Picture for Women, 1979, Jeff Wall
We’ve all been there. We all remember the first time we saw one of those grainy images, each one a single point perspective, whose horizon line divided the image perfectly in the middle and whose vanishing point was precisely and deliberately located smack dab in the middle. Its content was always a building, usually its interior; one made from concrete. At its pinnacle cunning, the image was likewise divided vertically in the middle by some building element, the edge of the building, a mullion, light fixture, trellis, or column. When the grid was not explicitly part of the image, its formal qualities made the gridding of space implicit, legible. The seriousness of all this was, miraculously, it seemed, offset by some element of pop. Whether the Thonet chair in the corner, the vase with flowers, the rack of cooking utensils, it was there; each a perfect proxy for domesticity. The images took the most heroic elements from Mies van der Rohe and borrowing as they did in broad strokes from David Hockney and Richard Hamilton, and specifically and diversely from Jeff Wall’s Picture for Women (certainly), Giorgio Morandi’s Natura Morta series (likely), and Balthus’s Le Passage du Commerce-Saint-André (maybe), produced in any one image a powerful alchemy that gained from its forebears legitimacy from architecture and cultural cache from art. The feeling each image conveyed was paramount, but the architecture represented - if it mattered - looked like Aldo Rossi’s work before he was able to build much. This was a good thing. In a frequent variation - this one a direct import from Mies - the framing put the building (outside now) way down at the bottom, perhaps foregrounding it with more pop imagery, maybe tropical plant life from a Gauguin or workers looking like feudal serfs toiling in a field. With so much sky above, it grounded the building as if to tell us how far we are from the Heavens. It frequently orbited in the realm of camp,1 but was too self-aware and perhaps not committed enough to such an aesthetic to actually go camping; characteristics that made the work even better. There were drawings that played supporting roles: the maniacally elaborate plans, the black and white axonometrics, so labored, and yet somehow sterile, delicately suspended in a place that either captured the madness of the capitalist city or the solemnity always attributed to its alternative. The drawings played a part, for sure, but it was the perspectives that carried the day. Always, the image was located in a square frame, the most elemental, the beginning of architectural form.
It was hard to place, but whatever it was, it was just what we needed. It went against everything we disdained in architectural representation, the solar flares, the photorealism, the flock of birds in the upper left corner, children running, tethered by colored balloons. Happiness. It went against the building as diagram of program-text, which had had us locked in a holding pattern, and took the effort to provide a whole new set of powerful, seductive writing to supplant the former. It, we could infer from the written work that somehow seemed to support the images, went against capitalism. It was, in a word, dogmatic. And we wanted more of it.
When you looked harder you were brought to a website with a .name domain. That single aspect was almost too unreal to believe. Who does that? The images were allegedly coming out of somewhere as nondescript, and yet, as symbolic as Brussels. Their production was a great equalizer: anyone with Photoshop, a Xerox machine, and access to the internet could produce/represent this architecture, so long as they were on board, and educated in the twentieth century avant-garde. Best of all: none of it was ever meant to be built - you can’t get any more against capitalism than that!
So you did what everybody else did, diving headfirst, both into its theory (by way of association) and techniques of representation. You started making at least the representation of your own projects like this. Doing so meant that you had read the books, you were in the know, and you were above all, righteous, fighting the good fight when the rest of the architecture world was running off the rails of capitalist development. You were in deep and everything was going swimmingly.
