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