Bound­ary-Work: Scale, Frag­ment, and Totality

William Orr

“The universe is an infinite sphere with its centre everywhere and circumference nowhere.”

Blaise Pascal, Pensées

This famous line from the posthu­mous­ly pub­lished Pen­sées, of sev­en­teenth cen­tu­ry poly­math Blaise Pas­cal, express­es with per­fect suc­cinct­ness, the dis­ori­ent­ing prospect opened up by new sci­en­tif­ic approach­es to cos­mol­o­gy in the ear­ly mod­ern peri­od. Pascal’s sub­ject finds them­self caught between two scalar extremes, the atom­ic and the cos­mic, between which the human body marks an ambigu­ous mean.”1 With­out the cer­tain­ty of an ordered rela­tion between micro and macro­cosm, the sub­ject is left with ambi­gu­i­ty: What will he do then, but per­ceive the appear­ance of the mid­dle of things, in an eter­nal despair of know­ing either their begin­ning or their end.” 

A cen­tu­ry lat­er, the etch­ings of Gio­van­ni Bat­tista Pirane­si express a sim­i­lar­ly dis­ori­ent­ing prospect, this time, in the archi­tec­tur­al terms of a delib­er­ate­ly deranged clas­si­cism. What Man­fre­do Tafu­ri described as Piranesi’s sys­tem­at­ic crit­i­cism of the con­cept of cen­tre’”2 finds its most lit­er­al expres­sion in the mass of archi­tec­tur­al forms piti­less­ly absorbed and deprived of all auton­o­my”3 with­in the frag­men­tary map” of the Cam­po Marzio. Trans­pos­ing Pascal’s terms onto Piranesi’s, we find that, the city is an infi­nite sphere, the cen­tre of which is every­where and the cir­cum­fer­ence nowhere”. For Tafu­ri, this trans­po­si­tion would come with a new social dimen­sion best expressed in the machine uni­verse” of the Carceri d’invenzione (Imag­i­nary Pris­ons). Not only is God’s cre­ation infi­nite­ly beyond human under­stand­ing, but so too increas­ing­ly is the human cre­ation, a world of social and tech­ni­cal insti­tu­tions” extend­ing beyond the bounds of sub­jec­tive com­pre­hen­sion and dis­solv­ing any organ­ic con­nec­tion to the nat­ur­al” world.4

Anoth­er cen­tu­ry and a half lat­er, Archizoom’s No-Stop City (1969) rais­es the same provo­ca­tion to new polem­i­cal heights. The order­ing of the whole (can we even say city”?) in the infi­nite grid of com­mer­cial infra­struc­ture becomes vis­i­ble when the pre­tence to the archi­tec­tur­al scale is aban­doned. Those heav­ier line-weights in the Cam­po Marzio, which iden­ti­fy the out­lines of dis­tinct struc­tures (dif­fi­cult as they are to iden­ti­fy) dis­ap­pear. Only a uni­ver­sal field of columns and dis­joint­ed squig­gles remains with­in the over­ar­ch­ing mega-interior. 

All three of the above exam­ples fea­ture a dis­ori­en­ta­tion of the medi­um scale between two extremes: the incom­pre­hen­si­ble total­i­ty, and the dis­lo­cat­ed frag­ment. In Pascal’s thought, what we might call this antin­o­my of scale” expressed the ali­en­ness of the mate­r­i­al uni­verse as uncov­ered by ear­ly mod­ern sci­ence, the break­down of the pur­port­ed link between micro­cosm and macro­cosm, and in gen­er­al a cri­sis of divine and homo­cen­tric cos­mol­o­gy. In the work of Pirane­si, it car­ries for­ward a sim­i­lar theme of alien­ation, this time point­ing, as Tafu­ri argued, to the self-alien­ation of mod­ern soci­ety as it under­went increas­ing ratio­nal­i­sa­tion and indus­tri­al­i­sa­tion in the eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry. For Pas­cal, the human sub­ject stood between clear extremes, in Pirane­si it is more com­plex. Most obvi­ous­ly the sub­ject is dwarfed by struc­tures and sys­tems beyond rea­son­ing or con­trol; how­ev­er, equal­ly, the sub­ject is con­front­ed by a world of objects, columns, stairs, appa­ra­tus­es, and arte­facts which nor­mal­ly sub­mit to human util­i­ty, but now fill the machine uni­verse” with a kind of alien lit­ter. In Archizoom, the dis­so­lu­tion of the medi­um scale appears to be com­plete, with noth­ing medi­at­ing between the objects—air-conditioners, fur­ni­ture, motorbikes—that lit­ter the floor, and the world-con­tain­er stretch­ing end­less­ly to the hori­zon. From the infin­i­ty of con­sumer prod­ucts to the infi­nite scale of the mar­ket in which they cir­cu­late, the archi­tec­tur­al object had been elim­i­nat­ed and the archi­tec­tur­al sub­ject appeared to be trapped between two scalar extremes, nei­ther of which amenable to dis­ci­pli­nary intervention. 

I have cho­sen this series of exam­ples for two rea­sons: first, because it express­es a mod­ern exis­ten­tial cri­sis in increas­ing­ly dis­ci­pli­nary terms as a cri­sis of the archi­tec­tur­al object and the archi­tec­tur­al scale. Sec­ond, it rep­re­sents the exis­ten­tial cri­sis in increas­ing­ly mate­r­i­al terms as deriv­ing, not mere­ly from mod­ern sci­en­tif­ic ideas, but from changes in the polit­i­cal-eco­nom­ic struc­ture of soci­ety. Tak­en togeth­er, these two aspects sug­gest that mod­ern mate­r­i­al anx­i­eties can appear in dis­ci­pli­nary terms through the prob­lem of scale”. Not only is scale capa­ble of express­ing the de-cen­tring of the human sub­ject from the social and tech­ni­cal world of cap­i­tal­ism, it con­fronts the archi­tect with the de-cen­tring of their dis­ci­pline from the mod­ern pro­duc­tion of the city. For Archizoom’s Andrea Branzi, this de-cen­tring had to be accept­ed and even embraced. With­in the emerg­ing ratio­nal order of the late cap­i­tal­ist world, the inter­me­di­ate scale of archi­tec­ture was no longer rel­e­vant.5

Here we encounter the con­tro­ver­sial notion of the death of archi­tec­ture”, which, as Diane Ghi­rar­do argued, appeared to be dis­cred­it­ed in the fol­low­ing decades by the enor­mous suc­cess of the star­chi­tects”.6 Archizoom had cer­tain­ly tak­en this prob­lem­at­ic to the extreme, far­ther even than their col­leagues in the loose com­mu­ni­ty of Flo­ren­tine Rad­i­cal Archi­tec­ture”. No-Stop City rep­re­sents a kind of reduc­tion absur­dam, a log­i­cal pro­jec­tion of ten­den­cies which, one must admit, nev­er played out in the lit­er­al man­ner imag­ined. Oth­er projects of the same era sug­gest dif­fer­ent, per­haps more real­is­tic” solu­tions to the same quandary. There­fore, in what fol­lows, I would like to bet­ter grasp the nature of this scalar antin­o­my”, and the nature of archi­tec­tur­al respons­es to it, by cov­er­ing sev­er­al oth­er exam­ples: (new-)Brutalism, Archi­gram, and Metabolism. 

