We live and work in highly problematic times, a time of burning issues that include the environmental crisis, the deterioration of democracy, deepening social differences, housing crises, and mass migrations, to list but a few of the enormous challenges of the day. Critical awareness of this special time is reflected also in the field of architecture, which is expressed as a call to action – a call to pursue architecture as an active co-creator of society, a co-bearer of much needed social change today.
This tendency is highly visible at the forthcoming Venice Biennial.[1] Or, for instance, in the orientation of the London Festival of Architecture that took a decisive turn away from last year's theme “to care” towards a far more militant position – the call “to act”.[2] Indeed we also find such a direction – towards developing the full power of architecture in relation to social issues – increasingly present in design practice. Architectural theory too is returning to the question of architectural agency in relation to society.[3] It seems that a kind of front is taking form: a front that aims at pursuing an active role for architecture in society, a front that no longer contents itself with repeating the standard claims – how deeply architecture is embedded in the mechanisms that run our world of globalised capitalism, how its capacity to affect change is so entirely blocked today and similar. Instead, it is interested in an active way, in the possibility of breaking through this condition of impotence – a condition in which we, as Junkspace would describe it, appear caught in “a web without a spider.”[4]
But for this front to be effective – and this is the central thesis of this article – the following is essential: in order to tap into the full potential of architecture the issues and challenges that architecture and thus we as architects confront today have to be thought in the way of architecture; they have to be thought architecturally. In other words, we have to think them from the point of view of architecture. We have to think them as problems and challenges that architecture confronts as architecture.
What does this actually mean?
This means that architecture doesn't understand and approach its task, some particular development of public space for instance, as a task imposed from outside, from some external agency – even if it is in fact an external agency that calls on architecture to solve an issue of public space. But rather that architecture understands and approaches this task as its internal task; that architecture approaches this task as an architectural task. And to approach it as an architectural task means that at the same time it is solving this task, it also constructs itself as architecture – as that specific body of theory and practice that connects science, technique, technology, and art.
That architecture develops an architectural solution for a given task means, firstly, that it constructs that particular object which it should or wants to make (such as a public space or a school, a house) as an object that is specific to architecture; that is to say, as an architectural object. And not simply as some kind of (decorated) utilitarian object. And secondly, it means that while it creates its object – the architectural object – it is also architecture itself that appears in the world as architecture. More precisely, it appears as a creative thinking practice – a practice that with each constructed object also constructs itself anew, invents itself anew. It re-invents itself.
And only when architecture works in such a way can architecture truly be productive for the society in which it operates.
Why?
Not only because its objects, the products that architecture constructs, respond to the various needs and requirements of different segments of (a given) society in its time and space, its temporal and spatial situation. And not only because architecture constructs public spaces, schools, kindergartens, or housing. But because, to emphasize the point once again, it constructs all these objects as architectural objects. And architectural objects are objects of a special kind. They are subjectified objects.
What does this mean?
This means that at the same time architecture constructs its objects, that is, when it constructs subjectified objects, it also co-constructs, co-creates a human being as their specific producer, spectator, user. It co-creates him or her as a subjectified human being.
And here, in my view, lies the socially transformative potential of architecture. And architecture can realise this potential if it activates its creative potential, its creative capacity. My position, therefore, holds that the act which is necessary today – and not only for us architects – is the act of insistence on architecture as a creative thinking practice.[5] A call to action should be conceived and understood as a call to architecture that operates in each given situation, in the world, as a practice of creative thinking. This is what we shall develop here in this article.
Changing the Question
The act that should be realised today was already defined, in his own particular way, by Giancarlo De Carlo in his seminal lecture “Architecture's Public”.[6] He defined it as the necessity to reformulate the question that leads architects.
Architects focused on the question “how?,” De Carlo argued, while they neglected the really important question – which is the question “why?”. In order that architecture evolve into what it potentially is – and it is, to sum up De Carlo, a socially transformative practice, or as I would put it, a creative thinking practice – we have to reformulate the question ‘how’, such that we first focus on the “why”.
We can only agree with De Carlo. More precisely, we can agree with him on one condition – on the condition that we understand the question “why” most literally. That we understand it as asking – strictly speaking – about that ultimate cause of the architect's action. We need to understand it as asking the question: What is it that drives and guides me as an architect? Or to put it somewhat differently: What is it – what is that “architectural cause” – to which I am committed as an architect? Put in more general terms: What is it that we as architects are striving for in our action; what does architectural action strive to achieve?
The turn from the one question to the other is the turn from architecture as a practice of instrumental thinking to architecture as a practice of creative thinking.
