OPERATIVE CRITIQUES (MAY DAY)

Harvard Design Magazine Mixes Things Up - The current issue of HDM (Spring/ Summer 2005) is a polyglot affair with mixed reports on the state of urban planning, including reasoned versus scorching critiques of present urban planning initiatives in New York in the form of the Far West Side (including the notorious stadium), and the Brooklyn waterfront (with its inevitable and unenviable gentrification) -- all pointing to the main problem, that is, urban planning as rubber stamp for public-private development schemes (with the public paying for the infrastructural upgrades, a practice, and pastiche, notably advocated by Jeffrey Sachs in his recent apologia for neo-liberal capitalism, The End of Poverty).

Apparently, the public (meaning governmental agencies, using bonds, tax dollars and tax incentives, a.k.a. rebates, and/or abatements) should fund "systems" best epitomised as power grids, roads, transport, and -- perhaps -- everything most costly, leaving the rest to the 'market', or private funding mechanisms (venture capital). 

In New York, Bloomberg and Doctoroff seem to think that the public should also underwrite any risk associated with the private deployment of new, unnecessary office space and the ludicrously expensive sporting facilities associated with the 2012 Olympic Bid.

Included in HDM is a very curious essay by Reinhold Martin (editor of Grey Room and Columbia School of Architecture don) regarding the vicissitudes of theory in the post-theory or post-critical phase architecture now seems hopelessly mired in. Most curious of all is Martin's dissing of anything resembling or associated with 'affectivity' and a rhetorical double-bind vis-a-vis 'architectural autonomy' (or formalism) introduced by way of his reading of conceptual terrain otherwise known as 'the Real', a terrain charted in post-Marxist works from Zupancic to Zizek to Badiou ...

Zizek/Badiou - http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/zizek_badiou.rtf

That said, Martin does justice (somewhat sardonically) to the current crop of nonsense passing under the sign of spurious, purely 'syntactical' (read, morphological) operations (plus pragmatism or neo-realism), or architectural design devoid of any signified (any semantic content whatsoever), or the legacy of 1990s accommodationist urbanism typified by MoMA’s Groundswell exhibition. Martin’s memorable diatribe weighs in, after all, on the necessity of restoring criticality within the nihilistic ravages of present-day architectural hubris. With nods toward Tafuri's ghost, and the appropriate noises apropos of useless reifications of 'operative criticism', Martin's critique suggests (perhaps against his own intentions) that it is only a matter of time before the bugaboo of 'affectivity' is seen by unrepentant modernists (and neo-modernists alike) as the necessary Way Out of the dialectical stalemate outlined above, a Way Out best pictured by the salient and numinous intersection of the contingent and the transcendent axes in architectural representation itself (part and parcel of structuralist readings, and Marxist and neo-Marxist readings especially).

Black Sun @ MoMA - http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/black_sun.rtf

Thus, the spectral nature of architecture's interiority returns in raw, unbridled form in the current crop of Eisenman books and exhibitions, but most of all in the Cultural Center at Santiago de Compostela and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, in Berlin (scheduled to open in May 2005), two projects unassimilable to the current state of things architectural and architectural criticism without affect.

Eisenman Juggernaut - http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/eisenman2.html

Immodernity, then, calls ... If it calls through 'affectivity', and if it now acts as catalyst for the production of new works of art, cinema, literature and what-have-you, why is 'it' all but taboo within the late-capitalist (late-modernist) machinations of architecture per se? Or, more critically, why is the architectural avant-garde all but dead and buried?

GK / LANY

Immodernity Itself - http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/immodernity.html

/S/O(MA) - /S/yntactical Operations (Metaphorical Affects)
GK / LANY - GK / Landscape Agency New York
&C: http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/looking_awry2.html

ENDNOTES

The operative critiques here include: Susan Fainstein, “The Return of Urban Renewal: Dan Doctoroff’s Grand Plans for New York City”, pp. 9-14; Robert D. Yaro, “Plans for Manhattan’s Far West Side: A Portent of New Urban Redevelopment”, pp. 15-19; and Reinhold Martin, “Critical of What?: Toward a Utopian Realism”, pp. 104-109 / The HDM issue in question (Spring/Summer 2005) is entitled “Urban Planning Now: What Works, What Doesn’t” …

Of so-called ‘historical’ interest, then, is Guy Debord’s 1967 book Society of the Spectacle (as well as Guy Debord’s 1973 film Society of the Spectacle). What Debord seems to get wrong, at that point along the way at least, is that ‘irreversible time’ (what he identifies as the specific ‘nature’ (or anti-nature) of capitalist production and spectacular forms of urban design, in particular) is not historical in quite the way he suggests, nor is it what needs to be re-appropriated or taken back by revolutionary praxis. Instead, it would seem that another type of time is at stake, a time that is buried inside of so-called irreversible (teleological) time -- or that which has been termed ‘eschatological time’ by Walter Benjamin and others of a more poetic and perhaps apocalyptic persuasion (such as Proust, or Simone Weil, a.k.a. ‘the categorical imperative in skirts’) . For this reason, Tafuri abandoned his critique of architectural, utopian modernism and de-camped for the curiously synchronic plenitude (abundance) of Mannerist architectures of the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, most especially the dark-somatic work of Giulio Romano.

Regarding Tafuri - See http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/formalism.html

See Alenka Zupancic for post-Zizek, post-Badiou readings of the imperative of present-day philosophy. In particular, see Ethics of the Real (London: Verso, 2000).