Before mov­ing to that mate­r­i­al, how­ev­er, I will define the crit­i­cal and con­cep­tu­al frame­work I believe best explains the dynam­ics involved by draw­ing on the soci­o­log­i­cal con­cept of bound­ary-work” and con­nect­ing it to Man­fre­do Tafuri’s cri­tique of archi­tec­tur­al ide­ol­o­gy as an ide­ol­o­gy of the Plan”. With this frame­work it will become pos­si­ble to grasp how the ambigu­ous rela­tion­ship between part and whole, between frag­ment and total­i­ty, takes on a spe­cif­ic sig­nif­i­cance with­in the cap­i­tal­ist mode of pro­duc­tion, rep­re­sent­ing the extreme polar­i­ty of com­mod­i­ty cir­cu­la­tion: the com­modi­ties themselves—ever-changing and appar­ent­ly infi­nite in number—and the total sys­tem of pro­duc­tion and con­sump­tion through which they cir­cu­late. As argued by Man­fre­do Tafu­ri, this chaot­ic split offered a pro­found chal­lenge to the archi­tec­tur­al dis­ci­pline, which, fac­ing the chaos of indus­tri­al­i­sa­tion and rapid urban growth became increas­ing­ly aware that effec­tive inter­ven­tion at any point in the chain of pro­duc­tion would require a thor­ough reform of the entire sys­tem. With that reform prov­ing impossible—at least under terms set by the discipline—architecture remained in a posi­tion sus­pend­ed uncom­fort­ably between the two poles. Archi­tec­tur­al prac­tices, par­tic­u­lar­ly polem­i­cal and the­o­ret­i­cal prac­tices, con­tin­ued to pro­duce ide­o­log­i­cal respons­es to this chal­lenge by attempt­ing to frame the dis­ci­pline around ide­al scalar bound­aries. These scalar lim­its define the range of com­modi­ties archi­tects seek to pro­duce (or more accu­rate­ly, par­tic­i­pate in the pro­duc­tion there­of), yet the under­ly­ing con­tra­dic­tion remained. Archi­tects try to find a man­age­able scale at which they can sell the object of their prac­tice: the hous­ing block, the detached house, the cap­sule. How­ev­er, in order to do that they also need to reor­gan­ise the urban sys­tem so that it will accept that work: the urban plan, the gar­den-city, or the Plug-In City”. The era of rad­i­cal archi­tec­ture” of the 1960s and 1970s brought this scalar impasse into stark relief, yet, I will argue, its con­tra­dic­tions remain essen­tial­ly the same for the dis­ci­pline today. So long as the cap­i­tal­ism sys­tem remains the dom­i­nant mode of pro­duc­tion in the West, archi­tec­ture will con­tin­ue to occu­py an ambigu­ous and essen­tial­ly con­tra­dic­to­ry posi­tion between ide­al yet elu­sive com­mod­i­ty forms and the reforms nec­es­sary but impos­si­ble to implement.

Disciplinarity, Boundary-Work, and Ideology

If the devel­op­ment of the cap­i­tal­ist mode of pro­duc­tion cre­ates con­tra­dic­tions with­in the archi­tec­tur­al dis­ci­pline, how and in what man­ner does the dis­ci­pline con­front these con­tra­dic­tions? Can we even assume the coher­ence of a dis­ci­pli­nary sub­ject capa­ble of mak­ing a recog­nis­able response, and, if so, to what extent is that sub­ject deter­mined by the very mate­r­i­al rela­tions pro­duc­ing the contradiction?

Tak­ing advan­tage of a for­tu­itous play on words, I would like to intro­duce a con­cept from the soci­ol­o­gy of sci­ence, which can help to frame our prob­lem. Bound­ary-work” defines a kind of dis­ci­pli­nary effort devot­ed to the main­te­nance, exten­sion, and defence of a discipline’s bor­ders and integrity—an active self-pro­duc­tion of the dis­ci­pline by its would-be prac­ti­tion­ers. As we shall see, for archi­tec­ture, an impor­tant form of bound­ary-work involves the lit­er­al draw­ing” and redraw­ing” of the dis­ci­pli­nary bound­aries around dif­fer­ent scales of intervention.

The term was intro­duced by Thomas F. Gieryn as a crit­i­cal tool for under­stand­ing the com­plex and often con­tra­dic­to­ry ways in which dis­ci­plines jus­ti­fy and defend them­selves, par­tic­u­lar­ly to an out­side audi­ence. Gieryn’s exam­ples come from the his­to­ry of sci­ence. The text Bound­ary-work and the Demar­ca­tion of Sci­ence from Non-sci­ence: Strains and Inter­ests in Pro­fes­sion­al Ide­olo­gies of Sci­en­tists” 7, begins with a clear intro­duc­tion to the term and its application: 

The demarcation of science from other intellectual activities—long an analytic problem for philosophers and sociologists—is here examined as a practical problem for scientists. Construction of a boundary between science and varieties of non-science is useful for scientists’ pursuit of professional goals: acquisition of intellectual authority and career opportunities; denial of these resources to “pseudoscientists”; and protection of the autonomy of scientific research from political interference. “Boundary-work” describes an ideological style found in scientists’ attempts to create a public image for science by contrasting it favourably to non-scientific intellectual or technical activities.8

Gieryn imme­di­ate­ly dis­tin­guish­es the term’s appli­ca­tion from debates around the true nature and bound­aries of a dis­ci­pline. Rather, what is in ques­tion are the stakes for prac­ti­tion­ers, their real invest­ment in the dis­ci­pline, and there­fore, in effect, the man­ner in which dis­ci­plines are social­ly con­struct­ed by their agents. Fur­ther­more, these stakes are much more con­crete than a mat­ter of ter­mi­no­log­i­cal clar­i­ty: they define the abil­i­ty of prac­ti­tion­ers to actu­al­ly prac­tice with­in a soci­ety gov­erned by the scarci­ty of resources and com­pe­ti­tion of inter­ests. The above pas­sage refers to an ide­o­log­i­cal style”, which Gieryn fur­ther char­ac­teris­es as a set of rhetor­i­cal prac­tices” that prac­ti­tion­ers employ in order to posi­tion their dis­ci­pline with­in the net­work of forces and pow­er-rela­tions that deter­mine insti­tu­tion­al sup­port and secu­ri­ty. Terms like style” and rhetoric” sug­gest a less than sci­en­tif­ic rigour is at work in sci­en­tists’ own self-pre­sen­ta­tion and posi­tion­ing. This con­tra­dic­tion, it turns out, is fun­da­men­tal, since the shift­ing con­di­tions for prac­tice do not allow for a sta­ble and con­sis­tent dis­ci­pli­nary strategy:

