“ (…) collaborative program of study (…) ” viii Preface

“It is not just by chance that the metropolis, the place of absolute alienation, is at the very center of concern of the avant-garde.” p. 1

“… the tool for a critical intervention in `natural´ reality is selection.” (p. A. Cozens, A New Method of Assisting the Invention Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape, London 1786.)

“Architecture now undertook the task of rendering its work `political´. As a political agent the architect had to assume the task of continual invention of advanced solutions, at the most generally applicable level. In the acceptance of this task, the architect´s role as idealist became prominent.” p. 12

“Rationalism would seem thus to reveal its own irrationality. In the attempt to absorb all its own contradictions, architectural `reasoning´ applies the technique of shock to its very foundations. Individual architectural fragments push one against the other, each indifferent to jolts, while as an accumulation they demonstrate the uselessness of the inventive effort expended on their formal definition.” p. 15

“ (…) the great new problem was that of the equilibrium of opposites, which in the city finds its appointed place; failure to resolve this problem would mean the destruction of the very concept of architecture.” pp. 15-16

“ (…) Resistance to this new law is paid for with torture (…) ” p. 18

“A city is like a forest, thus the distribution of a city is like that of a park. There must be squares, crossroads, and straight and spacious streets in great numbers. But this is not enough. It is necessary that the plan be designed with taste and vivacity of spirit, so that it has both order and fantasy, eurythmy and variety: streets laid out here in star formation, there in a claw pattern, in one part in herring-bone plan, in another like a fan, and further on parallel, and everywhere intersections of three or four streets in different positions, with a multitude of public squares, all different in size, shape, and decoration.” p. 20

“He who dos not know to vary our pleasures will never give us pleasure. [The city] should in fact be a varied picture of infinite unexpected episodes, a great order in the details, confusion, uproar and tumult in the whole.” p. 20

“The plan of the city should be distributed in such a way that the magnificence of the whole is subdivided in an infinity of individual beauties, all so different one from the other that the same object is never encountered twice, and moving from one end to the other one finds in each quarter something new, unique, and surprising. Order must reign, but in a kind of conclusion … and from a multitude of regular parts the whole must give a certain idea of irregularity and chaos, which is so fitting to great cities.” pp. 20-21

“What makes this passive duplicity possible is that the city is a monument; as a monument it is free to demonstrate continually and openly its own untimeliness.” p. 34

“Or better, of a renewed bourgeoisie, capable of accepting doubt as the premise for the full acceptance of existence as a whole, as explosive, revolutionary vitality, prepared for permanent change and the unpredictable.” p. 56

“The `Dadaist revolution,´ much more than that of the Surrealist, lies precisely in the courage to explode the contradiction which belongs to the system by placing itself before it as reality. Liberation from value in this sense signifies establishing the premises for action in that reality, in that field of indeterminant, fluid, and ambiguous forces. For this reason all interpretations of Dadaism or Futurism as hermetic self-recognitions of the irrational, or as cupio dissolvi in it, must be considered completely erroneous. For the avant-garde movements the destruction of values offered a wholly new type of rationality, which was capable of coming face to face with the negative, in order to make the negative itself the release valve of an unlimited potential for development. The cynicism of the avant-garde –at least where it is explicit– is nothing but the `disposition´ to this ideology of development, of the revolution of individual and collective behavior, of the complete dominion over existence.” p. 56

“`We want artists in industrial relationship. We want masters in industrial method – both from the stand-point of the producer and the product. We want those who can mould the political, social, industrial, and moral mass into a sound and shapely whole. We have limited the creative faculty too much and have used it for too trivial ends. We want men who can create the working design for all that is right and good and desirable in our life.´” (H. Ford- My Life and Work, Doubleday, Page & Co., Garden City, N.Y., 1923, p.104.) p. 67

“Organisation and planning are thus the passwords of both democratic socialism and democratic capitalism.” p. 69

“Ideology assumed for itself the task of unifying the subject and the object of production.” p. 70

“Salvation lies no longer in `revolt,´ but in surrender without discretion. Only a humanity that has absorbed and made its own the ideology of work, that does not persist in considering production and organization something other than itself or simply instruments, that recognizes itself to be part of a comprehensive plan and as such fully accepts that it must function as the cog-wheels of a global machine: only this humanity can atone for its `original sin.´ And this sin is not in having created a system of means without knowing how to control the `revolt of the objects´ against their inventor, as Löwith and the young Lukács understood Marxist alienation. This sin consists instead in man´s `diabolical´ insistence on remaining man, in taking his place as an `imperfect machine´ in a social universe in which the only constant behavior is that of pure silence.” p. 74

“The demonstration beyond question that there is no other way but to nullify the human subject in the subject of development, is a task tending to preserve ideology as an ultimate cultural project.” p. 76

“The fight against man is conditioned by the needs of development, and only if development encounters obstacles –due to the persistence of traditional prejudices– will it be posible to repropose a human mythology. This will, of course, be a cynical and regressive mythology, serving to break down only weak resistance.” p. 77

“The experience of the `tragic´ is the experience of the metropolis.” p. 78

“ (…) he who reacts loses the world, he who wants to cling to it loses it just the same.” (A. Döblin, Die drei Sprünge des Wang-Lun, 1915. See L. Mittner, L´espressionismo, Laterza, Bari 1965, p.96.)