Not long after you took the plunge, you noticed other people doing the same thing. They were cooler than you, and smarter, but you felt, rather than a poseur, part of the club. And then, like some slow-moving storm, the same books seemed to multiply, showing up on every desk and in every office library. Everyone around you was doing it, reading the books, making the images. Still you paid no mind. Afterall, everyone involved was an elite academic, and this whole thing was catching on. Perhaps it would against all odds and all forces, change business as usual. It wasn’t until you saw an image that was a bit too polished, perhaps as a competition entry for MoMA PS1, that you began to grow weary. Those kinds kept coming, a bit more waterdown with each new instance. Then came the coup de grâce: the firm of the same architect that called for architects to “ride the shockwave of the new economy” was using it. And for a big steel and glass office tower in midtown Manhattan. The fuck. That one hurt. It hurt because it had all looked so good and had meant so much. And it was the only thing we had so we clung to it hard. But just like post-modernism before, which was there and backed by all of this intellectual rigor, and then in a flash the only thing left was the tea kettle from Michael Graves for Target that sits on your stovetop, it too was gone, stylized, commodified, and for that reason, suddenly, conventional. Eventually things reached the point where any project could pass muster, so long as it looked right and perhaps invoked the right set of words or “key” concepts, because doing so gave to any project the same intellectual import that the originals did from architectural modernism and art history. And it continues, speeding up, featured in ArchDaily today and in Time tomorrow.
But what happened? What is happening? Can it explained by something so simple as “she went to the AA and then to Rotterdam,” or “he went to Yale and then to New York?” Could it have been just one misstep in the wrong direction that took the whole thing off course? Or is it otherwise explained by our friend capitalism taking its natural course, with its need for the production and consumption of things, its co-option of novelty, and that it just happened to be that our mode of representation had its ticket called this time around?
When we consider the facts, we can only conclude that a far more sinister activity has been at work, choreographed with one goal: to produce a regime of building without thinking, and therefore without stop. There was one small impediment to this happening; such an ambition could not be achieved without removing once and for all the element of architectural criticism from building production. With such consumable ends, an intermediate but altogether necessary step meant therefore annihilating visual representation as a medium of architectural criticism, its most consumable form. In order to this, it needed to bring its highest form to a level of ubiquity. All of this is almost too much to believe, but entirely true. It becomes crystal clear when we look at the facts logically and chronologically.
It was - the writing and images,2 the whole bit - pitched as the most radical form of criticism of neoliberalist building production, this we all know. What we didn’t know what that it was brought to us by a mole, one man picked for his genius at a young age, trained first at the most appropriate school in Venice, and who would subsequently enter into the hearts and minds of architecture students and practitioners by beginning with the last great anti-capitalist figure in architecture as a point of departure. In accordance with the plan, he was then brought into academia to spread the new gospel elsewhere, taking great yet impressionable minds from the best architecture schools in Europe and America because they were the ones - it was believed - who were most likely to build in the future. He would feed them texts that challenged the current lull in architectural criticism, and feed them images that would be treated as an analog to the texts. The images were a new form of advertising. Dripping with historical and intellectual might, they had the ability to conjure desire seemingly from very little. But their sale was not for a product, nor even the desire to make a building, just to represent one. In order to expedite the process, it was packaged in a formula for reproduction so easy that it needs not repeating, for I began here with its description. What would happen when the pinnacle of architectural representation - one that was commonly understood to be a jolt of criticism of the system - was no longer was able to criticize? When it became pure convention, it would leave no room for representational critique and importantly, nowhere else to turn. When this happens - we are now at the edge of the precipice - the plan will enter its final stage.
All of this is to say that if you believed your project was theoretical archipelago doing its part to fight the formidable forces of capitalist development, you were wrong. Your project isn’t against anything. It is - we’ll soon learn - only for it, and you unwittingly did your small part to inch it along to the point where representation becomes reality. There’s no turning back. Soon style will no longer matter, nor will content or intention. And it will all be built. But how could this be? All the publishing, the conferences, the lectures, the years of domain registration and hosting? Who paid for it? Cemex, Holcim, Lafarge and God.1
1 See, of course, Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp’,” chap. 5 in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London: Penguin Classics, 2009).
2 Could the use of the image itself have been the red herring? Can the deployment of images - and salacious ones at that - only be used in a manner that accelerates capitalist development by the simple fact that they are speculations on an as of yet un built future?Was this all able to evade ourscrutiny for so long due the fact that it presented itself so convincingly as the exact opposite?
3Elia Zenghelis.