Digital monuments : the dreams and abuses of iconic architecture 9780367201111, 0367201119, 9780367201128, 0367201127

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‘Simone Brott takes readers on a dark journey through the digital imaginaries of contemporary architecture. This timely book de-mythologizes the multi-layered paradoxes of “iconic architecture” and its genre of image that have become fundamentally intertwined with contemporary architectural culture. It compels us to rethink the future of the discipline.’ – Mark Jarzombek, Professor, MIT Department of Architecture ‘If you’ve been wondering what has happened to hard-hitting, Marxist analyses of architecture, Simone Brott is here with a lively critique of the iconic architecture of the last 25 years. Brott demonstrates that these structures are not just curious exuberances at the top of the architectural pyramid but an important building type with its own trajectory bound up with the pathologies of global capitalism.’ – Tom Spector, Professor of Architecture and Managing Editor, Architecture Philosophy ‘Typically insightful, razor-sharp and urgent in its message, Simone Brott’s new book presents a masterclass in reclaiming the political for architecture and showing it for what it truly is: the essence of how our discipline is thought and taught, discussed and built.’ – Marko Jobst, Architecture Theory Coordinator, Department of Architecture, Greenwich University

“Beware of the other’s dream, because if you are caught in the other’s dream you are done for.” Gilles Deleuze “Smash the control images—Smash the control machine.” William S. Burroughs “Resist any idea that contains the word algorithm.” Lebbeus Woods “The creation of a virtual image is a form of accident. This explains why virtual reality is a cosmic accident. It’s the accident of the real.” Paul Virilio “These days even reality has to look artificial.” J. G. Ballard “The image . . . bears no relation to any reality whatever.” Jean Baudrillard “Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable.” Mark Fisher

Digital Monuments

Digital Monuments radically explodes “iconic architecture” of the new millennium and its hijacking of the public imagination via the digital image. Hallucinatory constructions such as Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV headquarters in Beijing, Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and Zaha Hadid’s Performing Arts Centre in Abu Dhabi are all introduced to the world by immortal digital imagery that floods the internet—yet comes to haunt the actualised buildings. Like holograms, these “digital monuments,” which violently push physics and engineering to their limits, flicker eerily between the real and the unreal—invoking fantasies of omnipotence, immortality and utopian cities. But this experience of iconic architecture as a digital dream on the ground conceals from the urban spectator the social reality of the buildings and the rigidity of their ideology. In 18 micro-essays, Digital Monuments exposes the stereotypes of iconic architecture while depicting the savagery of the industry, from the Greek and Spanish crises triggered by financialised iconic development to mass labour-deaths on construction sites in the UAE.

Simone Brott is an architect and theorist, and Senior Lecturer in Architecture at Queensland University of Technology. Educated at Yale University and The University of Melbourne, she writes on the politics of the digital image in architectural production and the contemporary city. Her books include Architecture for a Free Subjectivity: Deleuze and Guattari at the Horizon of the Real (Routledge, 2016) and Architecture Post Mortem: The Diastolic Architecture of Decline, Dystopia, and Death (Routledge, 2016). A regular contributor to Log (Anycorp, New York), Brott has also written for AD Architectural Design (Wiley, London); Thresholds: Journal of the MIT Department of Architecture; Architectural Theory Review: Journal of the Department of Architecture, the University of Sydney; Journal of Public Space (City Space, Italy); and The Journal of Architecture and Urbanism. She has lectured at Yale University, Harvard University, Boston University, the University of Michigan, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Strathclyde University, Glasgow, and the University of Melbourne. She is currently working on a new project about the financialisation of cities.

Digital Monuments The Dreams and Abuses of Iconic Architecture

SIMONE BROTT

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business  2020 Simone Brott The right of Simone Brott to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Brott, Simone, author. Title: Digital monuments : the dreams and abuses of iconic architecture / Simone Brott. Description: New York : Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019010339| ISBN 9780367201111 (hb : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780367201128 (pb : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780429259647 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Architecture and fame. | Architecture—Psychological aspects. | Digital images. Classification: LCC NA2543.F35 B76 2019 | DDC 720.1/03—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019010339 ISBN: 978-0-367-20111-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-20112-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-25964-7 (ebk) Typeset in Univers by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK Book cover design by Adrian Elton / Adrian Elton Creative*

To Jacob

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Contents

Acknowledgements   1   2  3   4  5  6  7   8   9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

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Introduction: architecture’s fake left Digital ghost Modernity’s opiate Anti-iconic Reflections from damaged modernity Elysium Loop Sacrifice How iconic architecture triggered the Greek crisis The look of money Futurist iconic The architect-financier The abuses of iconic architecture The Zaha Hadid scandal Iconic dystopias and moral law The moral contents of the digital image Vagina stadium Autonomy and vanity After iconic architecture

1 17 25 30 39 45 56 67 81 92 100 108 121 127 137 152 159 164 171

Select bibliography Index

189 193 ix

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all those who contributed to the book, including my wonderful editor Jayne Kelley; generous readers Mark Jarzombek, Libero Andreotti, David Cohen and Donald Kunze; and David Gianotten, Marko Jobst, Wolf Prix, Simon Sadler, Georges Teyssot, Ben van Berkel and Joseph Young, whose thoughtful and provocative responses in the final chapter begin to enact a conversation I am hopeful will continue. I am also grateful to the architects who gave permission for the use of their images in this book—MVRDV, Zaha Hadid Architects, Coop Himmelb(l)au, New-Territories/R&Sie(n) (François Roche and Stéphanie Lavaux), Herzog & de Meuron and Tim Danaher— as well as to the photographers Yannis Prappas and Garmatis Pantelis and the filmmaker Michael Blackwood, who graciously shared their work for publication. Finally, I would like to thank Queensland University of Technology, whose generous support during a period of long service leave, maternity leave and professional development leave allowed this book to be completed. Digital Monuments is the culmination of a prior body of work. The original theory was first presented at the Second Annual Architecture and Philosophy Symposium: Architecture and Image, co-chaired by Harvard Graduate School of Design and

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Boston University Department of Philosophy; followed by a public lecture on iconic architecture at the University of Michigan, Taubman College of Architecture; a presentation at the 33rd Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ) conference, held at the University of Melbourne; and two journal articles, “Modernity’s Opiate, or the Crisis of Iconic Architecture,” in Log (New York), from which Chapters 2, 3 and 4 were derived, and “Calatrava in Athens: The Architect as Financier and the Iconic City,” in The Journal of Public Space, whose material was developed into Chapters 8, 9, 10 and 11; a new chapter in The Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture and Design, Routledge; and a visual-text installation in the Great War Island exhibition, at Magacin Gallery in Belgrade.

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Introduction Architecture’s fake left

Figure 0.1: Unknown photographer. Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao. © FMGB Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa, United Kingdom, 2019.

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Iconic architecture in the 21st century is a new form of media that, through unconscious messages screened by the digital image, exploits the mass unconscious for the purposes of capital in the contemporary city. Such buildings are defined by way of an uncanny surface resemblance between the built work and computer-generated imagery—an “iconicity”—that is not only a new technology of visualisation but a golden calf for the digital urban masses. Buildings such as Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV headquarters in Beijing, Norman Foster’s 30 St Mary Axe in London (the Gherkin), Zaha Hadid’s Performing Arts Centre in Abu Dhabi and Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao derive their power from the hypnotic authority of the digital image reified, or actualised, on the ground to the urban spectator; like a hologram, the building is both real and unreal, its eerie formal transcendence arousing fantasies of eternal youth, omnipotence, immortality, Elysian cities—and all the false promises of modernity. While iconic architecture parades as a visual stunt—an “avant-garde” project of the miraculous digital image that violently pushes physics and engineering to their limits—this illusion of aesthetic velocity and radicality conceals the social reality of the real buildings and the rigidity of their ideology. For the iconic project remains a principal technique of neo-liberal globalisation, and its absolute goals are to solve serious financial problems. Such megaprojects are only made possible by colossal debt arrangements that have the capacity to generate savage distortions of capital and social abuses, including financial crises in Greece and Spain triggered by speculative iconic development, as well as mass deaths of workers and human rights violations on iconic construction sites in the United Arab Emirates and former Soviet Union. Twenty years after the first iconic building of the digital age, Gehry’s 1997 Guggenheim, the digital image is a filmic screen

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Figure 0.2: Emmett Hume, renderer. Digital rendering of Frank Gehry’s Beekman Place, 8 Spruce Street, New York, October 2010. Licensed under CC BY 3.0.

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that hijacks the urban spectator, paradoxically making reality less real just as it flaunts the abuses of architecture’s “iconic project” and the failures of modernity in global cities. I call it an opiate of modernity. If I say “iconic” today do I mean something good or something bad? I wrote this book because it seemed that there was no credible theory of iconic architecture for the digital age but rather two ostensibly opposing but equally callow “sides,” the pro-iconic “right” and the anti-iconic “left” (if we can even use those terms anymore) — a status quo that reveals more about the bankrupt politics of the discipline than it does about the iconic project, which has dominated the field for 20 years. There are decisive historical reasons for this state of affairs. The post-political era of architecture solidified in the midto late 1990s, when a generation of architects including Peter Eisenman, Gehry, Hadid, Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind and Wolf Prix abandoned Deconstruction, a post-Soviet-inspired formalism and its related theory derived from the philosophy of Jacques Derrida. Having relinquished any traces of radical-left thought (contestation of space, metaphysics and subjectivity), these architects adopted a digital model sometimes referred to as Projective Architecture (by Eisenman, Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting), Parametricism (by Patrik Schumacher and Greg Lynn) or the New Pragmatism or New Materialism (by Schumacher and Manuel DeLanda respectively), and became the grown-up celebrity architects of the new millennium. Their new work used three-dimensional computer modelling, robots and algorithms to generate a delirious sciencefiction formalism that worships the contorted digital surface. This break with their fractured, theoretically provocative and postmodern work of the 20th century, signaled by the rise of pure digital monuments, would come to be known as the “iconic project.”

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As many theorists outside the discipline acknowledge, the break at the end of the 20th century, driven by digital technologies, also occurred in manifold fields outside of architecture, including finance, art, warfare, geopolitics, theory and religion. As the first instance of the iconic project, Gehry’s Guggenheim announced a radically new aesthetic object in the grandiose plastic surface made possible only by the use of aeronautic digital visualisation software, the use of which Gehry himself had pioneered in the discipline. Bilbao represented a paradigm shift evident in its astonishing impact and virtual reception as digital image both within and without the discipline, through exposure in advertisements for BMW and other luxury commodities and in cinema, television, visual art and music videos. If Deconstruction sought to dismantle metaphysical constructs of subjectivity via discordant geometries of fragmentation, the New Pragmatism of the iconic project has conceived a serpentine architecture of the digital surface that answers only to the dictates of market forces and the intelligence of digital formal production. Patrik Schumacher, a free-market libertarian and principal of Zaha Hadid Architects, has defended the iconic (while denying the category) with a dystopian brand of architectural politics he calls anarcho-capitalism, while those on the so-called architectural “left”—architectural theorists and academics—have dismissed the iconic project as entirely vacuous. (See, for example, Charles Jencks’s pejorative term for iconic buildings, the “enigmatic signifier,” by which he means an empty or meaningless icon.1) Yet the dominant conservative approach to this topic can be found in a lengthy stream of affirmative titles on digital technologies, such as Mario Carpo’s The Second Digital Turn and the Architectural Design profile Parametricism 2.0. Alternatives, such as Tom Dyckhoff’s The Age of Spectacle, are architectural

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journalism rather than critique. There are reasons for the dearth of serious leftist books on iconic architecture. After the great financial crisis of 2008 and a corresponding rise in anti-capitalist sentiment, the iconic project, like haute couture, was widely perceived by many as vain, marked by libidinous excesses and confected desires—in short, the architectural corollary to Oliver James’s “affluenza.” But in drawing this parallel, the left failed to understand that iconic architecture did not survive despite the financial crisis; it was an instrument of the crisis, and continues to exacerbate the crisis. While governments still vow a new iconic building will raise a city to the status of an urban global elite, it has become apparent that buildings such as the Guggenheim in Bilbao were conceived from the start with other aims: to act as apparatuses of financial remediation in the face of crisis, converting giant debt into fictitious capital via iconic intervention into the failed post-industrial European city. Equally, the social crimes of iconic architecture in the Middle East and former Soviet Union should not be viewed as collateral damage. They rather diagnose the ideological lining of an industry that serves a transnational capitalist elite against the global poor, who are pushed out to make way for such projects or employed under near-feudal labour conditions to erect iconic architecture for the capitalists. If there has been any resistance from the academic left— what Schumacher chronicled as the “anti-iconic”—it has never proceeded beyond futile negation. More than anything else, this deficit reveals the very disintegration of the architectural left. In the 1980s and 1990s, the neo-avant-garde—the Deconstructivist outfit that included Eisenman, Bernard Tschumi, Libeskind, Hadid, et al.—paraded itself as the new “left” of the discipline, even as it had openly compromised the goals of the 1970s

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avant-garde. Yet with the ascent of digital technologies and neo-liberalism, those same architects became rigidly conservative when they achieved fake celebrity status (became known as “starchitects,” appeared in The Simpsons) and launched the iconic project. The remnants of the original leftist project did not disappear, but were re-territorialised by the academy—by which I mean theorists and academics in the Northeast United States, the Ivy League axis of America. Political critique thus moved away from the centre, away from praxis. The selling out or neo-liberalisation of the avant-garde can be seen precisely in the ideological divorce between praxis and the academy manifest today at every level. First, architects no longer collaborate with critics and theorists in the way that Peter Eisenman, the last intellectual of the iconic project, had once collaborated with Jacques Derrida to write a book of theory, and even to carry out an architectural design. Next, we no longer conceive of the architectural object as an instrument for resisting dominant ideology, as the Russian Constructivist avant-garde did for architecture in 1910, or as the radical Italian Marxist architecture theorists of the 1970s did at the Venice School. Finally and most ominously, we can look to the violent quarrel between Schumacher and the academy to see how drastically things have changed: there has been a patent rise of rightist ideology within the avant-garde. In 2016, at the World Architecture Festival in Berlin, Schumacher called for the elimination of social housing and the privatisation of all public space—a manifesto that was cursed far and wide by the broader architectural left, including academics, architects, theorists and the architectural public. This protest, while well and good, failed to achieve anything other than simple veto: proclaiming that you disagree with this Orwellian manifesto is as easy as it is worthless.

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The impotence of the architectural left today lies in its ongoing failure to provide any critique or account of the iconic movement, which is not only the dominant formal terrain of architectural production but the very arena where global class warfare is played out—and thus where a leftist critique is both possible and desirable. Specifically, the architectural left has failed to address the role of the architectural image in geopolitics and the “worlding” of cities under the auspices of what I call the iconic architecture industry. Nor has the left provided any alternative to the iconic or its ideological programme. This is because the academic architectural left is not a real left, but what the late Mark Fisher would have called a fake, “petit-bourgeois” left. The current generation of academics and architects sold out their original 1970s project of architecture as an instrument of political critique and continue to do so, a trend concomitant with the left’s redaction of the role of the architectural critic as an agent of urban class struggle. While there exists a strong Marxist dialogue about cities among economists, urbanists and planners, notably David Harvey’s work, which traces back to the 1970s, there is no equivalent in architecture. The introduction of the widely derided disciplinary term “postcritical” did not mean the end of a critical politics in architecture, as argued by its proponents Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting in 2005 (where is their volte-face?), but the end of the critic’s agency within architectural politics. The postcritical became a self-fulfilling prophecy because the left failed to provide an alternative. The left’s campaign for increased “social responsibility”— advocating for “sustainable” architecture (in an industry responsible for 40 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States and Australia2), for “equity” and greater “inclusion”

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(domestic identitarian politics) or for “labour” (better industrial conditions for middle-class architects and academics)—are all symptomatic. First, they represent the narcissistic concerns of a comfortable class who abandoned the real Marxist cause, as the Venice School architecture theorist Manfredo Tafuri warned in the 1970s would happen. The architectural left as an agent in the materialist struggle with forces of capitalism has all but disappeared. Essentially, the architectural left has reverted to its most utopian discourse since the 1960s. Using technology to make the world a better place is the mantra of both the architectural left and right today—while the failure to show how technology is exploiting us is the failure of the left. Second, these concerns represent a retreat by the left from the architectural object itself, which is what has rendered the left irrelevant to architectural discussion and the radical evolution of praxis we are witnessing today; as argued above, the left has failed to provide any account of the iconic, or of the iconic image, of visuality, the level at which ideology currently operates. Third, the left’s architectural “critique” fits ever so neatly into the ideology of the neo-liberalised university: the sinister adoption of gender quotas that do not alter asymmetrical power relations, the implementation of environmental sustainability targets while erecting superfluous campus buildings that rebrand the university, and the general corporatisation and hijacking of leftist discourses, all of which disguise the university’s ruthless operation that privileges the technocratic, global education market over humans, turning humans into robots and knowledge into capital. At no point does the academic left resist these forces that subjugate them, or disturb the march of academic neo-liberalisation, the soil from which their soft critique springs. These are the reasons the architectural left has been rendered colourless and ineffective.

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While Schumacher has claimed that the left hoped to reverse the processes of market liberalisation, to return to the 1970s, no evidence of this wild agenda exists.3 The real task of the left is not to reverse history, but to interrogate iconic architecture with the historical consciousness that could de-mythologise the work via Marxist critique of the visual image itself—on the 150th anniversary of Capital. Energised by Theodor Adorno’s contempt for the iconicity of Hollywood cinema, this book unleashes a leftist critique of digital imagery at the level of the digital surface. Some might consider this technique a capitulation to the imagistic regime of what I call digital world capitalism. Yet for Adorno, the mediatic image reveals exactly what is unconscious in society, the ideology of capital. What is wrong with capitalism and modernity shimmers in the image itself. Confronted by the disintegration of the left’s project of architecture, the impotence of the academy and the loss of social consciousness from praxis, Digital Monuments returns to Adorno and Horkheimer, Marx, Weber, Lukács, Althusser, et al. to undress the iconic architectural image: the look of the work, its formal language, its grotesque fantasies and, importantly, its violence and deadly consequences. Definitions My approach to the subject requires a new terminological apparatus for those both inside and outside the discipline: Iconic architecture does not refer to the disciplinary canon of historical monuments past, such as the Eiffel Tower or Sydney Opera House. Rather, I invoke the term to describe a radical, digital paradigm of the architectural image since the end of the 1990s, under which cities have initiated publicly funded, debt-fuelled megaprojects at a spectacular financial,

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technological and formal scale heretofore unseen, made possible by the dual influences of financialisation and the capitalist incursion of digital visualisation and fabrication technologies into architecture—which together have led to a peculiar loss of reality in architecture and the city, and, paradoxically, a real geopolitical class war being fought across borders, in which the architectural discipline is a key agent. Iconicity or the iconic today refers to the technology of the digital image, specifically the mass exchange, via the Internet, of digital renderings produced for developers and the masses alike, which precede the finished building by many years and have become more valuable and more real than the final building itself. Adorno’s critique of the iconicity of Hollywood cinema, of its false immediacy—meaning its indistinguishability from reality—was prescient, because the iconic today operates through an increasing loss of distinction between buildings and their digital renderings. The hypnotic power of the parent rendering that flickers like a strobe light in the encounter with the real building contributes to the capitalist desire for a total indistinguishability between the digital model and the building, and therefore the de-realisation of reality itself. The profound wish of the iconic architecture industry is to one day make the digital model itself simply appear on site, magically, holographically, ex nihilo—in other words, to erase anything about the project that recalls the humanist act of building on a historical ground for the historical subject. Even when parity is not achieved, the hallowed rendering always represents the true intention and ahistorical fantasy of the iconic building, because the architectural image today is none less than the ideology of capital, and the rule of digital world capitalism is that reality must never interrupt the ideological circuit of the image. In this sense, iconic

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architecture today has more in common with Hollywood than with the architectural canon. When I say architectural image, I mean both the digital rendering (what appears to me on the screen) and the phenomenal image of the building materialised before me—but, importantly, it is the very science-fiction double image that collapses the two (the virtual and the real) in this imagistic encounter of reality I experience in the contemporary city. In homage to Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s “culture industry,” the iconic architecture industry is a capitalist machine for producing iconic monuments in a global class warfare fought via the digital image. The three agents of the iconic architecture industry are the government or city, the creditors and global investment banks that broker the deals and the industrialists, or what the economist Leslie Sklair calls the transnationalist capitalist class: architects, technicians and construction and development firms recruited to realise the projects. The “starchitects” I am interested in are deployed for one purpose: to produce serial digital imagery, not merely for an advertising campaign but as a catalyst for the wheels of financialisation. The architectural image literally effects the conversion of geopolitical space into an incomegenerating asset; its digital unreality is matched only by the unreality of the financial wizardry involved. The banality of the architects’ role should be clear: they are not real celebrities but puppets of the iconic architecture industry. Digital world capitalism is the ideology of the iconic architecture industry, exemplified in Schumacher’s anarcho-capitalist manifesto formalised in 2016 (although it has been functioning de facto without a manifesto for 20 years). Digital world capitalism emerges from the premise that parametric algorithms and digital tools are the new authority of the city, that technology can replace the welfare state and that a techno-digital Darwinism

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should determine the specific form and gestalt of the future city and all its architectures. This form of capitalism has its analogue in finance, which was also hijacked by robots at the very moment that digital tools were unleashed in architecture and the construction fields. Schumacher’s parametric urban visions are paragons of digital world capitalism—as in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the city is enchanted by robots, and humans themselves are reduced to robots in an ultimate techno-isation of bodies, minds and social relations that Georg Lukács called reification (Verdinglichung). Modernity is the epoch and project for immortality or eternal life, operative since the Enlightenment, which instrumentalises technology to maintain a double myth of eternal life and the eternity of capitalist production. Immortality has always been the end goal of technology and modernity, from medicine, life extension and cryonics to robotics, transhumanism and Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity prophecy. Modernity is therefore still synonymous with the promise to fulfil metaphysical wishes, but also the very failure to make good on that promise. Modern architecture is a cultural agent for reinforcing the false promises of modernity through its visual machinery of image production. Having failed in reality to provide Elysian cities, to create eternal life, and associated instead with the barbarism of war and destruction of cities, modern architecture remains a failed project, spawning an irreversible, unconscious guilt in the discipline. That repressed guilt is precisely what the iconic image of supremacy and immortality strives to conceal. Notes 1 Charles Jencks, The Iconic Building: The Power of Enigma (London: Frances Lincoln, 2005). See also Jonathan Coulson, Paul Roberts and Isabelle Taylor, University Planning and Architecture: The Search for Perfection, 1st ed. (Abingdon, England: Routledge, 2011), 35, and Rodrigo Pérez de Arce, Urban

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Transformations and the Architecture of Additions, Studies in International Planning History (London: Routledge, 2015). 2 United States Green Building Council, “Benefits of Green Building,” USGBC, updated October 2017, www.usgbc.org/articles/green-building-facts; “The ‘Forgotten’ Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Our Built Environment Will Be a Hard Nut to Crack,” The Fifth Estate, 2017. 3 Patrik Schumacher, “The Stages of Capitalism and the Styles of Architecture,” 2016, www.patrikschumacher.com/Texts/The%20Stages%20of%20Capitalism %20and%20the%20Styles%20of%20Architecture.html.

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Iconic architecture is the opiate of the masses

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Chapter 1

Digital ghost1

Figure 1.1: New-Territories/R&Sie(n). Digital rendering, Evolene “Scrambled Flat” (Swiss), unbuilt, 2003. Courtesy of New-Territories/R&Sie(n) by François Roche, Stéphanie Lavaux.

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Theodor Adorno was opposed to the cinema because he felt it was too close to reality, and thus an extension of ideological capital.2 What troubled Adorno was the iconic nature of cinema— its ability to mimic the formal visual qualities of its referent.3 Iconicity finds its perfect example in the film’s ingenuous surface illusion of an unmediated reality. For the post-war Hollywood-film spectator, he wrote, “the world outside is an extension of the film he has just left” because realism is a precise instrument for the manipulation of the mass spectator by the culture industry, for which the filmic image is an advertisement for the world unedited.4 Mimesis, or the reproduction of reality, is a “mere reproduction of the economic base.”5 It is film’s iconicity, then, its “realist aesthetic . . . [that] makes it inseparable from its commodity character.”6 Adorno’s critique of what is facile in the cinematic image—its false immediacy—glimmers in the ubiquitous yet misunderstood term “iconic architecture” of our own episteme. For iconic architecture is not a formal genre or style so much as it is a rebuke. In the unfolding global financial crisis since 2008, and almost 20 years after the destruction of the World Trade Center towers in New York, iconic architecture as a form of celebrity culture is viewed by many ambivalently, perhaps with a degree of shame and hypocrisy (just as we both love and hate Hollywood). In the digital age of mediatic simulation, and the appearance of buildings such as Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, iconic architecture is loosely aligned with the cult of the architectural image that, in today’s globalised culture industry, accords fame to any number of brave buildings—the CCTV headquarters in Beijing, the Shard in London, or the Signature Towers in Dubai, to name only a few—by the distribution of computer-generated imagery prior to their construction and completion. Yet to those within the discipline, such buildings are implicitly defined by way of a dead-on iconicity: the uncanny surface

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resemblance between the built work and its fake—or simulated— reality in the digital model that is both the building’s identical twin and its exalted reason for being. The “virtual” twin exists eternally in a four-dimensional computer coordinate system that is the sine qua non of such formally complex, dazzling geometries that previously could scarcely have been conceived, let  alone constructed. For architecture now depends on mimetic media, on computer visualisation, to see what the architects and the “masses” themselves cannot see with their own eyes and to fabricate what they cannot build with their own hands. If cinema is too close to reality, Adorno would surely have said that iconic architecture is too close to virtual reality. Contemporary architecture is our very own mediatic object of cultural inscription locked within an “iconically asserted” surface resemblance.7 Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum induces amazement and terror because it incarnates and materialises before one’s eyes a geometry that is ungraspable by humans, a geometry of a surreal order on the ground. To the spectator, the building’s reality converges on a virtual image that hovers in space, its presence felt only in the infinitude of choice that flickers in the plastic surface (not only the kaleidoscope of “views” or permutations of the digital surface, but also the splintering of the subject itself). The subject faced with infinite choice is paralysed, like any consumer. This mimetic apparatus is irreducible to a semiological or phenomenal relation between the building and its virtual model, even one indexically hitched to a real surface. For the purpose of iconicity is not mere deception, but rather the installation of a new subjectivity in the social encounter with the architectural commodity, the magic of which, in Marxian terms, is its simultaneously “sensual” (present) and “hypersensual” (transcendent) quality.8 Our experience of the iconic is a guilty mix

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of pleasure and anguish felt in the auratic presence of a technological apparatus that has acquired the peculiar status of an inhuman agency—a subjectivised machine—that threatens to subsume our own subjectivity. Adorno’s polemics on cinema were rejected by many, perhaps because audiences are only too willing to be taken in by the technical show; it is common, for example, to say a film is absorbing or a building hypnotic or compelling. Iconicity thus ensures the mystification of the commodity fetish, calling on the subject to complete its ideological task; and mimesis is a technique of distraction, even while the spectator appears to be absorbed in the architecture. The term iconic, in its posture as quasi-critique, reproduces this fundamental deception, and thus remains uneasy and problematic, even as an object of inquiry here. It is no doubt provocative, and indeed too late, to invoke the critical theory of the Frankfurt School today, in an architectural culture that has been called “postcritical”—a name given by Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting, the champions of the iconic project, who a few years after Bilbao declared the exhaustion of critical thought and the irrelevance of social theory for architectural praxis at the close of the 20th century.9 Yet to identify with the “critical”—the choice of the academic “left”—or the postcritical is a false choice; as Adorno remarked, the apparent “freedom to choose an ideology always reflects economic coercion, even here proves to be freedom to be the same.”10 Adorno, who was writing in American exile between the two world wars, had witnessed the barbarous assault on intellectuals and the avant-garde under the Third Reich, a situation he lamented as Germany’s “blocking of the theoretical imagination” in its “headlong rush into pragmatism.”11 That criticality should experience an assault from within the (millennial) avant-garde (if we can even

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name one) reveals the paradoxical state of the architectural discipline. Nonetheless, an examination of the theory of iconic architecture today, however lacking in development, reveals that those on both “sides” of the ideological divide—the postcritical camp and their opponents—maintain the exact same account of iconic architecture. They both believe that iconic architects are practising some sort of vulgar “materialism” or “pragmatism” (terms associated with Marx and C. S. Peirce, introduced to architecture in the late 1990s by Manuel DeLanda and John Rajchman, respectively), in the first case, applying Marx’s terminology toward formalist pursuits of exclusively technical means, a perverse materialism without intellectual engagement or concern for the social relations of digital architectural production. In short, the exact opposite of Marx’s concept of dialectical materialism, but I will return to this later.12 This uncontested definition of iconic architecture as a materialist, pragmatic, realist enterprise would not be so remarkable but for the fact that it is inaccurate. While it is widely thought that iconic architecture derives from the theory of empirical reality promoted by DeLanda, Michael Speaks, Patrik Schumacher, et al. in its adherence to the digital, the virtual, the transcendence of the mimetic image, iconic architecture is better situated within the philosophical tradition of German idealism and Enlightenment philosophy at the dawn of modernity, namely the work of G. W. F. Hegel, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and F. W. J. von Schelling.13 If iconic architecture’s basic tenet is the digital Geist immanent in the material building, it is also a return to Platonism—by way of Hegel’s Neoplatonism—where the digital spirit resides in built material and shares in its status of reality. Like geometric bodies in Plato’s theory of Forms, the built form is a mere contingent in relation to the higher digital “idea” or “form”; the virtual space, in Plato’s terms, is “absolute and eternal

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and immutable,”14 supremely real, and independent of ordinary objects whose traits and very existence derive from “participation . . . in the ideas by resemblance.”15 It must be emphasised that the question here is not one of epistemic status; rather, it is the veneration of a digital ghost-like reality that gives the iconic project its Hegelian slant. The cool original in this architectural paradigm, the most prized reality, is the digital abstraction—the highest code and truth that dictates everything the final building can and cannot do and be. Iconic architecture, in its sheer mimetic genius—the conception of architecture as a pure mind capable of performing mathematical operations—succeeds in attaining the absolute limit of human cognition (think Gottlob Frege), where higher thought of the human mind is taken up by the digital routine; it therefore continues Hegel’s idealist project for ahistorical truths (free of subjects, contingency and history). The immediate consequence of this Hegelian model is that the more fluent the plastic surface—the closer the plastic surface gets to the digital image—the more it renounces corporeal existence. As Adorno and Horkheimer wrote in Dialectic of Enlightenment, “This renunciation places the pure image in opposition to corporeal existence, the elements of which the image sublates within itself.”16 Even as iconic architecture appears to master reality, it shuts reality down: it reduces architectural experience to mathematics and digital processualism, to what is immediately apparent and yet held at bay. Like any good commodity, it promises but does not fulfil. Adorno famously described the suspension of reality in the mimetic film image as a modern form of magic or shamanism. What the digital model undergoes the constructed building will undergo; thus parametric software seen through Adorno’s eyes is high-tech shamanism for the 21st century. Contemporary

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architecture’s image of a digital supra-rationality thus illustrates the reversal of Enlightenment thought to myth in this resurfacing of modernity in the cultural dominant. The computerisation of the design process seeks to dispel any humanistic, mythological or romantic dimension that might attach to the plastic surface—to ensure that the purity of formal and material plasticity is not compromised by feeling or thought. But it thereby turns realism and pragmatism into myth, enchanted fact. The lesson of Dialectic of Enlightenment—the violent operation of Enlightenment values in modern culture—jumps to life in the workings of the iconic architecture industry. Notes   1 Chapters 2, 3 and 4 were originally published as a single essay: Simone Brott, “Modernity’s Opiate, or the Crisis of Iconic Architecture,” Log 26 (Fall 2012).   2 See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Cultural Memory in the Present (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), and Theodor W. Adorno, “Filmtransparente” (1966), in Prismen: Kulturkritik Und Gesellschaft, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), 357.   3 For C. S. Peirce, the icon is a semiotic category in which the signifier mimics the formal-visual qualities of its referent. See The Writings of Charles S. Peirce: 1857–1866, vol. 1 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982), 52–56.   4 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 155. See also Miriam Hansen, “Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing: Adorno, Derrida, Kracauer,” New German Critique 56 (Spring/Summer 1992): 43–73.   5 Theodor W. Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” New German Critique 6 (Autumn 1975): 12–19.   6 Theodor W. Adorno and T. Y. Levin, “Transparencies on Film,” New German Critique 24/25 (Fall/Winter 1981/82): 202.   7 Hansen, “Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing,” 45.   8 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, ed. Friedrich Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 74–75.

