Environments by Design

Abstract

The dominant academic narrative to debate how buildings engage with their societal and political reality—the old and convoluted debate on criticality—has systematically disempowered architecture from being an active transformative force. As a discipline, it could only be fully detached from reality to maintain its autonomy, or, if engaged with it, it had to remain uncritically submissive. Such positions have favored designs conceived using either formal abstraction or strategic conformity but rarely real actions. 

In an attempt to overcome that separation, this paper reframes architecture’s critical toolbox by proposing a double-step critique, which reconciles a realist emphasis on performative episodes of everyday life—such as intimate domestic scenes or informal social encounters—, with the unavoidable spectacular quality that these actions hold in contemporary capitalist societies. On the one hand, a Brechtian realist attitude (1938)—built through physical and mimetic actions instead of abstract and systematic ideas unlocks critical alternatives to instrumental rationality (Adorno,1979). On the other, any attempt to reproduce reality crashes into a simulation in which echoes of premodern storytelling reverberate (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1986), but whose current embodiment inevitably sinks us into Debord’s society of spectacular images (1967). If architecture wants to get closer to real life, to engage it and improve it, it needs to reproduce it as a fictional image. 

To explore this contradiction’s critical effectiveness, I will examine several projects from the modern residential canon: starting with the Marxist classicism of the Red Vienna, continuing with the vernacular scenography of Rome’s Quartiere Tiburtino and finishing with the fabricated social utopia of Erskine’s Byker Wall in Newcastle. Finally, I will compare the transformative qualities—both socially and politically—of these large housing projects with contemporary proposals tactical urbanism, which share the paradoxical negotiation between the performative reality of everyday physical life and the construction of fictional images and actions to make that reality believable.

This paper will examine the early explorers’ huts built in Antarctica, along with other structures such as the Fuller dome at the South Pole, to propose that the desert continent has served as distinctive site for the architectural imagination. With no building materials, with no aboriginal cultures, with no nations, the extreme setting has indeed been regarded as a tabula rasa for architectural thinking. But the paper will also explore, and emphasize, the proposition that these structures represent a distinct challenge to architectural history, resistant as they are to the conventions of architectural historiography, such as authorship, tradition, or representation. These desert buildings therefore offer a twofold challenge: the challenge of their imagining, and the challenge of their historical interpretation.