Alternative sets of characteristics available for ideological attribution to science reflect ambivalences or strains within the institution: science can be made to look empirical or theoretical, pure or applied. However, selection of one or another description depends on which characteristics best achieve the demarcation in a way that justifies scientists’ claims to authority or resources. Thus, “science” is no single thing: its boundaries are drawn and redrawn in flexible, historically changing and sometimes ambiguous ways.9

Much has been writ­ten on the spe­cif­ic chal­lenges of the archi­tec­tur­al dis­ci­pline: its depen­dence upon clients and con­struc­tion trades, its sub­servience to devel­op­ers and reg­u­la­tion. All these pres­sures and com­pet­ing fac­tors pro­duce what the bound­ary-work lit­er­a­ture calls strains” upon the dis­ci­pline. At the same time, fol­low­ing Gieryn’s argu­ment, strains are not enough to explain the ide­o­log­i­cal nature of bound­ary-work, which is essen­tial­ly moti­vat­ed by the mate­r­i­al inter­ests” of the dis­ci­pli­nary sub­ject.10 Bound­ary-work is there­fore a com­plex and nego­ti­at­ed process, but at bot­tom, its results are not a prod­uct of log­i­cal coher­ence, con­sis­ten­cy, or even good faith,11 but of pow­er-plays by prac­ti­tion­ers with spe­cif­ic stakes and inter­ests in the social rela­tions of production.

By simul­ta­ne­ous­ly accept­ing the shift­ing and arti­fi­cial nature of dis­ci­plines, while nev­er­the­less con­struct­ing a crit­i­cal per­spec­tive in which to locate and analyse dis­ci­pli­nary sub­jects, Gieryn pro­vides a flex­i­ble and sophis­ti­cat­ed frame­work for crit­i­cal analy­sis. Deploy­ing the con­cept of ide­ol­o­gy” and using inter­est as the dri­ving force behind bound­ary-work, the flu­id char­ac­ter of dis­ci­plines can be grasped as a prod­uct of their basis in mate­r­i­al social relations—rather than of lim­i­ta­tions in sci­en­tif­ic ratio­nal­i­ty per se. 

At this point we can make a con­nec­tion to archi­tec­tur­al dis­course, for, I argue, bound­ary-work pro­vides a use­ful exten­sion to the cri­tique of archi­tec­tur­al ide­ol­o­gy as devel­oped by Man­fre­do Tafu­ri from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s.12 First of all, the con­cept of oper­a­tiv­i­ty”, devel­oped in 1968’s Teorie e sto­ria del’architettura to describe the inter­est­ed char­ac­ter of archi­tec­tur­al crit­i­cism and his­to­ri­ans’ pur­port­ed­ly rig­or­ous con­struc­tion of dis­ci­pli­nary his­to­ry, demon­strates the mutu­al depen­dence between design pro­fes­sion­als and the writ­ers who accom­pa­ny and jus­ti­fy their work.13 Tafu­ri reveals mod­ern archi­tec­tur­al crit­i­cism and his­to­ri­og­ra­phy to be bound­ary-work prac­tices, defin­ing what is and is not, archi­tec­ture”, mak­ing claims on cer­tain fields of pro­duc­tion while exclud­ing others.

How­ev­er, bound­ary-work does not only man­i­fest itself in dis­ci­pli­nary lit­er­a­ture. Design prac­tices them­selves involve bound­ary-work, par­tic­u­lar­ly via projects charged with avant-garde, vision­ary, or crit­i­cal weight. Just like archi­tec­tur­al dis­course, such prac­tices also con­tribute to the pro­duc­tion and posi­tion­ing of the dis­ci­pline with results that effect more tra­di­tion­al prac­tices as well.14 Con­sid­er­ing pri­mar­i­ly the work of the archi­tec­tur­al avant-gardes, but locat­ing it with­in a larg­er dis­ci­pli­nary shift, Tafuri’s cri­tique of archi­tec­tur­al ide­ol­o­gy as begun in Per una crit­i­ca dell’ideologia architet­ton­i­ca” pro­vides the final clue to the dis­ci­pli­nary sig­nif­i­cance of scale.15

One Discipline to Rule Them All

Tafu­ri argued that the com­plex his­to­ry of mod­ern archi­tec­ture, from the sev­en­teenth cen­tu­ry to the mid­dle of the twen­ti­eth rep­re­sents the devel­op­ment of an ide­ol­o­gy of the Plan”, which final­ly takes clear shape at the height of the inter­war Mod­ern Move­ment.16 For Tafu­ri, who drew direct­ly upon Anto­nio Negri’s writ­ing on British econ­o­mist John May­nard Keyenes17, the Plan” takes on more than its usu­al dis­ci­pli­nary sig­nif­i­cance. It also implies the polit­i­cal-eco­nom­ic plan­ning of soci­ety as a whole: 

Starting from problems specific to itself, modern architecture, as a whole, was able to create, even before the mechanisms and theories of Political Economy had created the instruments for it, an ideological climate for fully integrating design, at all levels, into a comprehensive Project aimed at the reorganization of production, distribution and consumption.18

The tra­jec­to­ry of mod­ern archi­tec­ture there­fore involves a reori­en­ta­tion of the dis­ci­pline towards mate­r­i­al rela­tion­ships beyond its tra­di­tion­al bound­aries. This change in ori­en­ta­tion also involves a lit­er­al enlarge­ment of scalar bound­aries to take in entire cities—even entire regions. The impor­tant point to empha­sise here is that this move does not reflect mere mega­lo­ma­nia, but rather recog­ni­tion that archi­tec­tur­al ques­tions could only be addressed as part of a total sys­tem of pro­duc­tion and consumption. 

On this point we have to mark a depar­ture from the rel­a­tivism of Gieryn’s cri­tique of dis­ci­pli­nar­i­ty. A basic premise of exam­in­ing dis­ci­pli­nary pro­duc­tion under the terms of bound­ary-work” holds that dis­ci­pli­nary content—to use Gieryn’s exam­ple, sci­en­tif­ic truth—is social­ly con­struct­ed. Gieryn does not pre-judge the legit­i­ma­cy of rival claims to sci­en­tifici­ty. As an exam­ple, this means treat­ing a nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry debate between phre­nol­o­gists and anatomists as a con­test of rhetoric and polit­i­cal pres­sure, rather than truth and false­hood.19 Nev­er­the­less, the analy­sis of bound­ary-work can escape pure rel­a­tivism by mov­ing to the lev­el of the social forces and mate­r­i­al inter­ests moti­vat­ing dis­ci­pli­nary sub­jects. Truth can be found at the lev­el of polit­i­cal econ­o­my and ulti­mate­ly, his­tor­i­cal mate­ri­al­ism.20 Here lies the prob­lem: in Negri’s writ­ing on Keynes and in Tafuri’s writ­ing on the Mod­ern Move­ment, the Plan” rep­re­sents a sci­en­tif­ic approach to polit­i­cal econ­o­my. This cre­ates a para­dox unless we are will­ing to grant a dif­fer­ent kind of dis­ci­pli­nar­i­ty to polit­i­cal economy. 