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  9 See Log 5, ed. R. E. Somol and Sarah Whiting (Spring/Summer 2005). See also Reinhold Martin’s retort: “Moment of Truth,” Log 7 (Winter/Spring 2006). 10 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 135–36. 11 Ibid., xvi. 12 For a discussion on vulgar materialism in the context of Marxism, see Jonathan Friedman, “Marxism, Structuralism and Vulgar Materialism,” Man 9, no. 3 (September 1974): 456–57. 13 See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. J. N. Findlay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature as Introduction to the Study of This Science, trans. Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath (1797; rev., 1803; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 14 Plato, The Republic, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Lexington, KY: Simon and Brown, 2012), 529. 15 Plato, Parmenides, trans. Mary Louise Gill and Paul Ryan (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1996), 132d. 16 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 14.

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Chapter 2

Modernity’s opiate

By making reality less real, by hypostatising digital space, the iconic architecture industry guarantees a systemic “alienation,” transforming social relations in the city into commodities through capital’s intervention via the aesthetic image. While the transaction reduces the subject to a commodity relation—e.g., the tourist who visits the Guggenheim Bilbao—the iconic building itself becomes a peculiar “subject,” animated by the artificial intelligence that produced it. Adorno’s critique of film is all the more relevant to architecture today because, like the filmgoer, the architectural spectator is complicit in this process of alienation through his or her surrender to the iconic object. The problem of alienation is one that Frank Gehry is entirely conscious of, attuned to the unreal relationship between the building he conceived and the post-industrial city of Bilbao and its residents. Discussing the Guggenheim Museum, Gehry admitted to Vanity Fair, “You know, I went there just before the opening and looked at it and said, “Oh, my God, what have I done to these people?”1 To filmmaker Sydney Pollack, he confessed, “I couldn’t look at the Guggenheim building at first, I was self-conscious about it. It took me two years to get used to it.”2

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Modernity’s opiate

Inevitably, the architect has a morbid desire to look at the building, to enter into an encounter with the digital object that is now too real—and in doing so he forfeits his soul. In The Gift, Marcel Mauss argued that gifts are “inalienable” from the giver.3 Yet Gehry’s encounter with Bilbao—the real, situated building— belies the social estrangement, what Marx called Entfremdung, in the iconic work to which he nonetheless remains chained. The Guggenheim Bilbao represents architecture’s deepest fantasy realised, made real, which, as Jacques Lacan teaches us, is a terrifying experience. A reflective surface is required to produce the gaze, the architect’s fantasy that stares back at the spectator and at Gehry himself. If the gaze is modern architecture itself as ahistorical myth—had history been purified and modernity rendered successful, made a “complete” project, as fantasised by Jürgen Habermas—Bilbao is the apotheosis of the iconic project because it materialises the false continuity of modernity in an uninterrupted, Möbius-like loop. It speaks of the primal fantasy of modernism as a pure, infinitely continuous and unadulterated present. Like Faust, however, the city of Bilbao had to make a sacrifice in exchange for Gehry’s iconic building; the promise of Bilbao is the “magic” or higher sentience that derives from the insertion of iconic architecture, or what we call the “Bilbao effect.” But the offering of such an object and its processes of reification invariably create what Mauss called an object debt, which has to be repaid by its recipient—as the failed attempts to create a viable economy for Bilbao and the Basque Country would surely prove, long before Spain’s present financial crisis. In Adorno’s critique, it is the imagistic processes of mimesis that conceal a disappointing reality through the filmic screen (the debt). For Adorno, the solution was to embrace negative reality,

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to go beyond the mimetic image (beyond the Bilbao effect); in other words, what is required is a proper Marxist (i.e., dialecticalmaterialist) account of buildings such as Bilbao. The Guggenheim Bilbao project was part of Spain’s larger development efforts for cities that had undergone decades of financial atrophy after deindustrialisation began in the 1970s. With the inauguration of the museum in 1997 and the revenue it generated, the redevelopment of the Abandoibarra district—the city’s former port—was widely received as a success of postindustrial capitalism. Yet, as the region’s only international draw, the Bilbao development failed in its larger ambition to transform the city into a regional node in the European Union based on a restructured economic base. The city eventually forfeited its most significant functions to the more dynamic metropolises of Barcelona and Madrid, and Bilbao became a shell, like the city’s former abandoned factories.4 The museum did, however, succeed in converting the city into an image; in the Bilbao tourism agency’s own abused syntax, it put the city “on the map.” Although this image draws tourists to Bilbao every year, major industries and service-sector activities have vanished from the city, leading to the continuing exodus of the most highly skilled workers in Bilbao—the real Bilbao effect that is seldom discussed. The failure of the project to deliver its promises of urban growth exposes the deep rift between capital and social reality created by the iconic architecture industry, whose real purpose is the reawakening of a vanquished capital. In spite of this, the iconic architecture industry presses on: the stated goal of Bilbao Ría 2000, a non-profit group devoted to revitalising former industrial spaces around the city, continues to be the local and international promotion of “Bilbao’s new image as a post-industrial city.”5 Bilbao as pure image, as instrumentality, seeks to avoid the pain of modernity, to conceal its crisis or pathology. On this

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Modernity’s opiate

symbolic front the Bilbao project has succeeded—its image retains all the youth and vigour of 1997, but in real terms,6 like all images, Bilbao is empty, a mere opiate of modernity. What then does Bilbao—both the museum and the greater urban redevelopment programme it belongs to—tell us about capitalism and globalisation now? Although the iconic project remains a principal technique of neo-liberal globalisation, Bilbao represents the failure of this technique to rebuild capital in the post-industrial European city. Developments like Bilbao were designed to provide catharsis through the globalised capital of the contemporary city. The very term globalisation, however, no longer refers to something desirable, to expansion, but to its opposite: contraction, debt contagion, credit collapse and so on. In the face of the global debt crisis, the lessons of Bilbao are beginning to be learned; its larger premise—the injection of a building to treat an urban-economic malady—has now been widely contested.7 Iconic architecture is no longer a failed project on the side of global capital, but an emptying out of the architectural commodity. Having been made redundant by global capital, the architectural image no longer reifies capital but refers only to its empty self. In this sense, iconic architecture is in crisis. Iconicity is the first cause of architecture’s ideological complicity because, like film, it enables the architectural image to operate as an advertisement for reality, seen through capitalism’s eyes. For architecture to become art—that is, de-instrumentalised, autonomous and real—it must escape its bondage to mimetic formalism, to digital mimesis, and relinquish its ideological project of the architectural image as instrument for rebuilding capital, thereby renouncing false immediacy and intelligibility. Architecture becomes a willing participant in this exchange with capital, not because of its lack of integrity or “selling out,” as per the familiar rebuke—architecture is neither a passive agent nor

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Modernity’s opiate

an “icon” of capitalism—but because the symbolic contract with capital directly serves the discipline’s unconscious project to resurrect a deceased modernity, to recapitalise modernism. Architecture’s complexity lies in the refusal to confront its history, to lose this battle. But for Adorno, art is precisely a witness to history, and for this reason the critique of iconic architecture needs to move beyond the realm of the mimetic image—from facile judgements about a building’s entertainment value to the historical meaning of iconicity and the architectural image, vis-à-vis its relationship with modernism, and to the subject’s encounter with modernity via the architectural object on the ground. Notes 1 Matt Tyrnauer, “Architecture in the Age of Gehry,” Vanity Fair, August 2010. 2 Sketches of Frank Gehry, dir. Sydney Pollack (Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2005). Emphasis mine. 3 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (London: W.W. Norton, 2000). 4 See, for example, Jörg Plöger, Bilbao City Report, CASEreport 43 (London: Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, London School of Economics, 2007), 35. 5 Ibid., 16. See also the Bilbao Ría 2000 website, www.bilbaoria2000.org/ria 2000/index.aspx. 6 See Beatriz Plaza, “The Return on Investment of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30, no. 2 (2006): 452–67. 7 See Chapters 8–11 of this book and Arantxa Rodriguez, Elena Martinez and Galder Guenaga, “Uneven Redevelopment: New Urban Policies and SocioSpatial Fragmentation in Metropolitan Bilbao,” European Urban and Regional Studies 8, no. 2 (2001): 161–78.

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Chapter 3

Anti-iconic

Adorno’s theory of the Hollywood image would come to influence the course of Marxist architectural debate, particularly in Manfredo Tafuri’s polemics during the late 1970s on the architectural image as a medium of resistance. In Theories and History of Architecture, Tafuri explores Bruno Zevi’s thesis on the “critical value” of the architectural image that negates the dominant aesthetic, a procedure of resistance that ultimately articulates the code that constitutes architectural history. Tafuri wrote, “Every new architectural work is born in relation . . . to a symbolic context created by preceding works. . . . Every architecture has its own critical nucleus”—and the deviation from the centre, what Tafuri calls “infringement,” is not merely an empty stylistic battle but a critical de-mythicisation of the image.1 Tafuri believed that the image is the correct instrument for critical historiography, and that all critique functions at the level of the image. The critic, in other words, must construct an image in order to conduct critique. Yet the problem with this methodology is that an image always opens itself up to re-mythicisation. While an image can articulate the existing code through a “brutal contestation,” Tafuri argued that it cannot point out the reasons that have historically determined that code and its unconscious

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Anti-iconic

ideological content. For Adorno, on the other hand, the aesthetic image reveals exactly what is unconscious in society, the ideology of capital. If the Guggenheim Bilbao is the critical nucleus of the millennial iconic project, it illustrates the codification of the dominant aesthetic, a building that became a self-replicating image in the concatenating, titanium-clad objects seen to be parodying it in various parts of the world. This demonstrated the sheer power of Bilbao, as commodity and image, to conjure a chain readable by a public, to carry out the iconic project’s political ends. Bilbao established for the iconic project its first visual code, and on this purely mythic and highly effective level it situated the architect of iconicity in a peculiar ethical position, as if having openly surrendered aesthetic agency and integrity to the seriality and banality of a particular type. What, then, has become of the iconic project since Bilbao? Does iconic architecture today propose a new history in relation to Bilbao, and, if so, what does it teach us about architecture’s relationship with modernity now? Capitalism today looks nothing like it did in 1997, even if digital reality is unadulterated by the new experiences of architecture and the city (it remains always “new”). We have only to look at the negative reception of some of Gehry’s later works—works seen to have openly transgressed the code established by Bilbao—to gain insight into the late iconic project.2 Bad reviews are nothing new in architectural culture, but for Gehry, whose work has received so much adulation, an interesting question about authorship and critique arises. Perhaps because Gehry has left all theoretical considerations of his work to others, he is often represented as a fugitive from the academy, infatuated with his own genius for producing dazzling forms and formalisms at the expense of theoretical substance (if there is such a thing). Yet Gehry did not become

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Anti-iconic

Figure 3.1: Gehry Partners. Model, Dr. Chau Chak Wing Building, University of Technology Sydney, 2010. East elevation. Image provided by Gehry Partners, LLP.

well known and in demand because he is a mere inventor of populist forms. Rather, his work mesmerises by inducing the spectator’s encounter with an architectural unconscious—that which cannot be spoken; and it is precisely in this passive, repressive mode, at the level of symptomatology and pure image, that Gehry’s work operates. Gehry’s business school at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), completed in 2014, is the architect’s first building in Australia, and is no doubt just cause for celebration. It is therefore somewhat ironic that a wide array of observers have pejoratively referred to the 11-storey tan-brick building, composed of five crinkly boxes, as a “crushed brown-paper bag.” The east façade, built of buff-coloured brick, refers to Sydney’s yellow-stone heritage, and produces an image entirely unlike the metallic building envelopes associated with Gehry and encoded in the iconic project

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Anti-iconic

since Bilbao. Gehry’s new proposal, caught between the twisted alleys and streets laid out in the post-industrial locale of Sydney’s Ultimo suburb, reaches for something else: its anguished folds are anti-spectacle and anti-aesthetic. The curvilinear use of masonry rather evokes, unbidden, a modern architecture, like the folded brickwork of the Amsterdam School, the post-war projects of Alvar Aalto—an architect Gehry openly identifies with and admires (“My work is closer to Alvar Aalto than any of the other generations”3)—or Thomas Jefferson’s serpentine brick walls. An apparently un-iconic building, it has nothing of the mimetic quality of Bilbao; it neither looks like a digital model nor exudes the auratic gaze of Bilbao or any iconic titanium-clad object. There are radical differences between the two schemata. Unlike Bilbao, the UTS building deviates from the continuous surface, has several distinct façades and, in its way, engages its modernist allegory of decay or destruction. Of course, this building does not represent a departure for Gehry but a return to the formal type of the European housing block with cartoonish pop-out window detail, first observable in his “Fred and Ginger” building in Prague (1995) and repeated in the Neuer Zollhof development in Düsseldorf (1999) and the Ray and Maria Stata Center (2004) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This last project impelled UTS to approach Gehry, and his schematic design was based on it. Yet of the three buildings, the Sydney proposal is the only one that evokes collapse of the building fabric. It crumples downwards, unlike the MIT building’s lateral crumpling; the Neuer Zollhof is not crumpled at all—it represents modernity intact. By refusing mimesis in Sydney, Gehry’s building envelope reveals the precise conundrum of the tyranny and ubiquity of iconic architecture, just as it allows the façade to host the return of modernism in the digital age.

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Anti-iconic

Australia thus finally got a Gehry, but not the Gehry it imagined. The problem is not one of parochialism, but something historically peculiar to the 21st century, and a testament to the victory of the global iconic project at war with itself: namely, that Australia expected a more iconic and less contextual building. The design quite simply lacks what Max Weber called “charismatic authority,” or the jouissance of digital mimesis in the new millennium. But is this not pure poetic justice, a perversion of the Bilbao effect that reveals the Faustian nature of such an exchange? For Tafuri, “infringement” uncovers the mythical meaning of the original code given by the avant-garde, but it does not necessarily mean the code is in crisis; rather, criticism itself is in crisis since under the operation of the critical image, the historian, the sole arbiter of critique, is in danger of becoming redundant.4 And if the architectural image is decoded by the spectator in the mode of complicity with ideology, then this becomes the new locus for criticism. Gehry has said that the distortion of the building envelope and the use of curved masonry in his work are ways of humanising modernism.5 In projects like Bilbao, “I was looking for a way to deal with the humanizing qualities of decoration without doing [postmodernism],” he explained to Vanity Fair.6 Gehry’s quixotic refrain, that the UTS building is “crinkly like that because the hardest thing to do in modern architecture is to make it ‘humane’,”7 suggests that he sees himself as a modern architect. As I watched Gehry jerkily glance the UTS model’s surface with a green laser pointer while talking to Sydney television reporter Geraldine Doogue about modern architecture, it struck me that the east façade of the UTS project recalls the familiar film stills of the 1972 demolition of Minoru Yamasaki’s PruittIgoe public housing project in St. Louis, Missouri (1956). With its square punched windows similar to those used in Yamasaki’s

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Anti-iconic

Figure 3.2: US Department of Housing and Urban Development. Still from “Pruitt-Igoe Collapse Series,” 1972. Public domain.

building, the façade at UTS reads as two low-rise residential slabs stacked one atop the other—and imploding in slow motion. At the same time, the static image of the new building envelope reveals that the historicised failure of modernism in the St. Louis footage is not as stable as it first appeared in the wake of 1960s sit-ins and protest movements. Rather, it speaks of a second plateau or demise of modernism. Yet any return is not to modernism as an avant-garde but to the fall of modernism as polemic, incarnated and cryonically preserved in the Pruitt-Igoe image and its historical aftereffects. For there can be no real “end” to iconic architecture or to modernism (which such images paradoxically both attest to and deny); rather, this reveals the critical operation of the image in constructing architectural history. Here, in effect, is not a humanised modernism (which would reinstate the ego at the centre of the system), but a historicised modernism that

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Anti-iconic

reveals something inhuman: barbaric technology as an enduring modality of modernity. The demolition of Pruitt-Igoe was not the end of the modern movement, as Charles Jencks famously argued, but the moment that the critique of modernism as a destructive agent in the post-war city was flattened into an image. The power of the image is that it makes visible co-present and real arguments that are otherwise elusive and take place at various points in time. The image of a falling Pruitt-Igoe succeeded in converting modernism as ideological mirage into the fantasised collapse of a regime represented by the demolition of a housing estate—the house of modernism. The demolition footage revealed the naked irreality of modern architecture’s favourite tropes—functionalism, liberation, progress, purity—just as it concretised and visualised the hijacking of subjectivity, inhabitation and life itself inherent in the very same architecture. In the architectural image Gehry has made for Sydney, the processes of historicising modernism become the object of critique. The successive folds evoke the contorted relationship with the modern movement as history and the obsessive mourning of its loss. Gehry’s façade responds to the ahistorical myth of modernity that endures in today’s iconic project, shifting the gaze back to what is teleological and historical in the present moment. If we extend this reading to its limit, Bilbao and UTS propose two historiographic accounts. The collapsing UTS façade suggests a dialectical-materialist approach to history, in which modernism in architecture grew to a state of maximum efficiency then developed internal conflicts that led to its systematic decay. This is an essentially diachronic reading of history. The tragic image of self-destruction—a termite nest, as one critic called it—recalls the corruption of modernity as a project in class conflict. Bilbao, on the other hand, is a synchronic reading: its method of Hegelian

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Anti-iconic

idealism considers contemporary architecture an isolated product of the zeitgeist, of an ahistorical pure present. Its Neoplatonist formula of modernity—as the infinite plasticity of the metallic surface subjectivised by the digital Geist—promises the spectator a liberation from negative thought, from history itself.8 Yet it would be a mistake to think that the UTS building is a Marxian transformation of Bilbao or of the iconic project into materialist dialectics, because the new proposal remains within the orbit of an image that reproduces the original myth, a magical idea separated from the social struggle that was its first cause—which leads to the misrecognition of the façade. We cannot accept the critique of history in the hands of iconic architecture, however, as the UTS design betrays a nostalgia for the collapse of modernity even while it remains disenchanted. So close then is iconic architecture in Adorno’s account to the “primeval myth”—here, modern architecture—“from whose embrace it has wrested itself that its own lived past becomes a mythical prehistory.”9 Iconic architecture seeks to neutralise this mythical prehistory in buildings such as Bilbao, but it never relinquishes the fantasy of a return to the battlefield. (Paradoxically, the very desire to reinstate polemical modernism is to elude “modernism” in its purest, most essential, conceptual form.) What sets the contemporary version of this paradox apart is the troubling sense of retroaction in current architectural culture: the sense of an urgent need to rebuild, ex nihilo, not only in projects such as the World Trade Center but also in the global project to rebuild capital itself (to recapitalise modernity). Yet the UTS building does not seek any such catharsis; its very ugliness reflects what is grotesque about the return to the beginning of modernism, to the Garden of Eden prior to expulsion. This desire to return is the debt of contemporary architecture. Like the Athenian play, the Sydney façade is “tragic” in the true

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Anti-iconic

sense of the dramatic form, which was based on the protagonist’s reversal of fortune through a fatal error. To have invested so profoundly in a movement associated with horrors and the decline of civilisation, as the international modern movement did, creates a trauma, which Sigmund Freud defined as an injury that does not fade but intensifies over time. In this sense, there can be no catharsis in iconic architecture because the problems of social existence cannot be solved through the transaction of myth and objecthood. Gehry does not provide an answer to the post-1968 lamentation; what his late architecture accomplishes is the de-mythologisation of the iconic project, if only for a fading moment. With this folded envelope, Gehry thus makes historical the experiences of contemporary architecture. Notes 1 Manfredo Tafuri, “Architecture as Metalanguage: The Critical Value of the Image,” in Theories and History of Architecture, trans. Giorgio Verrecchia (London: Granada, 1980), 106–7, 109. 2 See, for example, Nicolai Ouroussoff, “Gehry’s New York Debut: Subdued Tower of Light,” New York Times, 22 March 2007. 3 Gehry interviewed in Sketches of Frank Gehry, dir. Sydney Pollack (Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2005). 4 Tafuri, “Architecture as Metalanguage,” 106. 5 Tina Perinotto, “Frank Gehry on Inspiration and Sustainability for the UTS in Sydney,” The Fifth Estate, 18 December 2010. 6 Quoted in Matt Tyrnauer, “Architecture in the Age of Gehry,” Vanity Fair, August 2010. 7 Gehry quoted in “Sydney to Have ‘Wrinkly, Crinkly’ Landmark,” Sydney Morning Herald Online, 16 December 2010. 8 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 113. 9 Ibid., 25.

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Chapter 4

Reflections from damaged modernity

Figure 4.1: 509th Operations Group. Atomic cloud over Hiroshima, 6 August 1945. Photograph taken from the Enola Gay during flight over Matsuyama, Shikoku, Japan. Public domain.

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Reflections from damaged modernity

“The cliché about modern technology being the fairy-tale fulfillment of every fantasy ceases to be a cliché only when it is accompanied by the fairy tale’s moral: that the fulfillment of the wishes rarely engenders goodness in the one doing the wishing,” Adorno wrote.1 Wishing for the right things in architecture and the city is the most difficult art of all: since the grim children’s tales of the 20th century we’ve been weaned from dreams and utopias, the stuff of modernism’s bad conscience.2 For Adorno, Hollywood cinema was a medium of “regression” based on infantile wish-fulfilment manufactured by the industrial repetition of the filmic image, which visualises the forbidden ideations of death and domination in the unconscious of the mass spectator.3 In other words, cinema takes the spectator on a journey into his unconscious fears and desires in order to control him from within. It works because the spectator believes the film is speaking to him in his very own image-language, making him do and buy whatever capitalism demands, by promising he can avoid death. From the 1953 essay “Prolog zum Fernsehen” to “Das Schema der Massenkultur” in 1981, Adorno described film frames as an “image-writing” (Bilderschrift) that not only mined the spectator’s fear of death but mythologised modernity’s rituals of its own death.4 Modernity for Adorno is precisely the instrumentalisation of collective unconscious desires through the mediatic images of the culture industry. Its project is to resist death. Today, the iconic architecture industry is the new executor of images of modernity linked to rituals of death and promises of omnipotence and immortality. The violent duplication and circulation of digital imagery surrounding iconic architecture, quite apart from the actual—and often as yet unbuilt—buildings, forms a new image-writing of architectural culture, a persistence of vision5 that spawns the illusion of aesthetic radicality and progress, just as it screens out the unconscious drives of modernity that

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Reflections from damaged modernity

are nonetheless resurrected in the digital surface. As I will elaborate in the following chapters, iconic buildings are not a reflection of external reality, but a regression to an unconscious architectural polemic that secretly carries out the disciplinary rituals of modernism’s death, and seeks to make good on the liabilities of architectural history. ∗∗∗ Immortality has always been the end goal of technology and modernity, an illimitable target that has given rise to industries and movements such as life extension, cryonics, robotics and transhumanism. According to Adorno, while modernity promised to ward off death via technology, objects of the culture industry, such as cinema and popular music, will “resist anything that would cause [the culture industry] to doubt its own eternity.”6 If we apply his argument to architecture, modern architecture was not merely a pragmatic instrument of technological progress, but a cultish figure of death resistance—the vehicle of a promise that could never be kept. As its tattered biography goes, modern architecture not only failed to deliver omnipotence and immortality to the modern subject, it was also charged with the hostile opposite: Hiroshima and Auschwitz, the cult of death. Instead of furnishing the post-war world with Elysian cities and the perfect life, it gave birth to urban dystopias, from the banal destruction and horrors of war to the dehumanised cities spawned by post-war urban regeneration. The moral of the discipline is that modernism is fated to bad things. Modernity today still means the promise to gratify metaphysical wishes—to assure the spectator that they will live forever—while modern architecture and modernism, its culture and ideology, represent the very failure

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Reflections from damaged modernity

of that project. The iconic architecture industry is simply a stubborn continuation of these efforts. In a rare statement about the post-war city, Adorno called attention to another damning aspect of modern architecture, its complicity with capitalist development: “Every glowing mention of the chief firm involved in the razing of cities enhances its good calling, for whose sake the best contracts for the reconstruction are doled out.”7 This failure to provide Elysian cities and profound structural complicity, by which destruction calls forth and underwrites more destruction, created a systemic guilt in the discipline, both psychic and financial. I call this guilt a debt in architectural history—and, like all debts, it must be repaid in a specific, material way. But rather than offering repayment, the iconic architecture industry’s vision of eternity and immortality seeks to conceal this very debt in the dazzling architectural image. Modernity’s morbid wishes for eternal life are thus cryonically preserved in the iconic project even after modernity’s explicit project—to provide freedom, equality and the good life—has been utterly dismantled. If we still have a guilty conscience—if we still haven’t got over the horrors of modernist history—it’s not because we refuse to give up gratification, what Adorno called the wishes, but because we know they are false projection and yet still believe in them. In other words, the debt is forever ritualised and memorialised. As a failed project that perseverates, modernity thus “functions as patient and corpse,” a drive that is both conscious and unconscious in the disciplinary imaginary.8 To paraphrase: in order for iconic architecture to keep modernity’s “promise still resonating . . . in the world,” it must produce proof in the form of imagery that a “reckless wish fulfillment” is still in its power.9 Given this purpose of the architectural image and its relation with modernity, the question I will attempt to answer in

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the following three essays is: Does iconic architecture fulfil the wishes of the discipline and bring about the final redemption of the modernist project? In other words, does it solve the discipline’s historical problems or extend its liabilities? To address this question, I will analyse three genres of iconic architecture: Elysium, the Loop and the Sacrifice. This typology is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather didactic— just as it is satirical. No doubt there are other formal types emerging in the digital mode of iconic production,10 but these three together illustrate the ideological structure of the iconic in all its grim lustre. For Adorno, the vocabulary of image-writing is composed of stereotypes that are “defended with technological imperatives,”11 and this is no less true for iconic architecture. To report on an architectural phenomenon that has been largely dismissed, we must begin with the visual stereotypes that provide an entry point for a reading. Iconic buildings are normally viewed as the Olympian victors of architectural history (just as celebrities are the “victors” of Hollywood cinema). To wit, the term iconic derived from the Greek word eikōn, or “image,” which referred to portrait statues of victorious athletes thought to bear a direct similitude to their parent divinities. But this grotesque connotation of athletic victor—the travesty that iconic architecture is a battle to the death—elides any serious account of the iconic project. Instead, I will show that each of the three iconic types represents a legible and distinct model of regression that not only presents a particular account of modernity, but also seeks to administer an intellectual solution. There is no winner here, but only different versions of history; and iconic architecture, per its semiotic moniker, is not a vacuous or empty signifier, but replete with symptomatic meaning about modernity and capitalism.

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Notes   1 Theodor W. Adorno, “Prologue to Television,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, European Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 57. Originally published as “Prolog Zum Fernsehen,” in Eingriffe: Neun Kritische Modelle (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1963).   2 Paraphrase of Adorno, “Prologue to Television,” 57.   3 Adorno, “Prolog Zum Fernsehen,” 514.   4 Ibid. My translation.   5 Persistence of vision was a theory of motion perception in cinema that explained how viewers understand multiple images screened in rapid succession as a single image. Though the theory has been scientifically debunked, it remained in use well into the 20th century.   6 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, vol. 362 (New York: Continuum, 1973), 369. Originally published as Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1966).   7 Theodor W. Adorno, “Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life” (1951), in Theodor W. Adorno. Collected Works, vol. 4, trans. Dennis Redmond (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2005), 36. Originally published as Minima Moralia: Reflexionen Aus Dem Beschädigten Leben, vol. 4 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1951).   8 Adorno, “Minima Moralia,” 38.   9 Adorno, “Prologue to Television,” 57. 10 For example, the study excludes iconic towers. 11 Adorno, “Prologue to Television,” 55.

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Chapter 5

Elysium

Figure 5.1: MVRDV. Digital rendering, Green Power Centre, Gwanggyo, South Korea, 2007.  MVRDV.

