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4. Project: Urban Society and Its Architecture
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165 I n June 1972, the Groupe de sociologie urbaine Paris 10 and the Institut de recherches at the Unité pédagogique no. 8 organized a colloquium at the Mediterranean tourist new town of Port Grimaud under the topic of architecture and the social sciences with the ambitious aim “to constitute architectural space as an object of study.”1 Even though sociology was included in the title of the colloquium, it was linguistics that fascinated the two most prominent contributors, Henri Lefebvre and Manfredo Tafuri. Tafuri called for an analysis of structuralism as one of the ideologies of the capitalist city, representing the belief that a management of contradictions secures the permanent technological innovation and development of capitalism.2 Lefebvre would agree with much of this, but during the discussion, when Tafuri referred to the operaist argument of workers’ struggle as the engine of capitalism, Lefebvre’s answer was ironic: “You put everything into your system .” “Not mine, that of capitalism,” responded Tafuri.3 The controversy between Tafuri and Lefebvre concerned not whether architecture is to be put on trial but rather what kind of critique should it be, how far should it go, and what should it aim at? In Port Grimaud, Lefebvre asked, “What is architecture? Is there something specifically architectural? Is it an art, a technique , a science?” He concluded, “I argue that architecture is a social practice.”4 Theanalysisofarchitectureinthisperspectivestartswithrecognizingthepractice of an architect as “a producer of space, but never the only one” who “operates within a specific space—the sheet of white paper.”5 This practice is defined by its external constraints imposed by other agents of the production of space (developers , bankers, planners, and “users”) and its internal competencies and limitations set by its specific concepts, ideologies, and modes of representation, drawings, Project Urban Society and Its Architecture 4 166 Project models, and abstractions.6 Architecture thus becomes a sum of the aims, instruments , and regulations assigned to it; its field of possibilities is delineated by its dependencies and synergies with other practices, disciplines, and institutions. InthisperspectiveLefebvrewouldagreewithTafuri’sprogram,publishedthree years earlier in the journal Contropiano, to disclose the origin, development, and end of modern architecture as a project “to resolve, on the level of an ideology all the more insidious because it lies entirely within concrete activities and real production cycles, the imbalances, contradictions and delays typical of the capitalist reorganization of the world market.”7 Developing this argument in Architecture and Utopia (1973), Tafuri identified the role of the modern movement in architecture as the final step in the Enlightenment’s venture of the creative destruction of the feudal city, aimed at clearing the ground for the fully rational capitalist planning , accommodating the shock of everyday life in the modern metropolis, and launching a pedagogical endeavor to discipline the subjectivity of urban dwellers according to the daily cycle of production, consumption, and distribution.8 For Tafuri, architects’ position within the social division of labor overdetermines all their operations, making it impossible to reflect with architectural means on the conditions of architectural production. In other words, the project and the critique must be kept apart: in Theories and History of Architecture (1968) Tafuri argued that any attempt at relating them to each other, either by introducing the methods of planning into criticism or by grafting critical tools into the practice of architecture, is bound to fail. This is because the project is always oriented toward novelty, while the critique is always historical and endowed with a demystificatory task, that of recovering “the original functions and ideologies that, in the course of time, define and delimit the role and meaning of architecture.”9 Tafuri’s position was contrasted to that of Lefebvre by Fredric Jameson, who linked them to two different lineages within Marxism. In his essay “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology” (1982), Jameson related Tafuri’s writings from the late 1960s and early 1970s to Althusserian Marxism and the vision of capital’s global domination colonizing the last pockets of resistance (the unconsciousness and the precapitalist agriculture of the Third World), paralleled by a sense of a complete blockage of alternative solutions. Jameson contrasted this reading of Marx’s argument that no qualitative change can arrive until all possibilities of capitalism are exhausted to the positions of Antonio Gramsci and Lefebvre, which were guided by a different claim of Marx: that the conditions of new social relations necessarily mature within the very mode of production they...