and the subsequent instrumentalization of Narrative
PART Architecture as a cultural and capital commodity, the Pool remains dialectical—either docked in the problematic
III

102
port of the status quo, or swimming aimlessly against its final subversive goal. Once a new generation of Diogenesian
swimmers/lifeguards ventures into the synchronized spectacle, a light shines in the distance of the night. With a
IMAGE potential shore awaiting another unmasking episode, the swimmers wonder if the light comes from the expected
PART III—KYNICISM 12/12 lighthouse (for the spectacle of the status quo), or from Diogenes’ lantern.
. .
. .
APPEN- .
DIX .
. .
. KYNICAL
. CON-
. CLU-
. SIONS
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. . 105
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. Ancient Kynicism,
. primary and pugna-
. cious Kynicism, was
. a plebeian antithesis
. to idealism. Modern
. cynicism, by contrast,
. is the masters’ anti­
. thesis to their own
. idealism as ideology
. and a masquerade.
. The cynical master
. lifts the mask, smiles
. at his weak adversary,
. and suppresses him.
. C’est la vie.
APPENDIX 106
Noblesse oblige... .
In its cyni­cisms .
hegemonic power .
airs its secrets a .
little, indulges in .
semi-self-enlighten- .
ment, and tells all. .
Master cynicism is .
a cheekiness that .
has changed sides. .
. .
Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of .
Cynical Reason .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
NARRATIVE ARCHITECTURE 107
. .
. .
. .
More than four decades after lifting the
delirious masks of ideology, Narrative
In a world where Architecture maintains
a dangerous silence in the face of cataclys-
Architecture remains overlooked, mis-
understood, and underutilized. Laughter,
mic threats, Architecture’s complicity
with dominant ideologies, the status-quo,
irony and cheekiness have switched sides, and oppressive power structures, renders

. .
becoming the instrument of choice of imperative that Kynical thinkers delve into
hegemonic powers with their self-enlighten creating new forms of Narrative Archi­

To laugh at oneself . curatorial boards, academic curriculums,

art festivals, gala diners and philantro-
tectures.
.
as one would have . capitalist benefaction. Master cynicism
justifies the spectacle of suffering, environ-
This book was written to show—in a 50
year-long sample—that it is possible for
to laugh in order to . mental destruction, and geopolitical scars
of its own doing. It benefits from bellicose
Architecture to face (and unmask) even
the most hegemonic and powerful of
laugh out of the whole . and class struggle, from the exploitation of ideologies. The Narrative Architectures

truth—to do that even .

material, emotional and economical capi- of Continuous Monuments, and No-Stop
tal while sponsoring, displaying and arguing Cities; of Fundamental Acts, and Cautio­

the best so far lacked . for the masterpieces of artists/architects/

designers posing like drowned refugees,
nary Tales; of Exodus, and Delirious
Modernists, are not nostalgic longings
sufficient sense for . carrying melting Arctic icebergs, and dis-
playing the shipwreck of desperate migra-
for a long-gone past at a safe distance,
but rather an architectural Pandora’s Box
the truth, and the . tion for the applause of the masses and
the medals of the critics. In this macabre
that has been opened. What awaits inside
are more provocations, more cheekiness,
most gifted had too . theater of bad taste, could Kynical laughter more unmasking, more brutal honesty,

little genius for that. .

—the one laughing out whole truths— have more irony, more perversion, and more
a future? laughter from below.

Even laughter may . .

.
.
If the Postscript —with its 10 points—calls
yet have a future. . .
.
for new forms of Narrative Architecture,
the Appendix outlines a series of projects
. . Unaware of its Kynical potential,
Architecture remains tangled up in a pre-
touching some of today’s ideological strug-
gles through a series of architectural pro-
Friedrich Nietzsche, . dicament of pressing historical urgency. jects. These Narrative Architectures are

.
The unwinding plot of depleted environ- just a few of the many Kynical strategies
The Gay Science ments in a dilapidated state, approach- that Architecture must embrace in order to

. . ing demise, the asphyxiating grip of class

. .
. .
. .
inequality, the never ending tribulations of
put into practice the Kynical Manifesto of
Narrative Architecture. This appendix is an
colonialism, antiquated sociocultural con-
straints refusing to go extinct, is part of
invitation for the creation of more Kynical
Critiques. This appendix calls for the crea-
the unfolding love story between architec-
ture, urbanism and hegemonic powers.
tion of more Narrative Architectures.
.
For every wall built, for every red taping

. .
maintained, for every neighborhood gen-
trified, for every prison, detention center,

. . border camp designed, new forms of

Kynicism require timely subversions,
. . exposures of truth.