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Elysium, the first genre of iconic architecture, describes those digital renderings of greenscapes: buildings and projects plastered with greenery. They proffer a deathly, green paradise, like the Elysian Fields, in a Marxist exchange that does not favour you, the spectator. In Greek mythology, after death, souls would be judged by three gods and then delivered to Elysium, Tartarus or the Asphodel Fields. Elysium was for the pure souls. It consisted of green plains, mountains and valleys, where, according to Homer, “men led an easier life than anywhere else in the world, for in Elysium there falls not rain, nor hail, nor snow, but Oceanus breathes ever with a West wind that sings softly from the sea, and gives fresh life to all men.”1 While Asphodel was for the neutral souls, the verso to Elysium, Tartarus, was the sunless underworld for those who had sinned against the gods. The central motif of the Elysian type is the “paradise in a bad world.” Its iconic exemplars are MVRDV’s Gwanggyo Green Power Centre, a master plan concept for Seoul (2007) centred on a lush acropolis of hill-like structures that would provide a selfsustaining city for up to 77,000 inhabitants (above); Wangjing SOHO, Beijing (2014), by Zaha Hadid Architects, a mixed-use development of three green mountains; Vincent Callebaut’s Farmscraper master plan for Shenzhen (2013), a vertical farm of six towers of interwoven steel-ringed pods, which Callebaut calls pebbles, with suspended gardens; and Bjarke Ingels Group’s 8 House in Ørestad, Copenhagen (2012), a vast, green residential city. Arguably, the first Elysian building was the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, King Nebuchadnezzar II’s feat of engineering circa 600 BC—an ascending series of tiered gardens that formed a gigantic mountain rising from the centre of the city. Like the Hanging Gardens then, today’s vainglorious structures have nothing to do with environmental sustainability or any notion

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Figures 5.2–5.4: Top and middle: Bryan Versteeg, artist. Digital renderings, Kalpana One Space Station, 2013. Courtesy Bryan Versteeg / SPACEHABS. COM. Bottom: Digital rendering of Elysium space station in the title sequence for Elysium, 2013. Neill Blomkamp, director. Fair use.

Figures 5.5 and 5.6: Zaha Hadid Architects. Top: Digital rendering, Wangjing SOHO, Beijing, 2013. Bottom: Digital rendering, Cairo Expo City, 2009. Courtesy Zaha Hadid Architects.

Figures 5.7 and 5.8: Vincent Callebaut Architectures. Digital renderings, Farmscraper, Shenzhen, 2013. Fair use.

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of social “good” or “responsibility.” The Elysium genre rather trades in the fantasy of an idyllic afterlife, a return to a paradise that never was, where the signifier green does not signify ecology, but eternity—forevermore. Elysium for the iconic architecture industry represents the quid pro quo Adorno called the living death.2 What matters is not the architect or buildings per se but the deal being offered. In exchange for your life, you get to live in paradise. But you’re dead. If there is scant difference between a Zaha Hadid computer rendering of a heaven-city for China, in 2014, and promotional images for Neill Blomkamp’s film Elysium, released the same year, it is because both conjure the exchange image advertising eternal life. To put the problem in Marxist terms: as a result of mimetic technology, iconic architecture has come to be organised around the production of exchange value, for its own sake, but which nonetheless exacts a surplus value.3 The surplus value is the exchange of life that unconsciously drives the economy of these images—that is the organising principle of the Elysian-iconic stereotype.4 Yet, as Adorno explained, “that exchange logic [Tauschprinzip] disguises itself as the object of enjoyment,” in this constellation of unpassioned images.5 Elysium is, of course, the central premise of countless science-fiction films since the start of the iconic project. In film, there are two varieties of Elysium: the first is a utopia reserved for the social elite, as in Gattaca (1997), The Hunger Games (2012) and Elysium. The second is a promised utopia that does not exist (and never will)—a digital illusion designed to control the masses, as in The Matrix (1999) and The Island (2005). Few science-fiction films have managed to escape this dialectical formula of the last 20 years, which is the result of the historic intervention of digital mimesis into the contemporary

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film studio. Beginning in the late 1990s, studio producers of sci-fi films routinely employed large render farms, clusters of many computers, to generate images based on three-dimensional digital models that have become integral to the genre (to the film script, its concept and the entirety of its visual language). The mimetic technology that produced the Elysian fantasy of the iconic architecture industry accomplished the self-same thing for neo-Hollywood. Film and iconic architecture are not vague analogies here but represent precisely the same historical problem. The digital image in both media represents the extreme limit of modernity: regression to metaphysical wishes, namely the project for everlasting life. Elysian buildings are as disappointing in real life as they are on the screen. Compare Wangjing SOHO’s rendered utopia and the austere project as built: there are no trees or landscape, just the object liberated from the idealised “green” expanse of the image, thereby confirming its empty promises. But the computer rendering is always the authority in any iconic project, not the real building, because it reveals the pure dreams of the iconic architecture industry. Max Weber would have surely denounced these landscapes as “monocratic” planning, what he called “the realm of the eversame”; and for Georg Simmel, after Friedrich Nietzsche, they would represent the eternal return of the ever same.6 Digital ennui is not due to a lack of imagination on the architect’s part; homogeneity, ubiquity and duplication are what protect the ritual function of iconic architecture, both internal to the discipline and beyond, for the so-called “masses” who are just as invested in the Hellenic myth as we are. A generous reading of Hadid’s projects in China would be to try to locate specific, cross-cultural meanings in their forms and approaches given this collision of East and West. However,

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it’s clear that her global, futuristic projects have more in common with Blomkamp’s science-fiction renderings then they do with anything pertaining to traditional Chinese and Asian culture. That is because the primary conditions that determine the iconic—those that bring an iconic architect to a place—are financial above all, and the iconic architecture industry is a capitalist, not a “cultural,” operation. This situation has been sanctioned by the authority of the global iconic project, which immunises architecture from the pathogens of geography, history and culture. Hadid’s objects concatenate identically around the globe irrespective of town or audience. Asia, the Middle East or the former Soviet Union—a project’s location doesn’t matter, and that is why the iconic oeuvre exacts this kind of “flat” analysis. Under the vast plane of financialisation of the iconic medium all cultural referents are subsumed and disciplined. Further, the images of these projects that circulate well before construction are never read in any cultural context specific to the project’s site. Even the seemingly “Chinese” pirating of Wangjing SOHO’s design in the Meiquan 22nd Century building in Chongqing confirmed the techno-capitalist premise of digital world capitalism: that a building is a digital image to be copy-pasted and duplicated ad infinitum.7 In fact, the encounter between Anglo-American science-fiction and the contemporary Asian city has a long history in the very use of Asian cities such as Tokyo as direct inspiration for science-fiction authors such as William Gibson and Phillip K. Dick in the 1980s. But while these authors exploited the aesthetic genius and singularity of Japan and China, the iconic architecture industry homogenises culture and transforms contemporary cities into bland dystopias. Today, the architectural image is a currency measured by its substitutive power to guarantee the permanent extension of life.

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This is perfectly illustrated, for example, in two renderings of the Swiss firm RAFAA’s Solar City Tower competition entry for the Rio Olympic Games in 2016, which feature a sublime “waterfall to heaven” rising up from the ocean and piercing the clouds above. But to be clear, no one really has to die in this exchange, and no one is going to heaven. Rather, in the age of iconic architecture, it is the problem of modernity that oscillates between life and death. Like Schrödinger’s cat, it is neither alive nor dead, until you open the box. But since these projects remain permanently unopened, so to speak—even if they do get built—no one is fooled, and no real sacrifice ever takes place. Rather, the exchange of life for eternity, and our investment in that promise, is a disciplinary ritual which turns on the fantasised death of the modern movement. Iconic architecture adopts an Elysian fantasy once promised by modern architecture in order to “complete” an incomplete modernity, to use Jürgen Habermas’s maxim. Elysium is the most transparent form of “regression”—which for Adorno did not mean a happy jaunt down memory lane; rather, he adopted Freud’s term, evoking a flight from unsatisfactory reality to an imagined phase of earlier historical life, when satisfaction was not withheld. But this genre of the iconic project re-enacts something that never happened. There never was an idyllic city of pristine green hills, a satisfactory reality sponsored by modern architecture. Its main vice is not the promise of eternal life, but the feigned satisfaction of that promise, specifically the ruthless completion of modernity via the subjugation of nature under the mandate of digital world capitalism. The technological realisation of such projects, which previously only existed on the front covers of pulp sci-fi-fantasy books, gets closer to the empty prize, to the original object of the exchange—utopia and the perfect life. And that is the

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intellectual labour, the modernist project that drives the type. Yet the Elysian model does not provide any real completion, which would have to account for the entire crisis of modernity up to the present moment. Elysium is 70 years too late and provides but an opiate of modernity. The redundancy of such projects can only be understood against the temporal-historical axis of the iconic project as a whole, equally apparent in all three types I discuss. A temporalhistorical axis forms a fourth dimension to these works that appear to deny history. Even the most brazen, seemingly ahistorical projects in Dubai, whose imagery portrays a permanent present moment without any past, are responding to history. The temporal-historical axis measures an intrinsic unit of intellectual time beyond the periodicity of construction and self-promotion found in construction and development time, Internet time or the temporality of web-browsing traffic. The temporal-historical axis coincides with the formal axis, and represents the time required for the intellectual project to complete its circuit over several decades—i.e., the distance in time between the successive crises of the modern project from Adorno’s 1940s post-war era to the dawn of iconic architecture in 1997. That journey converts time into an intellectual commodity outside the processes of exchange for labour power, understood in the classical Marxist sense. The point is that we should not be critiquing the architect or the building, in their supposed global context, but architectural history. History, to be clear, does not refer to a succession of buildings and architects, but to its simple meaning, a story: in this case, how the discipline repressed and nonetheless sustained a myth about itself through the architectural image, which becomes a surface of inscription for its misadventures and failures, and therefore reveals its debt position. The question for

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any iconic building is, therefore, What is the project’s exchange value in modernist history with respect to its debt position? Precisely because the modern movement was premised on death resistance, on the ritual investment in an everlasting present that would never fade, the ahistoricity of the iconic image acts as a mirage to resist death.8 Yet by dismissing the “iconic” as an invalid object of critique, the left (the architectural academy) has elided the historical problematic and critical content of the exchange. The iconic industrial complex expresses the real cost of the modern movement: the margin call of history. Its debt is now being called in with ever greater urgency, and this is what distinguishes the iconic era of the last 20 years from modern architecture proper (Adorno’s post-war era), when the loan was first drawn. Each is melancholic in its own way. For Adorno, the solution was not to be found in utopia and other childish wishes, but in what he called “negative” thought; his critical project was to form a negative image of utopia. Negativity does not carry the adverse connotation it does in our current, vacuous world of social media and the phony consensus it propagates. In his masterpiece, Minima Moralia, Adorno theorised, “The life of the spirit [Geistes] wins its truth only by finding itself in what is absolutely torn apart . . . [It finds its] power only when it stares the negative in the face.”9 He casts this negative methodology as the antidote to Hegel’s “liberalistic thought.” The remedy (negativity) for Adorno is to embrace death in art—not to avoid it through technology and mimesis. Reading from Plato’s Republic, he reminisced that art and death were once consciously linked. Today, iconic architecture is unconsciously linked to death, but symptomatically, only in the digitisation of metaphysical wishes and the denial of death.

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Figures 5.9 and 5.10: A water column to heaven. RAFAA, architect. Digital renderings of a monumental tower for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, 2011. Fair use.

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Notes 1 Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Samuel Butler, 10th ed. (1898; repr., London: Longmans, Green, 1999), Book IV, Section 46. 2 See the epigraph by Ferdinand Kürnberger, “Life does not live” (Das Leben lebt nicht), in Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (London: New Left Books, 1974), 19. 3 Adorno refers to the statement in Capital: “As a fanatic of the valorization of value, it”—exchange value—“ruthlessly compels humanity to production for production’s sake.” Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, vol. 362 (New York: Continuum, 1973), 362, 307. 4 It was Lukács who first said that commodity exchange has become the central organising principle for all of society. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone, vol. 215, Studies in Marxist Dialectics 1968 (Great Britain: Merlin Press, 1971), 85–86. 5 Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, trans. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 34. 6 Adorno discusses Weber’s phrase in The Culture Industry, 111. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (London: Psychology Press, 2004), xiv. 7 See Chapter 6 for a discussion of OMA’s CCTV tower within the specific context of China. 8 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 362. 9 In homage to Hegel, whom he nonetheless opposes. Theodor W. Adorno, “Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life” (1951), in Theodor W. Adorno. Collected Works, vol. 4, trans. Dennis Redmond (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2005), 2.

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Chapter 6

Loop

Figures 6.1 and 6.2: Rem Koolhaas/OMA. CCTV headquarters, Beijing, 2012. Left: Digital rendering, 2008. Fair use. Right: Photograph of the realised building. Fair use.

Figures 6.3 and 6.4: Vincent Callebaut Architectures. Digital renderings, Swallows Nest, Taichung City Cultural Center, Taiwan. Left: The Möbius strip. Right: The “endless patio.” Fair use.

Figures 6.5 and 6.6: Zaha Hadid Architects. Digital renderings, the New National Stadium for the 2020 Olympics, Tokyo, 2013. Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects.

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The second iconic type is the Loop. This is the most recognisable and distinct type, defined by a visually continuous loop surface and central void. Its exemplars are Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao (1997); Rem Koolhaas/OMA’s China Central Television (CCTV) headquarters in Beijing (2004–12); Vincent Callebaut’s Swallows Nest in Taiwan (2013); and Zaha Hadid’s New National Stadium, a venue for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics (2013; the project was withdrawn in 2015). The Loop is not a traditional radial or spherical object, but a formally and technologically staggering structure inconceivable without digital visualisation tools. Its formal genus is advanced infrastructure (e.g., a transportation loop) and mathematics, and its method complex computer algorithms that produce the illusion of a self-enclosed surface. It comes in many forms: a loop of six horizontal and vertical parts in the CCTV tower, an elliptical Möbius strip in Taiwan, a concise loop in Tokyo and the spasmodic circuitry of Bilbao. But per Adorno’s apophthegm about cinema, even buildings of this genre that appear to be different are essentially the same, because the Loop form represents a ceaseless distraction from ideology, via the unbroken gaze.1 In Adorno’s essay “Transparencies on Film,” film is an uninterrupted cognitive loop, blocking the spectator from thought or reflection. The aesthetic loop “incites the viewers and listeners to fall into step as if in a parade . . . As the eye is carried along, it joins the current of all those who are responding to the same appeal.”2 The cinema for Adorno is a medium of mass distraction; and, in order to succeed it must allow no visible break in the aesthetic system. Callebaut’s competition renderings depict a triangle rotated 80 times around an elliptical Möbius strip, whose resultant volume arises from the ground plane, producing vaulted apertures to a central void described by the architect as an “endless patio.” The concept of endless circulation and

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mobility coincides with the endless circulation of the digital image that insulates the spectator from thought, just as it perpetuates the myth of limitless capital. In this sense, form and image are fused by the process of mimesis, both inside and outside the computer. The CCTV tower similarly locks the spectator in a closed-loop electric circuit, providing a return path for the endless current of architectural masses who click on its image or visit the building. The eye automatically moves along the electric circuit not of its own free will, but by the order of the iconic architecture industry. The false “consensus which it generates reinforces blind opaque authority.”3 The CCTV headquarters teaches us something about all Loops. For in the building’s hypnagogic, M. C. Escher-type figure, the real aesthetic goals of the topological loop are revealed: to finally transcend the Cartesian coordinate system, the vanishing point of modernist ideation at the level of pure form. In simple terms, this building is no longer a formal object of space-time, but the very medium of space and time itself without subjects or objects. In Koolhaas’s unreal image, we see a mirrored pair of mathematical axes connected by a pair of single members. But rather than extending toward infinity and intersecting at zero, the duplicate pair of Ls formed by two vertical and horizontal axes appear to meet, and therefore intersect, at infinity, thus forming the infinity loop. In this version of modernity, infinity is the degree zero or absolute origin. The goal of the second type, thus articulated in formalist terms, is to paradoxically complete the modernist project itself, suspended in a pure unadulterated permanent present, without the interference of history, death or gravity. Clearly, we remain in the realm of unconscious wishes to live forever, and deathly life in all its forms. OMA’s building pushes its agenda of dematerialisation via the conceit of anti-gravity: its imagistic, digital transcendence of

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matter is made all the more effective in the surprising duplication of the digital model standing before me. More than any other example of iconic architecture, this building eerily resembles a computer model, or a hologram—simultaneously flat and vertical, present and remote, hot and cold—and, like a hologram, when it is placed in a beam of coherent light, a true threedimensional image of the subject is formed. The mythic digital surface and our ability to convert what is immaterial into built fact opened up a new form of reification that was hitherto unavailable in Adorno’s time, yet contemporary architecture’s prolific digital project confirms the same idealist fallacy that Marxism contests. As I argued in the opening to this book, architects from the iconic episteme have for the last ten years claimed to embrace “material reality” or “materialism”—the unversed misappropriation of Marx’s term—over “theory.” Yet the iconic project, premised as it is on digital mimesis, is deeply invested in the concept of a weightless, ephemeral, deathless formalism—in short, in idealism and myth, without which its ideology would wither. The Loop reifies through the dematerialisation of matter, under a false intellectual model that originated in the early 20th century. To explain this model and the perversion at play in architectural thought today, a digression to Vladimir Lenin’s 1908 book Materialism and Empirio-criticism is useful. Lenin was fascinated by the recent discoveries of electrons and quantum particles, which challenged previous conceptions of matter and materialism—terms bound up in Marx and Engels’s theory of dialectical materialism, which Lenin defined partially as the materialist inversion of Hegelian dialectics. In the essay “Matter Has Disappeared,” Lenin decried the misreading of quantum mechanics he observed at the time (citing works by J. B. Stallo and Pierre Duhem), which he argued distorted Marx and Engels’s theory of dialectical materialism by their false conversion into

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Hegelian idealism. For Lenin, at issue was the fallacious conjecture that matter no longer existed, which he described as a failure to distinguish between “metaphysical materialism” and “dialectical materialism.”4 Of course, the CCTV tower demonstrates that very reversal. It denies matter under the pretence of transcending physics and matter, which it mistakes as “metaphysical materialism” and the literal disappearance of matter. There is a sense in which the spectator of the CCTV building, like an electron, could be in two of the building’s branches at once, jumping from one branch to the next or travelling through the digitised walls of the envelope. This is not reason for applause, but the look of reification (Verdinglichung/thingification), per Georg Lukács’s famous argument, where architectural technology makes human beings seem like mere things obeying the inexorable laws of quantum physics (which becomes a crude metaphor for capitalism as the highest authority).5 With utter coldness, the Loop liquidates the subject. The acronym CCTV also stands in for closed-circuit television (more on this later), a technology used in industrial plants to observe, from a central control room, processes that take place in environments that are not suitable for humans— in other words, to be somewhere you physically are not. In order to experience the Loop at the molecular level, the spectator must dematerialise into subatomic particles, into the empty, infinite space of the iconic field. To recap the upshot of the two stereotypes of iconic architecture thus far: If you buy into the Elysium, you will enter heaven. If you buy into the Loop, you will enter the realm of the post-human. You will disappear. The procedure of reification whereby social relations are converted into material exchange objects is perverted in the CCTV loop via this suggestion of a dematerialisation—a digitisation— of matter. The iconic architecture industry tells us we want the heavenly transcendence that it promises. The CCTV tower has the

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appearance of desirability, but what we desire, perhaps, is more humanity, more engagement, and not antimatter or descent into a terrifying post-humanity at the threshold of physics. That the iconic architecture industry is the art of the consumer—i.e., what the masses want—is untrue; it is the ideology of ideology.6 To be clear, the ideological goal of the Loop type is not technology for the sake of technology, but the goal of all technology funded by capitalism: to satisfy metaphysical wishes for eternal life, to make the spectator think he can defy death just by looking (it’s why this structural feat is called death-defying). Immortality and mastery of matter, or nature, is what positivism attempts to reassure. The promise is that by penetrating atomic sub-matter, history and death can finally be defeated. But in its commitment to Hegelian transcendence, to revisionism and ahistoricality, the Loop becomes a reflection on history at the purest level of negation and denial. That is the temporal-historical axis of the iconic project that can always be recovered from each of its three types. ∗∗∗ On the ground, Koolhaas’s CCTV tower has sinister connotations beyond the metaphor of banal circulation evident in all Loop types. This is an ideological narrative specific to China played out in another visitation on the East by the iconic architecture industry. For the CCTV building represents Beijing’s state-sealed surveillance loop; the project developer, China Central Television (formerly Beijing Television), is the all-powerful state television broadcaster in mainland China. Both CCTVs—the broadcaster and the technology—are synonymous with urban video surveillance. Rem Koolhaas, who remarked in WIRED that all media companies suffer from paranoia, is likely aware that the CCTV tower reads as a very large camera in a country known for its

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intrusive surveillance, control of news providers and highly publicised violations of freedom of information and human rights.7 The CCTV headquarters was completed by the contractor China State Construction and Engineering Corporation in 2012, at a moment when China’s surveillance of its own citizens was also expanding beyond the reach of any real television network; a year earlier, China installed five million live-action cameras into cinemas, schools and supermarkets. But authority in the iconic architecture industry is not imposed single handedly from without by a government agency. Adorno diagnoses the film spectator’s own complicity in closing the loop: like the cinema, the architectural Loop is mobilised by the unconscious mass gaze, specifically the spectator’s inability to look away from the building or go outside the disciplinary image. In this sense, the Loop is the ultimate Foucauldian model where the masses do the surveillance for the authorities, just as they complete the image and its procedure of instrumentalisation. The act of looking en masse completes the circuit for ideology by deflecting the gaze from the social ground, and iconic architecture represents the seduction of the subject by a mesmeric technology that swallows her like quicksand. To maintain the deception, objects of the iconic architecture industry must appear to stand outside of time and history in the permanent present once promised by modern architecture. The CCTV headquarters thus functions like a television: it literally frames the status quo, that which stands before me, as the only reality worth seeing. But in doing so, it also tells a story about China’s place in the iconic project. Koolhaas’s building screens China’s story of how it became capitalist from the start of construction in 2004, but also later, in an involuntary, unconscious mode, how capitalism in China had started to fail by the building’s completion around 2012—which exploded

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Figure 6.7: Zhang Jiachen, photographer. Rem Koolhaas/OMA, architect. CCTV headquarters at night, 4 September 2015. Fair use.

this initial script. China began its economic transformation at the start of post-Mao reform, in late 1976, and became a market economy by the end of the 1990s, before it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001—the early iconic moment. As in Europe, the architectural image in China seeks to fortify a particular story of modernity, one of China’s economic modernisation. But the Chinese installation of the iconic project is not economically recuperative, as Europe’s is; it doesn’t seek redemption, but rather advances a story of progress,

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however bad that story has turned out. To the West, China’s narrative of economic liberalisation and modernist hyper-acceleration concealed a creepy, authoritarian style of capitalism, its rigid and hence economically unsustainable ideology. When construction of the building was complete, commentators hastily floated the idea that China was better at capitalism than the US—specifically, better at managing capitalism’s crisis.8 Since 2015, economists around the world have watched China’s stock-market meltdown and the global financial domino effect it has caused. The story is at once particular to China and universal. In the digital image of the Loop type, the will to represent capitalism as an unbroken chain, evident in works by Gehry, Koolhaas, Hadid and Callebaut, conceals everything that is broken: the severed history of modernity and unending emergencies of capitalism. The iconic project could be said to unconsciously monetise historical debt. The history of “what we did wrong”— i.e., the failure of capitalism—is given a monetary value in the exchange circuit. As various state currencies are devalued, iconic architecture itself moves in the opposite direction; as a currency it becomes inflated, it proliferates! Such is the prodigious nature of the iconic project, that it survives all crises. For these historical reasons, the Loop represents what Friedrich Engels described in a letter to Franz Mehring as “the bourgeois fantasy of the eternity and finality of capitalist production.”9 If the Elysium type is a form of historical sublimation—it re-enacts a 1970s modernist utopia that never existed—the Loop type is a more believable modernist experiment that exchanges historical thought for an everlasting capitalism, a modernism that will never be superseded or damaged by history. Iconic architecture in this way paradoxically teaches the public the story of capitalism and modernity. The architectural image is a symptomatic text encoded with the unconscious of the discipline, even if

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the architects remain unaware of it. As Sigfried Giedion once said, architecture plays the role of the subconscious.10 To return to the question of a “flat” (global) analysis of iconic architecture in Asia, in the CCTV tower, Koolhaas layers a response to the cultural problem of surveillance unique to Beijing over the real culture at play in the project: the culture of capitalism. Even if Koolhaas’s building speaks to conditions in China, its form renders the irrelevance of locale all the more apparent: the iconic architecture industry has no interest in “contextualisation”—a defunct term of the discipline. The industry requires a global aesthetic because it depends on the duplication of stereotypes driven by digital technologies. This does not mean the mass spectators don’t revolt against an iconic invasion. In 2016, the Chinese government issued a “ban” on “bizarre architecture”— an injunction that is perhaps far too late.11 Notes   1 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Allen Lane, 1972), 95. “All mass culture under monopoly is identical.”   2 Theodor W. Adorno, “Transparencies on Film,” New German Critique 24/25 (Fall/Winter 1981–82): 203.   3 Theodor W. Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” New German Critique 6 (Autumn 1975): 17.   4 Vladimir I. Lenin, “Materialism and Empirio-criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy,” in Collected Works, vol. 14 (1908), Chapter 5, Section 2. “Matter disappears” means that the limit within which we have hitherto known matter disappears, and that our knowledge is penetrating deeper; properties of matter are disappearing that formerly seemed absolute, immutable, and primary, and which are now revealed to be relative and characteristic only of certain states of matter. For the sole “property” of matter, with whose recognition philosophical materialism is bound up, is the property of being an objective reality, of existing outside of the mind.

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  5 Georg Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” (1923), in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1971), 95. Lukács refers to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Capital, vol. 3.   6 Adapted from Adorno, “Transparencies on Film,” 204.   7 Rem Koolhaas, “Beijing Manifesto,” WIRED, August 2004, 124.   8 Tony Karon, “Why China Does Capitalism Better Than the U.S.,” Time, 20 January 2011.   9 Friedrich Engels, “Letter to Franz Mehring, London, July 14, 1893,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Correspondence, 1846–1895: With Explanatory Notes (New York: International Publishers, 1942), 512. 10 Sigfried Giedion, Bauen in Frankreich, Eisen, Eisenbeton (Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1928), 3. 11 See Julia Zorthian, “China’s Government Wants to Ban ‘Bizarre Architecture’,” Time, 22 February 2016. This state ban was a formal response to President Xi Jinping; see Alyssa Abkowitz and Ma Si, “Xi Jinping Isn’t a Fan of Weird Architecture in China,” Wall Street Journal, 17 October 2014.

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Chapter 7

Sacrifice

Figure 7.1: Armin Hess, renderer. Coop Himmelb(l)au, architect. Digital rendering, JVC New Urban Entertainment Center, Guadalajara, Mexico, 1998. © Armin Hess, ISOCHROM. Courtesy Coop Himmelb(l)au.

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There is a third, unconscious response from the iconic architecture industry that converges on Adorno’s concept of sacrifice. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno wrote that eventually cannibalism was no longer necessary, but tribes continued to practise it for its ritual purpose. Iconic architecture of the third type is a sacrificial object that allegorises the ritual processes of historical reification elsewhere concealed in the iconic project. That does not make it less hysteric. At the end of the 20th century, Coop Himmelb(l)au’s New Urban Entertainment Center in Guadalajara, Mexico (1998), offered itself as the bleeding body of the modern project—a rare alternative to the Elysium and Loop types. If entertainment for Adorno means insulating oneself from the social ground, from what is negative, the iconic sacrifice “today [is] relate[d] . . . to the idea of a collective body, the tribe, into which the spilled blood of the tribe’s sacrificed member is supposed to flow back.”1 Unlike the first two types, which repress the original conflict, the Sacrifice attempts a bizarre restoration through the building, which in turn takes on the appearance of historical crisis, becoming itself an act of violence.2 In Wolf Prix and Helmut Swiczinsky’s masterpiece, the historical object undergoes a ritual cremation via the burning of avant-garde tropes3—the Tatlin tower, the spiral, the Corbusian promenade and (swollen) piloti—which together, like the Biblical burning bush, nonetheless remain standing. Adorno confirmed that this self-“demythologisation” engaged by the building itself “always takes the form of the irresistible revelation of the futility and superfluity of sacrifices.”4 In other words, the sacrificial object is never consumed—the architectural tropes persist—and history cannot be cremated or made to go away. Hence the obsessive-compulsive nature of sacrifice. The same firm’s controversial High School #9 for the Visual and Performing Arts (2008), across the Hollywood Freeway

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from Los Angeles’s Grand Corridor, similarly reconstructs the problem formulated almost 100 years ago via Le Corbusier and the Soviet critique of modernism: its failure as an effective instrument of political critique. Coop Himmelb(l)au’s brazen re-enactment of Vladimir Tatlin’s spiral scaffold (the symbol for a once-revolutionary modernism) was as provocative and contested in 2009 as Tatlin’s monument in 1919. This is not to claim some teleological account of the iconic project. What matters is how intellectual history is being traded through its sacrificial objects—in this case, how the modernist argument and its attendant tropes are ritually immolated in the architectural image. In this torturous process of summoning a ghost modernity, the fractured exchange object is made to stand in for the shards of history and severed social relations that all the

Figure 7.2: The re-enactment of Tatlin’s tower. Duccio Malagamba, photographer. Coop Himmelb(l)au, architect. Central Los Angeles Area High School #9 for the Visual and Performing Arts, 2008. © Duccio Malagamba. Courtesy Coop Himmelb(l)au.

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king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put back together again. In other words, like the Elysium and the Loop types, this is another failed attempt at another kind of redemption. As sacrifice, it “resurrects the archaic images of modernity.”5 Coop Himmelb(l)au’s late millennial works are manifestly iconic—in scale, budget, purpose and digital methods of production—but the difference is that their work, while using mimetic technology, is not in thrall to mimesis; it tells a story, and rather than lamenting the death of modernism, it embraces it through ritual (repetition, montage, metaphor). All three genres of iconic architecture involve this precarious process of object-based substitution or reification, but this is the only iconic genre that uses technology to address history and materiality, to reflect on death and modernity in the digital surface, however unconscious its articulation. For one, the Sacrifice is the only type concerned with how a building is assembled: it makes explicit the formal and intellectual construction of the sacrificial object, through references to the construction of the discipline and the building itself. Elysium and Loop buildings, while commanding enormous labour and materials, rush to conceal any appearance of their constructedness, because the profound wish of the iconic architecture industry is to make the digital model itself one day magically appear on site. Coop Himmelb(l)au’s LA school alternatively re-enacts the problem of building on a ground and the building of history alike. Similarly, Frank Gehry’s business school at the University of Technology Sydney (2014) is enveloped by a complex brickwork skin constructed entirely by hand, by Australian bricklayers, in a reference to its location’s industrial heritage. It nonetheless employs the same mimetic technology that Gehry himself pioneered—emphasising the real construction of the curvilinear building, a total anachronism in the iconic project.

