Architecture or Techno-Utopia

Author: Felicity D. Scott (Columbia University)
Year: 2001 (Grey Room 3, 112–126)
Source type: article
Raw file: raw/articles/scott-2001-architecture-or-techno-utopia.md

Summary

Scott excavates the 1970s "Gray/White" debate (inclusivism/exclusivism; Tafuri's "The Ashes of Jefferson" in l'Architecture d'aujourd'hui 1976, against Stern's "Gray Architecture") to ask how its particular return to "resemanticization" actually foreclosed alternative readings of modernism — namely the "experimental architecture" of the 1960s–70s (Archigram, Superstudio, Archizoom, Cedric Price, Michael Webb, Hans Hollein) that engaged technology and communications. She traces Tafuri's (and Rowe's) foreclosure of experimental/techno-utopian practice, and connects it to the contemporary "Deleuzian moment" of diagrams and asignifying regimes.

Key Claims

• The Gray/White debate and resemanticization: both Grays (Stern: "Gray buildings have facades which tell stories") and Whites/Eisenman shared a project of "resemanticization"; Tafuri's reply: "nothing remains but to gather around the hearth to listen to the fables of the new grannies." The debate "foreclosed alternative reevaluations of modernism," the experimental architecture that sought "to experiment out of architecture" (Cook).
• Rowe and Tafuri vs. the experimental avant-garde: Rowe collapsed commercial modernism and experimental practice; the New York Five's "autonomy" was "a new mythology" for Tafuri, whose "Post-Modern tight-rope walker" figures the architect's capture within a totalizing technical-commercial realm and loss of agency ("action without a subject"). Tafuri saw Archizoom/Superstudio/La Pietra's engagement with technology and communication as another "mass deception," resemanticization as "just another form of 'styling.'"
• Suppression of techno-utopia: the debate "foreclosed" the experimental/techno-utopian investigations of the 60s–70s (Archigram, No-Stop City, Twelve Cautionary Tales) — practices that negotiated (even dystopically) the feedback/control of new communications technology (cf. Banham: "Megastructure ... was obviously close kin to Big Management").
• The contemporary Deleuzian moment: Scott notes the recent recovery of Deleuze & Guattari (diagrams, asignifying regimes, "circuit breakers," "vacuoles of noncommunication") with experimental architecture, warning this "Deleuzian moment" risks "the same depoliticization ... that occurred at the hands of Tafuri and Rowe" — "we have come full circle." "architecture is the least likely instrument with which to accomplish the revolution" (Drexler).

Connections

Concepts: Critical Architecture · Ideology · Noopolitics · Parametricism
Authors: Felicity D. Scott · Manfredo Tafuri · Rem Koolhaas
Debates: Critical vs. Projective
Related source notes: The Fate of Critical Architecture (synthesis) · Architecture, Critique, Ideology (Wallenstein) · Flows of Capitalism (Gough)

Direct Quotes

"[N]othing remains but to gather around the hearth to listen to the fables of the new grannies." (Tafuri, as quoted)

"Gray 'buildings ... have facades which tell stories.'" (Stern, as quoted)

"[T]he rise of interest in asignifying regimes and nonsemantic organizations is being forged through a new articulation with communications technology."

"Creating has always been something different from communication. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control." (Deleuze, as quoted)

Open Questions

• Does Scott's recovery of "experimental architecture" offer a way beyond the Gray/White (and critical/projective) impasse — and how does the contemporary "Deleuzian moment" (diagram, parametricism) risk repeating the very depoliticization Tafuri and Rowe effected?