APPENDIX 108 NARRATIVE ARCHITECTURE 109

THE BEAUTIFUL CEREMONY . Under Technofascism, Multiculturalism .
. . was a thing of the past, as a new, per- .
. . fectly synchronized society was conceived .
. . by mixing genetic manipulation, and down- .
. . right forms of crypto-corporate Darwinism. .
. A tax-relaxing haven, Biennale Island was The design of Biennale Island was the .
. registered as a stateless corporation. apotheosis of a flawless self-generating .
. The nation-state with its orthodox bureau- development concretized in a Human Zoo .
. cratic system was dissolved into a privately of ethnographic structures of organization, .
. funded self-sustaining algorithm consoli- as well as in the spatial, phenomenological, .
. dating a self-perpetuating political system and spiritual manifestations of architecture .
. based on market driven automation. and the city. In the opening of Biennale .
. Technofascism was the pinnacle of societal Island, Parametric Capitalism became the .
. achievement. It implied the rule of design new commons. .
. above all facets of life. A political mixture . .
. of flawless social stratification and com- . The Architecture of Biennale Island was
. plete aesthetic control. Technofascism was . designed as the perfect complement to
. achieved ‘by the expropriation of inferior . its psychogeographical apparatus, as
. cultures that were unable to pay external . buildings, structures, elements and con-
. debts, student loans, mortgages and credit . cepts impeded the free flow of knowledge,
. card fees’. . egalitarian distribution of wealth, and the
. . . creative implementation, and practice of
. . . ritualistic freedom. As the elites flew in
. . . from all over the world to witness a utopian
. . . implementation of civil society one could
. . . hear them affirm their admiration for ‘the
. . . beautiful ceremony’.
. . . .
. . . .
. . Built at the end of History (again), Biennale .
Champagne glasses were clicking as the . Island was conceived as a place for the .
celebration of the opening of the Island was . ultimate collapse of dialectical materialism, .
finally under way. After a five-year plan . as both populations (workers and elite) .
involving political coups, intensive software . could coexist in perfect harmony without .
development and endless hours of hard . the feeling of inhabiting a twofold manifes­ .
work, the vernissage unraveled. To build . tation of utopia. The (docile) utopia of the .
an island from scratch is no easy task. The . migrant workers (perpetually denied of .
Island of Biennale was built to display the . citizenship) consisted of genetic modifi­- .
ultimate advancements of the Superior . ca­tions that prevented the instability of .
Culture in a cyclical program consisting . social unrest, and dissipated any chance .
of two-year periods of events and presen­ . of revolt. The (alpha) utopia of the elite .
tations. The island was planned as an . reinforced their feeling of philanthropy, .
oversized exhibition of the politics of archi- . charity, entrepreneurship, while eliminating .
tecture and urbanism; it hosted absolute . altogether with the concept of human .
forms of architecture in perfect symbiosis . exploitation (since subservient labour was .
with the freedom of frictionless market . genetically predetermined) the sense of .
economy. . guilt and remorse. .

APPENDIX 110 NARRATIVE ARCHITECTURE 111

 BORDER
We arrived in a Zeppelin. Airplanes with their limited luxury were a thing of the past. From high above we could
see the first pavilions built on Biennale Island. Now turned into ‘poetic’ ruins, the pavilions are floating monoliths
in which migrant workers arrived to build a wall to encircle the periphery of the island. Suffocated by the brutal
APPEN­DIX wars, military invasions, ethnic cleansing, and religious persecution (mostly funded and armed by the compa-
nies of the elite that sponsored the island), the first workers to arrive were mostly glad to join their new laborious
IMAGE lifestyle. They forged in pristine concrete, a wall that eventually would prevent them from leaving the island while
1/12 rendering virtually impossible the ‘unwanted’ arrival of new migrants.
WALL
The wall of Biennale Island had a very small footprint. Built with recycled concrete mostly gathered from conflict
APPEN­DIX zones, the aggregates of the Wall had organic certification from the bureau of sustainability issues. It took five
years of continuous building. During this period, workers erected parts of what would be their homes once the
IMAGE Wall was completed, and their tasks switched to farming, service, and infrastructure maintenance. The workers
2/12 fell in love, got married, and their families grew. They worked, slept, ate, played.