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In calling attention to the building’s assembly, the third type unconsciously embraces the material world in the Marxist sense: the world of production, of physical and intellectual labour, in the history of architecture. Second, in contrast to the first two types and the sham consensus they invite, the Sacrifice can often be found in architecture that the public finds hateful: Coop Himmelb(l)au’s LA school, Gehry’s building in Sydney and, a precursor to the iconic moment, Peter Eisenman’s Max Reinhardt Haus (1993) were all traduced by the city or client and rejected on aesthetic grounds, for their “ugliness.” But the face of the Sacrifice type is disfigured deliberately, its view of the city a battleground that bears the scars of modernity. Its exemplars are by design neither elegant, fluid nor weightless—but rather conform to the stereonomics of mass, its

Figure 7.3: Duccio Malagamba, photographer. Coop Himmelb(l)au, architect. Dalian International Conference Center, China, 2012. © Duccio Malagamba. Courtesy Coop Himmelb(l)au.

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inevitable decay and, therefore, the afflicted reality of historical duration and the alienated subject of digital world capitalism. If the second type depicts reality as an ahistorical loop or electric current (and the first surrenders reality entirely), the third is a series of electric shocks inflicted on the historical spectator and the body of capitalism itself. Coop Himmelb(l)au’s Dalian International Conference Center in China (2012) draws on the serial nature of historical crisis, as an accretion bursting out of its formal substrate. If the Loop is an American Hollywood film, the Sacrifice is Soviet montage, an art form that was never intended to amuse the masses. In Composing for the Films, Adorno and his collaborator, film composer Hanns Eisler, explained that montage’s “juxtaposition of heterogeneous elements raises the shocks to the level of consciousness and takes over the function of theory.”6 In Coop Himmelb(l)au’s shock tactics and juxtapositions, it is the architectural consciousness that rises to the surface. For Adorno, shock is an instrument for mobilising the art object as “an instrument for the cognition of reality.”7 This paves the way to understand iconic architecture as its own agent for historical critique that transcends the architect’s or developer’s ideas. Coop Himmelb(l)au’s works represent the stuttering of modernist history in the present, the serial erection and dismantling of bitter arguments thought long past. The shocks emitted by the architectural image are not merely an obsessive reaction to trauma; they screen the recurrent violence of history, like montage cinema once did in Adorno’s and Eisler’s time. Arguably, the original sacrificial object that screened the story of modernity to the American public was the unforgettable footage of the detonation of the Pruitt-Igoe housing estate in St. Louis in 1972. Its goal was to escape the house of postwar modernism. The social collapse of Pruitt-Igoe that led to its

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destruction ultimately represented the refusal by the masses to accept the deal—modern life—that they had been offered. As a result of Pruitt-Igoe, modernism is still equated with failed public housing and a wanton urban destruction. But as this history has become traumatised (in Freud’s sense of the term—a wound that rather than healing gets worse), the sacrificial object reappears under the iconic project to carry out the rituals of modernist history. We’re not willing to relinquish the original losses of modernism—like the European sovereign debt crisis, the debt can be neither paid nor forgiven—so we re-enact its myths through regression and modernist tropes of death inscribed in the iconic surface as immortality, transcendence and burning. Indeed, the scaffold-like structures that form Coop Himmelb(l)au’s body of work over 40 years demonstrate that the historical problem is still under construction. The firm’s name, Coop Himmelb(l)au, which translates to “skyconstruction cooperative,” was inspired by Russian Constructivism, a reference also invoked in their early Deconstructivist projects (for example, 1980’s Blazing Wing). Yet, this millennial work after the Ufa Cinema Center in Dresden in 1998 should not be considered Deconstructivist architecture (a movement that ended that same year), because it does not seek to destabilise any metaphysical origin. Rather, it represents an express train to the origin itself, to the original Soviet articulation of the problem and invention of formalism in 1914 that was based on the premise that art is a realist instrument for political critique. The very premise of the Sacrifice is that something has to be built in the real world to bring the problems of history into the present for examination, just like when the police reconstruct the room where a murder took place. Per Georg Lukács’s agenda for a critique that speaks “the relation between the tasks of the immediate present and the totality of the historical process,” it

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is the historical totality, today, even as elaborate myth, that must be reconstructed in order to create architectural questions for the present. Lukács thereby provides a method for structuring the question, What is iconic architecture?8 The idea of making an object to solve history is not as flaky as it sounds. That idea has roots in Marx’s theory of dialectical materialism, represented in Engels’s and Lenin’s aphorism that practice is the sole criterion for testing truth, in a world of material objects that they believed exists prior to and independently of consciousness.9 The question is, then, does the Sacrifice type as a constructivist practice pass the truth test? Does Coop Himmelb(l)au bring us closer to our history in the present moment? To answer the question, let me introduce a final example: the Musée des Confluences in Lyon, France. This long construction project, which resulted from a 2001 competition and was finished in 2014, effectively documents the unfolding of the iconic project from the turn of the century until now. Its fragmented envelope reads as a historical palimpsest on the one hand and an empty mausoleum or carcass, temporarily wheeled in to give its affidavit, on the other. Yet even with this narrative aura, the building has a weak relationship with its ground; it is precisely the ground of iconic architecture that is missing today—its definition, its historical backstory. Twenty years since Bilbao, we still have not grasped the historical totality of the iconic project. Yet the hole at the apex of the museum provides a clue: it suggests the self-consuming nature of capitalism intrinsic to its history, the rapacious black hole of capital that teaches us there is no escape from the demand for capital in the struggling contemporary city. This emergency is what fuels the iconic architecture industry— not a happy pragmatism, but the realities of fiscal crisis. To put this into current perspective, we are now less afraid of the destruction of the European city than the evacuation of entire countries from

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the eurozone. The hole is the only part of the museum that is solid and real. The rest is anarchy. The only truth—the only indisputable reality—is the truth of debt and austerity since 2008, the hole from which capital may never resurface. A certain mimesis is inherent in the problematic of iconic architecture of this type, which is the only genre to remind us of the collapse of finance capital in the present, just as it recalls the lost object of doctrinaire modernism (a loss which was itself spawned by the crises of capitalism). But does the Sacrifice contain the antidote to the ideology of the iconic architecture industry? Does it stand up to the Marxian reality test or Freud’s reality principle—our final willingness to give up gratification, i.e., de-mythologisation—or do we remain within the realm of childish wishes, the happily-ever-after afterlife? A traditional Marxist would protest that the Sacrifice type turns the real history

Figure 7.4: The carcass/mausoleum. Coop Himmelb(l)au. Digital rendering, Musée des Confluences, Lyon, 2014. © Jens Mehlan, ISOCHROM.com. Courtesy Coop Himmelb(l)au.

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Figure 7.5: The hole. Coop Himmelb(l)au. Musée des Confluences, construction site, Lyon, 2014. © Coop Himmelb(l)au.

or social battleground of modernism into another set of traded formal objects. It’s not a real avant-garde. But this simplicity would be unwarranted. Today, in an intellectually repressive environment, reification via the symptomatic objects of the iconic architecture industry provides an important opening for asking forbidden questions, through which the mass spectator can reflect on the role of architecture in the present crisis. Debt repayment In monetary terms, the surplus value drawn by each type is equivalent to the repayment plan of modernism’s debt, the “final” resolution of all disciplinary liabilities. Elysium does not seek to repay the debt, but declares bankruptcy, and thereby promises a state of permanent capital in the form of an afterlife. The Loop 76

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is not delinquent in this way; it rather promises to repay the debt directly, monetising the building into a new form of indestructible currency. The Sacrifice is primarily a leftist protest that the debt cannot be repaid under any circumstances. There is a sense in which the Sacrifice longs for the liberation promised by death itself, evident in imagery such as the coffin in the Musée des Confluences; in doing so, it avoids the conceits of immortality and omnipotence of the first two types by embracing death. The ritual purpose of the sacrifice in Lyon is the futile re-enactment of the tragedy of our discipline that we call a dead modernism. Futile, because the purpose of ritual for Adorno and Freud is to discharge the very ideas that are otherwise forbidden to the subject; if those ideas are never accepted or relinquished, the ritual must be endlessly repeated. The Sacrifice will thus never repay its debts. To answer the original question, then, the third type can never provide escape from ideology, because there is no cure or antidote for ideology, as Lukács wrote. Rather, the task of architectural critique is to assure that “its victory over Revisionism and utopianism can never mean the defeat, once and for all” of ideology.10 The Sacrifice is instead condemned to librate between historical reality and metaphysical wishes. That is the intellectual struggle with the forces of historical revisionism that defines the crisis of iconic architecture today. In that sense the third type has a clear purpose: to continue to fight. All three types strive for that damned elusive day of redemption from historical guilt. But lessons from the iconic architecture industry extend beyond any internal (disciplinary) crisis. To echo Adorno and Horkheimer, the demand for the marketability of entertainment by the iconic architecture industry is transforming the economic composition of all commodities in the contemporary city—and iconic architecture is therefore changing the structure of capitalism itself, as the next chapter will discuss.11 77

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Architecture’s purpose is not to provide liberation from ideology, but to teach the spectator about capitalism and modernity through the historical instrument of the architectural image. That is how iconic architecture becomes a form of cognition not only capable of negative thought (critique), but essential to the struggle against capitalism in the contemporary city. Notes   1 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 41.   2 Theodor W. Adorno, “Prologue to Television,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, European Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 54. For Adorno, the purpose of cultural commodities is to “accommodate repressed sexual impulses of the masses” but, per the psychologist Gershon Legman, “sexuality is replaced by the representation of desexualized brutality and acts of violence.”   3 The act of burning has significance for Coop Himmelb(l)au; see the short poem-like manifesto “Architecture Must Blaze,” of 1980, which currently appears on the firm’s website.   4 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 42.   5 Adorno, “Prolog Zum Fernsehen,” 514. My translation.   6 Theodor W. Adorno and Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films, Impacts (1947; repr., London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2007), 126. They point out this is distinct from Walter Benjamin’s concept of shock, which was based on the Brechtian abolition of the space between the spectator and the theatre.   7 Ibid., 49.   8 Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone, vol. 215, Studies in Marxist Dialectics 1968 (Great Britain: Merlin Press, 1971), 215.   9 Vladimir I. Lenin, “Materialism and Empirio-criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy,” in Collected Works, vol. 14 (1908), 221–22. 10 Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 24. 11 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 128.

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Santiago Calatrava: the Goldman Sachs of the iconic architecture industry?

C\ Taylor & Francis � Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com

Chapter 8

How iconic architecture triggered the Greek crisis1

Figure 8.1: Santiago Calatrava. The Athens Olympic Sports Complex: the Olympic Stadium, centre-front, and the Velodrome, centre-back, are connected by a central circulation spine to their right; the curved Agora colonnade structure, top right, encloses the Plaza of the Nations, bordered on the left by the Wall of Nations. Fair use.

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We may distinguish both true and false needs. “False” are those which are superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression . . . The result then is euphoria in unhappiness. Most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate, belong to this category of false needs. Herbert Marcuse2 I came to the conclusion that there is no bigger bubble than the Olympic Games. Roy Panagiotopoulou, University of Athens3

The official script for iconic architectural developments is by now as hackneyed as it is untrue: an insolvent government promises residents a “world-class” city through a spectacular megaproject that will attract tourism and provide jobs, magically recasting the city and its inhabitants as urbane and cosmopolitan.4 Unofficially, the government hopes the iconic development will convert the city into an income-producing asset actualised through real estate speculation and the new forms of architectural financialisation that are the true raison d’être of the iconic architecture industry.5 In real (materialist) terms, such projects are only made possible by giant debt arrangements, and their primary purpose is to solve serious financial problems. The conflict between these two clauses has never been more apparent. Not only do these projects often fail to generate the promised future income (fictitious capital),6 and thus leave the city with a 30-year mortgage that might never be repaid, iconic developments also have the power to trigger acute distortions of capital—financial crises—beyond the project and the city itself,

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as this chapter will detail. These financial emergencies are what the unreality of the digital image, and its unearthly promises, seeks to obscure. In 2012, Bloomberg published an astonishing tract, “How the 2004 Olympics Triggered Greece’s Decline,” one of copious articles by journalists and economists implicating Santiago Calatrava’s Olympic architectural development in the Greek debt crisis. These analyses centred largely on the project’s monumental cost overruns.7 At the same time, a parallel protest movement against Calatrava gained traction, in websites such as The Full Calatrava authored by “Geenwoordspaans,” for not only in his view exceeding project budgets, and thereby precipitating debt problems and financial crises, as in Greece, but for the accusations of corrupt financial practices associated with such failed projects. These claims are not new, and have proliferated in the media over the last two decades. Calatrava received the commission to design the Olympic Athletic Center of Athens (OAKA; now the Athens Olympic Sports Complex) in 2001. The project included four iconic structures: a new roof for the original Olympic Stadium, designed by Rudolf Moser in 1982, formed out of two curved polycarbonate leaves suspended from two immense tubular steel arcs; its twin, the Olympic Velodrome, a stadium built in 1991 for the Mediterranean Games for which Calatrava also designed a new roof; the Agora, a pair of skeletal, white colonnades that flicker in the light like digital wireframes; and the Wall of Nations, a neoFuturist tubular steel sculpture and projection screen designed to quiver mechanically before the Agora. Together, the Agora and the Wall of Nations enclose the central Plaza of the Nations, an amphitheatre for 300,000 people.8 There are also four entrance plazas to the complex, each covered by a vaulted steel canopy.

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What social interests or “advertisements,” as Marcuse would put it, seduced Greece into believing that it needed an iconic Olympic development? Contemporary Athens is the result of a post-war urbanisation process based on the replication of the polykatoikia building type, a Greek translation of Le Corbusier’s Domino system that has unfolded continuously as a project from the Second World War until the brief for the 2004 Olympic Games at the end of the 1990s. Unlike Bilbao or Detroit, Athens—Greece’s capital and largest metropolis— was not a city whose urbanity was lacking, so the need for an iconic infrastructural project was framed in terms of a new version of modernity.9 For Calatrava, “The return of the Olympic Games to their country of origin provide[d] an opportunity for renewal. . . . The renewal [was] possible, first of all, for Athens itself.”10 Thus a Marcusian narrative of false needs was spun, laying the ground for the “euphoria in unhappiness” that would follow. In his words, the intensity, the satisfaction and even the character of a city’s needs are always preconditioned by capitalism, as the Greek development would unfortunately demonstrate. The Greek Olympic project would become an unmitigated geopolitical and financial disaster. The lessons of Marcuse and Adorno remain ever relevant: in Greece, iconic architecture was an opiate used to render the public docile in a process that can aptly be called mass deception. Not only did construction costs blow out of control on the eve of the Greek financial crisis, making the Athens Games the most expensive ever (then),11 there would be no positive financial legacy for the city post-2004.12 After the Games, the two-kilometre seafront promenade that connected three Olympic stadiums became a wasteland.13 Calatrava’s glorious stadium and the former Ellinikon International Airport, which had been redeveloped into a sports park, became a United

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Figure 8.2: Nate Berg, photographer. Athens Olympics baseball stadium field (2004) as a United Nations refugee camp, 26 June 2016. Courtesy Nate Berg.

Nations refugee camp for a decade, a “tent city” for Afghan refugees escaping the Taliban and Syrians fleeing the war at home.14 Instead of fulfilling the city’s hopes for a “good” modernisation (Calatrava’s call for renewal), the Athenian megaproject heralded a “bad” modernisation, becoming a trope for the “bad life” in Europe in these neo-capitalist times. The opiate wore off rapidly. As a volunteer welcoming visitors to Calatrava’s Olympic stadium via loudspeaker exclaimed, “Enjoy yourselves. When will we ever see days like these again?”15 Indeed. According to the Bloomberg essay, it was the cost of the Games—at least €9 billion—that “helped push Greece into a fiscal black hole.”16 Although exact figures are difficult to obtain, finance minister Giorgos Alogoskoufis estimated that

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Olympic expenditure massively exceeded the original budget of €3 billion.17 Even if, as Bloomberg points out, €9 billion was only a fraction of the nation’s debt—€168 billion in 2004—the Games were built on the foundation of a much larger financial crisis brewing. In 2004, Greece’s budget deficit breached the limits set by the European Union, which chastised the country for being “financially imprudent.”18 By 2009, Greece’s debt crisis exploded, after which it sought two bailouts of €240 billion in total from the European Union and International Monetary Fund (IMF). The failure of the Greek Olympic development both epitomised and visualised spectacularly the structural problems that had plagued Greece for decades.19 The problem of Olympic spending was linked to wider geopolitical and financial forces at play. It wasn’t simply about the amount of spending, but the entire process and source of funding. In 2001, the Greek government instituted an infamous period of austerity in order to conform to the Maastricht Treaty and become a member of the European Union, which required eurozone member states to demonstrate that they had met minimum benchmarks in their public balance sheet. The country was already deeply indebted and had missed its first opportunity for eurozone entry, in 1999. Once the government joined the single currency, however, it relaxed its purse strings. While the state budget allocated €3 billion to construct the sporting venues,20 nearly €2 billion more went to infrastructure, urban regeneration and road networks. The Games were just one of many cases where public spending was unbridled and funded by excessive borrowing.21 Economists commonly repeated this version of the story to explain the Greek situation. But Robert B. Reich, the former US Secretary of Labor, offered another, in a 2015 article in The Nation: “The crisis was exacerbated years ago by a deal with Goldman Sachs, engineered by Goldman’s

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current CEO, Lloyd Blankfein. Blankfein and his Goldman team helped Greece hide the true extent of its debt, and in the process almost doubled it.”22 In 2001, amid a climate of austerity, Goldman Sachs secretly brokered a loan to Greece of €2.8 billion made to look like an under-the-table “cross-currency swap”—a labyrinthine arrangement whereby, according to Reich, “Greece’s foreign-currency debt was converted into a domestic currency obligation using a fictitious market exchange rate. As a result, about 2 percent of Greece’s debt magically disappeared from its national accounts.”23 Goldman Sachs was paid €600 million (US$793 million) for the deal. But it also “engaged in parallel derivative trading known as ‘credit default swaps’ – that is, betting on the possibility that that Greece would default” on its loan, as sociologist William I. Robinson explained in 2011.24 This situation, that economists described as a “moral hazard,” was the reason Goldman Sachs came under intense scrutiny in the media for its instrumental role in the Greek crisis. A moral hazard is a situation in which one party enters a deal aware of and protected against the risk they know the other party will have to assume, and attendant loss they will have to pay for. Goldman Sachs’s credit default swaps, Robinson continued, “raised the country’s cost of borrowing, making huge profits for Goldman Sachs and increasing interest rates many times over for Greece, while raising the prospect of sovereign debt default and thus justifying brutal austerity measures.”25 As was widely publicised, the deal went wrong. Following the attacks of 11 September 2001, “bond yields plunged, resulting in a big loss for Greece because of the formula Goldman used to compute the country’s debt repayments under the swap,” Reich wrote; “By 2005, Greece owed almost double what it had put into the deal, pushing its off-the-books debt from 2.8 billion euros to 5.1 billion.”26

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In terms of construction spending, the Olympic Stadium alone cost €300 million—€200 million over budget. While insignificant compared with the total Olympic deficit, to put this into perspective, €200 million today represents nearly half of the country’s first repayment instalment to the IMF made in April 2015 (which sparked a public march on EU offices and confrontation with riot police under the “Write Off Debt Now” movement).27 The only two arenas where a loss of €200 million is not mourned are Wall Street and the iconic architecture industry. Calatrava’s website provides a symptomatic apologia in the place of a normal project description: The city lacked experience with constructing such large-scale projects. Santiago Calatrava only received the commission on October 2001 and in addition to these difficulties and delays, rumors of catastrophic failures, including fears of a terrorist attack persisted throughout the construction and continued until the last days leading up to the opening ceremonies. This turned the Athens Olympics into the most costly and securityconscious games in modern history.28

In other words, 9/11 caused a spike in the Olympic construction deficit just as it doubled Greece’s national debt through a spike in its interest rate.29 Greece would pay twice for what happened in Manhattan. Calatrava’s defensive tone is instructive of how the Olympic development became a lightning rod for the country’s troubles. But there is even more to the story. Athens was allegedly idle for the first three of its seven years of preparation, warned by the International Olympic Committee in 2000 to tighten its organisation or risk losing the Games. In response to the warning, Greece entered a construction frenzy, hiring workers to build

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around the clock. The stadium was completed only hours before the Games began, and without a building permit.30 The millennial Olympic Games is not merely a two-week sporting event, but a vast iconic construction project completed at record pace—a sped-up modernity achieved through processes of Marxist exploitation whose ill consequences for the public are magnified by the compression of time. One critic on the architectural left argued that the gigantism and extravagance of the Olympic megaproject “monumentalised the unmatched magnitude of money,”31 but this financial analogy did not anticipate the scale of reversal that Calatrava’s project portended. What iconic architecture monumentalises is the gigantism of transnational sovereign debt, the black hole of capital in Europe that threatened to evacuate Greece from the EU. For the subject of exploitation in the iconic architecture industry today is not simply the labourer—while worker exploitation is rife, as I will discuss later—but the entire city, and in the case of Greece, the country itself. In Greece, the Olympic development became an image of Greece’s ongoing financial crisis. It illustrated in dazzling terms the ways in which national crises in Europe today are played out via the digital imagery of the iconic architecture industry, and the parallel transformation of architecture into a financial medium on the one hand and a narrator of financial crisis on the other. Notes   1 Before being developed here, Chapters 8, 9, 10 and 11 were originally published as a single abbreviated essay: Simone Brott, “Calatrava in Athens: The Architect as Financier and the Iconic City,” The Journal of Public Space 2, no. 1 (2017).   2 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1964), 4–5.

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  3 Quoted in Nate Berg, “The Urban Games: For Olympic Host Cities, Wins and Losses Last Forever,” Curbed, 3 August 2016.   4 Michael Goldman, “Financial Magic and the Urban Hustle: Creating Upheaval in the U.S., Spain, and India” (paper presented at the UCLA Seminar for Comparative Social Analysis, Los Angeles, CA, 5 March 2015).   5 On architectural financialisation, see Michael Goldman, “Speculative Urbanism and the Making of the Next World City,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35, no. 3 (2011); Antoine Guironnet and Ludovic Halbert, “The Financialization of Urban Development Projects: Concepts, Processes, and Implications” (working paper 14-04, Latts, Université Paris-Est, 2014); Ludovic Halbert and Katia Attuyer, “The Financialisation of Urban Production: Conditions, Mediations and Transformations,” Urban Studies 53, no. 7 (2016); David Harvey, “Globalization and the Spatial Fix,” Geographische Revue 2, no. 3 (2001); and Louis Moreno, “The Urban Process under Financialised Capitalism,” City 18, no. 3 (2014): 253.   6 See Adolf Beltran, “Calatrava ha cobrado más de 94 millones por la Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias,” El País, 4 May 2012, and Fiona Govan, “Valencia: The Ghost City That’s Become a Symbol of Spain’s Spending Woes,” The Telegraph, 29 September 2012.   7 Nick Malkoutzis, “How the 2004 Olympics Triggered Greece’s Decline,” Bloomberg, 2 August 2012; see also Peter Berlin, “How the Olympics Rotted Greece,” Politico, 10 July 2015, and Associated Press, “Did Olympics Cause Greek Financial Crisis?,” ESPN, 3 June 2010.   8 “Athens Olympic Sports Complex: Santiago Calatrava,” arcspace.com, 1 August 2012, www.arcspace.com/features/santiago-calatrava/athens-olympicsports-complex/.   9 Yannis Aesopos, “Diffused Athens: From Polykatoikia to Networks,” Pidgin, no. 8 (2010). 10 Brian Libby, “Calatrava’s Classical Greek,” W ArchitectureWeek (blog), 17 November 2004, www.architectureweek.com/2004/1117/design_3-1.html. 11 Malkoutzis, “How the 2004 Olympics Triggered Greece’s Decline.” 12 Helena Smith, “Athens 2004 Olympics: What Happened After the Athletes Went Home?” Guardian, 9 May 2012. Notwithstanding the financial catastrophe that followed Calatrava’s development, the criticisms of its cost do not take into account direct and indirect income or the ratio between external and internal benefits (e.g., from investments in sporting structures versus tourism or infrastructure operative after the Games).

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13 Jonny Singer, “Athens’ Olympic Venues Lie Abandoned and Left to Decay, Ten Years After Spending over £7bn to Welcome the Olympics Home,” Daily Mail, 6 August 2014. 14 Mairi Mackay, Atika Shubert and Arwa Damon, “Greece’s ‘Warehouse of Souls’: Refugees Stuck in Old Stadiums, Derelict Airport,” CNN, 9 March 2016. 15 Quoted in Malkoutzis, “How the 2004 Olympics Triggered Greece’s Decline.” 16 Ibid. 17 Associated Press, “Olympics €2.4bn over Budget,” Guardian, 12 November 2004. 18 Malkoutzis, “How the 2004 Olympics Triggered Greece’s Decline.” 19 “Explaining Greece’s Debt Crisis,” New York Times, 17 June 2016. 20 E. Demian et  al., The Impact of the 2004 Olympic Games on the Greek Economy (Athens: Ι∆Ρυμα ΟικονομικΩν & ΒιομηχανικΩν ΕρευνΩν Iobe, 2015). 21 Malkoutzis, “How the 2004 Olympics Triggered Greece’s Decline.” 22 Robert B. Reich, “How Goldman Sachs Profited from the Greek Debt Crisis,” The Nation, 16 July 2015. 23 Ibid. 24 William I. Robinson, “The Global Capital Leviathan,” Radical Philosophy 165 (January/February 2011), 4. 25 Ibid., 5. 26 Reich, “How Goldman Sachs Profited.” 27 Nektaria Stamouli, “Greece Meets Deadline to Repay IMF Bailout Loan,” Wall Street Journal, updated 9 April 2015. 28 “Olympic Sports Complex,” Santiago Calatrava Architects and Engineers, accessed 26 January 2018, https://calatrava.com/projects/olympic-sportscomplex-athens.html. 29 “Greece’s Olympic Bill Doubles,” BBC News, 12 November 2004. 30 Nicholas Paphitis and Theodora Tongas, “Athens Olympic Site in Ruins 10 Years On from 2004 Games,” News.com.au, 14 August 2014. 31 Jilly Traganou, “Shades of Blue: Debating Greek Identity through Santiago Calatrava’s Design for the Athens Olympic Stadium,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 26, no. 1 (May 2008): 185–214.

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Chapter 9

The look of money

Calatrava's Olympic structures for the Athens Games exude financial meanings, via his quixotic imagery that hovers somewhere between digital and real. The iconicity of these projects, their false digital immediacy, like all iconic architectures, speaks the repressed contents of ideology.1 The financial meanings to be discovered are those volunteered not by the architect but by the mimetic architectural image itself, where the unconscious of each project symptomatically appears, unbidden. Within the Athens Olympic Village, Calatrava’s stadium and velodrome are fraternal twins: their underlying structural language is composed of two steel arcs and two suspended curved surfaces connected by tension cables. The velodrome is an inversion of the main stadium cavity—split, turned upside down and solidified into an airtight double shell, the duplicated steel arcs from the stadium finally squeezed together at the velodrome base. The stadium envelope itself derives from a slit in a single sheet, stretched to create two new surfaces and a giant hole that acts as a volume of “water” upon which float two impossibly thin surfaces, like two wet skins, with four vertices providing their only structural contact. Calatrava has claimed that the forms of the two projects are a reference to the Mediterranean, to nature, or to Europe, 92

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Figure 9.1: Model of Santiago Calatrava’s Olympic Stadium in Athens on display in the exhibition Santiago Calatrava: Exploring the Art of Construction, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2016. Public domain.

Figure 9.2: Tim Danaher. Digital rendering of the Athens Olympic Velodrome roof. Courtesy Tim Danaher.

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classicism or the Byzantine.2 Yet this ghostly architecture that seeks liberation from the laws of statics and physical limits is the enemy of such earthly, humanist models. For the locus of the Athens stadium is the virtual space behind the computer screen where nature has been subdued and gravity no longer exists. By reducing the structure to four points, the floating surfaces act as reverse-tectonic sheets, not intended to signify or function as shelter; because under the iconic mandate of digital world capitalism, real parabolic surfaces and suspension cables are designed to look as ethereal and unseeable as digital wireframe models. The mawkish narrative of Calatrava as a Spanish artist inspired by the beauty of organic nature is dispelled in the stadium’s surface construction, where the architect-engineer’s techno-mathematical intentions are transparent—its relentless contours, constructed by parallel lines, are more reminiscent of the “Gaussian curve” in Iannis Xenakis’s Philips Pavilion, a far more complex mathematical form conceived for the 1958 Brussels expo. While digital-virtual reality and the software that could visualise a formalism of parabolic surfaces did not yet exist for the prophetic Xenakis, for the iconic architect, digitised surface-mathematics as commodity fetish and the unreal reality of digital visualisation are today what architecture is. Critics such as Hal Foster have situated Calatrava within the 1970s high-tech tradition, in which a building aestheticises technology and wears its structure on its sleeve, of which the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (1977), conceived by Richard Rogers, Renzo Piano and Gianfranco Franchini, is a seminal example. But while Beaubourg’s architectural image celebrated the real structure of mechanical, electronic and hydraulic systems in architectural production, the image of the Athens Olympic complex resembles an uncanny digital reincarnation of something more spectral than mere structure made manifest. This architecture is

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Figure 9.3: The parabolic colonnade’s strobe effect—an image of the new world of money, of ones and zeroes extending out to infinity. Yannis Prappas, photographer. The Cyclist, 2013. Photo Yannis Prappas Athens Greece.

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Figure 9.4: Garmatis Pantelis, photographer. The Agora, Athens, 2004. Courtesy Garmatis Pantelis.

indeed bewitched by structure, but in its recreation of a virtual space and post-human atmosphere of infinite duplication, what the project depicts is the structure of capital and serialisation of money, in the otherly virtual realm of transnational finance. That is what the buildings signify, and what the digital image surveys at the Athens Games. Both fascinating and terrifying, the visualisation of capital and its processes is even more palpable in Calatrava’s Agora, a curving promenade of 99 tubular, vaulted steel arches running along the northern edge of the site and enclosing the semicircular Plaza of the Nations, a sloping amphitheatre. From the 8th century BC, the ancient Greek agora was a financial space where merchants sold goods from stalls and shops set amid colonnades.

