The Singular Objects of Architecture (review)

Hyperbolic, sketchy, and enormously suggestive, these two reworked interviews—originally part of Urban Passages, a series of encounters between architects and philosophers that took place in Paris in 1997 and 1998—are likely to annoy readers committed to disciplined thinking, even as they will leave those willing to wrestle with what is said here with a deeper understanding of the world we live in. In his foreword, K. Michael Hays warns the reader not to expect "that either architecture or philosophy will be treated in this dialogue in anything like a traditional way (which, were it the case, would seem not so much old-fashioned as reactionary, coming from two of the few cultural figures practicing today that we could still dare to call progressive)" (vii). What surprised me was how traditional, despite much trendy rhetoric, the key ideas developed in these pages are. Hays may find extraordinary "that architecture and philosophy are treated with any distinction at all by progressive thinkers in our present era." But such a distinction is a presupposition of thinking responsibly about either philosophy or architecture. Theory that blurs that distinction aestheticizes thinking. And just such aestheticizing of theory and of architecture is challenged in this conversation. I was surprised to discover how familiar, despite jargon very much of today, key ideas, and especially that of "the singular objects of architecture," seemed in the end.

Take Baudrillard's pronouncement "I'm for everything that is opposed to culture" (19), here cited first by Jean Nouvel and reaffirmed by the former: "I oppose culture emphatically, with no concessions, without compromise" (20). I cannot hear such words without thinking of similar words once uttered by Goebbels, and, more to the point, of Heidegger's not unrelated critique of culture, which he, too, would have us understand as a defining characteristic of our age, this "Age of the World Picture." ¹ The task of art was then understood to be that of tearing away the mask aesthetics and culture had placed over our suffocating artificial world, where the virtual threatens to displace the real.

Much that Baudrillard has to say in these "interviews" can be read as an up to date variation on this Heideggerian theme. Baudrillard, too, links culture to aesthetics, to a debased aesthetics that "involves the total legibility of everything in it" (19), that means both, the Disneyfication (69) of the world, and the death of any art that might restore to us a sense of the singular. Baudrillard is "opposed to such aestheticization because it inevitably involves a loss: the loss of the object, of this secret that works of art and creative effort might reveal and which is something more than aesthetics" (19). The rift between writing and the visual needs to be preserved, so that images will retain their fantastic singularity (27). Baudrillard wants to recover the "enigmatic side" of things, "which is what makes them radical" (15) and, like Heidegger, envisions an art beyond aesthetics: "In art the strongest works are those that abandon this whole business of art and art history and aesthetics" (13), works that break open modern culture, which today is "everywhere. . . a homologue of industry and technology" (20). The creative artist must leave the clutter of culture behind: "The ability to create a vacuum is undoubtedly the prerequisite for any act of authentic creation. If you don't create a vacuum, you will never achieve singularity" (75). "A work of art is a singularity, and all these singularities can create holes, interstices, voids, et cetera, in the metastatic fullness of culture" (20-1).

Of special interest here is what Baudrillard has to say about Beaubourg:

What interests me is architecture as monster, those objects that have been catapulted into the city, from someplace else . . . We could provide a cultural description of Beaubourg, consider Beaubourg as the synthesis of its total "culturization," and in this case be...