HOUSING
Workers’ housing was the result of one of the self-programming plans of ethnographic design. Libertarian housing
was free of cost for its inhabitants, since they paid with their labour by assembling walls, in the service they
provided, and by farming the open fields. The families of the first workers (those who arrived to build the wall),
APPEN­DIX interrelated with the new workers (those genetically modified in the art of docility), perpetually remaining on
the periphery of Biennale Island. Architecture in the form of pavilions was inserted occasionally in their bucolic
IMAGE surroundings, providing the necessary programmes to keep the lower cast of society isolated from the rest of the
3/12 ‘smart city’.
GARDEN
Once the wall and the housing units were built, workers planted the trees that now divide them from the city
centre. Among the flora of the island, hyper-efficient wind turbines were installed next to some of the most
advanced water collection plants and irrigation systems. Technology had advanced enough as to be as efficient as
the economic system that supported the island. The ‘Green Belt’ consisted of an area where some workers laboured
tirelessly picking up fruits and vegetables harvested without pesticides or preservatives. Others processed Coltan
and Tantalum in small protected pools to develop communication, agriculture, and transportation tools. Some
APPEN­DIX workers were in charge of manufacturing garments with biodegradable fabrics while others developed ecological
materials for the construction of buildings. To defend the island from possible threats to the sustainable state of its
IMAGE economy, a select group of genetically modified workers was trained to farm an army capable of maintaining order
4/12 within the island and monitor the peripheral wall.

CENTRE
At the Island centre, past the Green Belt, a series of pristine towers offered housing, offices, and shopping malls
for the technocrats and businesspeople responsible for developing, planning, and managing the island. Traveling
from other developed cities with certifications and diplomas from the most respected global institutions, the elite
APPEN­DIX class was entrusted with the development and growth of the economy of the island while residing in pristine lofts
and home offices. Architecture once again provided an infallible security blanket that reflects the conditions and
IMAGE lifestyles of those who inhabit it. Just like the workers’ housing was provided for procreation and seclusion, the
5/12 radiant structures of the centre were equipped to host the highest forms of entertainment and consumerism.
MUSEUM
At one of the towers rising in Biennale Island, a collection of once subversive forms of architecture occupied several
of its levels. The collection, funded with donations from the deep pockets of fuel barons, pharmaceutical CEOs,
weapon dealers and manufacturers, and mass media moguls featured some of the most hardcore speculations of
the last two hundred years of architectural speculation. The foundation, the agency responsible for the curatorial,
preservation, and presentation logistics of the collection made sure that the exhibitions were always updated to
critically reflect global changes. Recent exhibitions discussed the deteriorating state of the environment, biodiver-
sity, humanitarian crises around the world, as well as technological and economic advances. In a special room, an
exhibit presented—through diagrams, videos, and images—how through technological inventions, strategic inter-
ventions, and legislative implementations the island became not only a paradigm for sustainable development in
the world, but also for ideal living conditions. The show displayed samples of the ivory and concrete, of the glass and
APPEN­DIX marble used to build its architecture. A series of charts displayed its continuous financial development. From a large
window one could see the distant horizon, as the chimera of modernization was enclosed within a horizontal white
IMAGE wall. Within the limits of Biennale Island, efficiency was treated as the ceremony of life. On the island everyone
6/12 assumes his or her role. The island grows economically. Its development is ‘sustainable’.
POST-COLONIAL PROSE In a warming world . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. Tropics are environmental, economic, humanitarian, militaristic subject . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. Colonial Fetish . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. Test grounds for catastrophe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. Re-discovered and reimagined phenomena . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. Pictorial landscapes, ideological paraphernalia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. .....................................................................
. . . . . . . Aesthetico-political nature reigns supreme . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . Extreme expropriation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . Preservation apotheosis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . Radical takeover . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . Colonial farce . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. .....................................................................
. Turn of the Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. Alexander Von Humboldt renders in his Ansichten der Natur . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. Voluminous, colorful, fresh tropics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. .....................................................................
. Kosmos is born . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. .....................................................................
. . . . . . . Based on its selective narrative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . ‘Tropicals’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . Bucolic scenarios stripped from the influence of their people . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . Colonize the canvas of the Hudson River School . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. .....................................................................
. Nature is not so natural . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. .....................................................................
. Frederic Edwin Church . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. Norton Bush . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. Theologically dream of sublime foliage, minus Chibchan, Arawak, Muisca, Xinguanos . . . . .
. .....................................................................
. Palm trees, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . and flowers, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . and rivers, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . and swamps, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . and mangroves . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. .....................................................................
. Vast emptiness reinvented in radical nakedness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. Awaiting to be conquered . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. .....................................................................
. Radiant skies and palm trees, and rubber leaves (Ford), and Coffee, and Coconut, . . . . . . .
. and Cacao, and Coca Roots, and stems, and flowers, and fruits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. .....................................................................
. . . . . . . Codified . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . Politicized . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . Historicized . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. .....................................................................
. .....................................................................