To put it anoth­er way, if bound­ary-work is real­ly just a dis­ci­pli­nary sales pitch with­in the mar­ket­place of ideas, the Plan” is para­dox­i­cal because it attempts to sell the end of that mar­ket­place, the end of sales pitch­es, as one more sales pitch. We can see this para­dox at work, for instance, in Le Corbusier’s attempts to sell the social­i­sa­tion of prop­er­ty to banks, indus­tri­al cap­i­tal, and bour­geois gov­ern­ments, as a solu­tion to the polit­i­cal cri­sis of indus­tri­al urban­i­sa­tion.21 But this is real­ly the para­dox of Keye­n­e­sian plan­ning accord­ing to Negri, which he described as cap­i­tal [turn­ing] to Marx, or at least [learn­ing] to read Das Kap­i­tal”.22

With­out trav­el­ling fur­ther down the rab­bit hole, what are we to make of this? Only that a kind of truth test did come into play with the Mod­ern Movement’s ide­ol­o­gy of the Plan”. Plan­ning had to work, it had to actu­al­ly reor­gan­ise pro­duc­tion and con­sump­tion as an effec­tive anti­dote to a real cri­sis of cap­i­tal­ism. That cri­sis had become pal­pa­ble through urban issues like the hous­ing prob­lem, but it would become unmis­take­able with the Sovi­et Rev­o­lu­tion and the Great Depres­sion. If the archi­tec­tur­al dis­ci­pline were able to pull off this one last sales pitch, it would effec­tive­ly cement the tran­scen­den­tal char­ac­ter of archi­tec­ture as uni­ver­sal dis­ci­pline: the key to every­thing.”23

In this way, the Mod­ern Move­ment attempt­ed a qual­i­ta­tive change, which of neces­si­ty forced a quan­ti­ta­tive change. It tried to extend its dis­ci­pli­nary bound­ary to include the eco­nom­ic organ­i­sa­tion of soci­ety at all lev­els and all scales. Its cen­tre would be every­where and cir­cum­fer­ence nowhere. Tafu­ri described the integration:

From the standardized part and the cell to the single block, the Siedlung, and finally to the city: such is the assembly line that architectural culture devised between the wars with exceptional clarity and consistency. Each “piece” in the line is fully resolved and tends to disappear or, better yet, to dissolve formally in the assembly.24

How­ev­er, such ide­al pro­pos­als were only pos­si­ble for a brief peri­od before the dis­ci­pline ran into larg­er forces and inter­ests unmoved by the mod­ernist sales pitch. Tafu­ri describes how the real­i­ty of the Plan, through gov­ern­men­tal imple­men­ta­tion of Keye­n­e­sian eco­nom­ic poli­cies, over­took and dis­placed the vision­ary and utopi­an sug­ges­tions of archi­tects. Le Corbusier’s dis­ci­pli­nary-cum-polit­i­cal man­i­festo Archi­tec­ture or Rev­o­lu­tion,” was side­lined by the Wel­fare State’s third way: the imple­men­ta­tion of demand-side poli­cies and a pub­lic plan­ning and build­ing sec­tor in which archi­tec­tur­al vision would be sub­or­di­nat­ed to prac­ti­cal util­i­ty. Tafu­ri blunt­ly described this rever­sal: once the Plan came with­in the scope of the gen­er­al reor­ga­ni­za­tion of pro­duc­tion, archi­tec­ture and urban plan­ning would become its objects, not its sub­jects.”25

In this way, Tafu­ri describes a failed bound­ary-work project, per­haps the most ambi­tious under­tak­en by any dis­ci­pline in mod­ern his­to­ry. After its fail­ure, Tafu­ri appeared to hold lit­tle hope for redemp­tion since the only way out from architecture’s his­tor­i­cal check­mate had proven futile. In the scalar terms of this essay, the way to guar­an­tee a secure dis­ci­pli­nary bound­ary would have been to draw the line around the entire­ty of human pro­duc­tion and con­sump­tion. Yet the exam­ples we are inter­est­ed in, the projects of the 1960s and 1970s with their con­tem­po­rary res­o­nance, appear, at least super­fi­cial­ly, to extend beyond the fail­ure of the Mod­ern Move­ment into new dis­ci­pli­nary directions. 

I believe bound­ary-work” offers a ver­sa­tile con­cep­tu­al frame­work for main­tain­ing the terms of Tafuri’s cri­tique of ide­ol­o­gy beyond the lim­its of the Mod­ern Movement—particularly where scale remains a fun­da­men­tal prob­lem. This is par­tic­u­lar­ly cru­cial when con­sid­er­ing that Wel­fare State eco­nom­ic plan­ning itself had its lim­its, col­laps­ing in the lat­ter decades of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. In what is gen­er­al­ly referred to as the neo-lib­er­al era, scalar antin­o­mies return with a vengeance. When released from anti-cycli­cal reg­u­la­to­ry poli­cies and with­out the sup­port of a pub­lic build­ing sec­tor, the chaos of cap­i­tal­ist pro­duc­tion and con­sump­tion con­fronts archi­tects with a stark new dichoto­my between the ide­al scales of inter­ven­tion: the con­sumer com­mod­i­ty, and the unruly mar­ket sys­tem which refus­es to offer archi­tects a slice of the pie.

Radical Architecture and the Libertarian Paradox

Reyn­er Banham’s A Home is Not a House” stands neck-beard to neck-beard with oth­er works of lib­er­tar­i­an fan­ta­sy, such as Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged or Ken­neth Neumeyer’s Sail­ing the Farm.26 Where the lat­ter two launch their ideals of free­dom upon the rails or the sea, Ban­ham is inter­est­ed in the less grandiose trans­port of roads and high­ways. Tak­ing to Amer­i­can cul­ture with the fanati­cism of the con­vert, Ban­ham extrap­o­lates on the ideas of Buck­min­ster Fuller, com­bin­ing them with what he sees as the suc­cess of the mobile home enjoyed by untold thou­sands of Amer­i­cans”. He projects a future of shel­ter com­plete­ly lib­er­at­ed from infra­struc­ture and human settlement: 

If someone could devise a package that would effectively disconnect the mobile home from the dangling wires of the town electricity supply, the bottled gas containers insecurely perched on a packing case and the semi-unspeakable sanitary arrangements that stem from not being connected to the main sewer—then we should really see some changes. It may not be so far away either; defense cutbacks may send aerospace spin-off spinning in some new directions …27

In real­i­ty, the fol­low­ing years would see that spend­ing come spin­ning” down on Viet­nam and Laos in the form of the largest bomb­ing cam­paign in his­to­ry. No archi­tec­tur­al-indus­tri­al com­plex was to take the place of the mil­i­tary-indus­tri­al com­plex. For its his­tor­i­cal and geopo­lit­i­cal myopia as much as its archi­tec­tur­al hyper­opia, this pas­sage might stand as the most clue­less piece of archi­tec­tur­al crit­i­cism ever pub­lished. How­ev­er, as bound­ary-work, it is per­fect­ly rational. 