The practice of instrumental thinking limits itself to questions related to solving the problems and tasks that the given social reality has defined as the problems and tasks that need to be addressed or solved. And at the last instance they need to be solved, because their solutions serve to preserve the given reality – reality as it is. Instrumental thinking practice is and always remains determined by the framework of the given reality; it does not try to critically surpass or move beyond this reality. Rather the opposite: it is always subservient to it.[7]
Instead, the practice of creative thinking actively engages in determining the key questions and problems that should be addressed and solved in social reality, such that this reality could operate and evolve as a sphere of free, emancipated, and egalitarian individuals. Within the framework of the given reality this practice operates such that it draws on that which it itself is capable of presenting and pursuing within the framework of an affirmative argument, as that cause of thinking and action that is worth defending and fighting for.
It is this cause, and not reality as it is, that gives this practice its support and its orientation, the cause that the practice of creative thinking itself constructs in the world. Creative thinking is therefore always a separation from the framework of the given reality. This is how philosopher Rado Riha defines it; he writes that it is “the act of bouncing away, distancing itself from the given reality, the act of interrupting with the given order, the given reality,” and thus it is the act of resistance: “The resistence to what is and what insists because it just is the way it is.”[8] Architecture resists because it is driven by the cause. It realises this cause in the form of its objects, the architectural objects. And insofar as it succeeds in this construction, it is with these objects that architecture infringes on, breaks the framework in which the given reality is framed.
(Re)Constructing the Cause in the World
Let us look at this more closely. Let us first observe the construction of architectural objects. How does an architect work when she sets out to solve a task? How does this process begin?
At the beginning, an architect encounters various conditions and factors relevant to the given task. These include a rich corpus of architectural knowledge, past and present, the history of architecture and current trends, as well as the requirements of the concrete program, site, legislation, and technology. Of course, these conditions also include the factors that constitute the wider context of the given task, such as the current environmental conditions, contemporary consumer culture, etc. This set of various conditions constitutes the “material” with which an architect works when she engages in a specific task. What makes this task truly demanding, however, is that there is no recipe, no rule or guide that could tell an architect how to use this “material”, how to put it together, such that as a result architecture would be made – that is to say, an object that is not merely a utilitarian object but is at the same time also an architectural object.
The given conditions therefore do not constitute all of the possible conditions. Another condition must be added to them, a strictly architectural condition – the condition that concerns architecture itself. This is the condition that the architect is able to use the given set of conditions in an appropriate way, such that she constructs architecture out of it. Architecture as an activity that appears in the world in the form of its products, its constructed objects – architectural objects.
The addition of this condition, which is the spontaneous beginning of every architectural task, is usually called an intervention in the given conditions. The intervention – this is the architect's act with which she opens up an empty place in the set of given conditions, a place for herself. It is in this place that the architect situates herself with her concrete decision as to how to reconstruct the given conditions and connect them such that this will lead to the appropriate architectural solution of the given task. It is here, in this place, that architecture begins.
Why do I say that this place is empty? Again: because there is no rule and no recipe that could tell the architect how to achieve an architectural solution of her concrete task. The right way of constructing architecture out of the given conditions must each time be found anew, from case to case. It must be invented.
The creative practice of architecture is therefore, in a way, creatio ex nihilo. Not, naturally, because it would ignore the given conditions, isolate itself from its environmental context. But because it is grounded in the act – the act of intervening in the conditions, opening up an empty place within them.[9]
It is precisely from this empty place that an architect proceeds with her constructional act. The architect's act therefore has no other support but the act itself. More precisely, its support is that cause that guides the architect in her construction, in the process of solving a given task – the cause which forces her to think, that is, to construct. Whereby she does not know and cannot know in advance what exactly this cause is. This particular way of acting is well described by architect Zvi Hecker, when he says that an artist – and I would say that the same holds true for an architect – “is never fully aware of what he does, but nevertheless has to do it very precisely.”[10]
The only way to find out, to assume this cause that guides an architect, is to materialise it in the world, render it materially present. In short: construct it, build it in the form of a material object that she constructs. And if she succeeds, then the constructed object is an object, redoubled in itself. It is redoubled into the constructed utilitarian object and (in each case specific) the cause of architecture, which this constructed object renders visible. That is to say, it is redoubled into the utilitarian object and that specific form of architecturalness that an architect strives to realise in her constructed object. If she succeeds in this process, then the utilitarian object, apart from being the utilitarian object, also becomes the architectural object.