118 NARRATIVE ARCHITECTURE 119

Nature is not so natural . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.....................................................................
McKinley excels, eliminating, dividing, disappearing, cancelling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, Seminole and Cherokee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Plots takeover of the Colonias Antillanas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.....................................................................
. . . . . . Yorubas, Igbos, Bantus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . All embedded . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . In endless brutal struggle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.....................................................................
1898 is the year of the handover . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
One Island sets itself free (conflict zone) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The other remains a colony (test lab) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.....................................................................
. . . . . . 1949 is the year of Orwell’s 1984 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . And the Chinese Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . Indonesia fights the Dutch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . The Cominterm echoes loudly in the Caribbean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . The first elected Governor takes command in the test lab . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.....................................................................
Roosevelt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Truman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Muñoz Marín . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Now statues of Old identity forged in Bronze . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Shape the political scenario . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.....................................................................
‘Tropicalia’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
(then a secret military branch) leads potential conflicts over warming zones . . . . . . . . . . . .
With avant-garde plans stolen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
With new technologies in place . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.....................................................................
Many years earlier, espionage gave way to . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A Leonidov . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A Krutikov (both intercepted from the CCCP Союз Советских Социалистических . . . . . .
Республик on its way to its Caribbean branch) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Two Fortresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Two Camps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.....................................................................
. . . . . . Many years later, financial crisis and inability to recover . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . Paved the way to expropriate the island . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . Hudson School all over again . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.....................................................................
Empty landscapes are the best landscapes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.....................................................................
A Promesa of ‘Reconstruction’ took place . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Architecture (almost all architecture removed) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Concrete and steel of no value . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
APPENDIX 120
. . . . . . Landscapes rebuilt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . Left as if unaltered by people . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . Radical new nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . Green Utopia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.....................................................................
Many attempts to burn it all to the ground . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Failed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
More trials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Overpowered by hegemony . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.....................................................................
. . . . . . On the surface, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . Only (some) architecture remains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.....................................................................
Between Aviaries, Camps, Antennas and Globes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.....................................................................
And Palm trees, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . and flowers, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . and fruits, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . and fresh water, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . and fresh air . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.....................................................................
. . . . . . Post-Novis plans a rebellion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . Witches, and Calibans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . Masks in hand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . Narrative Architecture plots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . Endless unmasking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.....................................................................
New Worldmaking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.
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NARRATIVE ARCHITECTURE 121