Fol­low­ing the explo­sion of con­sumer mar­kets brought on by pre­cise­ly the demand-side eco­nom­ic poli­cies described above, a num­ber of archi­tects were quick to recog­nise a lucra­tive new dis­ci­pli­nary pos­si­bil­i­ty: archi­tec­ture as con­sumer prod­uct. The inte­gra­tion of archi­tec­ture into a reor­gan­ised indus­tri­al build­ing sec­tor had of course been an essen­tial pro­pos­al of the Mod­ern Move­ment. What was dif­fer­ent in the work of Buck­min­ster Fuller and the many who fol­lowed decades lat­er, was a focus on the auton­o­my of the archi­tec­tur­al object as a con­sumer prod­uct that could be made inde­pen­dent of the usu­al plan­ning and infra­struc­ture dif­fi­cul­ties. Fuller’s sales pitch required only a reor­gan­i­sa­tion of dis­tri­b­u­tion and pro­duc­tion with­in the fac­to­ry. With no real plan­ning required—not even at the lev­el of plumbing—the Dymax­ion House (1933) offered a com­plete­ly atom­ised con­sumer solution.

Stand­ing simul­ta­ne­ous­ly as a dis­ci­pli­nary rad­i­cal and an indi­vid­ual entre­pre­neur, what Fuller need­ed to do, in the tra­di­tion of the British mechan­i­cal inven­tors of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, was to patent his inven­tion and demon­strate its prac­ti­ca­bil­i­ty to an indus­try buy­er. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, as Ban­ham men­tioned, the prac­ti­cal­i­ties of plumb­ing (among many oth­er things) remained insur­mount­able obsta­cles. Still, with the Dymax­ion deploy­ment unit (1940), Fuller’s cre­ations did attract a lim­it­ed por­tion of mil­i­tary spending.

Alli­son and Peter Smithson’s House of the Future, pro­duced in mock-up for the 1956 Dai­ly Mail Ide­al Home Exhi­bi­tion, sug­gests a fur­ther devel­op­ment of the same bound­ary-work tac­tic. In the H.O.F.”, all inte­ri­or func­tions and appli­ances are built-in. Beat­riz Colom­i­na described how the project trans­lat­ed ear­li­er mod­ernist exper­i­ments in indus­tri­alised and mod­u­lar hous­ing into a new form:

A plastic version of the 1920s dream of the industrialized house then. But the dream was no longer of a series of standard elements that could be combined in different ways to produce different houses. Rather, the dream was of a series of unique molded shapes that could fit together in only one form. Prefabrication in the H.O.F. doesn’t represent infinite flexibility but a singular, self-supporting shape, which will, like any other consumer product, be abandoned as soon as a new model comes out.28

Here we can see the com­mod­i­ty log­ic of the Dymax­ion house clar­i­fied in order to match the advanced com­mod­i­ty log­ic of the post-war peri­od. A total­ly inte­grat­ed archi­tec­tur­al sys­tem, mod­elled after the auto­mo­bile, would elim­i­nate fur­ther com­mod­i­ty sup­ple­men­ta­tion. With­out need for fur­ni­ture and appli­ances, the con­sumer dwelling unit would become a uni­ver­sal com­mod­i­ty, absorb­ing into itself an enor­mous con­sumer prod­uct sec­tor. At the same time, its per­fec­tion and inflex­i­bil­i­ty would neces­si­tate replace­ment when needs, mate­r­i­al or oth­er­wise, changed. In this case the dis­ci­pli­nary bound­ary is drawn at the small phys­i­cal scale of the home, but nev­er­the­less rep­re­sents an extreme expan­sion of the bound­ary in real mate­r­i­al terms. 

The weak­ness of the project, how­ev­er, was easy to find, for it lay at pre­cise­ly the same scalar bound­ary bedev­illing ear­li­er attempts: how are indi­vid­ual units to be aggre­gat­ed and organ­ised? The Smith­sons’ pro­pos­al, a matt-clus­ter” with cir­cu­la­tion of the most rudi­men­ta­ry and inflex­i­ble kind, reveals the inabil­i­ty of such ide­al com­mod­i­ty scale solu­tions to simul­ta­ne­ous­ly address plan­ning and infra­struc­tur­al questions.

Enter the megas­truc­ture. As Tafu­ri argued, Le Corbusier’s Obus Plan for Algiers already achieved the most advanced the­o­ret­i­cal hypoth­e­sis of mod­ern urban­ism” in 1931. Corb broke the unbro­ken asso­cia­tive chain of archi­tec­ture-neigh­bor­hood-city” by archi­tec­tural­is­ing the entire sys­tem.29 But this solu­tion would be explored in greater detail in the work of Yona Fried­man, the Metabolists, and Archi­gram decades lat­er. The latter’s Plug-In City (1963 to 1966) demon­strates most clear­ly the scalar con­tra­dic­tion that inevitably results. Focussing on the pod-form of the indi­vid­ual dwelling unit, Archi­gram sought to project an ide­al lifestyle prod­uct: flex­i­ble to whim and fash­ion, expres­sive and mobile. How­ev­er, such pods could not be insert­ed direct­ly into the city as it exist­ed. A new sys­tem of ports and inter­faces would be required. There­fore, the full inte­gra­tion of archi­tec­ture into mod­ern con­sumer culture—a far from rev­o­lu­tion­ary proposition—required an infra­struc­tur­al trans­for­ma­tion hard­ly imag­ined by even the most ardent social­ist plan­ners. Plug-In City express­es per­fect­ly the para­dox of free-mar­ket lib­er­tar­i­an­ism: absolute free­dom of the indi­vid­ual requires the most extreme total­i­tar­i­an sys­tem to sup­port and guar­an­tee the prop­er­ty rights on which such indi­vid­u­als depend. Trans­lat­ed into archi­tec­tur­al terms, Plug-In City pro­vides a dia­gram of this extreme con­tra­dic­tion. Its colour­ful illus­tra­tions sell this cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance as an aes­thet­ic value.

