Architecture
and «pessimism»
On the
political condition of architecture
Pedro
Levi Bismarck
•
Ex-curso . series b <1>
October 2020
ISSN 2184-5859
5€
•
1. object
and landscape
an
architecture without project
2. the
architect as an entrepreneur
the
privatization of architecture
3. to
organize pessimism
on the
political condition of architecture
•
More than
another plea to the political commitment of architects, this essay seeks to
understand how neoliberalism challenged an entire way of practicing
architecture. If words like «city» or «plan» are just an uncomfortable
embarrassment in the mouth of so many architects, or simply old relics placed
in the showcase of the museum of architectural history, it is because the
entire foundations of the idea of project – which marked the experience of
architecture throughout the twentieth century – were shattered by the
progressive dismantling of the Welfare State.
That’s the
reason why the «architectural object» is the true successor of the idea of
«architecture as project»: it consumes and consummates the death of the project
while giving formal and conceptual expression to the position that architecture
occupies in the political economy of neoliberalism’s total market. On the other
hand, the current disciplinary anxiety for the «essential values of
architecture» or the «poetics of form» is not a coincidence: in making each
architectural object an eternal spring poem, full of promises of happiness,
redeems the harsh reality of a profession crossed by precariousness and social
irrelevance, furthermore concealing the ongoing neoliberal dissolution of
public institutions. This is the reason why the object is always private: a
privatized architecture, that is, an architecture expropriated from its public
condition.
Nonetheless, if
we are left with nothing more than pessimism, this doesn’t mean any fatalistic
resignation, but means, as Walter Benjamin already knew, that this is the only
point from one can start: «il faut organiser le pessimisme».
•
.jpg)