FLOATING FORTRESS
One of two prototypes intercepted from the CCCP on its way to the Caribbean branch, a Krutikov floats above
shores, and rivers, and lakes and lagoons. The product of a carefully executed intelligence campaign that inter-
cepted a plan making its way from Moscow to Cuba, the structure was conceived in the 1920s by a cosmic
architect. The Plan Krutikov consisted of floating architecture: a city hovering at consistent heights above the
APPEN­DIX ground. After finding the secret plans, a group of architects specialized in speculative cosmonautics and quantum
aeronautics concentrated on developing the project. Unable to move forward with the plans of building it due to
IMAGE the impractical economic climate and slugging technological advancements, the Floating Fortress finally saw
7/12 the light of day once Tropicalia was awarded governing autonomy.
AMPHIBIAN FORTRESS
Like a metallic star in a cosmic jungle, the Amphibian Fortress stands firm in the thick, humid soil with its
extended shiny, robotic limbs. Consisting of six rectangular members meeting on a common vortex, the
Amphibian Fortress is able to move freely through any type of solid and semi-solid surface. The automated
structure, developed in collaboration with a government-funded conceptualist artist, collects information on
the island’s soil, flora, and fauna while sending waves to the communication structures on the island. Built with
lightweight metal alloy, the Amphibian Fortress is a new form of walking architecture. While the Floating
APPEN­DIX Fortress takes care of keeping the shores safe from intruders, the Amphibian Fortress patrols inland, paying
close attention to the rainforests and adjacent terrains. The Amphibian Fortress gathers and distributes infor­
IMAGE mation about potential threats to the natural purity of the island. The Amphibian Fortress is a kinetic enforcer
8/12 that, together with the Floating Fortress, ensures the island’s security while protecting its Tropicality.
 GLOBE & JAVELIN
Another prize of meticulous espionage, the plan for the Globe and the Javelin was captured during the years of TELESCOPIC TOWERS
the Cold War. Resting on top of mangroves, the Globe and the Javelin monitor weather conditions while receiving The Telescopic Towers are the largest structures erected since the island was reclaimed by Tropicalia. Consisting
signals from the Floating and Amphibian Fortresses. of three towers anchored in the higher peaks of the mountain range at the centre of the island, the Telescopic
APPEN­DIX Built from lightweight, self-regulating nano-fabrics, the Globe and the Javelin work in combination. At night the APPEN­DIX Towers are connected by a series of hyper sensible fibres that create an informatics black hole (the world’s most
Globe floats free, lit with the rays deflected by the moon and the stars. When the wind is too strong, the Globe spears sensitive radio wave receiver). Like Suprematist icons on the virgin landscape, the Telescopic Towers were
IMAGE its anchors to the ground. On the mangrove, silently, the Javelin receives and forwards radio waves about the island IMAGE designed to process all the information collected by the Fortresses. In constant communication with the Globe
9/12 and its diverse ecosystems. 10/12 and the Javelin, the Telescopic Towers are the ears and brain of the agency in the mainland.
 AVIARY
Encased by mesh and titanium rods, the Aviary, with its clear geometric shapes stands in the virgin landscape.
The structure focuses on the study and research of alternative forms of Ornithological interrogation. The Aviary
is in reality a Detention Centre for Tropical Birds, a Guantanamo for colourful parrots. A lightweight structure
assembled following simple geometric and constructive principles, the first Aviary was erected during the great
Purge—a massive expropriation of the island in order to regain complete control over its most ‘valuable’ resources.
Unsuspecting, the public thought of it as another zoologist project, one of many in those days of political austerity and
land acquisitions by the Federal Government and the Fiscal Control Board. Birds thought to possess valuable infor-
mation were detained, interrogated, and studied in the Aviary. Birds were taken from cages and trees. Snatched in
mid-flight by Floating Fortresses, captured in the forests by the Amphibian structures. The Javelin’s highly sensitive
sensors could detect birds flying thousands of kilometres away. The Amphibian Fortress could feel the noise of a
APPEN­DIX beak chewing on insects. In less than a year no birds remained free. More Aviaries were spotted on the newly
claimed landscape. At one time focused on dolphins and rats, military training was now directed towards birds.
IMAGE Tropical Birds were the new POW. Those willing were converted into allied spies. All birds sang. Some birds sang
11/12 louder than the others.
CAMP
The Camps are the only evidence of the island’s previous inhabitation. Like nuclear no-go zones, they are fenced