Not all megas­truc­tur­al projects proud­ly exhib­it this lev­el of ide­o­log­i­cal baf­fle­ment. A more seri­ous pro­gramme can be read in projects of the Metabolist group. In Ken­zo Tange and the Mod­ern Move­ment, Zhongjie Lin describes how the eco­nom­ic, polit­i­cal, and dis­ci­pli­nary con­straints the Metabolists faced in post-war Japan were man­i­fest in Tokyo’s accel­er­at­ed and unplanned expan­sion on a feu­dal pat­tern unchanged by incom­plete and unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic process­es of land reform.30 Lin places Ara­ta Isozaki’s City in the Air in this con­text, quot­ing the archi­tect: an emp­ty lot of about 10 square meters is all I need on the ground. I will erect a col­umn there, and that col­umn will be both a struc­tur­al col­umn and a chan­nel for ver­ti­cal cir­cu­la­tion.” Above that min­i­mal plot, the project branch­es out into a high­ly ordered urban net­work, com­plete­ly free of the com­plex con­straints that hold the ground.

Metabolist megas­truc­ture projects like the City in the Air, are not ide­al cities unto them­selves, but an ide­al sup­ple­ment to an exist­ing, less-than-ide­al city. As Japan­ese soci­ety tran­si­tioned (under Amer­i­can direc­tion) almost straight from late feu­dal­ism into neolib­er­al­ism, the era of the Plan” was large­ly fore­closed. With no prospect for a planned reor­gan­i­sa­tion of the city of the kind sought by the Euro­pean Mod­ern Move­ment, the Metabolists inter­nalised plan­ning with­in the para­dox­i­cal scale of their archi­tec­ture. Simul­ta­ne­ous­ly occu­py­ing a small plot of land—theoretically requir­ing lit­tle reform to prop­er­ty rela­tions with­in the city—the project is nonethe­less capa­ble of expand­ing into an artic­u­lat­ed urban infra­struc­ture. In effect, the Metabolists cre­at­ed an ide­ol­o­gy of the Plan” the­o­ret­i­cal­ly inde­pen­dent from real plan­ning. Metabolist archi­tects could assign their projects dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal log­ics, from social­ism to neo-feu­dal­ism,31 because the project exists as an imag­i­nary appendage to the polit­i­cal-eco­nom­ic real­i­ty of the city. 

Famil­iar con­tra­dic­tions do, how­ev­er, reap­pear at the lev­el of the meta­bol­ic” unit, the pod, or cap­sule”. Despite appeals to Japan­ese tra­di­tion or to the trans-dis­ci­pli­nary author­i­ty of sci­en­tif­ic biol­o­gy, the obvi­ous metab­o­lism” at stake in the Metabolist project is the metab­o­lism of the busi­ness cycle. Turn-over of cap­sules, like dis­card­ing one House of the Future in order to buy the next, ful­fil the sys­temic need to con­tin­u­ous­ly extend and renew con­sumer mar­kets. In the end, the plan­ning at stake is planned obso­les­cence,” and yet even this kind plan­ning would prove utopi­an! Despite the unique com­pro­mise of their bound­ary-work, the Metabolists could no more achieve the nec­es­sary bound­ary redraw­ing required to inte­grate their rec­om­men­da­tions favourably into a new pro­duc­tion and con­sump­tion cycle. Indi­vid­ual cap­sules of the Nak­a­gin Cap­sule Tow­er nev­er had the chance to ful­fil this aspect of their func­tion. Instead, the entire struc­ture rapid­ly obsolesced.

The Truly Radical Scale

Thus we return to Archizoom’s No-Stop City as ulti­mate expres­sion of the dis­so­lu­tion of archi­tec­ture into the twin infini­ties of com­mod­i­ty and mar­ket. How­ev­er, as should be obvi­ous, as an archi­tect will­ing to accept this con­se­quence Branzi proved to be in the minor­i­ty. Shar­ing the Ital­ian archi­tec­tur­al scene, a dif­fer­ent move­ment pur­sued what appeared to be the oppo­site solu­tion: dis­ci­pli­nary retrench­ment around tra­di­tion­al, even archa­ic bound­aries. In stark­est pos­si­ble con­trast, Aldo Rossi’s the­o­ry of archi­tec­ture and the city delib­er­ate­ly cen­tres on the medi­um-scale of the urban arte­fact”.32 In An Ital­ian Querelle: Rad­i­cal vs. Ten­den­za”,33 Pablo Martínez Capdev­ila describes this debate over the nature of the archi­tec­tur­al dis­ci­pline. On the side of the Ten­den­za, Rossi’s lieu­tenant Mas­si­mo Sco­lari attacked Branzi and the Rad­i­cal group for their dis­ci­pli­nary ambi­gu­i­ty, a charge that real­ly came down to the lack of any medi­um scale with­in their projects.34 For Branzi, it was a mat­ter of read­ing the direc­tion of advanced cap­i­tal­ist devel­op­ment and accept­ing the consequences.

Telling­ly, both Branzi and Sco­lari make claims for their dif­fer­ing dis­ci­pli­nary posi­tions on the grounds of rea­son, even, in the case of Sco­lari, sci­en­tif­ic rigour. Writ­ing in Casabel­la, Branzi express­es sur­prise that Archizoom’s own No-Stop City, which stands at this date as the most rad­i­cal appli­ca­tion of the very con­cept of ratio­nal archi­tec­ture,’ could be crit­i­cized in a pub­li­ca­tion that advo­cates ratio­nal archi­tec­ture.”35 For Branzi, rea­son dic­tat­ed that archi­tec­ture no longer mat­tered as an autonomous dis­ci­pline, while for the Ten­den­za, the fac­tic­i­ty of archi­tec­ture” as a uni­ver­sal and nec­es­sary” part of human civil­i­sa­tion36 pro­vid­ed the oppo­site con­clu­sion. Inter­est­ing­ly, and cer­tain­ly in keep­ing with Gieryn’s descrip­tion of the ambi­gu­i­ty of sci­en­tif­ic bound­ary-work, the lat­ter argu­ment, in spite of its obvi­ous log­i­cal incon­sis­ten­cies, proved vic­to­ri­ous. From the sev­en­ties to the eight­ies, the Ten­den­za grew in promi­nence, gain­ing dis­ci­pli­nary recog­ni­tion, an inter­na­tion­al fol­low­ing, and, in some cas­es at least, archi­tec­tur­al com­mis­sions. On the oth­er side, the rad­i­cals made their own log­i­cal dis­ci­pli­nary move, accept­ing the scalar con­se­quences of their analy­sis and aban­don­ing archi­tec­ture for design”. The lines were clear­ly drawn in 1973 at the 15th Milan Triennale:

the Tendenza established itself as the hegemonic movement of Italian architecture. While Rossi curated the international architecture section of the Triennale, Radicals Andrea Branzi and Ettore Sottsass curated the design section, foretelling the fate that awaited the many Radicals who would thereafter focus primarily on furniture and product design.37