And the architectural object is an object of a special kind. For it not only works as the product of architectural practice, but at the same time it also works as its cause. This cause is manifested in the way that the constructed object is always also something else than what it is. It is an expression of the time and space, the conditions in which it was made. It carries different meanings. And yet, it can never be reduced to its set of conditions and it can never be entirely exhausted by the meanings with which we invest it. To put it more conceptually: it is an object that is always different from itself. In short: it is an object with an inner difference.[11] It is because of this inner difference – because of its so to speak eternal “something else” – that this object triggers our thought, the thought of us as architects, the bearers of architectural action. It forces us to think, that is, to construct.[12]
The difference, the inner difference, which characterises the architectural object is the manifestation of the fact that this object was constructed from an empty place, so to speak, ex nihilo. For we can say for this difference that it is almost nothing. Objectively speaking it is nothing. We cannot see the difference as such – we only see a well-constructed object. And yet it isn't simply null, because for the architectural object it is crucial, constitutive. It is owing to this internal difference that the architectural object resists being reduced to the set of conditions out of which it was constructed, or entirely captured in the vast network of various meanings. It cannot be situated within the framework of the given reality, but in its material presence – as I said earlier – it breaks this framework itself. And as such it can persist and endure in different times, in different spatio-temporal situations, sometimes for centuries.[13]
Co-Creating Architectural People
The architect is one who succeeds in creating such objects, objects with an inner difference. But here we must be more precise: only when an architect creates an object with an inner difference does she really become an architect. When we are in the realm of creative action, an architect isn’t simply one who, as a “grand creator” sovereignly creates her objects. It would be more appropriate to say that exactly the opposite is true: it is the object that creates the architect. Object in a specific sense – the object as the cause of architecture, a specific architectural idea that the architect tries to realise in the construction of her objects. The cause of architecture works both as a firm starting point and as that which drives and guides the architect in her constructions. But as such a driving force and starting point it exists only in the ability of the architect to construct it in her products, again and again. And if she succeeds in this process, she attains what she is looking for. She encounters that cause, the ultimate cause of her action. It is in this encounter that she only really constitutes herself – constitutes herself as an architect. Or, to use the more explicit formulation by Riha, she constitutes herself as an architectural worker, as one who serves architecture, or serves that cause which she recognised as that which is crucial for architecture.
This way of acting can be called the process of subjectivation. This is the process in which those who enter architecture – from the architect to the many possible users and spectators of architecture – are in the process of becoming subjects.
The figure of subject first appears in the Enlightenment, and marks the emergence of independent thinking, of someone who thinks independently. For the process of subjectivation, to which architecture invites us (and not only architecture, but all creative thinking practices) something else is characteristic. This is a double independence; that is, the inseparability of independent thinking and independent action.[14] Subjectivation or the becoming of a subject therefore means to be in the process of becoming an agent of independent thinking AND action.[15] More precisely, an agent who shares her independence with the cause that guides her.
The cause of architecture is the central point of the creative practice of architecture. It is that which on the one hand the architect alone constructs in the world, and which on the other hand constructs her as an architect. It gives her support and orientation such that she can be in the world in that particular way that is characteristic for creative action – in the way of distancing herself from the situation, of bouncing away from it. An architect who is driven by the cause therefore not only produces objects of a special kind, but also acts in a special way. She is in the given world in the way that within that world and its logic she acts regardless of that logic. She pursues her own logic, the logic of the cause of architecture – the logic of creativity. She is in the world in the way that she is torn-out of the world.
By creating the possibility of tearing oneself out of the mechanisms of the given world, architecture, just like all creative practices, opens this possibility up not only to architects, but to all. Not only to those who themselves construct architecture, not only to the producers, but also the spectators and users of architecture. The creative thinking practice of architecture does not differentiate between the experts and the rest, the people. It requires the same from all: to activate their sensual and intellectual capacities. And these are generic human capacities, capacities that everyone has.[16]
This is how architecture works when it approaches its tasks – such as the development of public space – as architectural tasks, and when it also succeeds to solve them as such. Then it constructs structures and spaces that, in a way, construct us. They constitute what we could call a place for human life. A place for a human being who found there something that has worked as an “eye opener”, and a “hearing sharpener”, and a “trigger for thought”. They constitute places for a human being who looks because she wants to see; who listens because she wants to hear; who thinks because she wants to think and understand. In short, architecture creates places for a human being who is capable of looking, feeling, listening, and thinking independently – a place for a human being who activates her or his own sensual and intellectual capacities. As a result, she or he is in the world in a special way – in the way of an agent of independent thinking and action. And it is the activation of this capacity to think and act independently, the capacity intrinsic to every human being, that is the first and necessary condition for every true social change.