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In adopting the term today, Calatrava has become a prime agent in the transformation of the agora from an everyday politicalcommercial space into a site for transnational financial deals brokered by Wall Street. The striation of light and shade in the parabolic colonnade creates a stroboscopic effect—an image of the new world of money, of ones and zeroes extending out to infinity, a dizzying financial hyperspace in which no human has any place. Indistinguishable from a wireframe digital model, its infinitesimal lines, intersections and threads mimic the digital minutiae that cannot be grasped by a humanoid, and which reduce human experience to an algorithm, in this latest historical version of the reification of the spectator augured by Georg Lukács. Calatrava’s shadow structure is not a fetishisation of mechanical reproduction for the sake of lines but a representation of the techno-industrial reproduction of capital itself. As George Dyson, the son of quantum physicist Freeman Dyson, elaborated at the height of the financial crisis, “The problem starts, as the current crisis demonstrates, when unregulated replication is applied to money itself.”3 The Agora, itself a digital figure of seemingly unregulated auto-replication, is a spectacular representation of the technological process that brought the financial world to its knees: the aggressive duplication of derivatives trading at a magnitude only possible with the new financial Computer and Information Technology (CIT) that spawned the globally integrated financial system. In high-frequency trading, computers rather than humans execute trades in milliseconds, intensifying speculation and leading to the destabilisation of capitalism, as transpired in 2007. CIT appeared in the financial world at the same time that architecture was revolutionised by computer technology, by complex algorithms and parametric design, where robots replaced the architect’s hand, eye and brain. This is not a vague homology.

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The historical disruptions of cities and world finance took place at the same moment, in concert, for the same historical reasons. Their mutual goals and methods are the same: capital accumulation on a vast scale enabled by digital manipulation and management of crisis through technology. So too are their logics. Computer technology accelerated the de-realisation of both architecture and capitalism; one aspect of this latter process of financialisation is the shift from material labour and production to the production of money within the virtual space of finance for its own sake.4 The rise of virtual abstraction and post-human agency was characterised by journalist Sean Dodson: The people who write the algorithms that drive the software are called quantitative analysts, often referred to simply as “quants”. They are generally physics and mathematics graduates working in risk management—calculating whether a given deal is a good idea—and derivatives pricing, which entails putting a figure on trades that in effect bet on other trades. It’s enormously complex, which is why only the quants could understand it—if, that is, they did. History now suggests they didn’t.5

This story also has an important moral analogue in architecture. Like the quant, Calatrava is a human in charge of a high-risk process, really being controlled by machines, in a scenario where the human loses the ability to calculate risk. Calatrava almost always goes over budget—meaning it seems as if he’s very poor at risk assessment (even if the reality is something else, as discussed in Chapter 11). Calatrava’s Olympic development is just one example of the way in which risk assessment in iconic developments has been spectacularly flawed, and the gamble does not pay off.6

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In the end, the greatest loss in these projects is not financial. Humans are collateral damage in the transfer of public space from the city and its people to robots, mathematical algorithms and digital computation. Plato’s friend Diogenes, who lived in the agora of ancient Athens, was known to raise a candle to the faces of people in the agora in his search for a real human being; Socrates was known to frequent the markets and interrogate customers about the meaning of life.7 Calatrava’s Agora could never be a place of assembly for free humans. The iconic Agora appears to have been designated for post-humans, or docile robots, the future citizens of a world where intellectual reflection has been replaced with digital enchantment. Notes 1 For more on the relationship between iconicity and ideology, see Chapters 2–4. 2 Brian Libby, “Calatrava’s Classical Greek,” W ArchitectureWeek (blog), 17 November 2004, www.architectureweek.com/2004/1117/design_3-1.html. 3 George Dyson, “Economic Dis-Equilibrium,” Edge, 24 September 2008. See also Sean Dodson, “Was Software Responsible for the Financial Crisis?” Guardian, 15 October 2008. 4 For sources related to architectural financialisation, see Chapter 8, note 4. 5 Dodson, “Was Software Responsible for the Financial Crisis?” 6 Andrew Zimbalist, Circus Maximus: The Economic Gamble Behind Hosting the Olympics and the World Cup (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2016). 7 “Agora,” Ancient History Encyclopaedia, accessed 17 April 2018, www. ancient.eu/agora/.

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Futurist iconic

Figure 10.1: Santiago Calatrava. The Wall of Nations, Athens Olympic Sports Complex, 17 August 2004. Photograph by Flickr user gichristof. Fair use.

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We want to glorify war—the only cure for the world—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “The Futurist Manifesto”1

The Wall of Nations, the fourth element in the Greek Olympic master plan, facing the Agora and lying just south of the Plaza of the Nations and the development’s central axis, is an 850-footlong electric sculpture built out of 960 repeated tubular steel elements that undulate rhythmically, powered by a battery of 480 motors. Whereas the Agora is a digital skeleton of visually separable parabolic arches, the intricate tubes of the Wall of Nations blur into a single curvilinear surface that performs as a large video screen for functions in the plaza. Its surface is solid yet transparent, imperious but fleeting. The Wall of Nations is formally analogous to Calatrava’s high-speed train station in Reggio Emilia, Italy (2013), but compared with the station canopy’s plain functionality, the Wall of Nations has an eerie autonomy and purposelessness that makes it all the more overcoded as an unconscious surface of inscription. The wall’s image is peculiarly of the past and of the future, its tubular elements at once reminiscent of the architect Antonio Sant’Elia’s drawing of a power station (which illustrated his August 1914 “Manifesto of Futurist Architecture”) and laboratory silos for chemical production in a futuristic industrial landscape. Sant’Elia abhorred “decoration,” and as if gazing at Calatrava’s work itself, wrote, Oblique and elliptic lines are dynamic, and by their very nature possess an emotive power a thousand times stronger than perpendiculars and horizontals . . . no integral, dynamic architecture can exist that does not include these . . . We—who

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are materially and spiritually artificial—must find [architectural] inspiration in the elements of the utterly new mechanical world we have created.2

With its blurring of movement, the Wall of Nations also illustrates the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting, in which its group of artists observed, “On account of the persistency of an image upon the retina, moving objects constantly multiply themselves; their form changes like rapid vibrations, in their mad career,”3 an aesthetic exemplified historically in Giacomo Balla’s Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912). The dynamic striation and selfreplication of Calatrava’s forms also evokes the Futurists’ belief that art should depict a world in perpetual movement, but Filippo Marinetti could not have anticipated that replication would eventually document not human movement or even that of machines and cars, but the digital movement of ones and zeroes. Given these affinities, Calatrava’s style has been described as “neo-futurist”—a modernist category devised by Hal Foster, mostly applicable to work from the 1960s and 1970s, that derives from the Italian and Russian avant-garde of Marinetti, who promoted the synthesis of architecture, fast cars and Fascist politics.4 Neo-futurism has more recently surfaced in the “Neo-Futurist collective” of artists surrounding Joseph Young and his 2008 Neo-Futurist manifesto,5 formalised by Vito Di Bari during the 2015 Milan Exposition, more than a century after Marinetti.6 While such Italian Futurist tropes almost 100 years old are evident in Calatrava’s structures, their historical significance for the iconic project has gone unnoticed because of the illusion that “the iconic” is an ex nihilo category suspended in a permanent present outside of time and history. What is most uncanny about Calatrava’s resurfacing of historical Futurism in the present

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is the very ahistoricity of the Futurist manifesto, its insistence on destroying the past, its glorification of modernity and vision of a permanent present in time—which we find all too readily in the iconic project. Article 8 of Marinetti’s manifesto declared, We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.7

Sant’Elia also wanted to liquidate the past—in particular, historical architectures in their entirety. Each city was to exist for only a single generation, and then be torn down, a decree the iconic architecture industry and especially the Greek development may yet ratify.8 Hence, in Calatrava’s hypertechnocratic work, futurism is not metaphorical; rather, the Futurist dream of a sped-up modernity, the post-human subject and end of history are actualised in terrifying technicolour vision. As neo-futurist, the Wall of Nations conjures the irredentist, nationalistic politics of Futurism at a moment in history where a resurgence of nationalistic extremism has swept across central Europe. Marinetti and Sant’Elia were both nationalists and, like other Futurists, opposed parliamentary democracy and supported Fascism, which they believed were keys to modernising Italy. As was typical of avant-garde movements, Futurism also contained radical leftist anti-Fascist members, who nonetheless dangerously admired violence for its potential to bring about revolution. The Wall of Nations and Calatrava’s iconic work more generally is not only a transparent realisation of Futurist avant-garde formalism, but a finalisation of its modernist project of ideology—not a socialist-utopian modernism, but the dark

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modernism of the avant-garde right and its violent post-human visions. It thereby illustrates another avenue of regression in the iconic project under digital world capitalism. To be clear, there is no avant-garde any more,9 and yet Calatrava—part agent, part instrument of the iconic architecture industry—unconsciously fulfils the original Futurist avant-garde project without any revolutionary convictions driven by Fascist dreams. The Futurists were passionate nationalists who published political manifestos. The iconic architects of today, while glorifying science and the technocratic subject like the Futurists, have no political passions or even position beyond executing the client brief. The one exception is Patrik Schumacher (see the introduction to this book). Yet after Schumacher released his manifesto, Zaha Hadid Architects published a statement distancing themselves from its contents. Given these singular neo-futurist tendencies, Calatrava’s style does not fit into any of the iconic types I describe in Chapters 5–7, but constitutes its own fourth type because it is, in a sense, the most pure form of iconicity: the fusion of hypertechnology, neo-capitalism and the modernist wishes for immortality of the 20th century re-territorialised in the digital image. It’s clear that the digitised, futuristic subject inscribed in his work is the same as the post-human spectator of the Loop, but there is further a more fundamental ideological relation between Calatrava’s work and the types established thus far: its immortality project. The futurist iconic is yet another category striving for immortality, as all iconic types do. Sant’Elia described the “monumental,” “museum” architecture of his time as “funerary,” meaning deathly, a regressive modernism evoking dead classical motifs that interrupted Futurism’s dream of eternal life guaranteed by advanced technology. Futurism is therefore the earliest ideological avant-garde precedent for the iconic project.

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Yet neither the iconic architects nor the millennial NeoFuturists bear any of the revolutionary consciousness of original Futurism and its dark modernity, having taken refuge in a blind, insipid utopianism. The Neo-Futurist manifesto expresses a “hope of a positive future where technology, art and humanity will unite to overcome pessimism, despondency and futile utopianism in all its spurious forms”—by which it reproduces the most arid cliché of the modernist movement both before and after the world wars, without alteration. The belief that advanced technologies will provide a better future and a “better quality of life for city dwellers” was the fundamental lie of the

Figure 10.2:  Tullio Crali. Nose-Diving on the City, 1939. Oil on canvas, 130 × 155 cm. Public domain.

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modern movement, as documented in the historic failure of the urban renewal movement then, by Jane Jacobs, and today, in the actual future that was the vanishing point of 20th-century modernist ideology, with the dire urban conditions that are a reality for the majority of the world. To reiterate: “Using technology to make the world a better place” remains the shibboleth of the millennium for both the right and left, and beyond architecture, as mocked, for example, in the television show Silicon Valley. If in the 1960s the locus of critique was the wanton destruction of the traditional city through urban renewal and the razing of built fabric, today it is the technologies of capitalism and the techno-financialisation of architecture that are irrevocably destroying the contemporary city. Notes 1 F. T. Marinetti, “The Futurist Manifesto” (1909), reprinted in Patrick G. Zander, The Rise of Fascism: History, Documents, and Key Questions, Crossroads in World History (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2016), 138. 2 Antonio Sant’Elia, “Manifesto of Futurist Architecture” (1914), reprinted in Rethinking Technology: A Reader in Architectural Theory, ed. William W. Braham and Jonathan A. Hale (Abingdon, England: Routledge, 2007), 18. 3 Umberto Boccioni et  al., “Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto” (1910), reprinted in Art and Its Significance: An Analogy of Aesthetic Theory, ed. Stephen David Ross, 3rd ed. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 657. 4 The manifesto was originally published in Le Figaro in February 1909, and reprinted as F. T. Marinetti, Fondazione E Manifesto Del Futurismo: Pubblicato Dal “Figaro” Di Parigi il 20 Febbraio 1909, Manifesti Del Movimento Futurista (Milan: “Poesia” via Senato, 2, 1909), and F. T. Marinetti and C. R. W. Nevinson, Vital English Art: Futurist Manifesto (Italy: 1914). 5 Neo Futurist Collective, “Manifesto of Neo-Futurism,” accessed 4 February 2018, https://neofuturistcollective.com/manifesto-of-neo-futurism/. 6 Vito Di Bari, “From Manifesto of Futurist Architecture to Manifesto of NeoFuturistic City,” brochure, 2014, neo-futurism.com. Accessed via the Internet

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Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20150608041736/http://neo-futurism. com:80/Brochure_ManifestoFuturismo.pdf. 7 Marinetti, “The Futurist Manifesto,” 138. 8 Sant’Elia, “Manifesto of Futurist Architecture,” 15–18. 9 For more on the dissolution of the avant-garde, see the introduction, Chapter 17, and Joseph Young’s response in Chapter 18.

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Chapter 11

The architect-financier

Today the City of Arts and Sciences is sinking under its own excesses. That is where the architect died and the businessman was born. Miquel Alberlola1

Figure 11.1: Website founded by Ignacio Blanco, opposition member for the Valencian provincial parliament for United Left, 2017. Fair use.

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How are we to view Calatrava himself in relation to the iconic Olympic project, which was charged with precipitating a financial crisis? It might be preferable to acquit the architect and shield his architectural creations from the financial tale that bedevilled his project—and thus to confine the definition of architecture to a disciplinary genealogy of historical architectural typologies and formal languages, quarantined from the dirty business of money. Yet the transnational flows of capital and the global crises they create are the premise of the iconic project, whose digital monuments can no longer be understood through a vertical history of aesthetic types otherwise known as the canon. Athens now has more than 12 abandoned or unutilised Olympic venues, and, according to recent reports, Calatrava’s village of 2004 is a dire precinct of atrophy and poverty. Of course Calatrava had little say in how the structures would be used after the Games, nor did he have any direct influence over the financial and political conditions in Greece that preceded his intervention or the political and financial crisis that would blossom in its wake. But neither can we claim that Calatrava was a hapless artist hired to insert an iconic stadium who then found himself accidentally at the centre of a transnational financial disaster. This is to say that Calatrava bears responsibility for the financial management of the project, and importantly that this situation was not new in his career. It might be tempting to defend Calatrava given that similar developments throughout the 20th century were also associated with financial mismanagement. Like Calatrava, the legendary planner Robert Moses was able to conjure up large sums of money in the 1940s; even while he frequently ran out of funding, he still built a vast amount of iconic infrastructure. Indeed, post-war modernism was also defined by a period of debt and sovereign debt default, and the use of what were then thought of as iconic developments to remediate financial crisis. One might

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thus compare Moses’s struggles in creating, say, the 1964–65 World’s Fair with that of the Greek Olympic development. But for the Olympic development and iconic architecture now, the scale of money involved is simply incomparable with that of the postwar decades, and the buildings themselves appear to be less and less real, in line with their primary purpose: financial remediation, or what David Harvey famously termed spatial fix. It could further be argued that Olympic stadiums are almost always financial failures, and that state-funded stadiums have always been controversial, as they transfer debt to taxpayers (as in the case of Montreal, whose citizens were taxed for 30 years to pay off the debt from its 1976 Games). But it is important to recognise that Calatrava has faced the selfsame charges for all of his millennial projects, including the non-stadiums. Calatrava has considerable experience in financial and budgetary crises over a decades-long career in megaprojects in Europe and the US. The problem with stadiums sharpens the point, as the Olympic Games are a concentrated, rapid-fire laboratory of the iconic architecture industry at large. Not only has Calatrava faced criticism from the political enemies of the conservative party in Greece for his financial handling of the Olympic development in Athens, he has also been charged with going over budget and disadvantaging towns such as Valencia that have inherited his projects as documented in great detail by “Geenwoordspaans” in The Full Calatrava.2 The growing movement against Calatrava Architects in Europe is exemplified in the website of the left-wing Esquerra Unida party, that has levied accusations of greed, systemic corruption, financial manipulation and creation of moral hazard against the firm. Beyond Athens, the most significant complaints against Calatrava have been made by the cities of New York, Maastricht and Valencia.3

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The numbers are not flattering for the architect. The World Trade Center Transportation Hub in New York cost US$4 billion, double the original budget.4 Calatrava was paid US$80 million.5 Losing $2 billion of public money cannot be viewed as accidental or simply going over budget because of the magnitude of funds being transferred and social costs of such losses to the city. The Campus Maastricht project was abandoned after the original budget of €40 million escalated to €235 million and €66 million of public funds had already been spent. Calatrava received his entire fee, as if the project had been completed, thanks to the contract the architect had negotiated with the city.6 The most controversial of all, Valencia’s Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias (CAC), or City of Arts and Sciences, cost €900 million, triple the original budget. To protest this overage, Ignacio Blanco, an opposition member of the Valencian provincial parliament who opposed Calatrava’s use of public funds, founded the website www.calatravatelaclava.com, a rhyme that means “Calatrava bleeds you dry”; Calatrava successfully sued for the site’s removal in 2013.7 In response, another website called Calatrava no nos calla—“Calatrava will not silence us”—was erected by the left-wing Esquerra Unida i Alternativa party, which claims it has viewed copies of bills of €100 million paid to Calatrava by the People’s Party regional government.8 The same year as the Athens Games, Calatrava received the commission for the “Ghost Towers,” as they are sardonically called—another Valencia project that was to insert four flexuous skyscrapers beside the CAC for €450 million.9 While the towers were never built, Calatrava received €15 million of taxpayer money for two paper models.10 What is most astonishing is the government’s rationale: to sell the four completed towers in order to offset the monolithic losses incurred by the building of the CAC, which, at a total cost of €1.3 billion, exceeded its

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Figure 11.2: Jordi Vicent, photographer. Santiago Calatrava presents the second iteration of the “Ghost Towers” for Valencia to mayor Rita Barberá (left) and the president of the Generalitat Valenciana, Francisco Camps (right), 2004. Fair use.

original budget of €300 million by a billion euros. The government thus visits the cash flow sins of one Calatrava project by taking on another. This returns us to Greece, where the same financial logic is in place. In April 2016, contrary to all expectations, Greece met its deadline to repay the first instalment of the bailout loan it had received from the International Monetary Fund.11 In order to fund the payment, the Greek government signed a deal to sell the Ellinikon airport site, which housed 2,500 refugees at the time, to Lamda Development, a Greek company, for €915 million. Lamda will invest €8 billion to transform the 600-hectacre seafront property into a seaside resort, including a giant park.12 The Greek and Spanish cases illustrate the speculative and recursive formula of the iconic architecture industry—one speculation is used to

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cover the losses of a prior failed speculation through the intervention of iconic architecture. Such opportunism has become widespread after the 2008 collapse; Wall Street banks that brokered the debt arrangements to finance iconic projects returned to “solve” the debt problem they created by helping to finance new speculation, using the government bailouts and commissions they received.13 In this sense, iconic architecture today can be considered a form of securitisation—it turns a 30-year mortgage into a “tradable” source of urban-economic speculation, a bet which almost never pays off for the city. The debt that is never repaid robs capital from taxpayers that could have been directed to the social needs of the city, for public space and for the public itself. The banks—and, of course, corollary figures like Calatrava—are the only ones to benefit. Such developments are examples of the financialisation of architecture by governments, and their liquefaction of the city. The architect has historically denied any responsibility for cost overruns,14 yet Calatrava is aware of his role as financier given the scales of money involved, and he also likely understands how much more a project will cost in reality given his extensive experience with iconic developments, as noted above. In fact, Calatrava did not have a single cost overrun in any project until 1995—i.e., just before the inception of the global iconic project. After 2005, all of his projects have grossly eclipsed their budgets.15 The iconic megaproject provides architects today with opportunities to collect a scale of fees unimaginable 25 years ago, and this creates the opening for corruption and moral hazard. For example, in Valencia, Calatrava suggested the towers should number four and be much taller than the original three— and as the project’s scope inflated, so did the architect’s fees. Esquerra Unida further claimed that contracts were offered to Calatrava via “an unpublicised negotiating system establishing

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his payments as a percentage of the final cost of each project, which doubled or tripled in respect to the original budgets.”16 Calatrava always stipulates that his contract fee is a percentage of the final project cost, rather than the budgeted cost, so he serves to benefit as costs rise. Another moral hazard comes into play when the project is never completed: the architect still gets paid, even though the city does not benefit. To this point, Calatrava managed to flex his urban power in Valencia even further in the contract he signed with the government, according to The Full Calatrava, where in case of sale of the site, the buyer would also have to purchase the project for Calatrava’s towers. If the buyer did not wish to proceed with the Ghost Towers, they would have to negotiate with Calatrava about the new use, meaning the buyer would have to hire Calatrava for a new architectural project, or else pay Calatrava an exorbitant sum to remove the architect from the contract. Of course, the taxpayers bear these spiralling costs. In Valencia, the public protested that €15 million for two models was extortionate and an unreasonable loss for a city already in great financial trouble. This is a paper architecture par excellence. As an aside, financial troubles often plague Calatrava’s developments even after they are completed because of engineering failures: their cladding frequently falls off, or the envelope is not waterproof, leading to, for example, leaks in the roof of the Olympic Stadium.17 These problems are often expensive to fix in themselves, adding to the staggering total bill of the project overall. But bad engineering is secondary in the iconic architecture industry, because technocracy furnishes the look of financialisation—what counts is to visualise the capitalist instrumentalisation of art and the city. Financialisation under the iconic architecture industry divests architecture of its objecthood and its reality and turns failed

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dreams into fictitious money for the agents of that very industry. Louis Moreno defines financialisation with a catchphrase, “profiting without producing.” To state the obvious, Valencia did not need an iconic City of Arts and Sciences or Ghost Towers, just as Athens did not need an iconic infrastructure project. These projects hijacked the city from the public, as they were established to solve financial problems, to financialise architecture into a future income-producing asset based on the promise of what Karl Marx, in Volume III of Capital, called “fictitious capital.” The money earned in these projects is itself a form of financialisation because the buildings did not make a productive contribution to the city. That the public will pay for bad architectural financial instruments is now an essential statute of the iconic architecture industry and its “contract” with the city. The noxious collision of public finance and private transnational finance capital under digital world capitalism is a new combat zone where the transnationalist class elite is waging a war against the global poor and working classes. To return to the original question about the architect’s role in this equation, Calatrava is not a puppet of the industry, nor straw man for the larger financial crisis in towns like Valencia, but has become something akin to a Goldman Sachs figure of the iconic architecture industry, sharing the guilt with the governments who hire him and financial entities that implement the damage. But the problem clearly extends beyond Calatrava, to the global-psychological complex he has successfully exploited. Put simply, the problem is the government’s belief that iconic architecture is effective at remediating financial crisis—and, in turn, the mass delusion of the public, dazzled by the chance that an iconic “star” will visit their town and insert an iconic masterpiece (a delusion whose use-by date has expired in Southern

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Europe). In this way, the iconic architecture industry reinforces its role as the new Hollywood, an elaborate digital entertainment medium for the global masses, whose cities are de-territorialised and perilously converted into fictitious financial products. Yet financial danger is part of the perverse, gambler’s appeal of iconic architecture in the European city—the government is the gambler in this analogy. Large sums of money evaporating in public space inspire the same awe as a 19,000-ton Olympic roof floating in the Grecian air. Notes   1 Quoted in Giles Tremlett, “Architect Santiago Calatrava Accused of ‘Bleeding Valencia Dry’,” Guardian, 8 May 2012.   2 The blog The Full Calatrava keeps an ongoing list of budget overages related to his projects; see https://thefullcalatrava.wordpress.com/.   3 Tremlett, “Architect Santiago Calatrava accused of ‘bleeding Valencia dry’.”   4 Suzanne Daley, “A Star Architect Leaves Some Clients Fuming,” New York Times, 24 September 2013.   5 Alissa Walker, “Can You Guess How Much NYC Paid the Architect of the Most Expensive Train Station on Earth?” Gizmodo, 19 April 2016.   6 “Campus Maastricht – Maastricht (NL),” The Full Calatrava, 26 November 2013, https://thefullcalatrava.wordpress.com/2013/11/26/campus-maastrichtmaastricht-nl/.   7 The site has since returned.   8 Tremlett, “Architect Santiago Calatrava Accused of ‘Bleeding Valencia Dry’.”   9 Ignacio Blanco, “Wasteful Projects and Invoices without VAT,” 2016, www. calatravanonoscalla.com/#!/ciutat-de-les-arts/. The website has since been shut down. 10 “Calatrava Towers – Valencia, Spain,” The Full Calatrava, 13 September 2013, https://thefullcalatrava.wordpress.com/2013/09/13/calatrava-towers-valenciaspain/. 11 Nektaria Stamouli, “Greece Meets Deadline to Repay IMF Bailout Loan,” Wall Street Journal, updated 9 April 2015. 12 Angeliki Koutantou, “Greece Revises Hellenikon Property Deal, Unlocking Bailout Funds,” Reuters, 7 June 2016.

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13 William I. Robinson describes this as “unloading surplus into sovereign debt markets that they themselves helped to create.” Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 155. 14 Ashifa Kassam, “Controversial Architect Santiago Calatrava Defends His Record,” Guardian, 9 June 2015. 15 See The Full Calatrava, https://thefullcalatrava.wordpress.com/. 16 Quoted in Tremlett, “Architect Santiago Calatrava Accused of ‘Bleeding Valencia Dry’.” 17 These problematic projects have been widely publicised, including footbridges in Bilbao and Venice that have injured pedestrians or remain inaccessible for disabled users; the City of Arts and Sciences opera house, which has faced numerous issues; a collapsing conference centre in Oviedo; and the leaky roof of a winery in the Álava region. See Ashifa Kassam, “Controversial Architect Santiago Calatrava Defends His Record,” and Grace Quah, “Valencia to Sue Santiago Calatrava over at City of Arts and Sciences,” Dezeen, 2 January 2014.

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Just because something bears the aspect of the inevitable one should not, therefore, go along willingly with it. — Philip K. Dick

C\ Taylor & Francis � Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com

Chapter 12

The abuses of iconic architecture

And so evil a man was Kheops that, needing money, he put his own daughter in a brothel and made her charge a fee (how much, they did not say). She did as her father told her, but was disposed to leave a memorial of her own, and asked of each coming to her that he give one stone; and of these stones they said the pyramid was built that stands midmost of the three, over against the great pyramid; each side of it measures one hundred and fifty feet. Herodotus1

As image, iconic architecture in antiquity is a symbolic exchange for the life or human capital vanquished in its monumental production. The emperor Vespasian built the Colosseum of Rome, the most prodigious arena in the Roman world, in AD 72–80. Ten years earlier, his son, the future emperor Titus, sacked the city of Jerusalem, plundering its treasures to pay for the Colosseum’s construction. No expense was spared in the project. After the Jewish War in AD 70, 100,000 prisoners were brought back to Rome as slaves to build the arena. The stadium was used to entertain the masses, hosting battles to the death between slaves. In 2014, the International Trade Union Confederation reported that 1,200 construction labourers had died and up to 7,000 migrant 121

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workers “might die” building at least eight iconic stadiums for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.2 This morbid exchange of built form for life has always haunted iconic architecture. Yet today we are witnessing a return to an archaic urbanism via the intervention of the iconic architecture industry in oil-rich dictatorships of the former Soviet Union and the Arab world, which, as part of an unprecedented building boom, are erecting iconic megaprojects under neo-feudal labour conditions as a means to gain membership in the transnational neo-capitalist class. Nasser Beydoun, an Arab-American businessman who spent nearly two years as an “economic hostage” in Doha, told the New York Times that foreign workers in Qatar are “modernday slaves to their local employers. The local Qatari owns you.”3 It is the confluence of archaism and late modernity, to use Adorno’s maxim, that characterises the iconic architecture industry in its incarnation in the Middle East. Labour abuses on construction sites in such jurisdictions are becoming increasingly apparent to the discipline, in a growing debate on the intervention of Western architects in these regions and the troubling question of the architect’s moral responsibility. A most interesting recent example—and the subject of later chapters—is the scandal surrounding Zaha Hadid’s Al-Wakrah Stadium in Qatar, also designed for the 2022 World Cup, which will replace the original Saoud bin Abdul Rahman Al-Thani Stadium, designed by Albert Speer & Partner GmbH, the son of chief Third Reich architect Albert Speer. According to an Amnesty International report published in 2015, labour conditions for construction workers on World Cup stadium sites are harsh and dangerous because of the extreme heat; workers are forced to work at the hottest time of day in a race to actualise the buildings in record time.4 Such global cultural events command a violent, accelerated modernity to fabricate an

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instant city ex nihilo, at any cost. Worse, the stadiums are being constructed by offshore workers imported from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and the Philippines under Qatar’s kafala (sponsorship) law,5 which Human Rights Watch has called an organised form of modern slavery in the Gulf emirate.6 It is common for migrant workers to take out high-interest loans to pay exorbitant fees to recruitment agencies in order to secure work in Qatar. According to Amnesty International, these agencies often “make false promises about salaries or the type of work on offer. In some contexts, deception over work conditions and the situation in which migrant workers then find themselves can amount to human trafficking.” Migrant workers are often deceived and paid late or forced to work for no pay at all.7 The US Department of State has detailed such abuses in its Trafficking in Persons Report: “Sponsors have the unilateral power to cancel workers’ residency permits, deny workers’ ability to change employers, report a worker as ‘absconded’ to police authorities, and deny permission to leave the country.”8 Amnesty International has also described how workers further “risk abuse and sanctions for making formal complaints,” including being detained or deported. The organisation cites the story of one such worker: To come to Qatar I had to take a loan of 130,000 Sri Lankan Rupees [approximately US$1,000] at an interest rate of 36 percent. I just want to work and earn some money for my wife and children, but because of my sponsor I cannot change jobs. If I go to the police they will arrest and deport me because I do not have an ID.9

Such abuses amount to a living death, even if a worker escapes with their life.

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This activity is permissible under kafala law in a country that is essentially a slave state.10 Marx wrote, “The slave-owner buys his laborer as he buys his horse. If he loses his slave, he loses capital.” Marx further distinguished the mode of alienation of the slave labourer from that of the wage labourer by defining the slave as fixed capital, versus the working capital of the wage labourer. Yet in a despotic monarchy like Qatar, the conditions under which the labourer is employed are so petrifying that the situation could scarcely be said to reflect “the alienation of their labour through free choice.”11 The despot does not merely exploit surplus labour but surplus life. The final death, if it occurs, is a culmination of the deathly life that has already been sacrificed; both deaths are dissolved in the liquid aura of the digital image that knows no morality or humanity. The digital superficies of iconic architecture in the Gulf today resurrect the archaic images that have long haunted modernity. While appearing to herald modernisation and enlightenment in the Middle East, iconic development in Qatar is regression to neo-feudalism in the hands of advanced technology. In May 2015, the Qatari government released a plan to erect seven “labour cities” to house 258,000 migrant labourers, by the close of 2016; while at least one has been completed at the time of this writing, the reality is that the majority of labourers continue to live in camps on the outskirts of the city.12 The labour city is but a grotesque fantasy, a shadow city for slave labourers to build an iconic city for the capitalist elite—those who will gain financially from the World Cup (the government, construction companies, developers and architects) and those who attend the games. Social relations are dissolved in the radiant iconic object by an exchange not of labour, but of life itself; the deaths of workers are absorbed into the act of exchange by the sadistic overvaluation of the digital image and its grim

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actualisation in space. For Adorno and Max Horkheimer, this macabre exchange is a ritualistic sacrifice. In other words, the deaths are not simply the “cost” of making iconic architecture (i.e., the cost of doing business), but bear symbolic value in this cultish iteration of modernity that elevates the violence of technology to the mystical or sacred. Hadid herself made another type of sacrifice on the other side of ideology: she died prematurely of a heart attack, aged 65, effectively exchanging her own life for the iconic project, her life’s work, in what might be chillingly read as poetic justice. Her death came one year after she sued the Guardian for making a moral judgement about her response to the deaths of labourers on Qatar World Cup construction sites. The writer Leslie Sklair has called Hadid a member of the transnationalist capitalist class—an elite—but at the point of her death, she became an abstraction, a moral lesson, highlighting the way in which workers have been reduced to currency in the mortal exchange for capital under the iconic industrial complex.