Yet, at first, and despite their dif­fer­ent dis­ci­pli­nary goals, both the Rad­i­cals and the Ten­den­za pur­sued the same ini­tial dis­ci­pli­nary tac­tic. They drew their bound­aries through the medi­um of draw­ing—not in the tra­di­tion­al man­ner of the archi­tec­tur­al draw­ing sub­mit­ted to the client as part of a build­ing project, but as a bound­ary-work project tout court. As a work of art, paper archi­tec­ture”, the draw­ing can func­tion as a meta-prod­uct. As such it stands as a com­mod­i­ty inde­pen­dent of the build­ing sec­tor alto­geth­er, while con­tin­u­ing to rep­re­sent, and, in a sense, sell archi­tec­ture.” It is impor­tant to recall here that this same tac­tic had been Piranesi’s, whose fan­ci­ful depic­tions of Rome quick­ly sold to eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry tourists, for in Pirane­si the atten­tion to the mar­ket was nev­er sep­a­rat­ed from a pro­gram­mat­ic intent”.38

Despite indi­vid­ual suc­cess­es like Piranesi’s, the archi­tec­tur­al draw­ing as art com­mod­i­ty rep­re­sents the last redoubt of dis­ci­pli­nary boundary-work—the small­est of all scales and the thinnest in terms of insti­tu­tion­al sup­port and resources. Not intend­ing to remain at this lev­el, both the Rad­i­cals and the Ten­den­za trans­lat­ed their bound­ary-work into dif­fer­ent forms of pro­duc­tion. Yet in both cas­es, espe­cial­ly the lat­ter, draw­ing remained fun­da­men­tal. The Ten­den­za, most promi­nent­ly Aldo Rossi, was able to use draw­ing as a means to rein­vest in the architect’s pow­er to gen­er­ate added val­ue. Pro­ceed­ing simul­ta­ne­ous­ly through draw­ings, paint­ings, and design work, the for­mer act­ed as sup­ple­ment to the lat­ter. The scalar rela­tion­ship between archi­tec­ture and the city” was recon­struct­ed through the draw­ing by lever­ag­ing the architect’s artis­tic and indi­vid­ual inter­pre­ta­tion of the common—see for exam­ple Rossi’s con­tin­u­ous draw­ing and redraw­ing of urban arte­facts” from his youth. The unique author­i­ty of the archi­tect as artist is what actu­al­ly gave the sup­pos­ed­ly ratio­nal and com­mu­nal urban-arte­fact” its value.

Seen in this light the tra­di­tion­al medi­um scale of archi­tec­ture” was only recu­per­at­ed through the sup­ple­men­tary scale of the draw­ing itself as art-commodity—a kind of impor­tant but often over­looked bound­ary-work. But we can find a deep­er expla­na­tion for why this was pos­si­ble. At the buyer’s end of the eco­nom­ic exchange, the enor­mous explo­sion of real-estate and finan­cial invest­ment which occurred after the neo-lib­er­al switch from demand to sup­ply-side eco­nom­ics pro­vid­ed the fer­tile soil for a wave of new archi­tec­tur­al projects. This mar­ket explo­sion ele­vat­ed an elite group of dis­ci­pli­nary prac­ti­tion­ers to new heights of fame and for­tune: the star­chi­tects”. Thus after both vision­ary and real wel­fare state plan­ning end­ed, even after the total mar­ket ratio­nal­i­sa­tion envis­aged by No-Stop City proved utopi­an, the new real-estate invest­ment dynam­ics of gen­tri­fi­ca­tion pro­vid­ed the answer to the scalar antin­o­my: from the hum­ble­ness of the Airbnb con­ver­sion to the Big­ness” of the star­chi­tects”, new polit­i­cal-eco­nom­ic real­i­ties offered the dis­ci­pline new scales and new oppor­tu­ni­ties for bound­ary-work. But only for a time.

Material Impasse

As revealed by the finan­cial crash of 2008, and the more recent and pre­cip­i­tous Covid crash”, crises are endem­ic to cap­i­tal­ism. Archi­tects again find them­selves on the brink of dis­as­ter. Trapped inside their live-work apart­ments, they again draw the bound­ary around the tight con­fines of their home, or extend it to cov­er the entire globe. Visions of cap­sules and megas­truc­tures inevitably return. As Tom Daniell remarked in 2012: Whether due to pure admi­ra­tion or latent envy, the eter­nal return of projects by Archi­gram, Archizoom, Super­stu­dio, Team X, Yona Fried­man, Con­stant Nieuwen­huys, Cedric Price, ear­ly OMA, and so on, sug­gests that there is a block­age in the metab­o­lism of archi­tec­tur­al dis­course itself.39

The block­age is mate­r­i­al. The dis­junc­tion between the macro-scale and the micro-scale exem­pli­fied in works of rad­i­cal archi­tec­ture”, is at bot­tom an expres­sion of the fun­da­men­tal con­tra­dic­tion of cap­i­tal­ism: between the social­i­sa­tion of pro­duc­tion and the pri­vate appro­pri­a­tion of its sur­plus, or between the plan­ning with­in indi­vid­ual cap­i­tal firms and the chaos of the cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem as a whole. There can be no organ­ised total­i­ty under cap­i­tal­ism, nor can there be a sys­tem­at­ic inte­gra­tion across its scales: glob­al, nation­al, region­al, urban, or domes­tic. Until there is a fun­da­men­tal change to the mate­r­i­al struc­ture of soci­ety, archi­tects will remain trapped in the scalar antin­o­my, forced to draw and redraw their bound­aries for a shift­ing and alien mar­ket. The split between com­mod­i­ty and mar­ket rep­re­sents the uncon­scious ide­o­log­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance of archi­tec­tur­al scale” in gen­er­al, and a mate­r­i­al cause of the dis­ci­plines ongo­ing precarity.

  1. 1

    For in fact what is man in nature? A Noth­ing in com­par­i­son with the Infi­nite, an All in com­par­i­son with the Noth­ing, a mean between noth­ing and every­thing. Since he is infi­nite­ly removed from com­pre­hend­ing the extremes, the end of things and their begin­ning are hope­less­ly hid­den from him in an impen­e­tra­ble secret, he is equal­ly inca­pable of see­ing the Noth­ing from which he was made, and the Infi­nite in which he is swal­lowed up.” Blaise Pas­cal, Pen­sées, trans. W.F. Trot­ter (New York: P.F. Col­lier, 1910), 27.

  2. 2

    Man­fre­do Tafu­ri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, trans. Pel­le­gri­no d’Aciero and Robert Con­nol­ly (Cam­bridge, Mass.:MIT Press: 1990), 27.

  3. 3

    Man­fre­do Tafu­ri, Toward a Cri­tique of Archi­tec­tur­al Ide­ol­o­gy,” trans. Stephen Sartarel­li, in Archi­tec­ture The­o­ry since 1968, ed. K. Michael Hays (Cam­bridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 10.

  4. 4

    Tafu­ri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, 32.

  5. 5

    Pablo Martínez Capdev­ila, An Ital­ian Querelle: Rad­i­cal vs. Ten­den­za,” Log, no. 40 (Spring/Summer 2017): 74.

  6. 6

    Diane Y. Ghi­rar­do, Man­fre­do Tafu­ri and Archi­tec­ture The­o­ry in the U.S., 1970–2000,” Per­spec­ta 33 (2002): 39.