areas encircling monuments, obelisks, effigies, and icons of the life that used to occupy the island. In the years of
the great purge, all forms of ‘historically significant architecture’ (a concept used by members of Tropicalia to iden-
tify any form of artefact, from statues of political figures to pieces of buildings, and infrastructures that carry a form
APPEN­DIX of idealism) were concentrated in these Camps.
As the Camps were quickly filled, more of them were built. Always respecting ecologically sensible zones, the Camps
IMAGE were constructed in areas of transition. Between the palm trees and the beach. Between the mountains and the sea.
12/12 The Camps are Tropical Museums: Prisons for Ideology, internment camps for Architecture.
 NOTES IMAGES 8 Unsigned, ‘Unitary Urbanism at 7 Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis
PART I the End of the 1950s’, International with Madelon Vriesendorp and
. Situationiste #3, December 1959, Zoe Zenghelis, ‘Exodus: Or the
1 Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Theory of the Dérive… Voluntary Prisoners of Architec­-
Oeuvre complète, volume 1, 9 Guy Debord, ‘On Wild Architec­- ture’ (1972), from Exit Utopia:
1910-1929. ture’, POST-SI, September 1972, Architectural Provocations 1956-
2 Le Corbusier, Aircraft (London: in Theory of the Dérive and other 76, Martin van Schaik and Otakar
Trefoil Publications, 1987), 84. Situationist Writings on the City, Macel, eds., (Munich: Prestel
3 Le Corbusier, Quand les cathé- 152-153. Verlag, 2005), 236-253.
drales étaient blanches (1947) 10 Southdale Regional Shopping 8 Koolhaas, ‘Exodus’, 236-253.
translated as When the Cathedrals Center advertisement. 9 For a detail description of the dif-
were White, trans. Francis E. 11 ‘The City of the Future, HP-talk ference between high theory and
Hyslop, JR., (New York: McGraw- with Constant about New low theory regarding Kynicism
Hill, 1964), 23. Babylon’, originally published in see Peter Sloterdijk, ‘In Search of
4 Le Corbusier, Précisions sur un Dutch in Haagse Post, August 6, Lost Cheekiness’, Critique of
état présent de l'architecture et 1966, in Exit Utopia: Architectural Cynical Reason, trans. Michael
de l’urbanisme (1930), translated Provocation 1956-76, Martin van Eldred, (Minneapolis: University of
into Precisions on the Present Schaik and Otakar Macel, Minnesota Press, 1987), 101-133.
State of Architecture and City (Munich: Prestel 2005), 10-12. 10 Rem Koolhaas, ‘Field Trip: A(A)
Planning, trans. Edith Schreiber 12 Constant, Debord, ‘The Amster-­ Memoir (First and Last…)’ (1993),
Aujame, (Cambridge: MIT Press, dam Declaration’, International in Koolhaas, Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL,
1991), 241. Situationiste #2, December 1958, (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995),
. in Theory of the Dérive…, 80. 215.
. 13 Yona Friedman, ‘Paris Spatial: 11 Koolhaas and Zenghelis with
PART II A Suggestion’ (1960), in Exit Vriesendorp and Zenghelis,
. Utopia: Architectural Provocation Exodus, op. cit. (note g), 248.
1 Alison Smithson, ed. Team 10 1956-76, Martin van Schaik and 12 Koolhaas, ‘Appendix: A Fictional
Primer, (London: Studio Vista, Otakar Macel, in Exit Utopia, 26. Conclusion’, in Delirious New York,
1968), 91. . 293.
2 Definition of kitsch taken from . 13 See Koolhaas, ‘The City of the
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable PART III Captive Globe’ (1972), in Delirious
Lightness of Being, trans. Michael . New York, 294-296.
Henry Heim, (New York: Harper & 1 Archizoom Associati, ‘No Stop 14 Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 17.
Row Publishers, 1984), 130. City: Residential Car Park 15 Koolhaas, ‘The Story of the Pool’
3 The idea of the Sublime Object of Universal Climatic System’, (1977), in Delirious New York, 310.
Ideology is borrowed from the Domus Magazine No. 496, March .
eponymous book by Slavoj Žižek 1971, in Andrea Branzi, No-Stop
that comments on Sloterdijk’s City: Archizoom Associati,
Critique of Cynical Reason. Žižek, (Orleans: Editions HYX, 2006), 177.
The Sublime Object of Ideology, 2 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York:
(London / New York: Verso, 1989). A Retroactive Manifesto for
4 Constant, ‘The Great Game to Manhattan, New York: The
Come’, Potlatch #30, in Theory of Mona­celli Press, 1978), 253.
the Dérive and other Situationist 3 Superstudio, ‘The Continuous
Writings on the City, Libero Monument: an Architectural
Andreotti, Xavier Costa, eds., Model for Total Urbanization’, in
(Barcelona: Museu d’Arte Superstudio: Life Without Objects,
Contemporani de Barcelona / ed. Peter Lang and William
ACTAR, 1996), 62-67. Menking, (Milan: Skira Editore,
5 Constant, ‘The Great Game to 2003), 122-147.
Come’, 62-67. 4 Archizoom Associati, ‘No-Stop
6 Unsigned, ‘Unitary Urbanism at City’, 177.
the End of the 1950s’, International 5 Superstudio, ‘The Continuous
Situationiste #3, December 1959, Monument’, 122-147.
in Theory of the Dérive…, 83-88. 6 Superstudio, ‘The Continuous
7 Constant, ‘New Babylon’ (1974), Monument’, 122-147.
Theory of the Dérive…, 158.

