Autistic Architecture

Definition

Autistic architecture is Maria Kaika's term for the contemporary corporate building that is spectacular in design yet serial in production — "a pathological self-absorption and preoccupation with the self to the exclusion of the outside world." These buildings serve footloose transnational elites, are detached from public space and urban fabric, and are commissioned with planned obsolescence (a 20–50 year life), in contrast to earlier place-loyal corporate monuments that "carried the names of their patrons," "ennobled" workers, and were built to last forever. The term recategorizes what is commonly called "iconic" corporate architecture as closer to Baudrillard's "serial objects": mass-produced forms that nonetheless claim uniqueness.

Key Thinkers

• Maria Kaika — coined the term; situates it in Castoriadis's framework of the radical imaginary and the shift from place-loyal to footloose elites.
• Leslie Sklair — the Transnational Capitalist Class as the patrons of autistic architecture; "a regime of power without responsibility" (Sennett).
• (Related, not yet paged: Cornelius Castoriadis — the "radical imaginary" as the instituting force of new elite power; Richard Sennett — the city's "passive beloved"; Jean Baudrillard — "serial objects.")

Related Concepts

• Iconic Architecture — the category Kaika argues autistic architecture has displaced while masquerading under its name.
• Architectural Object — Bismarck's self-referential, privatizing entity; autistic architecture as its built form for the corporate tower.
• Star Architecture — the commissioning system that produces autistic architecture's serial "originals" (Gehry's replicated Bilbao curves; the bullet form of the Gherkin repeated in Torre Agbar, Chicago Spire).
• Neoliberal Metropolis — the urban condition that autistic architecture both expresses and reinforces.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Autistic Architecture: The Fall of the Icon and the Rise of the Serial Object of Architecture
• Architecture and Crisis: Re-inventing the Icon, Re-imag(in)ing London and Re-branding the City
• Who Wins and Who Loses in the Production of Cultural Iconic Architecture?

Open Questions

• Is "autistic architecture" a useful periodizing term for a specific phase (post-1970s corporate architecture), or does it describe a permanent feature of architecture under financialized capitalism?
• Can a building be both "autistic" (self-absorbed, indifferent to the city) and genuinely "public" — or does the concept inherently foreclose the possibility of critical or civic corporate architecture?