Notes   1 Herodotus, The Histories, trans. A. D. Godley, 2.126.1–2.   2 International Trade Union Confederation, Qatar: Profit and Loss, Frontlines Report (Brussels, December 2015).   3 Quoted in Richard Morin, “Indentured Servitude in the Persian Gulf,” New York Times, 12 April 2013.   4 Amnesty International, Promising Little, Delivering Less: Qatar and Migrant Labour Abuse Ahead of the 2022 Football World Cup (London, 2015).   5 See Azfar Khan, “Why It’s Time to End Kafala,” The Guardian, 26 February 2014, and Maysa Zahra, “The Legal Framework of the Sponsorship Systems of the Gulf Cooperation Council Countries: A Comparative Examination,” Explanatory Note No. 10/2015, Gulf Labour Market and Migration programme.   6 Human Rights Watch, Building a Better World Cup (2012).   7 Amnesty International, Promising Little, 5.

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  8 United States Department of State, “Qatar,” in Trafficking in Persons Report (2011), 302.   9 Quoted in Amnesty International, Promising Little, 5, 9. 10 International Trade Union Confederation, Qatar: Profit and Loss. 11 Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One: A Critique of Political Economy, ed. Friedrich Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, vol. 1 (1906; repr., Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2011), 292. 12 Amnesty International, Promising Little, 5; Charles Sale, “Qatar Looks to Learn from London Mistakes Ahead of 2022 World Cup,” Daily Mail, 17 November 2016.

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Chapter 13

The Zaha Hadid scandal

Figure 13.1: Zaha Hadid Architects. Digital rendering, Al-Wakrah Stadium, Qatar, designed for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, circa 2013. Courtesy Zaha Hadid Architects.

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This is a story that begins with a war between an architect and a critic. In the 5 June 2014 issue of the New York Review of Books, Martin Filler excoriated Zaha Hadid for her denial of moral responsibility and apparent lack of remorse for the migrant deaths on building sites for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, for which her Al-Wakrah Stadium was completed in 2019.1 Hadid had made a statement, cited in the Guardian, that started the commotion: “I have nothing to do with the workers,” said Hadid. “I think that’s an issue the government – if there’s a problem – should pick up. Hopefully, these things will be resolved.” Asked if she was concerned, Hadid added: “Yes, but I’m more concerned about the deaths in Iraq as well, so what do I do about that? I’m not taking it lightly but I think it’s for the government to look to take care of. It’s not my duty as an architect to look at it. “I cannot do anything about it because I have no power to do anything about it. I think it’s a problem anywhere in the world. But, as I said, I think there are discrepancies all over the world.”2

On the surface, Hadid’s answer—that she is entirely liberated from any moral question—is perhaps too frank, and therefore astounding. A less honest but more redemptive response would be to say that she hoped the stadium would in some small yet positive way better the lives of the locals. In August 2014, Hadid sued both the Guardian and the New York Review of Books for defamation.3 She did so, first, on chronological grounds: that construction on her site had not begun when she was first interrogated in relation to the deaths, and that none of the deaths had taken place on her own site. Hadid further argued that the report had been refuted and that there were more effective labour controls in place on her construction site than on others.

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The cases were settled out of court. As part of the agreements, brokered by Hadid’s lawyers at BakerHostetler, Filler published an unconditional retraction and apology, clarifying that no deaths had occurred on Hadid’s site when he made his claims, and that the deaths he discussed took place on construction sites for the World Cup overall, not specifically her stadium.4 Can we thereby deduce from Hadid’s defence an admission that had construction begun prior to the deaths, she would no longer perceive herself outside the moral question, and would therefore be exposed to all moral charges? That Hadid took effective legal action to exonerate herself indicates that she may not have believed her own statement that the architect has no duty to address these questions. For her part, Hadid agreed to make a donation to an international labour rights organisation.5 Of course, this forced action was symbolic, devoid of any moral truth or substance (moral action has to be undertaken freely); and it was designed to appease not Filler, but the masses. The public and media were not consoled by Hadid’s legal response, and the result did not satisfy the moral demand made of her—and, implicitly, of the architectural discipline itself. In essence, it was Hadid’s insistence of moral separation—of the autonomy of architectural production and of the architect—that outraged the public. The controversy thus did not go away. Hadid was scathed for suing the critics, and moral condemnation of the architect only intensified after her legal action was settled. In ARTINFO, Anna Kats argued, Hadid’s legal actions are a disturbing, if not absurdly comical, measure of her social consciousness . . . If Hadid was truly troubled by Filler’s statements, she could use her position of authority to do something about their suffering, and her own.6

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In Vanity Fair, Paul Goldberger also appealed to Hadid’s fame: There are few architects who are bigger celebrities than Hadid, and for better or worse, celebrities have the potential to offer a moral example. Hadid has exploited her celebrity with more skill and determination than just about anyone. It is time that she made the most of this aspect of her celebrity too, and decided that there is nothing wrong with taking a moral stand.7

James S. Russell drew conclusions from the scandal for the profession as a whole, contending that “architects do have a moral imperative to collectively work with labor-rights groups and other construction-related professions to end abuse of the powerless by the powerful.”8 In an isolated defence of Hadid’s position (though not of the tone of her comments), the San Francisco-based firm HB+A Architects echoed Hadid’s own argument that the architect’s responsibility during construction is limited: Architects when/if hired for construction administration only “observe” not inspect construction. . . . [The] Architect’s duty during construction is to visit the site when appropriate to become “familiar” with the progress and quality of work. An example of gross negligence during Construction Administration includes not reviewing shop drawings carefully, that could possibly result in work that isn’t in accordance with contract documents and potentially causes an injury. Many projects involve having the architect only produce the Contract Documents and not be involved at all during construction. The Architect isn’t responsible for “the means and methods of construction and for safety precautions”.9

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But this argument only addresses the architect’s legal and professional obligations in relation to the work, not their moral responsibility. If Hadid was not morally culpable for deaths on a construction site that falls under Qatar legislation, then the charges against her were not for killing, but for not preventing the killing—for not seeking to improve labour conditions, or for not appearing to do so. In discussions during the 1970s surrounding the question of “doing versus allowing harm,” moral philosophers argued that killing and letting die were morally equivalent—in other words, if you let a person die, you are as responsible as you would be if you had killed that person. This extreme position of moral equivalence has more recently been contested.10 Nonetheless, the impotence to halt the deaths of thousands of third-world labourers installed on feudal construction sites and held as slaves, is something we should be outraged by. The protest against Hadid was that she made no objection at all. Her argument that these abuses are no worse than those in Iraq or that abuse is commonplace or “normal” in the Middle East and “anywhere” in the world does not lend her statements greater moral value. It’s another case of the fake renunciation and zero-politics position we’ve come to expect from architects.

Moral distance Hadid’s principal claim is that she operates at an infinite distance from the site of murder, from murder itself—that she cannot be connected to the murder chain. The simple argument is that the designer of a museum or stadium in Qatar is not the cause of any worker abuse occurring there in the same way that the designer of a capital punishment facility or the gas

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chambers in Auschwitz—where death is intrinsic to the architectural programme—would be.11 Yet this distinction between a programmed (explicit) architecture of death versus a “cultural” programme where worker deaths are a sinister, probable end under the barbarism of kafala labour law does not alter the moral inquest. The dead are the dead. In fact, the argument can be reversed, as this implicit or “accidental” murder-ascollateral-damage by a cultural facility in some sense intensifies the moral charge against Qatar—namely, the very idea that the iconic architecture industry deploys “culture” to murder people might be even more disturbing. But when human life is violated and sacrificed, when human rights abuses lead to large numbers of deaths, the programmatic distinction collapses. The moral causality and the location of the architect within the moral chain are altered, but this alteration does not obviate the architect’s responsibility. The moral distance argument is an old one in moral philosophy. Emmanuel Levinas deemed that immorality based on the illusion of distance was a myopia, a short-sighted perception of oneself as autonomous, the inability to see that which exists outside one’s immediate world, i.e. the suffering subject.12 Peter Singer similarly argued, The moral principle takes no account of proximity or distance. It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor’s child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away.13

Zygmunt Bauman asserted that what made the Holocaust possible was precisely the feeling that each Nazi had of being simply a cog in a larger machine—that their moral responsibility was

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so dispersed within the vast bureaucratic organisation of killing, and at a distance from the totality of the crime, that they felt freed of any moral charges.14 (Bauman was responding to one of the most oft-cited historical examples: Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer responsible for planning the transportation of six million Jews to Auschwitz and other death camps, who infamously invoked the moral distance argument during his trial in Jerusalem. Eichmann claimed he was not culpable, that he was merely the logistical transporter of the Jews to the camps, and was therefore far from the figure of the killer.) For Bauman, any moral distance is eradicated by the reality and scale of murder—a consideration that also applies in Hadid’s case, although it need not be stated Qatar cannot be compared with Germany under the Third Reich. Yet even if Hadid had no power to stop deaths on stadium sites, nor to change the general labour conditions and labour law, the number of deaths surrounding the Qatar World Cup development machine is so great that as a key industrial agent within it she could not ignore the deaths even while claiming to be only peripherally connected to the site of murder in a material capacity. The mass scale of deaths eliminates moral distance and even heightens individual culpability. Put another way, if one architect’s actions can, from a distance, be implicated in the deaths of 1,000 people, the architect’s moral responsibility rises. After construction commenced, only one labourer had reportedly died on Hadid’s site. But the mass deaths across the entire Qatar World Cup development project (of which her building is an essential component) must be viewed as systematised and intentional under kafala law, and the moral relation—indeed the complicity—of any architect who enters that region is thereby reinforced. The moral subject is born at the point of insertion in an immoral power matrix, whose

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individuality is not dissolved by the aggregate or the bureaucracy. Hadid, in other words, must be judged as an individual moral agent, not a cog in the iconic machine. Hadid’s moral distance argument (what about all the problems everywhere and therefore nowhere?) also smacks of the false justification that she was operating in a foreign land, far from her home in London. Again, Hadid is morally responsible, apart from the perpetrators, because she was an outsider coming from a country with high labour standards. It is the convenient geographical and political distance of the global iconic architecture industry in non-Western jurisdictions that furnishes the architect with the illusion of exemption from moral responsibility—an illusion that it weaponises with impunity. According to this argument, an architect might potentially express more remorse about 1,200 worker deaths on a project erected on their own soil, rather than an offshore construction site that is foreign on every level—legal, cultural, moral, political and economic (yet there is no great evidence of this remorse at home, either). The mordant irony is that Hadid was born a Muslim in Iraq, which masquerades her real subject position in the iconic architecture industry in the Arab world, where she is idiotically admired for her brand identity as a female Muslim architect. In fact, Hadid had a Catholic education, and operated as a capitalist British practitioner while exploiting her MiddleEastern profile and connections for success. That the workers were themselves not Qatari locals but Nepalese and Indian recruits produces yet another weaponised illusion of remove or moral distance and, ipso facto, additional counts of abuse; in other words, this is a transnational operation that becomes an opening for a suite of human rights abuses peculiar to labourers working outside the protection of their own lands. For Levinas, paradoxically, it is the outsider and distant sufferer that has the

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capacity to awaken the moral instinct in the subject. Fyodor Dostoevsky expressed a more cynical view: that proximity does not guarantee compassion, because human nature is devoid of compassion! In The Brothers Karamazov, there is no possible redemption for the man who feels compassion. Dostoevsky might say that architecture, too, is pitiless, and will always see itself as a morally autonomous operation. Notes   1 Martin Filler, “The Insolence of Architecture,” New York Review of Books, 5 June 2014.   2 James Riach, “Zaha Hadid Defends Qatar World Cup Role Following Migrant Worker Deaths,” Guardian, 25 February 2014.   3 Joanna Walters, “Zaha Hadid Suing New York Review of Books over Qatar Criticism,” Guardian, 24 August 2014.   4 Martin Filler, “A Letter Correcting and Apologizing for a Statement about Zaha Hadid,” New York Review of Books, 25 September 2014.   5 Caroline Massie, “Zaha Hadid Reaches Settlement in Lawsuit Against The New York Review of Books, Martin Filler,” Architect, 26 January 2015.   6 Anna Kats, “Zaha Hadid’s Trials and Tribulations,” BLOUIN ARTINFO, 26 August 2014.   7 Paul Goldberger, “Zaha Hadid Is Still Wrong about Construction Worker Conditions,” Vanity Fair, August 2014.   8 James Russell, “A Defamation Suit Win Doesn’t End Ethical Dilemmas for Celebrity Architects,” 26 August 2014, http://jamessrussell.net/zaha-hadidwins-defamation-battle-loses-reputation-war/.   9 HB+A Architects, “Zaha Hadid Debacle over Labor Deaths in Qatar and the World Cup,” HB+A Architects Blog, 27 June 2014, http://blog.hbaarchitects. com/2014/06/27/zaha-haid-debacle-labor-deaths-qatar/. 10 See, for example, James Rachels, “Active and Passive Euthanasia,” New England Journal of Medicine 292 (January 1975); Michael Tooley, “Abortion and Infanticide,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 2, no. 1 (Autumn 1972); Frances M. Kamm, “Harming Some to Save Others,” Philosophical Studies 57, no. 3 (1989); and Helen Frowe, Killing John to Save Mary: A Defense of the Moral Distinction between Killing and Letting Die (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006).

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11 On the opposition to designing capital punishment facilities, see Architects/ Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility, “Human Rights & Professional Ethics,” 2016, www.adpsr.org/home/ethics_reform. 12 See Emmanuel Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers (Springer Science & Business Media, 1987) and “The Rights of Man and the Rights of the Other,” in Outside the Subject (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). 13 Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 1, no. 1 (Spring 1972): 231–32. 14 Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 22.

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Chapter 14

Iconic dystopias and moral law

The scandal involving Zaha Hadid and worker deaths on Qatari construction sites leads to a simple conclusion: when a great many people die in building an iconic structure, this is no longer architecture, which is supposed to serve humanity, but a humanitarian disaster. If 1,200 labourers die, these buildings should be likened to war crimes. It is thus stupefying that the architectural profession has not established a moral code requiring an architect to uphold life, to prevent deaths or to refuse commissions offered under the auspices of despotic capitalism. There exists no moral code for the field, or moral guidance furnished by the industry bodies in the US, the UK or Australia for the individual working in foreign geopolitical contexts where human rights may be abused. Rather, the industry bodies are enablers of iconic dystopias and their abuses. Architects’ codes in the English-speaking world are almost entirely based on professional rather than moral questions, and are woefully restricted to their delimited jurisdictions. In other words, the code does not tell a Western architect how they should behave when they enter a foreign land without just labour laws.

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The “Code of Ethics” of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) reads: Rule 2.105: If, in the course of their work on a project, the Members become aware of a decision taken by their employer or client which violates any law or regulation and which will, in the Members’ judgment, materially affect adversely the safety to the public of the finished project, the Members shall: (a) advise their employer or client against the decision, (b) refuse to consent to the decision, and (c) report the decision to the local building inspector or other public official charged with the enforcement of the applicable laws and regulations. . . . This rule extends only to violations of the building laws that threaten the public safety. The obligation under this rule applies only to the safety of the finished project, an obligation coextensive with the usual undertaking of an architect.1

In other words, the the AIA’s code addresses public safety only for those using the finished building, not the safety of workers (local or offshore) constructing it. The statute also makes no mention of differing legal systems in foreign countries—it assumes American architects only ever build projects in America. Finally, the code refers to a threat to safety only when the law has been breached; as the human rights violations in Qatar are compliant with kafala law, the AIA statute does not apply. The AIA’s ethical code does state that “Members should uphold human rights in all their professional endeavors.” However, there is no statute that tells an American architect how they should operate when entering a region known for human rights abuses with legally enforced slave labour. The “Code of Professional Conduct” of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects (RAIA) stipulates that members must

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maintain “social justice”—but not human rights—and further “abide by the codes of ethics . . . and laws in force in the countries and jurisdictions in which they provide . . . services,” which again is not helpful in depraved jurisdictions without just labour laws—where abuse is instituted by the law.2 Neither does the Architects Registration Board (ARB) in the United Kingdom provide a moral code for transnational practice. In June 2015, the problem was raised at a symposium held at University College London titled “Practicing Ethics in Built Environment Research,” hosted by Jane Rendell of the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment. The symposium called on participants to consider whether architects dismiss moral questions about their practices. Yet the colourless topics pursued mostly related to local housing, regeneration and ecology. The application of the professional codes of ethics was raised when Jeremy Till, head of Central Saint Martins, argued: The 12-point ARB Architects’ code allows architects to completely avoid ethical questions, because its conception of ethics is about how to best serve a client. These are the ethics of the marketplace simply about how one subscribes to the value system and phony ethics of the marketplace. And yet we are told by ARB that this is a source of ethical guidance.3

But he didn’t go far enough, because as in the United States, this critique is parochial, being entirely focused on Britain when the real global site of architectural human rights abuses is not the UK or the US but outside the West—jurisdictions where local British codes have no agency or relevance. Yara Sharif and Adrian Lahoud did raise a global topic at the symposium—the Israel/Palestine dispute—which had become, according to Will Hurst, “such a farce for the RIBA” in 2014.4

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On this topic, Dezeen reported, “After a change of leadership and criticism from leading architects, the Royal Institute of British Architects has overturned its own motion calling for a suspension of Israel from architecture’s international membership body.” The current president of the RIBA, Steven Hodder, said the decision to call on the International Union of Architects (UIA) to ban Israel had not made “a constructive contribution to the current situation.”5 Sharif and Lahoud’s intervention absurdly only highlighted the chasm in the discussion of global architectural ethics. Why was Israel, the only democracy in the region, singled out? A country with strong labour laws that protects labourers—that has never been documented by Amnesty International for labour abuses—and that is utterly insignificant in the iconic architecture industry, because it doesn’t have the economy of the UAE, Saudi Arabia and the string of despotic monarchies in the Middle East, where iconic architecture thrives and human life is cheap? It is the human rights groups’ reportage on architectural developments in those jurisdictions and their violations of human rights that should point architects to where the discussion needs to move, and that should prompt a new conception of architectural ethics that moves beyond professional responsibility. In contestation of the AIA on various local issues, an informal group called The Architecture Lobby, whose headquarters are the Yale School of Architecture, has issued a manifesto for architectural ethics. Yet its prescriptions are limited to the labour rights of the American architectural petit bourgeoisie, without mention of human rights in architecture, the question and sanctity of human life, or of doing no harm—nor of the possibility that they the practitioners, the group the Lobby is sworn to defend, may inflict harm on others. The Lobby’s primary interest is ostensibly to improve the employment conditions of graduates from the most

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prestigious American schools of architecture and their professors. Within its context, the Lobby is a well-intentioned project; however, it has no conception of the global context outside America, where the questions of ethics and ethical responsibilities of the architects themselves are more pressing, where life hangs by a thread. Some might see the Lobby as the entitled refuge of a highly privileged group. The AIA charter at least includes “human life” and the upholding of human rights, however inadequately. Another group, Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility, is concerned with human rights, and Raphael Sperry, its president, is currently petitioning the AIA “[to] amend its Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct to prohibit the design of spaces for killing, torture, and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,” which in the United States includes “execution chambers; super-maximum security prisons (‘supermax’) . . . and solitary confinement facilities for juveniles and the mentally ill.”6 While of great national significance, this discourse on ethics in architecture remains too general in its focus for jurisdictions outside the US. The one exception to this void is the group Who Builds Your Architecture? (WBYA?), which explores the political and social relations of architectural labour in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and around the globe, the question of human rights and the architect’s ethical responsibility working abroad. The field needs more than just activism, however. I suggest the national codes be expanded to address globalisation and praxis in foreign jurisdictions. The codes should include moral guidance for architects on how to think through the problem of whether to accept a commission, weighing the geopolitics of the region, reportage on the country by rights groups, the level of control the architect has under the specific foreign agreement and the construction conditions observable in similar concurrent projects.

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Ultimately, it is our responsibility in the West to raise questions about human rights for those jurisdictions where such questions cannot be asked, where there are serious penalties for challenging authority. The Hadid case is arguably more significant than torture and supermax, because it is implicated in a much larger territory (the globe) that lies beyond the United States, the UK and Australia—the design of iconic buildings all over the world, in an industry without any moral regulation that assumes and hides beneath a veil of global neutrality and moral distance (where morality is displaced onto the host country), and which has the capacity to degrade and terminate human life on an industrial scale. Just say no Marx did not apply a moral value to the theory of exploitation that he sees as intrinsic to the capitalist process—the exploited simply always receive an amount of lesser value than the labour they invested in the product. Yet can we even call the death of a labourer Marxist “exploitation,” or is it simply murder? This distinction depends on how we answer the question, Who is the murderer? The architect? The labour authority? The construction company? There are differing levels of culpability, where the architect may be less guilty than the labour authority—yet we then enter into the bizarre idea of a certain party being more or less of a murderer than another. Regardless of this comparison, the culpability of other parties does not remove the architect’s responsibility. From the standpoint of the free moral agent, which is the standpoint of moral philosophy, Immanuel Kant provides a clear answer to the key question—Should the architect take the job?— in the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. According to

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Figure 14.1: Herzog & de Meuron. Digital rendering, competition submission for Gazprom City, 2006. © Herzog & de Meuron.

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the Second Formulation of the Categorical Imperative, he wrote, we must “act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.”7 This humanity principle makes Hadid’s actions unethical because it is inhumane for architects to treat labourers as expendable (as a means to an end), and it is immoral for the architectural profession to not provide guidance on the question—and thus to enable worker deaths through their silence and passivity. Kant’s First Formulation of the Categorical Imperative provides a more difficult challenge: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”8 In other words, can we imagine a world where Hadid’s complicity with Qatar’s labour environment was universalised, or universally approved? Hadid’s involvement with a larger development that involved over a thousand deaths would not be something we would want to become universal, and therefore, for Kant, Hadid’s actions were immoral. However, the problem is that I can imagine a world where all iconic architects accept a contract with the Qatar authority to design an iconic museum, stadium or cultural centre, and believe that the others should do the same—because we live in that very world; the principle has unfortunately already become universalised by the architects—by our discipline—and, horrifically, it therefore does not technically contradict Kant’s categorical imperative. To demonstrate the universality of the principle, there is no evidence of any present-day iconic architect publicly refusing a major commission for work in the Middle East on the grounds of a government’s human rights record—and then following through on that commitment. The question traces back to Plato, who travelled to Syracuse to teach philosophy and give counsel to the tyrant Dionysus. This is the point on which Kant’s moral

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theory may be contested: universal consensus does not guarantee morality. While this is only a consensus of architects, the public clearly sees a moral problem here. Laughably, there are bounteous cases of architects claiming they would refuse such commissions and working in these jurisdictions regardless. In a 2015 Guardian essay in the wake of a contentious BBC interview with Hadid, Richard Rogers is cited as saying that his firm will not engage in any work in Saudi Arabia or for the military. “It is imperative that architects should be ethical,” he explained. We went to Saudi Arabia and looked at it and thought, “If women can’t work there and it is a dictatorship situation and there is an immense supply of arms, we better not work there.” . . . If we believe in a sustainable world, then we have to make some sort of stand. If we want to be involved in society, then we have to take forward our sense of social responsibility.9

Rogers would be a significant example of an architect taking such a moral stance; like Hadid, he is a British architect, studied at the Architectural Association in London and is a giant in the iconic architecture industry, as well as the discipline today and its longer history. But Rogers’s statement is perplexing, because he was already working in the Middle East, on four towers on Abu Dhabi’s Al Maryah Island, the first of which was set for completion in 2016 (with the rest of the complex to be completed in 2020).10 Rogers might argue that his firm stated only that it would refuse work in Saudi Arabia or for the military. Yet the reasons he provided for refusing commissions in Saudi Arabia were the country’s oppression of women, its despotic government and its major weapons economy, conditions that also prevail in Abu Dhabi.11 Human rights groups report the same labour abuses in Abu Dhabi as in Qatar.12

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In 2008, Daniel Libeskind similarly proclaimed, “I won’t work for totalitarian regimes . . . I think architects should take a more ethical stance,” claiming that he will not accept work in China.13 Yet he broke his promise, as in 2016 construction commenced on his Museum of Zhang ZhiDong in Wuhan. Libeskind, Rem Koolhaas, Hadid, Herzog & de Meuron and Norman Foster have all worked on iconic architecture projects in China and Russia; Hadid is just the architect overwhelmingly singled out by critics and the media, for reasons I will discuss in the coming chapters. There are few exceptions to this internal consensus by the architects, and that is because they have failed to understand that the moral question is determined by their actions as free moral agents, not as impersonal components of the iconic architecture industry. A person’s morality is always and only determined by their actions as an individual. In March 2017, I wrote to Aaron Betsky, author of an article titled “The Evil of Banality and How Architects Can Fight It,” with the question, Is the architect morally responsible in a case like Hadid’s? Betsky responded: Where do you draw the line? The whole issue of worker exploitation runs all the way from Polish workers being abused in the UK and Mexicans being abused in the US to the situation in the UAE and even worse in other Arab countries. . . . And, yes, working for dictators is wrong, but should you work for people who made their money through exploitation and environmental devastation like the Waltons or the Kochs? Should you work in Putin’s Russia? Erdogan’s Turkey? I am not saying you are wrong to ask those questions, but just wonder how you decide what is and isn’t acceptable.14

Shortly after our exchange, he published an article where he posed exactly this question: “Where do you draw the line?”15 146

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Betsky raises a possible defence for Hadid: where do you draw the line? The answer is obvious; death is the only line! Hadid’s case demonstrates that each architect should be called to draw the line for themselves, to inquire after the ethical and political conditions of production as part of their investigations prior to accepting a commission. Hannah Arendt famously said that the Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann was guilty for not thinking for himself, for having not reflected.16 The advice might be to think the moral question, as it’s a lack of thought that has produced the misnomer “architectural ethics” in national codes that are devoid of thought, of any moral questions. Each agent in the discipline may draw a different line, but a line must be drawn, because it is becoming increasingly clear that the architectural public, the architectural media and portions of the academy do see a connection between the architect, morality and the conditions of production—and that they hold the architect morally responsible. The lamentation that the architect is powerless with respect to construction is vacuous when we consider that the architects who build iconic projects in the Middle East are typically huge firms with enormous power, as Paul Goldberger has pointed out.17 Zaha Hadid Architects has a singular brand, and therefore a “toll position”—no other firm can provide the same signature formal objects (without her actual signature), so her firm has a unique opportunity to use her power, especially after her death, to effect positive change. Just as national professional bodies should provide guidance about how to operate, there should be a moral standard imposed on the architect working in a foreign country. When working with offshore labourers in a transnational intervention, the architect has a higher moral obligation to respect human life. When the people cannot depend on their host government to uphold the value of human life, moral responsibility falls on the architect, whether the architect sees it or not. Confronted with despotic capitalism, the outsider-architect has an unavoidable 147

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choice to make, where they as moral agent will draw the line, which cities they will work in and which cities or projects they might boycott—an individual choice, but one that should be guided by expanded national codes. The architect should contractually demand that certain labour conditions are maintained and include exit clauses if those conditions are breached, again under the guidance of revised national codes. Why does architecture get a pass? The moral distance and exemption from responsibility assumed by architects is a position nurtured not only inside the discipline but outside it as well. Even human rights groups do not name architects in their shaming of project stakeholders or calls for reforms, boycotts or other action in tales of development gone wrong. A Human Rights Watch report about the illegal and violent evictions of people from their houses in a development area in Azerbaijan, which included the site for Hadid’s Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku and a new concert hall, cited a long list of morally responsible parties, starting with the organisers of the Eurovision Song Contest and the European Broadcasting Commission, who they recommended should apply pressure or a boycott.18 Yet, puzzlingly, neither Hadid nor any construction company is mentioned in the report. Conversely, there is a litany of artists whom rights groups have named and called to action; Amnesty International has previously criticised Sting and John Legend, for example, for agreeing to perform in regions with poor human rights records,19 but the group has never named Hadid or any architect for such misdeeds. How and why did architecture acquire moral immunity from the moral barrage on architectural developments by groups dedicated to human rights? The impact of Hadid’s interventions in Qatar or Azerbaijan is far more destructive than that of

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Sting or Legend performing a concert, the influence of which is largely symbolic. Architecture plays a symbolic role, as well, but musicians don’t have the same potential to harm the population (to kill people); they also don’t stand to lose as much if they refuse a concert. I sought to contact the researchers who authored the Human Rights Watch report on Azerbaijan as well as Amnesty International with the question, What is the architect’s responsibility in cases of labour abuse? I received no reply. Historically, we have excused projects built by slaves, such as the Colosseum and the pyramids,20 from this type of criticism—perhaps because they are so very old, and no longer harming anyone.21 But given the return to archaic urbanism in the iconic architecture industry, the question must be asked: Is there something specific to architecture and society’s perception of the discipline that liberates architecture from moral judgment? Is the answer that we separate architecture from the means of production, as Hadid did—i.e., we maintain the old distinction between architecture and building? If the false claims against Hadid were not related to her architecture, but rather about the method of production and the conditions of labour required to construct the work, a legitimate defence for Hadid would be, Why has she taken the brunt of criticism, rather than the builder or developer? The answer is because the architect and the architecture she authored perform a symbolic, ideological operation in the real world—and what remains on the site for posterity is not a building site but the building, and the enduring architectural image that is the final attester of what has taken place on that site. It would be easy to reduce the amoral status of iconic architecture to an equation where the ends justify the means, but I argue those many deaths are neither disconnected from the architecture nor incidental to the architect’s role. The mythic,

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cult-like status of such spectacular architecture renders the mass deaths in Qatar a ritualistic sacrifice, and an example of what Adorno called the primitive, regressive nature of modernity. The cult status of digital monuments instructs us that the moral problem is formed prior to any distinction between architecture and building. Namely, we separate architecture from what is moral by way of a religious overvaluation of the digital image that forgives all labour abuses under the name of aesthetic autonomy—a concept invented at the end of the 18th century that positions art as independent of any external conditions and brought into architecture in the late 20th century, as Chapter 17 details. Here, suffice it to say that 70 years after Adorno and Horkheimer, architecture is still bewitched by Enlightenment philosophy, under the reign of a digitised ghost modernity that instrumentalises form for the sake of formal genius, anaesthetised from the moral and the social. The issue is not Hadid’s powerlessness or inability to effect change, but rather a ruthless, widespread commitment to the genius of digital technologies and the virtuosic formalism thus enabled by technology—the precise position by which Hadid secured this commission and others, and an attitude that characterises the evolution of modern architecture until its apotheosis in the iconic project today. Paradoxically, since the Second World War, architecture’s goal to quarantine the architectural object has never succeeded, because death and violence forever haunt the architectural image under the realities of late capital and the contemporary city. Notes   1 American Institute of Architects (AIA), Office of General Counsel, “2017 Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct” (2017).   2 The Royal Australian Institute of Architects, “RAIA Code of Professional Conduct” (2006). 150

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  3 Will Hurst, “What Are Architects Responsible For?” The Architects’ Journal 242, no. 1 (2015).   4 Ibid.   5 Anna Winston, “British Architects Kick Out Their Own Resolution against Israel,” Dezeen, 9 December 2014.   6 Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility, “Human Rights & Professional Ethics,” accessed 27 March 2018, www.adpsr.org/home/ ethics_reform.   7 Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals: With a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concerns, trans. James W. Ellington (1785; repr., Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1993), 36.   8 Ibid., 30.   9 Quoted in Jessica Elgot, “Zaha Hadid Cuts Short BBC Today Programme Interview,” Guardian, 24 September 2015. 10 Elizabeth Hopkirk, “RSHP Nabs First Middle East Job – Despite Rogers’ Stance,” Building.co.uk, 17 September 2014. 11 Steve Gardner, email correspondence with author, 22 March 2017. 12 David Batty, “Migrants Building UAE Cultural Hub ‘Risk Abuse If They Complain’,” Guardian, 10 February 2015. 13 Rory Olcayto, “Ethics Debate: Take an Ethical Stance, Libeskind Tells His Peers,” Building.co.uk, 14 February 2008. 14 Aaron Betsky, email correspondence with author, 20–21 March 2017. 15 Aaron Betsky, “Architects May, Heaven Save Their Mortal Souls, Have to Work on Trump’s Wall,” Dezeen, 18 April 2017. 16 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963; repr., New York: Penguin Books, 2006). 17 Paul Goldberger, “Zaha Hadid Is Still Wrong about Construction Worker Conditions,” Vanity Fair, August 2014. 18 Jane Buchanan, “They Took Everything from Me”: Forced Evictions, Unlawful Expropriations, and House Demolitions in Azerbaijan’s Capital (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2012). 19 Jamie Merrill, “John Legend Responds to Criticism over Bahrain Gig amid Human Rights Concerns,” Independent, 26 February 2015. 20 The pyramids were traditionally believed to have been built by slave labourers, a commonplace which has since been disproved. 21 Tom Spektor, email correspondence with author, 25 February 2017.

