Charissa Terranova, Harvard University W(h)ither Postmodernism? Heresy and the Amorals of Contemporary Architectural Practice

In the now canonical essay, "Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" [1984], Fredric Jameson gave architecture favored status, declaring it to be the "privileged aesthetic language of postmodernity."¹ Focusing his attention on Los Angelean architecture, in particular the Westin Bonaventure Hotel [sic] designed by the architect-cum-developer John Portman, Jameson astutely recognized that postmodern architecture had outgrown the aesthetic traditions of mimesis and representation. Far from the age-old Vitruvian conventions of architecture as anthropomorphic and reflective of natural proportion and much closer to the late-modern Lefebvrian conception of urbanism as congealed capitalist space, postmodern architecture, following Jameson, gave articulation to an entirely new type of space. Postmodern architecture housed, projected and produced a generic space activated by capitalist flows yet hermetically enclosed within dumb-box architecture: space amputated from the heady chaos of streets, sidewalks and pedestrians. Organ-like in its separation and concealment, this cut-off architecture announced a certain postmodern dismemberment, that is, the disconnection of the architect from architecture. In short, building and urban development in the postmodern landscape no longer necessitated an architect. Today, sixteen years after Jameson's essay, this process of dissection has been aptly described by the architecture critic Bob Somol in terms of "urbanism without architecture."²

While Jameson set in relief the architect's frivolous status within postmodernity and, in short, the end of conventional architectural representation, theorists, historians and critics in architecture schools across the country continued to promote design philosophies rooted in the traditions of architecture's legibility. Architecture must be meaningful: it must be representational in order to be architecture. Or so they claimed. Repressing what was evidently the increasingly superfluous status of the architect, pedagogues and designers turned to history in order to prop up both the architect and architecture, to inject meaning into an artistic discipline that was fast becoming mere "building" in the face of information flows and raw capitalist interest. Envisioned as a kit-of-parts, history in architecture became a series of pasted-on styles and ready-made plans, a simplistic heuristic trope that promised to bring meaning back to architecture. The vehicle for this temporal consciousness, or in architectural parlance, "postmodern historicism," was typology, an eighteenth-century idea of architecture as taxonomy: architecture conceived as a limited set of programs and facades rooted in the Classical systems of representation and mimesis going back to Vitruvius and Alberti. Supported by the armature of Structural Linguistics, typology promised to return a moral consciousness to architecture. Historical representation in architecture became a moral duty, a means by which to resist "building," or to be more precise, the hegemony of late capital in the realm of architecture conceived as art (viz. Portman's hotel).

While for Robert Venturi, author of Learning from Las Vegas, this importunate morality became but a lugubrious game of signage, for others, such as Michael Graves and Alan Colquhoun, typology became a means of redemption. Postmodern architecture, in an oddly modernist vein, would continue its role as agent of moral reform through the ruse of representation, or postmodernist historicist pasties. Ultimately, thus, the trouble with postmodernity within the discipline of architecture is that it was never truly as Jameson interpreted and outlined so keenly, but rather precisely a reaction to and denial of it: that is to say, postmodern architecture within the academy was marked by a full throttle resistance to the motor of global capitalism, its inevitable dominance and well-nigh re-invention of architecture and the concomitant, if not necessary, end of architecture as moral arbiter.

Yet contemporary architectural practice, both writing and building within the academy, has taken a healthy turn to the amoral. And this trend toward amorality - to a certain pragmatics of contingency within design - is indeed indifferent to past attempts to resist the greater system of capital. In short, contemporary amoral practices accept, utilize and, at times, celebrate the flows of late capital that were so inimical to architecture in the twentieth century. Stan Allen, a New York-based architect and professor at Columbia, has markedly eschewed both modern and postmodern claims to "moral duty" and re-inscribed a forward-looking architecture that is foremost a spatial trigger of events. Janus-faced in his coupling of early-twentieth-century functionalism and twenty-first-century pragmatics, Allen revives a certain modernist penchant for the machine, albeit shorn of its moral promise of social improvement en masse. Through the idea of "infrastructure," Allen advocates an architecture that is engineered rather than designed, urban in scale and, perhaps most importantly, unabashedly instrumental in nature. For Allen, the postmodernist turn to semiotics in the late 1960s and early 1970s - architecture's need to be legible and meaningful - destabilized the greatest potency of architecture, namely its instrumentality and capacity to "intervene in" and "transform...reality."³

Far from regurgitating Platonic dualities already digested and passed, Allen's conception of the "real" is constituted by manifold flows of information: it is precisely the "real," indeed an unreal real in the Platonic sense, that constitutes the Portman building and which Jameson so clearly recognized years ago. And, once again, antithetical to the "historical real" of postmodernist historicism, it is the "real" of late capitalism. That is to say, Allen arrives at contemporary architecture, at the object of architecture today, by taking a detour, by rejecting traditional forms of representation and the optical, those moralistic forms of both modern and postmodern architecture that denied architecture's status as an object of capitalism. Rather than viewing architecture as a limited set of possibilities - a series of types based in history - architecture thus becomes a matter of negotiating use and function within a given geography. Moreover, infrastructural architecture is constituted by a series of new tools, processes and modes of signification. The primacy of drawing, for example, is displaced by a diagrammatics of space. And for designers, there is "less a concern [with] how [architecture] looks and more with what it can do."⁴ [show and discuss in passing project for Barcelona: Logistical Activities Zone, 1996.]

This brief journey through recent architectural history and theory begs the question of postmodernity: since architecture, at least that in the academy, is a latecomer to this postmodernism, this acceptance of a certain complex and economic "real," does it not cease to be such? Has not architecture, perhaps yet again, announced a new period, post-postmodernism if you will, within late capitalism?

While this question is very large and must necessarily be left open to negotiation, I would like to close with a nudge, a tilting of architecture toward heresy rather than centrism. The amorals of contemporary architecture, while indeed welcomed, run the risk of generating an architecture of apathy wherein the game of stoicism and stochastics gives way to the morass of centrism, that is, a realm of utter homogeneity in which architecture has ceased to be a force making possible new choices - in both thinking and form. However, I would like to suggest that the amorals of architecture is itself the greatest form of choosing. Calling on the late Greek root of the word heresy, hairesis, or "to choose" or "to take for oneself," it is a form of heresy in design. Rejecting past morality in design and choosing an amorals of practice: these are, in Allen's words, acts of "choosing not to choose," or, in so many words, architectural heresy.⁵

Notes

¹ Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1992) 37.

² Somol, Bob, "Urbanism without Architecture," Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999) 138-153.

³ Allen, Stan, "Infrastructural Urbanism," Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999) 50.

⁴ Allen, 52.

⁵ Allen, Stan, Stan Allen, Essays: Practice, Architecture, Technique and Representation (Amsterdam: OPA, 2000) 180, fn. 4.