The fifth power.
Architecture, another power.
In the field of architecture, the way in which the discipline is approached (academically) and the way in which practice is approached (professionally) must be analysed. We live at the right time to activate this analysis and thus involve the agents.
illustration by the author: the fifth power
Recurrently, we are able to identify the concerns of architects in the form of their doubts. Currently, it is possible to summarize this theme in the questions about fragile disciplinary ethics and politics of production dedicated to the ephemeral. It is possible that not everyone is aware of what I am saying and that is also why this is the right time to act. We can, for an example, by reading the description of the most recent public action from the European institutional spheres, recognise how much we need a change. At the political-government level, the observation of this need for a clear renewal of the issues related to the human habitat is a position made public, but it should be in the perception that the broader community retains from academia and practice, that the discussion should deepen.
In academia is where the practices (and politics) of the discipline are endemically reproduced. Classical teaching ensured that theoretical-practical concepts were transmitted over time, through writings and pedagogies to the future architects, in the form of a curricular normalisation based on the production of agents in the discipline of architecture. It is obvious that the ethical decision depends on each one of these agents after the individual training period in the way they approach the practice of the discipline. However, there are relevant conditions in the training period, registered during the internship period (training) and later manifested in the autonomy of the profession (practice) that I am interested in identifying. Specifically, the teaching practiced in the Western academy (Europe, America), during the period of globalization of the modern movement in its promise of solving social problems inherent to the urban habitat. I argue that, by criticizing the projectual method, first taught and then practiced, we accumulate the necessary framework to initiate the questions, not only about the most recent period in our history, but also about its pedagogical relationship with the most elementary concepts of discipline (eg, does the Vitruvian triad still hold true?).
The project methodology is one of the most powerful tools in the architecture discipline.
From this reading of the foundational components of the discipline, I can invoke broader discussions, where we cannot refuse the inclusion of concepts such as ethics, virtue and principle in the possible repair of the various constituents of the intellectual plane, influenced by the academy. Especially in its dialectic with the modern movement, the decades of submission of architecture to interest and meager morality in the construction of the habitus have now been too long. The territory, the city and the house are models, reproduced in an exemplary way and reflecting above all, the “colonization” of the academic pedagogy, through a vision dependent on the so-called Western knowledge. This repetition of the model is based on politics defended by the “industrialized” way of designing introduced by the modern movement, whether through the approach, the process or the solution. The teached design methodology, but also of thought, is still clearly transported to the decision-making mechanism of political institutions. It is practiced there through their agents, conveniently “colonised” during the period of contact with the academy.
In professional practice, we live in another issue of repetition, first of style and then of the absence of a critical position, both individual and collective. Perhaps there is no possibility of a position, but the fact is that the space is filled with “sermons” that carry the same problems to the answers. Mainly in urbanism the in-depth study of the most relevant issues in the decision process, is constantly avoided. Perhaps due to the lack of appropriate context between mechanisms and agents, it is easier to carry the same assumptions in a good enough attitude than to defend the best solution, as the only solution to the irrefutability of the process. This state of conflict is at the outset a lost opportunity for a fluid and evolutionary construction of the territory, whether applying the elementary knowledge of the discipline, as well as activating suggestions for alternative solutions from other fields of human knowledge. Urbanization, the hierarchy between the means of transport and even parcelation are examples of morphological figures in constant discussion, without a clear position regarding the necessary way to practice architecture by those who must decide. There are exceptions, a few, even fewer than those we find irrefutable.
Power decides architecture and architecture depends exclusively on power. So goes the polis.
To change this paradigm it is necessary to take a stand (individual, collective, unambiguous), where the public, in a notion of community, can be integrated as an interested party and participant in the notion of time and the construction of our contemporary space. Without questioning power, architecture cannot act as a foundation applied to its most elementary cultural dispositions. It is necessary a (re?) evolution of pedagogy, from the institution (academic, professional, associative and governmental, international, national, regional and cultural). Above all, an understanding of power in architecture is needed, starting with the identification of installed, rooted, and subliminal devices. Being able to relate power to the discipline implies being able to identify without any doubts:
- their elementary position, from academic training to professional supervision of an inter-practitioner relationship;
- the conformation of pedagogy, from the classroom, the scientific committee, to the project office (both public and private offices);
- the current disciplinary ethics, from the endemic practice of outdated, conservative or inappropriate concepts, to confrontation with other fields, other disciplines;
To ensure proper accessibility to the process, where architecture can look for approaches and methodologies in formulating its most elementary position in society, this is then the right time to ask: what is the prevailing device in the discipline of architecture? Through this necessary contemporary reflection, I can argue that through the study of the project construction process, we can recognize methodological patterns, rooted and subliminal, that influence interventions and design at an urban scale. The extreme need for revision must start from the study of the project’s own methodology, identifying the classroom and the architectural office as the first place for ambiguous practices. It is urgent to verify the mechanism that drives, prevents or incites us to practice the discipline. It is necessary to question the agents, institutions and publics, directly or indirectly involved in this ethical-political system of creation, which relates architecture as the apparatus that governs the construction of the cultural habitat.
At first, it is relatively easy to agree that architecture, by itself, cannot resolve my assumption. Only after the epistemological reading of the discipline can we invoke arguments of different orders, in addition to other methods, processes and tools, so that the problems are effectively delimited. And it is here that change can happen, before the same solutions are proposed, as happened in other similar moments. The proposal for a critical reading of this context (full of opportunities) must come from a team of allies, complementary, carefully selected in various disciplinary fields:
- in philosophy, analytic, critical;
- in sociology, as a science and systematically methodological;
- in geography, in the reading of positional, pedagogical, political space;
- in design, in systems (investigative, research and problematization).
Imminently intersectional, the critical analysis of this contemporary context on the role of architecture, but above all on the state of the discipline, must still distill a set of questions, organized in a flow of information between agents, intuitions and audiences. This guiding line expands into different positions and unavoidable perspectives:
- the disambiguation between discipline and practice;
- the conditional involvement between the academy, the association and the professional individual;
- the commission, as the conscious and social act of the order in its relationship with the public or private interest.
These beginnings will be evidence of the prevailing devices, and as I intend to demonstrate, a notion of the state of the discipline and practice of architecture.
A critical reading of the state of the discipline of architecture can start with the identification of its dispositifs, in an objective analysis of the prevailing physical, institutional or administrative mechanisms. These structures of knowledge that feed the exercise of power within the social system are the presuppositions that Foucault defines in his 1977 interview “Confessions of the flesh”. The philosopher suggests that these components, generalist, linguistic or non-linguistic (…from speeches to buildings…) take the form of what is necessary and that they always result from its strategic function with any relationship of power. These devices for mediating the direct relationship of the social body with the implicit notion of resistance are in themselves a network, a system, including in their dynamics the consideration of the scientific and the non-scientific. Later, Agamben sums it up: “The device is, in reality, above all, a machine that produces subjectivations, and only as such is it a governing machine.”
The device’s strength is thus related to its existence (position), its epistemic recognition (pedagogy) and its network of social influence (power). As such, I chose as primary devices for problematizing my reflection on the state of the discipline and practice of architecture, the class and the commission:
- the class, in the reading of pedagogy as the disciplinary, individual and collective position;
- the commission, in its demanding ethical position on professional practice.
Architecture is the direct manifestation of the set of powers of the trias politica of antiquity. Perhaps it is time to assume its position as the fourth, or rather the fifth power, since the media are in their place.
Nothing prevents me from invoking Her as The fifth power.