  7. 7

    Thomas F. Gieryn, Bound­ary-work and the Demar­ca­tion of Sci­ence from Non-sci­ence: Strains and Inter­ests in Pro­fes­sion­al Ide­olo­gies of Sci­en­tists,” Amer­i­can Soci­o­log­i­cal Review 48, no. 6. (Dec. 1983): 781–795.

  8. 8

    Gieryn, Bound­ary-work,” 781.

  9. 9

    Gieryn, Bound­ary-work,” 781.

  10. 10

    Gieryn, Bound­ary-work,” 792.

  11. 11

    Gieryn, 787.“Boundary-work,”

  12. 12

    In choos­ing these spe­cif­ic years, I inten­tion­al­ly dis­tin­guish the work of this peri­od from the lat­er work in which Tafuri’s choice of con­cep­tu­al ref­er­ences moved fur­ther away from mate­ri­al­ism and Marx. I also group Teorie e sto­ria more close­ly with the work of the Marx­ist peri­od than chronol­o­gy alone should allow. This is because I believe there is a stronger con­ti­nu­ity here than is gen­er­al­ly accept­ed by lat­er reflec­tions based on the 1980 trans­la­tion: The­o­ries and His­to­ry. For a full account of my argu­ment, please see the chap­ter Tafu­ri for Mil­i­tants” in: William Hutchins Orr, Coun­ter­re­al­i­sa­tion: Archi­tec­tur­al Ide­ol­o­gy from Plan to Project” (PhD the­sis, Archi­tec­tur­al Asso­ci­a­tion and The Open Uni­ver­si­ty, 2019), 43–83, http://oro.open.ac.uk/61433/.

  13. 13

    Man­fre­do Tafu­ri, Teorie e sto­ria dell’architettura (Bari: Lat­erza, 1968). The book went through sev­er­al edi­tions before being trans­lat­ed into Eng­lish in 1980: Man­fre­do Tafu­ri, The­o­ries and His­to­ry of Archi­tec­ture, trans. Gior­gio Ver­rec­chia (Lon­don: Grana­da, 1980).

  14. 14

    This sort of rela­tion­ship has been described by soci­ol­o­gist Howard Beck­er as a dynam­ic com­mon among dis­ci­plines on the bound­ary between art” and craft”: Crafts ordi­nar­i­ly divide along the line between the ordi­nary crafts­man try­ing to do decent work and make a liv­ing and the artist-crafts­man with more ambi­tious goals and ide­olo­gies. Ordi­nary crafts­men usu­al­ly respect artist-crafts­men and see them as the source of inno­va­tion and orig­i­nal ideas.” Howard S. Beck­er, Arts and Craft,” Amer­i­can Jour­nal of Soci­ol­o­gy 83, no. 4 (Jan. 1978): 866.

  15. 15

    Man­fre­do Tafu­ri, Per una crit­i­ca dell’ideologia architet­ton­i­ca,” Con­tropi­ano 1 (1969): 31–79.

  16. 16

    Tafu­ri, Toward a Critique 
    of Archi­tec­tur­al Ide­ol­o­gy,” 15.

  17. 17

    Anto­nio Negri, La teorie cap­i­tal­is­ti­ca nel 29: John M. Keynes,” Con­tropi­ano 1 (1968): 3–40; Anto­nio Negri, Keynes and the Cap­i­tal­ist The­o­ry of the State, Post-1929,” in Rev­o­lu­tion Retrieved: Writ­ings on Marx, Keynes, Cap­i­tal­ist Cri­sis, and New Social Sub­jects (1967–83) (Lon­don: Red Notes, 1988), 5–42.

  18. 18

    Tafu­ri, Toward a Cri­tique of Archi­tec­tur­al Ide­ol­o­gy,” 15.

  19. 19

    Gieryn, Bound­ary-work,” 787–789.

  20. 20

    Gieryn cites Marx for the the­o­ry of ide­ol­o­gy as moti­vat­ed by inter­est: Gieryn, Bound­ary-work,” 782. I fol­low this open­ing to its log­i­cal conclusions.

  21. 21

    Le Cor­busier, Archi­tec­ture or Rev­o­lu­tion,” in Towards a New Archi­tec­ture, trans. Fredrick Etchells (New York: Dover, 1986), 7–14, 249–269. The case is made more force­ful­ly in points 72, 73, 91, 93, 94, and 95 of the Athens Char­ter: Le Cor­busier, The Athens Char­ter, trans. Antho­ny Eard­ly (New York, NY: Gross­man, 1973), 93–105.

  22. 22

    Negri, Keynes,” 12–13.

  23. 23

    Point 92 of: Le Cor­busier, The Athens
    Char­ter
    , 104.

  24. 24

    Tafu­ri, Toward a Cri­tique of Archi­tec­tur­al Ide­ol­o­gy,” 21.

  25. 25

    Tafu­ri, Toward a Cri­tique of Archi­tec­tur­al Ide­ol­o­gy,” 21.

  26. 26

    Reyn­er Ban­ham, A Home is Not a House,” Art in Amer­i­ca no. 2 (1965): 70–79. Ken­neth Neumey­er is cred­it­ed with devel­op­ing the idea of seast­eading” in: Sail­ing the Farm (Berke­ley, CA.: 10 Speed Press, 1981).

  27. 27

    Ban­ham, A Home is Not a House,” 74–75.

  28. 28

    Beat­riz Colom­i­na, Unbreathed Air 1956,” Grey Room, no. 15 (Spring 2004): 31.

  29. 29

    Beat­riz Colom­i­na, Unbreathed Air 1956,” Grey Room, no. 15 (Spring 2004): 31.

  30. 30

    Zhongjie Lin, Ken­zo Tange and the Mod­ern Move­ment (Lon­don: Rout­ledge, 2010), 69–74.

  31. 31

    Kiy­onori Kiku­take made the case for feu­dal­ism in a remark­able inter­view: Rem Kool­haas and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Kiy­onori Kiku­take,” in Project Japan: Metab­o­lism Talks (Taschen, 2011), 143.

  32. 32

    Aldo Rossi, The Archi­tec­ture of the City , trans. Diane Ghi­rar­do and Joan Ock­man (Cam­bridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1982).

  33. 33

    Pablo Martínez Capdev­ila, An Ital­ian Querelle: Rad­i­cal vs. Ten­den­za,” Log, no. 40 (Spring/Summer 2017): 67–81.

  34. 34

    Capdev­ila, An Ital­ian Querelle,” 71–72.

  35. 35

    Capdev­ila, An Ital­ian Querelle,” 72.

  36. 36

    Rossi, The Archi­tec­ture of the City, 12.

  37. 37

    Capdev­il­la, An Ital­ian Querelle,” 68.

  38. 38

    Tafu­ri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, 52.

  39. 39

    Tom Daniell, The Return of the Repressed,” Log, no. 24 (2012): 27.

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