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Chapter 15

The moral contents of the digital image

If we criticise one individual like Zaha Hadid, or any of her colleagues, for not taking a stand by refusing work for despotic governments, we are in effect questioning the ethical legitimacy of capitalism itself and the architect’s role in it. As an individual, the iconic architect is morally responsible when they enter a foreign jurisdiction and operate under its laws because they are the author and the lead operator of the enduring architectural image that crystallises the moral exchange of life and death in the digital surface. The architect makes bad ideology visual, aestheticising the violence vanquished in the architectural image. That is the real moral content of the architect’s actions. Whether the architect admits it or not, the architectural image advertises a ruthless monarchy from the moment the digital renderings are released to the public, and the holographic architectural image that materialises on the ground continues to work for that regime long after the architect exits the site. When the architect returns home, moral agency shifts from the architect to the architectural image. It follows, then, that we question not only the moral stature of the architect, but the moral status of the architectural image itself. Does the architectural image retain traces of death or neutralise those deaths—just as

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time has neutralised the barbarism of ancient monuments built by slaves? If we go with this second (easy) argument, the iconic image appears to do harm by evacuating the deaths entailed in its creation: after the works are complete, the building site and its horrors are replaced with the lustre of the iconic object. In this formula, the image is a murderer, because it murders the memory of those dead just as it only exists by virtue of those deaths. Yet is it not also true that in the sheer digital mastery of the architectural image, and its aesthetic content, death is retained in unconscious form? Those media stories that protest Hadid’s commission in Qatar are often illustrated with digital marketing renderings, rather than the violent images of workers on building sites published by Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch that would better support their protest. That is because the digital image is as much a target of the moral outrage as the architect herself, because it preserves the remains of death in all its eerie unreality. ∗∗∗ Take the film animation of a simulated soccer match at Hadid’s Al-Wakrah Stadium. The film’s prelude renders the event less like a sporting match than a funeral procession, with its anodyne Muzak superimposed onto haunting Arabic ululation (wailing) and slow pan of a rendered building envelope, which looks much like a curved mausoleum. The camera approaches the grand opening at the top and slowly lowers itself in, like a body into a crypt. When the camera finally lands in the stadium’s concrete lower bowl, the players do not run but glide in a slow-motion ritual ceremony, whose audience is no longer the savage crowd once described by Elias Canetti, but a docile population of 40,000

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“fortunate ones” standing together, slowly swaying and waving flags in unison, eerily sated and wanting for nothing, having arrived in the afterlife. The only interruption to this Elysian dream staged within the Loop type (in this hybrid of types) is the glorious anatomical spine and its curved timber ribs that span massive white roof pillars, the bones of the mausoleum and its anthropomorphic roof. The camera moves outside the building to the supernal forecourt. We see the spectral movement of people who do not appear to be going to a game as much as drifting toward heaven to the beat of Arabic flute, like the mesmerised characters in a 1970s science-fiction film. The camera hovers over the building once again; and, having arrived at nirvana and completed its metaphysical circuit for the spectator, the building finally fades away, becoming whitened and ethereal. At no point do the worker deaths resurface in the digital image; rather, the real deaths—both material and barbaric—are replaced with the seeming afterlife of the drugged spectators. So, to answer the original question, death is both vanquished and allegorised in the architectural image. That is the contradiction of digital world capitalism which must conceal and reveal in equal measure to control the spectators. The Al-Wakrah image thus animated provides a deeper appreciation of the metaphysical wishes embedded in the iconic project. Contrast this to Hadid’s project for the Opus hotel and office tower in the Business Bay district of Dubai, which is also nearing completion; its image is similarly hybrid, this time subsuming both the Loop and Sacrifice types. The Opus takes the form of two towers that meld into a single cube, hovering over a platform eroded by a fluid yet ragged void. The morose reflective curtain wall of the void, coloured in midnight blue, gives the hole both a solidity and an unearthly aqueous quality. Unlike Hadid’s other Loop types, including the unbearable lightness of

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Figure 15.1: A curved mausoleum. Zaha Hadid Architects. Stills from an animation of Al-Wakrah Stadium, circa 2013. Fair use.

Hovering above the mausoleum.

The camera lowers itself into the crypt . . .

. . . and approaches the grand opening to the cavity.

In the Elysian forecourt, the drugged masses drift toward heaven . . .

The camera pauses over the building again . . .

. . . having reached nirvana, and completed the circuit for the spectator, the building finally fades away, becoming whitened and ethereal.

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Figure 15.2: Zaha Hadid Architects. Digital rendering, the Opus, 2014. Courtesy Zaha Hadid Architects.

Al-Wakrah, the Opus void inches closer to the gravitas of the real “death.” To be clear, these are not the real deaths in the Middle East, but Death as chronicled in Western metaphysics, via European philosophy. Both a dazzling formal and construction feat, the Opus has a clear geometric parallel in Koolhaas’s CCTV headquarters (see Chapter 6). But as opposed to OMA’s transcendent hole into a quantum universe, in Hadid’s Opus, the hole is death itself. Unlike the virtuosic death-resistant posture of the CCTV’s geometry, something of the true death has been preserved in the Opus’s amorphous void, which makes no promises to overcome death, but rather seems to invite it, to lure the spectator into the hole. In Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Céline wrote that the blackness of the night was so dark it

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would take your arm away—a darkness that he said had homicidal tendencies. The Opus void is a solid, sticky substance that could erode the silver box entirely engulfing it. Again, this is but an abstract, metaphysical death that captures the psychic fears of a privileged audience, not labourer deaths, for example. Still, unlike the CCTV tower, the Opus doesn’t promise immortality but death itself, in a direct confrontation. The Opus Dubai is therefore post-punk science fiction, and escapes the Elysian genre described in Chapter 5. While nonetheless constituting a Loop, it perverts the very idea of a smooth, uninterrupted circuit: rather than leading the eye around a relentless circuit, the square frame of the image, the hole itself becomes the architecture in this project; it rules over the building and spectator. Per Adorno’s critique of film discussed earlier in this book, both the CCTV tower and Al-Wakrah Stadium, as examples of the Loop type, alternatively reinforce the fantasy of the neverending circuit of capitalism, and ipso facto, the promise of infinite youth and the never-ending life guaranteed by modernity. But in the Opus, by melting the Loop, by destroying false immediacy (we cannot grasp the hole, it evades any geometric reduction) and by thus removing any illusion of the continuous life (and the complete subject), the Opus escapes the drone-like circuitry of modernity usually embedded in this type. Since the ultimate goal of modern technology has always been immortality (there can be no higher goal), the evocation of a limitless circuit of capitalism and eternal life coincide in Hadid’s animated stadium image, which like an elixir satisfies the spectator’s deepest metaphysical wishes—namely, to defy death just by looking, by remaining within the unbroken loop of the capitalist gaze. The Opus building provides no such elixir. In the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud theorised that dreams are nothing but wish-fulfilment veiled by the anxiety

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surrounding that wish.1 Modernity’s wish for immortality must be concealed or repressed precisely because it has a forbidden, antisocial quality: after all, the wishes for immortality are inseparable from the guilty conscience that accompanies the hubris of striving to elude death. Under the iconic architecture industry, the promise of eternal life for the transnational capitalist class is indeed sinister when viewed from the struggle of the workers who pay with their lives for the completion of the building. Here, advanced technology meets tribal ritualism and sacrificial death under the barbarism of neo-modernity. That is the anxious content of the image that triggers its repressive mechanisms. Put simply, the iconic stadiums of the Loop type in the Middle East function as contemporary totems. They ward off death by vanishing real deaths in iconic images that simulate eternal life—warding off the death lying just beneath their surfaces, perversely promising an afterlife to those who were not killed under the regime that produced the building. While scientists in the West energetically pursue cryonics and its exquisite deathlessness, life is ever short and expendable in the developing worlds. That is the moral content of the architectural image for which the architect is unknowingly responsible. Adorno’s prescription for this situation, if he were alive? To imagine a new architectural image that embraces our own mortality in all its forms, a new image capable of interrupting the mesmeric dream of digital world capitalism and its repressive apparatus. Note 1 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, ed. James Strachey, vol. 4, The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (1900; repr., London: Vintage Books, The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psychoanalysis, 2001), 122, 35.

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Chapter 16

Vagina stadium

While Zaha Hadid was being damned in the media for her statement and involvement in the 2022 Qatar World Cup, for which ongoing mass worker deaths on sites tracing back to 2012 had become a contentious issue—she had also been subjected to another “moral” censure. The Al-Wakrah Stadium resembles a vagina. The Daily Show screened images of the stadium coated with pubic hair, claiming Hadid is “the Georgia O’Keeffe of things you can walk inside.”1 The feminist website Jezebel covered the project by noting that “any discerning human will be quick to recognize that the building looks exactly like an enormous vagina.”2 As the Guardian reported, “Hadid has been forced to bat off claims that her design for Qatar’s Al-Wakrah stadium . . . is based on the female genitalia.”3 Hadid responded that the building’s undulating roof surfaces were inspired by local sail-boats, and inveighed against the claims: “It’s really embarrassing that they come up with nonsense like this.” Indeed. “What are they saying? Everything with a hole in it is a vagina? That’s ridiculous.” Yes, it is. “Honestly, if a guy had done this project, critics would not be making such lewd comparisons.”4 No, they wouldn’t. So what if it looks like a vagina? This question was also raised by Jezebel. Does the vagina need to be defended or 159

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excised? And is it a female architect’s job to defend the project against charges that it looks like a vagina, or to defend the vagina itself (to “bat off claims” about the vagina)? Do I have to defend the vagina too? The Guardian, while ostensibly only reprinting the vagina allegations of others, and Jezebel, while counselling that the vagina is “no cause for embarrassment” and even facetiously proposing there should be more vagina motifs in architecture,5 both perpetuate misogyny by way of pseudo architectural critique. In short, this part-mockery part-defence of female genitalia masks both sexual anxiety and fear of women. It is shameless when it comes not just from a male reporter from the Guardian, which used to be one of the most highly regarded newspapers in Britain, but from Jezebel, the self-appointed feminist blog of the 21st century, which has made fighting misogyny and maltreatment of women its daily mission. To engage the “vagina” accusation with such inherent acceptance of its terms is evidence of the ways that misogyny has been fully internalised. Saying we need more buildings that look like vaginas doesn’t address—let alone solve—the problem. The question is: What ideological work does the vagina perform in this moral exchange? While the vagina would appear to be irrelevant to the political debate of iconic architecture and deaths of construction labourers in Qatar, on closer inspection it sheds light on that very problem. The vagina is first a form of punishment issued by the public and discipline on Hadid for those ongoing deaths surrounding iconic development in Qatar, by 2012 a matter of wide public knowledge, where she would be found guilty by direct legal causality or other material means. In other words, the accusation resurfaced prophetically in another concealed form, via the trope. To reformulate the perpetrator in the figure of the woman, is the accusation then that the woman, or vagina (represented by Hadid), has killed the man? Hadid was

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often referred to as the “only female starchitect,” perhaps the most famous architect in an almost exclusively male industry (iconic architecture), and for this she must pay the price. And that is what is at stake, and that is why this looks like misogyny. At the same time, it is as if the public charged Hadid not with murder, but with something far worse: of having a vagina, or simply for being a woman—implying that it is the vagina that is responsible for the deaths. The vagina is the ultimate signifier that differentiates the crime, that differentiates Hadid from every other iconic architect (which is why she was morally singled out in the first place). Hadid’s response is classic; she tries to slip out of the transference—she denies the building is a vagina, as if to say, I am not a woman. (I note Hadid died like a man, of a heart attack in Miami at age 65, one year later.) When Hadid said “I have nothing to do with it” (the deaths)—we could say she wasn’t talking about architecture but about her womanhood. In other words, I’m not here because I’m a woman. I didn’t displace a man to create this building—and neither am I about to change the men’s rules (the kafala labour law that dictates the employment conditions of transnational workers in Qatar). Like any man or male architect, like Richard Rogers, I deserve total immunity from all moral charges. The meaning of vagina as accusation also has another broader, disturbing connotation: that women as a whole are guilty for “taking over the world,” and for the crimes of geopolitics— women like Hadid who ostensibly hold all the power, in a neomasculinist paranoia that has become increasingly evident and gained traction in online Men’s Rights forums or the so-called manosphere. The vagina trope as both a “dirty” joke and moral charge all at once is more palatable than the truth, that we collectively of the “developed” world are responsible for turning workers’ deaths into global mass entertainment, for aestheticising

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violence under the global iconic architecture industry, which has nothing to do with gender politics or women, but with bare life and the devaluation of life in non-Western jurisdictions by Western architects who remain oblivious to moral responsibility in geopolitics. A precise ideological displacement has taken place where the figure of the vagina is a scapegoat that masks our own ideological system.6 In Marxian terms, the vagina displaces the relentless struggle between the brown workers and white transnational capitalist elite of the iconic architecture industry to another power terrain, the pretend war between men and women. But there is a real reality to this gender war. First, no male architect has received the sustained level of rebuke for working for the wrong regime as Hadid: Norman Foster builds in Kazakhstan and Rem Koolhaas in Beijing, Qatar and throughout the Middle East, along with Libeskind, Rogers and others, without precipitating any scandal (see Chapter 14)—just as Hadid points out no one would call their stadiums vaginas (even calling buildings penises is passé). Finally, let us not forget it is men who wrote the kafala laws and women who are oppressed under the despotic monarchies of the Emirates. The vagina is a convenient hole to take in the ideological ejaculate of the system. Yet the trope also has a metaphysical connotation, for the vagina as life-giver, as the starting point and opening for pure life, presents the ultimate escape from death, and can therefore be understood as a pharmakon of modernity. To escape fear of death, we replace it with the vagina as trope, effecting a symbolic regression to the female tunnel from which life emerges. The horror of death takes refuge in the vagina. The vagina therefore not only functions as a repressive device, to screen out what is undesirable and forbidden about our own actions under capitalism and geopolitics; the trope of the vagina

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or sexual orifice as giver of life is also invested with our unconscious metaphysical desire for the everlasting life—the ultimate object of modernity—and the eternal frustration of that object, for which iconic architecture provides a mere opiate. The repressed contents of the architectural image can only be addressed by confronting our own mortality and by facing our moral responsibility as architects to protect life. These dual tasks are inextricably linked in the face of the barbarism of the iconic architecture industry. For the discipline, the problems of life and death, of morality and the morality of building, need to be articulated in singularly architectural terms. It is architecture's history that holds the key to the origins of the disciplinary neurosis rooted in the failure of the modern movement, its violence, its failure to achieve its utopian objectives, its failed principal of autonomy and its mythicised demise (while it continues today), which together form the historical unconscious of the discipline. Notes 1 The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, “Unnecessary Muffness” segment, aired 19 November 2013 on Comedy Central. 2 Callie Beusman, “Qatar’s New World Cup Stadium Will Look Like a Giant Vagina,” Jezebel, 18 November 2013. 3 Oliver Wainwright, “Zaha Hadid’s Sport Stadiums: ‘Too Big, Too Expensive, Too Much Like a Vagina’,” Guardian, 28 November 2013. 4 Noah Rayman, “Architect Zaha Hadid Fires Back at Critics of Her So-Called ‘Vagina Stadium’,” Time, 22 November 2013. 5 Callie Beusman, “Architect of Giant Vagina Stadium Says It Doesn’t Look like a Vagina,” Jezebel, 25 November 2013. 6 My idea follows the analysis of anti-Semitism and scapegoating of the figure of the Jew in Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Phronesis (London: Verso, 1989), 48.

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Chapter 17

Autonomy and vanity

Figure 17.1: Group portrait. From left to right and back to front: architects Bernard Tschumi, Helmut Swiczinsky and Wolf Prix of Coop Himmelb(l)au, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind and Zaha Hadid, and theorist Mark Wigley. From the film Deconstructivist Architects (1989), directed by Michael Blackwood, produced by Michael Blackwood Productions.

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Michael Blackwood’s portrait in Figure 17.1 depicts the neoavant-garde of the 1980s American architecture scene, a group of Deconstructivists, subversives and theorists who would become, 20 years later, the celebrity architects of the global iconic architecture industry, on the wrong side of ideology. (The anomaly is Mark Wigley, the pure theorist of the group, who once collaborated closely with Tschumi and Peter Eisenman in the Deconstructivist era, but who would eventually let his close association with the architects lapse.) From the start, the architectural methodology of this group of architects was driven by the concept of “autonomy,” a movement born in architecture at a 1970s symposium at the Princeton University School of Architecture, with Peter Eisenman at the centre. This event provided a distinct theoretical platform for an autonomous architecture—a purely internally derived conception of architecture freed from external frameworks such as economics, anthropology, politics, even morality—that would continue as a thread through successive decades and movements uniting Eisenman’s contemporaries, including Hadid, Gehry, Libeskind and Koolhaas. Autonomy was articulated alongside its opposite, the “critical” architecture model that emerged in the debate between Eisenman and the Italian Marxist architecture theorist Manfredo Tafuri, who argued that architecture’s role was to critique capitalism. Criticality, however, was never consummated, its failure historically illustrated in the famous split between Eisenman and Tafuri. The autonomy model, on the other hand, has been reinforced by every successive architectural movement over the last 50 years. Criticality remains an unfulfilled project, a debt, that reappears symptomatically in the imagery of the iconic architecture industry. The original modernist concept of autonomy emerged in Russian Constructivism in 1913, when Vladimir Tatlin contested

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the autonomy of art: art was instead to be singularly “constructed” as a political instrument for the social, for the good of society. To this day, Hadid’s posthumous office paradoxically bears its formalist aesthetic roots in the Soviet constructivist avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s; its sweeping curves still derive from the Russian Constructivist painters and avant-garde moderns, almost a century ago, for whom art was an instrument for political revolution. Hadid’s politically cool incarnation of a subversive Soviet-style formalism (to which she openly averred allegiance) sweeps to the side the radical politics of Constructivism in an irony and perversion common to all the starchitects. In fact, the autonomy claimed by Eisenman et al., which betrayed the Constructivist agenda, derives from an earlier concept of aesthetic autonomy dating to the end of the 18th century. Aesthetic autonomy is the belief that art is inherently independent of moral and social conditions, that art’s sole purpose is beauty itself. The model originated in the theories of the late 18th-century Enlightenment philosophes, including Immanuel Kant’s “purposive purposelessness” and Friedrich Schiller’s “purposelessness” of art, that was later exemplified in the 19th-century attitude of “art pour l’art,” attributed to Théophile Gautier. This Enlightenment conception of art to which the iconic architecture industry remains in thrall is distinct from that of the Renaissance, where for example both Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci believed that the moral and the aesthetic are connected in the painter. In the 21st century autonomy re-entered architectural discourse via the 2002 essay “Notes around the Doppler Effect” by Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting, published in Perspecta 33, “Mining Autonomy.” The authors suggest that the failed concept of critical architecture developed by Eisenman–Tafuri should be extinguished and replaced with “projective architecture.”

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The argument gained momentum in a theme issue of Log, “Critical/Post-Critical,” in 2005, in which guest editors Somol and Whiting wrote that “criticality is no longer necessary,” that the social, moral and political critique of architecture was no longer relevant in the wake of postmodernism and the exhaustion of self-conscious interdisciplinary movements of architectural production at the end of the 20th century. For them, moving beyond the critical project was a way to move beyond an abstract intellectualism: “Rather than isolating a singular autonomy, the Doppler focuses upon the effects and exchanges of architecture’s inherent multiplicities: material, programme, writing, atmosphere, form, technologies, economics, etc.” While they claimed that the “projective” programme “incorporates diverse economies, ecologies, information systems, and social groups,” its adoption by architects, especially under digital Parametricism, manifested as a purely formalist approach to architecture that only answered to the dictates of market forces and the digital technologies of formal production. Today the degenerate position of New Pragmatism, New Materialism or Parametricism, whose practitioners avow intellectual, moral and political immunity (autonomy), is patently invalid, as the debates around Zaha Hadid’s stadium in Qatar and Santiago Calatrava’s Olympic architecture in Athens both demonstrated. Given that iconic architectural production has relocated to moral dystopias that are clearly exacerbated by the intervention of iconic architects—the autonomy position is bloodless, over. Fifteen years later, what we are witnessing is a global crisis around the social and financial crimes of the iconic architecture industry, and the failure of architects to address the ethical problems of transnational development and their moral responsibility in the chain of production. The outrage expressed by the media

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and the public shows us that critique in architecture today has shifted away from praxis (the starchitects) and the bourgeois left (the academy; see the Introduction to this book), and that it is the digital image in all its symptomatism that wields the role of critique in the hands of the public and media—the image itself teaches the public about capitalism and modernity. That is why the Hadid controversy was a good thing, and why “bad” digital images are important; they teach us the false stories of the architects and bad ideology that underpins them. It is therefore important for iconic architecture and its digital renderings to continue to be interrogated by the masses, the urban public and the media, because that is an available means by which the iconic architecture industry can be transformed from mesmerism, phoney consensus and mass entertainment into a real politics and thought, and ultimately to a critical architecture. A critical architecture today will never be the same as the constructivist avant-garde of the early 20th century, a veritable agitprop apparatus that openly critiqued authority. Yet the discipline can still perform this critical work, in reverse: since the image is on the wrong side of ideology, so resistance must take the form of demythologisation of the image outside the discipline, mining it relentlessly for its repressed contents. Such arduous work is not as enjoyable as inhaling the digital surface like a drug—as looking at iconic architecture through the eyes of a pleasure seeker, through the eyes of capital—but allows us to see unpleasant, naked reality undoctored by capitalism. Because there is nothing more valuable than naked reality. It is the difference illuminated by Ecclesiastes (Koheleth), son of David, king of Jerusalem, between the vanity of seeing or having and the pain of knowledge.

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Vanity of vanities, said Koheleth; vanity of vanities, all is vanity Come now, I will mix wine with joy and experience pleasure; and behold, this too was vanity: For I saw through prophecy that many misfortunes come about through laughter. Of laughter, I said, “[It is] mingled”; and concerning joy, “What does this accomplish?” I searched in my heart to indulge my body with wine, and my heart conducting itself with wisdom and holding onto folly, until I would see which is better for the children of men that they should do under the heavens, the number of the days of their lives. I made myself great works; I built myself houses, and I planted myself vineyards. I made myself gardens and orchards, and I planted in them all sorts of fruit trees. I made myself pools of water, to water from them a forest sprouting with trees. I acquired male and female slaves, and I had household members; also I had possession of cattle and flocks, more than all who were before me in Jerusalem. I accumulated for myself also silver and gold, and the treasures of the kings and the provinces; I acquired for myself various types of musical instruments, the delight of the sons of men, wagons and coaches. So I became great, and I increased more than all who were before me in Jerusalem; also my wisdom remained with me. And [of] all that my eyes desired I did not deprive them; I did not deprive my heart of any joy, but my heart rejoiced with all my toil, and this was my portion from all my toil. Then I turned [to look] at all my deeds that my hands had wrought and upon the toil that I had toiled to do, and behold everything is vanity and frustration, and there is no profit under the sun. And I turned to see wisdom and madness and folly, for what is the man who will come after the king, concerning that which they have already done? And I saw that wisdom has an advantage over folly, as the advantage of light over darkness.

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The wise man has eyes in its beginning, but the fool goes in the darkness, and I too know that one event happens to them all. And I said to myself, “As it happens to the fool, so will it happen to me too, so why then did I become wiser?” And I said to myself that this too is vanity. For there is no remembrance of the wise man even as of the fool forever, seeing that in the coming days, all is forgotten. And how shall the wise die with the fool? So I hated the living, for the deed that was done under the sun grieved me, for everything is vanity and frustration. Koheleth (Ecclesiastes), Chapter 2, Verse 1–26

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Chapter 18

After iconic architecture

Three theorists, four architects and one artist were invited to respond to the following questions about the future of the iconic: Will the iconic architecture industry accelerate toward its own end? If so, what will come after iconic architecture? Will the digital image continue its reign over architecture? Will the iconic architecture industry help kill off capitalism? Or does it prove there is no alternative to capitalist realism? Georges Teyssot criticises the technophobia of the left; Marko Jobst provides future scenarios from the death or intensification of the iconic, to apocalyptic paranoia and the digital dissolution of architecture, where buildings themselves cease to exist; Wolf Prix describes the iconic as the features of a city’s face; Ben van Berkel writes about the post-iconic where augmented reality will be much more commonplace, while he contests the prevailing idea of landmark buildings or architecture as image making; Simon Sadler describes the first iconic

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failure, the 1972 demolition of Pruitt-Igoe, and the Grenfell inferno of 2017, that he writes was an icon of the failure of neoliberalism; David Gianotten argues the importance of context in an iconic project and that iconicity is completely overrated, a desire present in both capitalist and non-capitalist societies; and finally in Joseph Young’s poem “Whither the Avant Garde?” – the Spectacle has killed the avant garde – beneath the pavement there’s simply another marketing opportunity – market forces are the new avant guard – Exotic Financial Instruments their form.