NARRATIVE ARCHITECTURE 129

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This Kynical Manifesto for a Narrative The Graham Foundation for the Ross Miller, Thomas Prinz, Mike Zhang Ke / standardarchitecture / .
. Architecture is part of a continuous Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts in Nesbit providing an experimental ZAO mentoring and supporting our .
. search to contribute to the collective Chicago awarding a Grant to com- space for discourses and positions critical project during seven critical .
. intelligence of Architecture through plete the research in this book… at Maple St. Construct… years in Beijing… .
. critical inquiry, alternative practice, . . . .
. and post-colonial pedagogies. . . . .
. A Diogenesian lantern lit up by more Ronald Frankowski providing count- Aaron Betsky and Chris Lasch pro- Stephen Lee and Yoko Tai welcoming .
. than ten years of subversive fire, this less valuable insights, philosophical viding a space for the ideas of this us to Pittsburgh where the contents .
. book wouldn’t be possible without: foundations, bibliographical material book to flourish in an experi­mental of this book were completed… .
. . and editorial work, and devising pedagogical environment at The . .
. . together with Dominique Frankowski School of Architecture at Taliesin… . .
. . a retreat in the Alps where most of . Our students at The School of Archi­ .
. . the images in the book were created… . tecture at Taliesin, the University of .
. . . Jorge L. Lizardi Pollock, Francisco Nebraska-Lincoln, and Carnegie .
. . . Javier Rodriguez, Elio S. Martinez- Mellon University expanding the .
. . Michelle Garnaut who has been Joffre, and Anixa Gonzalez believing legacy and subversive potential of .
. . monumental through her friendship, and supporting the initial gestation Narrative Architecture and other .
. . moral support, individual contribu- of this Project at the Universidad de forms of critical Architecture… .
. . tions and through the involvement Puerto Rico in Rio Piedras… . .
. . in the arts and culture of Capital . . .
. . M, M on the Bund and the Beijing . The Visiting Teaching Fellowship .
. . and Shanghai International Literary Rodrigo Vidal revealing key, unpub- at The School of Architecture at .
. . Festivals… lished research material… Taliesin, the Hyde Chair of Excellence .
. . . . in Architecture at the University of .
. . . . Nebraska-Lincoln, and the Ann Kalla .
. . Marcel Witvoet, Milou van Lieshout, Laura Alvarez and Vibok Works, Professorship in Architecture at .
. . and the team at NAI010 Publishers Hori­zonte Journal for Architectural Carnegie Mellon University for pro- .
. . making this book a physical reality… Discourse, Ahn Lihn Ngo and ARCH+, viding us with space for research and .
. . . MONU Magazine on Urbanism, pedagogical experimentation… .
. . . Thelma Jimenez Anglada and Revista . .
. . Team Thursday / Loes van Esch and Cruce, Perspecta Magazine, Brendan . .
. . Simone Trum authoring the graphic Cormier, Volume Magazine, Revista The Institute of Optimistic Archi­ .
. . structure, and partaking in the con- Opcion, Christopher Rey Perez and tec­tures supporting continuously .
. . ceptual dialogue that resulted in the Dolce Stil Criollo, Conditions, USC architectural, artistic and literary .
. . design of this book… School of Architecture, Matteo experiments… The many Kynics .
. . . Ghidoni and Fundamental Acts, the lifting Diogenesian lanterns in search .
. . . US Consulate in Shanghai, Petra of an honest Architecture… .
. . Luis Othoniel Rosa providing timely Eckhard, GAM and TU Graz, offering . .
. . and critical insights on the text, its platforms for the diffusion of Narra­ . .
. . theoretical ambitions and its philo- tive Architecture… . .
. . sophical framework… . . .
. . . . . .
. . . Sarah Herda, Joseph Grima and the . .
. . Jan Sobotka supporting the book, Chicago Architecture Biennial ad­- . .
. . Holly Craig, and Hilary Wiese collab- dressing with Narrative Architecture . .
. . orating with projects of Narrative the question about the State of the . .
. . Architecture, and Aaron Culliton Art of Architecture… . .
. . assisting with archival material… . . .
. . . . . .
. . . Pedro Gadanho at the Museum of . .
. . Rem D. Koolhaas / United Nude, Modern Art in New York (MoMA), . .
. . Daan Roggeveen, Hao Chen, and and at the Museum of Art, Archi­ . .
. . Li Shan with their collaborations tecture and Technology in Lisbon . .
. . and support… (MAAT) engaging with the media, . .
. . . discourse and strategies that form . .
. . . part of this book… . .
. . Jeffrey L. Day, Jason Griffiths, . . .
. . Sarah Deyong, Craig Babe, and . . .
. . David Newton supporting us at . . Cruz Garcia &
. . the University of Nebraska-Lincoln… . . Nathalie Frankowski