“Except that now form had to be understood as the logic of subjective reactions to the objective universe of production.” p. 91

“The public had to be provoked.” p. 91

“The blasé attitude had to be transformed into effective participation in the urban scene.” p. 92

“ (…) global alternatives to political practices; alternatives that assumed all the characteristics of ethical choices.” p. 93

“Chaos and order were thus sanctioned by the historical avant-garde movements as the `values´, in the proper sense of the term, of the new capitalist city.” p. 96

“Of course, chaos is a datum and order an objective. But from now on form is not sought outside of chaos; it is sought within it.” p. 96

“But the real place of the improbable is the city.” p. 96

“Now it was no longer objects that were offered to judgment, but a process to be lived and used as such. The user, summoned to complete Mies van der Rohe´s or Gropius´ `open´ spaces, was the central element of this process. Since the new forms were no longer meant to be absolute values but instead proposals for the organization of collective life –the integrated architecture of Gropius– architecture summoned the public to participate in its work of design. Thus trough architecture the ideology of the public took a great step forward.” p. 101

“ (…) the ultimate test of the theoretical hypotheses was the confrontation with the city.” p. 103

“ The architecture of the large city depends essentially on the solution given to two factors: the elementary cell and the urban organism as a whole. The single room as the constituent element of the habitation will determine the aspect of the habitation, and since the habitations in turn form blocks, the room will become a factor of urban configuration, which is architecture´s true goal. Reciprocally, the planimetric structure of the city will have a substantial influence on the design of the habitation and the room.” p. 104

“ (…) a society organized in and by the great metropolis.” p. 124

“`The architect is an organizer, not a designer of objects´”(Le Corbusier) p. 125

“ (…) demonstrate that the maximum level of programing of productivity coincides with the maximum level of the productivity of the spirit (…)” p. 125

“ (…) connects intellectual initiative and the civilisation machiniste.” p. 125

» (…) the repository of a new scale of values (…) ” p. 127

“Even Le Corbusier used the technique of shock, but the objects à reaction poétique are now connected in an organic reciprocity and it is impossible not to experience the dynamic interrelationship of their forms and functions.” pp. 129-130

“Architecture thus becomes a pedagogical act and a means of collective integration.” p. 132

“From the reality of production to the image and the use of the image, the entire urban machine pushes the `social´ potential of the civilisation machiniste to the extreme of its possibilities.” p. 133

“Architecture as ideology of the plan is swept away by the reality of the plan when, the level of utopia having been superseded, the plan becomes an operative mechanism.” p. 135

“Free oneself from the fear of the future by fixing the future as the present” (A. Negri) p. 135

“ (…) integration of the public, involved as operators and active consumers in the urban mechanism of development, now rendered organically `human´.” p. 135

“Incapable of analysing the real causes of the crisis of design, contemporary criticism concentrates all its attention on the internal problems of design itself.” p. 136

“The general solicitation of a rationalisation of cities and regions remains without response, continuing to act as but an indirect stimulus for realisations that are compatible with the partial objectives set from time to time.” p. 136

“In this phase it is necessary to persuade the public that the contradictions, imbalances, and chaos typical of the contemporary city are inevitable. Indeed the public must be convinced that this chaos contains an unexplored richness, unlimited utilizable possibilities, and qualities of the `game´ now made into new fetishes for society.” p. 139

“ (…) flexibility indispensible in a period of transition (…)” p. 140

“The fact that such games, more or less skilful, are given ample space in design is due to the split existing between the building cycle and those industries producing `objects´. And one might ask if in this explosion of images we are not whitening the prelude to a great change in the control of production, already indicated by the new techniques of automation, and that a technological restructuring of building activity would render inevitable.” p. 143

“ (…) ideology of permanent and programmed innovation.” p. 156

“Once art (architecture) was materially inserted into the mechanisms of the universe of production, its own experimental character, its own character of co-reality, was necessarily compromised.” p. 157

“In fact, if the communicative system refers only to the laws of its internal structure, if architecture can be interpreted –in its specific aspects– only as linguistic experimentation, and if this experimentation is realised only through an obliqueness, through a radical ambiguity in the organization of its components, and, finally, if the linguistic `material´ is indifferent and matters only in the way the various materials react with each other, then the only road to be followed is that of the most radical an politically agnostic formalism. In other words, the formalism most distant –by free and conscious choice– from the very reality that makes it possible for architecture to exist.” p. 157

“The attempt to revitalise architecture by means of an exploration of its internal structures comes about just at the moment when avant-garde studies in the linguistic field are abandoning `ambiguous´ communications and taking their place in the heart of the productive universe, through the creation of artificial programming languages.” p. 160