Georges Teyssot Q. Will the iconic architecture industry help kill off capitalism? Or does it prove that there is no alternative to capitalism? It is not a minor paradox that Heidegger’s technophobia has found fertile ground in “leftist” thinkers, such as Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Giorgio Agamben or Bernard Stiegler, who (oversimplifying excessively their work) partly based their criticism of the technique on Heidegger. Moreover, it seems an amalgamation occurs, in which science, technology and capitalism are combined in an arbitrary manner. In terms of political philosophy, which is implicit in the current debate, the favour met by Heidegger’s technophobic inspiration lies mainly in the equation established between these three terms. In a single gesture, this argument seems to criticise technique itself as reductive process, science as representative project serving the technical, thus mingling with the technique, and capitalism operating to the same result, expanding the universe of global commodity in the world trade. Through its simplicity, such a homogenisation of political criticism feeds a kind of obsessive catastrophism, seducing many 172

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discourses. Conversely, it seems urgent and necessary to think of capitalism, science and technology separately, to the extent that, in their history as in their practice, these three fields may both converge and diverge. Moreover, such “criticism” does not take into account changes since the time of Heidegger. Q. Will the digital image continue its reign over architecture? For half a century, the thought about devices, their shapes and rhythms, has undergone fundamental changes, especially since the introduction of finer and cleaner computerised techniques. These open up a world possibly spared the immense devastation of the first industrialisation, without (or with less) damage and with fewer disruptions. An antidote to Heidegger’s doom, and perhaps also a fix for the “devastation of the sensible” announced by Stiegler, would come from listening to and reading the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, whose deep understanding of technical objects offers a remarkable return from the bilious and dyspeptic pessimism of the German philosopher, locked in his Greco-Germanic, original, alethic truth as unconcealment (from the Greek ἀ–λήθεια, i.e., the state of not being hidden). For Simondon, instead, the technical object progresses toward a state of organicity, placing itself at an intermediate stage between the biological object and the physical object. Discovered early by Gilles Deleuze, the work of Simondon saw a posthumous adventure in itself as a corpus of exceptional magnitude. Far from being limited to an original approach to technique and the mode of existence of machines, he develops an original philosophy that overcomes most of metaphysics’ historical oppositions (subject/object, form/matter, concrete/abstract, figure/ground, material/immaterial). In opposing the dominating technophobia implicitly, he brings a thought of the environment (milieu) that questions the genesis of individuals 173

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(and pre-individualities, as the membrane) and their interaction with the environment. Various books, including those by Jean-Hugues Barthélémy and Xavier Guchet, allow us to better understand and grasp the dimension of this work. Building on the concepts of individuation, transduction and metastability, Simondon has developed a thinking about creation and production, where the distance between animate and inanimate wanes, as much as that between individual and collective. When Simondon, in his book Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 1958), refers to the ages of techniques, he focuses especially on the task of generating “phylogenetic lineages,” refusing any idea of a general history of technics. He also excludes the reduction of technical objects to their usage (i.e., their socio-economic function), attempting, instead, to define their specific, precise operations (fonctionnements). Ultimately, Simondon’s method is able to distinguish between a genetic perspective (his own) and a purely historical perspective. Simondon offers not only a historical periodisation of technology but also, eventually, an understanding of what technicality is (technicité) as a genesis. Q. Will the iconic architecture industry accelerate toward its own end? What will come after iconic architecture? Nobody knows; nevertheless it is urgent to challenge the division (and the divide) between architecture and construction. As said before, in order to dissect the notion of structure, one could introduce some of Simondon’s concepts, such as individuation, transduction and metastability, and key points, listing among the latter antennas and telephone exchanges. These objects, that in Simondon’s view are both technical and aesthetic, organise the territory. They create key points embedded in the landscape. In a synergetic alliance of technical patterns and natural powers,

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the new grid establishes privileged places in the world generating a novel form of genius loci. For Simondon, the technical object acquires its aesthetic capabilities against the background of a vaster reality. Types of energy crossing nodes, these key points confer aesthetic meaning to topography. In the building of a network, such points are placed in the middle, between things; they form a “milieu.” While examining the question in a geographical (and a topographical) context, one has to redraw a map between design, technology and landscape. Above all, it is important to give precise and thorough accounts of the concepts of information and entropy, which help to highlight the obvious presence of the notion of form in the word in-formation—clearly the best place to hide something is always in plain view. Georges Teyssot, Professor in the School of Architecture at the Université Laval, Quebec, has taught the history and theory of architecture at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura of Venice, Princeton University’s School of Architecture, and the Department of Architecture at the ETH Zurich. He is the author or editor of many books, including Interior Landscapes, The American Lawn and Prosthetic Architecture. Marko Jobst Iconic Architecture: 3+1 Scenarios for the Near Future1 Scenario 1: Dictum In 2016, China’s State Council and the Communist Party’s Central Committee make an announcement against “oversized, xenocentric, weird” architecture, echoing the voice of Xi Jinping recorded in 2014.2 With Xi’s enthronement for life, the world’s

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biggest economy and the global power to define the 21st century kills icons with a single gesture. The age of iconoclasm begins. Scenario 2: Dictum and reversal The Palace of the Soviets is resuscitated on an unprecedented scale. Russia, China and the United States of Trump erase the illusory opposition of neo-liberal capitalism and state communism. The architectural-object-as-icon makes a comeback, revealing an older ideological lineage than the one that marked the turn of the third millennium. Scenario 3: Paranoia From architectures of the visible, to the invisible architectures of power. Bunkers and panic rooms of the tech elites dot the elevated landscapes of New Zealand in preparation for the ecoapocalypse.3 Subterranean, invisible, these are the spaces of paranoia divorced from images in the ancient Greek sense (εἰκών). Scenario 4: Dispersion Far future. No object is remotely autonomous in the way we could once conceive. Bodies, objects, buildings, all are eroded by unimaginable flows. The image/icon cuts across scales, because perception does. Your liver, authored and signed by a surgeonarchitect without your knowledge,4 is one with the building you inhabit as well as the habitats on Mars, through quantum connections. One electron changes direction in your liver, another mirrors it inside Martian soil. Icon simultaneously is and isn’t.5 Marko Jobst is an independent researcher. Until September 2018, he was Architecture Undergraduate Theory Coordinator at the Department of Architecture and Landscape, Greenwich

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University, UK. He holds a Diploma in Architecture from Belgrade University and MArch, MSc and PhD degrees from The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. He has practised architecture in Belgrade and London and taught at a number of London schools of architecture. He has published on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and creative and performative writing, and is the author of A Ficto-Historical Theory of the London Underground (Spurbuch AADR, 2017). Wolf D. Prix Iconic buildings form the lines in the face of a city, they render and define its identity. Wolf D. Prix is the co-founder, Design Principal and CEO of Coop Himmelb(l)au. Ben van Berkel The term “iconic architecture” is the description of a design approach that was widely adopted in the late 1990s and continued into the first decade of the 21st century. The primary purpose of iconic buildings was to emphasise the brand value of architecture. In recent years, however, we have noticed somewhat of a paradigm shift within the profession, to the extent that I would say we have recently entered a post-iconic period. This shift has in fact been so significant that you could say it is almost a backlash against the monofunctional value that was placed on buildings by the “iconic architecture” label. (It is also perhaps worth noting that—as we ourselves have often stated— iconic architecture is somewhat of a misnomer, as icons cannot be designed instantaneously or on demand. They emerge over time.) Today most clients request much more than merely a landmark building. We are now seeing continuous demand for

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highly performative, sustainable, human-centric, technologydriven, safer and healthier buildings. That said, although image-making is no longer the priority, powerful images can still be generated as a result of these values. It is not the case that architecture is becoming purely utilitarian, but instead that more distinguished and intelligent—perhaps even at times ungraspable—images are being generated. We have referred to this in the past as the “after-image”: a visual effect, similar to seeing an intriguing movie or painting, that will encourage people to come back to a building, to discover more within the multiple layers of the design. Not only the buildings themselves as image, but the representational computer generated images—or renderings—that were used as the interface to communicate what was to come, played a large and at times much maligned role in the proliferation of iconic architecture. Whilst these images continue to function as a signifier and a very useful communication tool for architects and clients alike, a few years ago the representational honesty of the digital image began to be questioned. It was felt in some quarters that the widespread use of idealised renderings was in fact more closely related to deception than to persuasion. The argument was that the manipulated image, the ideal image, replaced the reality of the resulting architecture that it represented: the, at times, less-perfect scenario of the built. To a degree this argumentation has value; however, I believe that while the digital image will continue to serve a useful purpose, the recent shift in values within the profession will mean that the diagram will become an increasingly important form of architectural communication. This because only the diagram can truly describe or illustrate the complex conceptual and organisational principles that lie behind and give added

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value to a design. It is through the diagram as a communication tool that architects can communicate their ideas in bite-size, digestible portions. We must also not forget, however, that in the very near future augmented reality will be much more commonplace. Through augmented reality a layering can also occur between diagrammatic techniques and CGI representations, which will make the communication of the more complex, otherwise invisible qualities of design thinking, visible. I do feel it is important to point out that even during iconic architecture’s heyday, architects always found ways to add value far beyond the monofunctional image of their buildings. We ourselves have always been much more fascinated with the organisation of our projects; with problem solving and inventing new ways to organise programmes and the numerous flows that connect them. It may well be the case that up until recently many clients would simply request a “landmark building,” but as an architect you are always intent on adding value wherever you possibly can. In the end most projects have a social function in one way or another, and architects are always aware that how you design these functions will inevitably determine the success of your project. To conclude, today’s architecture is about the application of design knowledge across a broad spectrum of expertises. I would in fact dare to proclaim that within just a few years, architecture that is based purely on its image—iconic architecture—will be widely understood to be a thing of the past. Ben van Berkel studied architecture at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and at the Architectural Association in London, receiving the AA Diploma with Honours in 1987. In 1988 he and Caroline Bos set up an architectural firm in Amsterdam, extending their theoretical and writing projects to the practice of architecture. Today, UNStudio presents itself as a network of

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specialists in architecture, urban development and infrastructure with projects worldwide. Van Berkel has lectured and taught at many architectural schools around the world. Currently he holds the Kenzo Tange Visiting Professor’s Chair at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Joseph Young From a performance at the symposium “Whatever happened to the Avant Garde,” 2014 (Introduction) Whatever happened to the avant garde? As an artist and an activist that’s a big question. One that I wrestle with almost every day. In fact, it’s so big a question that it’s impossible to try and answer it in 5 minutes. So instead I’m going to read you a poem . . . WHITHER THE AVANT GARDE? Whither the avant garde? Wither the avant garde! Whither the avant garde? Wither the avant garde! The Spectacle has killed the avant garde Beneath the pavement there’s simply another marketing opportunity market forces are the new avant guard Exotic Financial Instruments their form. . .

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The artist inside the market The market inside the artist In the beginning was the avant garde And the avant garde was with god And the avant garde was god The same was in the beginning with the avant garde All things were made by the avant garde And without the avant garde was not anything made that was made In the avant garde was life And the life was the light of men And the avant garde shineth in darkness And the darkness comprehendeth it not “The avant garde needs a manifesto” Brian Eno is not the avant garde Damien Hirst is not the avant garde The Chapman Brothers are not the avant garde Tracy Emin is not the avant garde Sarah Lucas is not the avant garde Gillian Wearing and Sam Taylor-Wood are not the avant garde Jeremy Deller might be the avant garde The avant garde flourished in the 1980’s during the rise of the neoliberals which culminated in the End of History Pop music was made that referenced Revolution, Derrida, Deconstruction and Dance (1) “The last time baby that I came to you oh how your flesh and blood became the word”

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David Bowie was once the avant garde Fuelled by heroin and the Berlin Wall Art Schools that produced musicians were once the avant garde But 9,000 pounds a year tuition fees does not a revolutionary make Re-enactment practice pretends to be the avant garde Returning to the scene of the crime And re-presenting it as spectacle The simulacrum of ideas Beauty and Truth are not the avant garde Nor the classical Greek dramas of pity and terror The avant garde is not unlistenable The avant garde is unspeakable The avant garde will not be brought to you by Fox News and Rupert Murdoch The avant garde will not give you sex appeal The avant garde will not feature a theme tune written by Edgard Varese The avant garde will not be televised, except if it’s sponsored by the BBC and Sky Arts Fillipo Tommaso Marinetti was the avant garde And then he started the Fascist Party Luigi Russolo definitely was the avant garde And indeed, did produce unlistenable music Hugo Ball was the avant garde As was Tristan Zara Cabaret Voltaire was the avant garde And so is Chris Watson 182

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The Great War of 1914–18 begat the slow death of modernism The avant garde as rearguard action The avant garde as an attempt to recapture a moment in time when “everything is possible and nothing is permissible” The avant garde has been bought and sold The avant garde is the gold standard by which everything else is measured The avant garde guarantees stability in the marketplace Neo Futurist Collective “is” the avant garde Freee “is” the avant garde Ultra Red “is” the avant garde John Cage was the godfather of punk but he was not the avant garde (2) “Art will not save the world” For art to be free it can have no ideology For art to matter it can have no purpose If art is to change the world It must embody the sublime (3) “If the subversion of experience proper to art and the rebellion against the established reality principle contained in this subversion cannot be translated into political praxis, and if the radical potential of art lies precisely in this non-identity, then the question arises: how can this potential find valid representation in a work of art and how can it become a factor in the transformation of consciousness.” So . . .Whither the avant garde? 183

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(1) Scritti Pollitti, “The Word Girl” (1985) (2) Rowena Easton, “Manifesto of Neo-Futurism” (2008) (3) Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension (1977) Joseph Young (www.artofnoises.com) is a sound artist based in Brighton and Berlin. His work has been widely exhibited and is held in several permanent collections. David Gianotten Iconic architecture can never be regarded as an object. Iconicity never follows just from form or substance; it can result from the way a built structure responds to its context and its ingenuity in solving a particular problem. Therefore, iconicity is related not just to the architecture industry and its ambitions, but also to the problems and briefs clients put forward, and how the context of a project is addressed. I think the programme should be the base of every building. A spectacular shaped building is in my perception only iconic if it is functional, if it adds something significant to the setting—with integrity. There is a change in the briefs that we receive: iconicity is completely overrated. I think this causes a dilemma for the architect. Do I choose to create a spectacular image as is desired by the client, or do I respond in the most intricate way to the location, for the required programme? Still I observe that the majority of architecture firms that we compete against take a functional approach, letting function and context guide the design rather than vice versa. The eagerness for iconicity is definitely a desire driven by capitalism. Private companies consider a unique, striking building as a marketing tool. But—if you look at architecture and planning overall, I think we are building so much at this moment in time; cities are developing so rapidly that it is impossible to make everything

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iconic. And architects are responding to briefs in a very responsible and intricate way, despite the push for iconicity by clients. It is not only capitalism, though, that increases a demand for iconic structures. In non-capitalist societies, political forces can also strongly push for the most unique, the most alien architecture, as symbol of power. Architecture is not a representation of one philosophy, but can represent many philosophies. Maybe also due to this, or mainly due to this—the fact that architecture has the power to play a role in representing both economic and political forces—I think it is essential for every design to be contextual and respond to the place it is set, not just to the brief of the client, whether market party or public authority. The architect has the responsibility to take into account the context and what a building does for its surroundings. You are not building for the client only. You are also building for society. What is the need of the neighbourhood, the need of the city, which connections are important, which type of mobility should be enhanced, how does the big scale relate to the small scale, how can you embed the history of the place? All these questions need to be addressed, even if the client does not ask them. The architect cannot force the client to adopt their suggestions, but does have the moral responsibility to take all these considerations into account and present them to the client. I think iconic architecture is never-ending. But, iconicity is fluid: a building that is iconic now may no longer be iconic in 50 years. Iconicity will not end itself, but the icons will change along with the problems set by clients and the inventiveness of architects in building solutions. It is necessary for clients to understand that developing a building takes time and needs a lot of integrity, a lot of study. Architecture should not become the design of an image. An image cannot sustain a programme and respond to a context

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in a meaningful way. An image cannot become an iconic building, in my understanding of iconic architecture. The more clients will push for an object which first and foremost impresses merely by its visual impact, the fewer substantial icons will be realized. David Gianotten is the Managing Partner-Architect of OMA. In this role he is responsible for the management, business strategy and growth of the company worldwide. As partner-in-charge he also oversees design and construction of various projects, including the Taipei Performing Arts Centre, the masterplan of Feyenoord City and the new Stadium Feyenoord, the CIFCO building in Beijing, the Prince Plaza Building in Shenzhen, the KataOMA resort in Bali and the New Museum for Western Australia. In his role as acting partner-in-charge of OMA’s Hong Kong and Beijing offices and director of OMA Asia, David leads the firm’s large portfolio in the Asia Pacific region. He is also one of the two directors of the recently opened branch office of OMA in Australia. David joined OMA in 2008, launched OMA’s Hong Kong office in 2009, and became partner at OMA in 2010. Before joining OMA he was Principal Architect at SeARCH in the Netherlands. David studied architecture and construction technology at the Eindhoven University of Technology, where he is also a professor in the Architecture Design and Engineering department. Simon Sadler Iconic architecture is most closely associated with the postmodern period, and the political-economic regime most closely associated with postmodernism is neo-liberalism. Postmodernism/neo-liberalism began with icons of failure— notably the televised 1972 demolition of Pruitt-Igoe, depictions of it descending into dust clouds symbolising the demise of modernism and its welfare-state patronage.

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And so the failure of the postmodern/neo-liberal era would be justly marked with icons of its own, if only they were not so nauseating. “Until the Grenfell tragedy,” wrote architect Douglas Murphy in the Architectural Review, contemplating images of the deadly 2017 inferno aided by a slick but cost-cutting re-cladding of a public housing tower (near the London home of Charles Jencks, the critic-historian who popularized the Pruitt-Igoe failure-icon), “the housing crisis has mostly been slower and more grinding.” Murphy goes on, with grim optimism, “We should always celebrate great new work, but should also remember that the last time architecture was both radically innovative, of good quality—and most importantly—widely built, was in the ruins after the Second World War. It took historic crisis and destruction to make society look around for new solutions, and at this point the best architects had been rehearsing answers at the right scale.” Welfare state modernism had its own icons, and its own problems, but its scale was ultimately beyond the iconic, since public housing, health, social security and education offered a political, economic and ethical foundation beyond particular blocks and facades. The iconic architecture of the last few decades has been fun to photograph, teach and visit. But that larger design—the design of a political, economic and ethical foundation that is difficult to see or to diagram—is I think intriguing to students now, even though their 1970s predecessors wearied of it and switched to the glamour of the icon. Simon Sadler is Professor in the Department of Design at the University of California, Davis. His publications include Archigram: Architecture without Architecture (MIT Press, 2005); Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism (Architectural Press, 2000, co-editor, Jonathan Hughes); and The Situationist City (MIT Press, 1998).

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Notes 1 “Near Future,” The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, accessed 28 March 2018, www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/near_future. 2 “China’s New Homes Will Promote Block Districts,” 22 February 2016, www. xinhuanet.com/politics/2016-02/22/c_128738587.htm. 3 Mark O’Connell, “Why Silicon Valley Billionaires Are Prepping for the Apocalypse in New Zealand,” Guardian, 15 February 2018. 4 Frances Perraudin, “Surgeon Admits Marking His Initials on the Livers of Two Patients,” Guardian, 13 December 2017. 5 “Schrödinger’s Cat,” Wikipedia, accessed 28 March 2018, https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat.

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Adorno, Theodor W. Minima Moralia: Reflexionen Aus Dem Beschädigten Leben. Vol. 4. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1951. ———. “Prolog Zum Fernsehen.” In Eingriffe: Neun Kritische Modelle. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1963. ———. Negative Dialektik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1966. ———. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. Vol. 362. New York: Continuum, 1973. ———. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. London: New Left Books, 1974. ———. “Culture Industry Reconsidered.” New German Critique 6 (Autumn 1975): 12–19. ———. “Filmtransparente” (1966). In Prismen: Kulturkritik Und Gesellschaft. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977. ———. “Transparencies on Film.” New German Critique 24/25 (Fall/ Winter 1981/1982): 199–205. ———. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Translated by J. M. Bernstein. London: Routledge, 1991. ———. Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. European Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

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———. “Prologue to Television.” In Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. European Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Adorno, Theodor W., and Hanns Eisler. Composing for the Films. Impacts. 1947. Reprint, London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2007. Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. “The Culture Industry.” In Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Allen Lane, 1972. ———. Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Allen Lane, 1972. Althusser, Louis, Olivier Corpet and François Matheron. Writings on Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan. European Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Brott, Simone. “Modernity’s Opiate, or, the Crisis of Iconic Architecture.” Log 26 (2012): 49–59. ———. “Reflections from Damaged Modernity.” In Architecture, Critical Project and Negative Thought: The Critique of Architecture under the Cultural Logic of Contemporary Society, edited by Nadir Lahiji and Patrick Stein, 30–31. Canberra: University of Canberra, 2015. Engels, Friedrich. “Engels to Franz Mehring Letter, London, July 14, 1893.” Translated by Donna Torr. In Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Correspondence, 1846-1895: A Selection with Commentary and Notes. New York: International Publishers, 1968. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. 1900. Reprinted in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited by James Strachey. Vol. 4. London: Vintage Books, The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psychoanalysis, 2001. Herodotus. The Histories. Translated by A. D. Godley. Homer. The Iliad. Translated by Samuel Butler. Originally published 1898. London: Longmans, Green, 1999. ———. The Odyssey. Translated by Samuel Butler. 10th ed. Originally published 1898. London: Longmans, Green, 1999. Kant, Immanuel. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals: With a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concerns. 1785.

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Translated by James W. Ellington. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1993. Lenin, Vladimir I. “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy.” In Collected Works. Vol. 14 (1908). Available from www.dropbox.com/s/bcu4rwl25nz00au/Lenin%20 Materialism%20and%20Empirio-Criticism.pdf?dl=0. Levinas, Emmanuel. Collected Philosophical Papers. Netherlands: Springer Science & Business Media, 1987. Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Studies in Marxist Dialectics 1968. Vol. 215. Talgarth: The Merlin Press, 1971. ———. “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” (1923). Translated by Rodney Livingstone. In History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1971. Marinetti, F. T. Fondazione E Manifesto Del Futurismo: Pubblicato Dal “Figaro” Di Parigi il 20 Febbraio 1909. Manifesti Del Movimento Futurista. Milan: “Poesia” via Senato, 2, 1909. Marinetti, F. T., and C. R. W. Nevinson. Vital English Art: Futurist Manifesto. Italy, 1914. Marx, Karl. Capital. New York: International Publishers, 1975. ———. Capital Volume Three: The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. Edited by Friedrick Engels. Vol. 3. 1894. Reprint, New York: International Publishers, 1996 [1894]. ———. Capital, Volume One: A Critique of Political Economy. Edited by Friedrich Engels. Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Vol. 1. 1906. Reprint, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2011. Marx, Karl, and Jean-Pierre Lefebvre. Le Capital: Critique de L’économie Politique: Quatrième Édition Allemande. 3rd ed. Paris: Quadrige/ PUF, 2009. Marx, Karl, and Jean-Jacques Marie. Karl Marx: Le Christophe Colomb Du Capital. Collection Voyager Avec. Paris: Quinzaine littéraire, 2006.

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Simmel, Georg. The Philosophy of Money. 1900. Reprint, London: Psychology Press, 2004. Tafuri, Manfredo. “Architecture as Metalanguage: The Critical Value of the Image.” In Theories and History of Architecture, 103–140. Translated by Giorgio Verrecchia. London: Granada, 1980. ———. Theories and History of Architecture. Translated by Giorgio Verrecchia. London: Granada, 1980. Weber, Max. “The Nature of Charismatic Authority and Its Routinization.” Translated by A. R. Anderson and Talcott Parsons. In Theory of Social and Economic Organization. London: W. Hodge, 1947.

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Aalto, Alvar 33 Adorno, Theodor 10, 20, 29, 30, 48, 84, 158; critique of cinema by 10, 11–12, 18–19, 20, 22, 25, 30, 40, 57–58, 62–63, 157; critique of image by 22, 26, 31, 43; on modernity 37, 40, 41–42, 51, 122, 150; on montage 72; “negative” thought developed by 26–27, 53; on post-war city 42; on sacrifice 72, 125, 150 Agamben, Giorgio 172 Alberti, Leon Battista 166 Alogoskoufis, Giorgos 85 Althusser, Louis 10 American Institute of Architects (AIA) 138, 140, 141 Amnesty International 122, 123, 140, 148, 149, 153 Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility 141 Architects Registration Board (ARB) 139 Architecture Lobby, The 140–41 Arendt, Hannah 147

Balla, Giacomo 102 Barberá, Rita 112 Barthélémy, Jean-Hughes 174 Bauman, Zygmunt 132–33 Benjamin, Walter 78n6 Betsky, Aaron 146–47 Beydoun, Nasser 122 Bjarke Ingels Group 46 Blackwood, Michael 164, 165 Blanco, Ignacio 108, 111 Blankfein, Lloyd 87 Blomkamp, Neill 47, 48, 50 Brecht, Bertolt 78 Calatrava Architects see Santiago Calatrava Calatrava, Santiago: Athens Olympic Sports Complex 81, 82–89, 85, 92–99, 93, 95, 100, 101–4, 109–10, 167; Campus Maastricht 111; Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias (City of Arts and Sciences, Valencia, Spain) 111, 113; critiques of 83, 108, 110–14, 117n17; cost overruns by 98, 110–11, 114; and Futurism

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Index

101–4; “Ghost Towers” (Valencia, Spain) 111–12, 112, 114; role of in financialisation 109–15; train station, Reggio Emilia (Italy) 101; World Trade Center Transportation Hub 111 Callebaut, Vincent 46, 47, 56, 64 Camps, Francisco 112 Canetti, Elias 153 Carpo, Mario 5 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand 156–57 China Central Television 61 Coop Himmelb(l)au 67–76, 164; Central Los Angeles Area High School #9 for the Visual and Performing Arts 68–72, 69; Dalian International Conference Center (China) 71, 72; and Deconstructivism 73; early works by 73; JVC New Urban Entertainment Center (Guadalajara, Mexico) 67, 68; Musée des Confluences (Lyon, France) 74–76, 75, 76; Ufa Cinema Center (Dresden) 73 Corbusier, Le see Le Corbusier Crali, Tullio 105 Danaher, Tim 93 da Vinci, Leonardo 166 DeLanda, Manuel 4, 21 Deleuze, Gilles 173 Derrida, Jacques 4, 7, 172, 181 Di Bari, Vito 102 Dick, Philip K. 50 Diogenes 99 Dionysus (emperor) 144 Dodson, Sean 98 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 125 Duhem, Pierre 59 Dyckhoff, Tom 5 Dyson, George 97

194

Ecclesiastes (Koholeth) 168–70 Eichmann, Adolf 123, 147 Eisenman, Peter 4, 6, 7, 165–66 Eisler, Hanns 72 Engels, Friedrich 59, 64, 74 Esquerra Unida i Alternativa (political party) 110, 111, 113 European Union 27, 85, 86, 89 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 21 Filler, Martin 128–29 Fisher, Mark 8 Foster, Hal 94, 102 Foster, Norman 2, 146, 162 Foucault, Michel 62 Franchini, Gianfranco 94 Frege, Gottlob 22 Freud, Sigmund 28, 51, 73, 75, 77, 157 Full Calatrava, The (website) 83, 110, 114 Gautier, Théophile 166 Gehry, Frank 4, 64, 165; Beekman Place (New York) 3; Dr. Chau Chak Wing Building, University of Technology Sydney (UTS) 32, 32–35, 36–38, 70–71; “Fred and Ginger” building (Prague) 33; Guggenheim Bilbao 1, 2, 5, 18, 19, 25–29, 36–37, 57; Neuer Zollhof (Düsseldorf) 33; Ray and Maria Stata Center (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) 33; reception of later works by 31–32; and use of software 5 Gibson, William 50 Giedion, Sigfried 65 Goldberger, Paul 130, 147 Goldman Sachs 86–87, 115 Guardian, the (newspaper) 125, 128, 145, 159, 160 Guchet, Xavier 174

Index

Habermas, Jürgen 26, 51 Hadid, Zaha 4, 6, 49–50, 64, 147, 164, 165; Al-Wakrah Stadium (Qatar) 122, 127, 128–35, 148, 153–58, 155, 159–63, 167; and Al-Wakrah Stadium as a vagina 159–63; biography of 134; Cairo Expo City 47; and Constructivism 166; and controversy over workers’ deaths in Qatar 128–35, 137, 142, 144, 145, 146–47, 149–50, 168; death of 125; Heydar Aliyev Center (Baku, Azerbaijan) 147–48; New National Stadium (Tokyo) 57, 57; the Opus (Dubai) 154–57, 156; Performing Arts Centre (Abu Dhabi) 2; Wangjing SOHO (Beijing) 46, 47, 48, 49–50 Harvey, David 8, 110 HB+A Architects 130 Hegel, G. F. W. 21–22, 36, 53, 55n9, 60, 61 Heidegger, Martin 172, 173 Herzog & de Meuron 143, 146 Hess, Armin 67 Hodder, Steven 140 Homer 46 Horkheimer, Max 10, 22, 77, 125, 150 Human Rights Watch 123, 148, 149, 153 Ingels, Bjarke see Bjarke Ingels Group International Monetary Fund (IMF) 86, 88 James, Oliver 6 Jefferson, Thomas 33 Jencks, Charles 5, 36, 187 Jezebel (website) 159–60

Kant, Immanuel 142–45, 166 Kats, Anna 129 Koolhaas, Rem 4, 164; CCTV headquarters (Beijing) 2, 56, 57–65, 63, 146, 156–57, 162 Kurzweil, Ray 13 Lacan, Jacques 26 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 172 Lahoud, Adrian 139–40 Lamda Development 112 Lang, Fritz 13 Lavaux, Stéphanie 17 Le Corbusier 68, 69, 84 Legman, Gershon 78n2 Lenin, Vladimir 59–60, 74 Levinas, Emmanuel 132, 134 Libeskind, Daniel 4, 6, 146, 162, 164, 165 Lukács, Georg 10, 13, 55n4, 60, 73–74, 77, 97 Lynn, Greg 4 Marcuse, Herbert 82, 84 Marinetti, Filippo 101, 102–3, 182 Marx, Karl 10; and dialectical materialism 21, 59–60, 74; experiences of capitalism identified by 19, 26, 124, 142; and financialisation 115 Mauss, Marcel 26 Mehring, Franz 64 Moreno, Louis 115 Moser, Rudolf 83 Moses, Robert 109–10 Murphy, Douglas 187 MVRDV 45, 46 Nebuchadnezzar II (King) 46 New-Territories/R&Sie(n) 17 Nietzsche, Friedrich 49 OMA see Rem Koolhaas

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Index

Peirce, C. S. 21 Piano, Renzo 94 Plato 21–22, 53, 99, 144 Pollack, Sydney 25 Prix, Wolf (Wolf D.) 4, 68, 164; see also Coop Himmelb(l)au

Tafuri, Manfredo 9, 30–31, 34, 165, 166 Tatlin, Vladimir 68, 69, 165–66 Till, Jeremy 139 Titus (emperor) 121 Tschumi, Bernard 6, 164, 165 United Nations 84, 85

RAFAA 51, 54 Rajchman, John 21 Reich, Robert B. 86–87 Rendell, Jane 139 RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) 139–40 Robinson, William I. 87, 177n13 Roche, François 17 Rogers, Richard 94, 145, 161, 162 Russell, James S. 130 Sant’Elia, Antonio 101–2, 103, 104 Schelling, F. W. J. von 21 Schiller, Friedrich 166 Schumacher, Patrik: 2016 privatisation manifesto by 7, 104; advocacy of anarcho-capitalism by 5, 104; defence of iconic project by 5, 6, 10, 21; and terminology associated with iconic project 4, 5 Sharif, Yara 139–40 Simmel, Georg 49 Simondon, Gilbert 173–75 Singer, Peter 132 Sklair, Leslie 12, 125 Socrates 99 Somol, Robert 4, 8, 20, 166–67 Speaks, Michael 21 Speer, Albert 122 Sperry, Raphael 141 Stallo, J. B. 59 Stiegler, Bernard 172, 173 Swiczinsky, Helmut 68, 164

196

Vespasian (emperor) 121 Vincent Callebaut Architectures see Callebaut, Vincent Weber, Max 10, 34, 49, 55n6 Whiting, Sarah 4, 8, 20, 166–67 Who Builds Your Architecture? (WBYA?) 141 Wigley, Mark 164, 165 World Trade Organization 63 Xenakis, Iannis 94 Xi Jinping 66n, 175 Yamasaki, Minoru 34–35 Young, Joseph 102 Zaha Hadid Architects: Al-Wakrah Stadium (Qatar) 122, 127, 128–35, 153–58, 155, 159–63, 167; Cairo Expo City 47; and Constructivism 166; Heydar Aliyev Center (Baku, Azerbaijan) 147–48; New National Stadium (Tokyo) 57, 57; the Opus (Dubai) 154–57, 156; and Patrik Schumacher 5, 104; Performing Arts Centre (Abu Dhabi) 2; reputation of 147; Wangjing SOHO (Beijing) 46, 47, 48, 49–50; see also Hadid, Zaha Zevi, Bruno 30 Žižek, Slavoj 163n