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 130 NARRATIVE ARCHITECTURE 131

CREDITS . For works of visual artists
. affiliated with a CISAC-organization
. the copy­rights have been settled
. Texts with Pictoright in Amsterdam.
Cruz Garcia & Nathalie Frankowski, © 2019, c/o Pictoright Amsterdam
WAI Architecture Think Tank .
. . Although every effort was
. Images made to find the copyright holders
Cruz Garcia & Nathalie Frankowski, for the illustrations used, it has not
WAI Architecture Think Tank been possible to trace them all.
. Interested parties are requested
. Assistant Editor to contact nai010 publishers,
Ronald Frankowski Korte Hoogstraat 31, 3011 GK
. Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
. Copy Editing .
Leo Reijnen (Taal & Teken) . nai010 publishers is an inter­
. nationally orientated publisher
. Design specialized in developing, producing
Team Thursday and distributing books in the fields
. of architecture, urbanism, art and
. Lithography and Printing design. www.nai010.com
Wilco Art Books .
. . nai010 books are available
. Paper internationally at selected book-
Invercote Metalprint, Biotop stores and from the following
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Whyte Inktrap, Burgess America: Artbook | D.A.P., New York,
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nai010 publishers idea@ideabooks.nl
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. Publisher . For general questions, please
Marcel Witvoet, contact nai010 publishers directly
nai010 publishers at sales@nai010.com or visit our
. website www.nai010.com for
. further information.
. .
. . Printed and bound in the
. Netherlands
. .
. .
. This publication was made .
possible by financial support .
from The Graham Foundation .
for Advanced Studies in the Fine .
Arts, the Institute of Optimistic .
Archi­tectures, Michelle Garnaut, .
and Jan Sobotka. .
. .
. © 2019 nai010 publishers, . ISBN 978-94-6208-524-4
Rotter­dam. All rights reserved. NUR 648
No part of this publication may be BISAC ARC000000, ARC00100
reproduced, stored in a retrieval .
system, or transmitted in any form . Narrative Architecture - A Kynical
or by any means, electronic, me­chan- Manifesto is also available as:
ical, photocopying, recording or Narrative Architecture - A Kynical
otherwise, without the prior written Manifesto e-book (PDF) e-ISBN
permission of the publisher. 978-94-6208-562-6
 Narrative Architecture reveals a stream of remarkable
architectural and urban visions in the twentieth century
that culminated in the construction of one of the most
powerful, misunderstood and underutilized weapons
of architectural and urban critique, thinking and
representation.
.
This historical genealogy in three parts weaves insepa­-
rable modern architecture and narrative critique through
never before seen images of half a century of utopian,
heroic, commercial, ironic and critical projects by
Le Corbusier, Team 10, Constant, Victor Gruen, Yona
Friedman, Archizoom, Superstudio and Rem Koolhaas.
.
Alluding to Diogenes, the ancient kynic who wandered
with a lantern in search of an honest man, through
narrative, archival and provocative images and texts,
the book lays the groundwork in search of an honest
architecture able to question the pressing challenges
of our times.
.
Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski are architects, educators,
codirectors of international studio WAI Architecture Think Tank.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
nai010 publishers
www.nai010.com
.

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