“It is true that the value of an aesthetic object is not inherent to it. It is, however, also true that the value attributed to it is not a `value´ understood traditionally, according to pure axiological categories or according to parameters of conscience, but it is identified with its describability. In other words, the qualities of value, being describable quantities, lose any aura of metaphysical indeterminateness and can be circumscribed within the area of measurable quantitative phenomenon. Evaluation thus becomes a simple description.» (G. Pasqualotto, Avanguardia e technologia, cit. p. 30.) p. 165

“And yet within urban structures the whole contribution of the historical avant-garde lives on with a particular pregnancy. The city as an advertising and self-advertising structure, as an ensemble of channels of communication, becomes a sort of machine emitting incessant messages: indeterminacy itself is given specific form, and offered as the only determinateness possible for the city as a whole. In this way form is given to the attempt to make the language of development live, to make it a concrete experience of everyday life.” p. 167-169

«It is not sufficient to create languages of the plan artificially. It is, however, necessary to immerse the public in the image of development, in the city as a programmed network of communications, the subject of which is always the `necessity´ of the capitalist plan of integration.” p. 169

“ (…) ideology, despite all its ineffectiveness, has its own structure; and, like all structures it is both historical and transient.” p. 169

“In other words, the ineffectiveness of ideology is clear. Urban approximations and the ideologies of the plan appear as old idols, to be sold off to collectors of antique relics.” p. 170

“The difficulty of the struggle for urban legislation, for the reorganisation of building activity, and for urban renewal, has created the illusion that the fight for planning could in itself constitute an objective of the class struggle.” p. 171

“To aim at the pacific equilibration of the city and its territory is not an alternative solution, but merely an anachronism.” p. 173

“The change from the use of static models to the creation of dynamic models seems to be the task posed today by the necessity of capitalist development to update its programming techniques.” p. 173

“Systems of values can no longer be considered established for long periods. What can be wanted depends on what can be made possible, and what must be made possible depends on what is wanted. Ends and functions of utility are not independent measures. They have a relationship of implication in the decisional ambit. Representations of value are controllable within broad limits. Faced with the uncertainty of future alternative developments, it is absurd to wish to construct rigid decisional models that furnish strategies over long periods.” p. 175

“Decision theory must assure the flexibility of the `system that make decisions.´» p. 175

“What systems of values are generally coherent and guarantee the possibility of adaptation and therefore of survival?”(H. Rittel) p.175

“And ominously present on the horizon is the worst of the evils: the decline of the architect´s `professional´ status and his introduction into programs where the ideological role of architecture is minimal.” p. 177-178

“First among the intellectual illusions to be done away with is that which, by means of the image alone, tries to anticipate the conditions of an architecture `for a liberated society.´ Who proposes such a slogan avoids asking himself if, its obvious utopianism aside, this objective is perusable without a revolution of architectural language, method, and structure which goes far beyond simple subjective will or the simple updating of a syntax.” p. 181 *

“Modern architecture has marked out its own fate by making itself, within an autonomous political strategy, the bearer of ideals of rationalisation by which the working class is affected only in the second instance. The historical inevitability of this phenomenon can be recognised. But having been so, it is no longer possible to hide the ultimate reality which renders uselessly painful the choices of architects desperately attached to disciplinary ideologies.” p. 181

«`Uselessly painful´ because it is useless to struggle for escape when completely enclosed and confined without an exit. Indeed, the crisis of modern architecture is not the result of `tiredness´ or `dissipation.´ It is rather a crisis of the ideological function of architecture. The `fall´ of modern art is the final testimony of bourgeois ambiguity, torn between `possitive´ objectives and the pitiless self-exploration of its own objective commercialization. No `salvation´ is any longer to be found within it: neither wandering restlessly in labyrinths of images so multivalent they end in muteness, nor enclosed in the stubborn silence of geometry content with its own perfection.

For this reason it is useless to propose purely architectural alternatives. The search for an alternative within the structures that condition the very character of architectural design is indeed an obvious contradiction of terms.

Reflection on architecture, inasmuch as it is a criticism of the concrete `realized´ ideology of architecture itself, cannot but go beyond this and arrive at a specifically political dimension.

Only at this point –that is after having done away with any disciplinary ideology– is it permissible to take up the subject of the new roles of the technician, of the organiser of building activity, and of the planner, within the compass of the new forms of capitalist development. And thus also to consider the possible tendencies or inevitable contradictions between such a type of technical-intellectual work and the material conditions of the class struggle.

The systematic criticism of the ideologies accompanying the history of capitalist development is therefore but one chapter of such political action. Today, indeed, the principal task of ideological criticism is to do away with impotent and ineffectual myths, which so often serve as illusions that permit the survival of achronistic `hopes in design.´” p. 181-182

Tafuri, M. (1976). Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. Estados Unidos: The MIT Press.