Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development

Hayden, Dolores; Tafuri, Manfredo; Penta, Barbara Luigi la

doi:10.2307/3103122

Cited by 43 publications

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“…In relation to socio-political background, the type and scope of spatial transformations speak of systemic appropriation and usurpation of the common spaces and the existing building infrastructure, initially supported by state institutions. Paradoxically, the mega-structures of the socialist-modernist mass housing settlement were able to absorb the side-effects of the social turn: from "the bad taste of its inhabitants" (Tafuri, 1976) to the new developments, marked by the unfinished office building at the corner of the Block, serving as a true expression of ambitions and perils of construction under the free-market economy (Figure 9; see also…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Calibrating the Parallax View: Understanding the Critical Moments of the Yugoslav Post-Socialist Turn

Dukanac,

Milinković,

Bnin-Bninski

2024

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In this article, we seek to provide a new line of sight referring to specificities of the neoliberal turn in post-socialist societies and corresponding transformations of space. By employing the methodological approach that side-by-side explores two mutually exclusive strategies of analytical and empirical survey, we intend to tackle the question of irreducible antinomies pertinent to architectural research methodologies. Block 23 of the Central Zone of New Belgrade, designed by Branislav Karadžić, Božidar Janković, and Aleksandar Stjepanović (1968), has been widely recognised and aptly studied as one of the highlights of modern urban planning and design, conceived and realised in the period of late socialism in Belgrade (Serbia, former Yugoslavia). Featuring a notion of a “parallax gap,” we presume that the reading of Block 23 through two close yet clearly distinctive perspectives can bring a new scope of knowledge and point to the gap inscribed in the buildings themselves. The first point of view is empirical, centred on the notion of everyday life, and concerns the interpretation and use of space by its inhabitants. The second one is analytical, determined by the work of the architect and architectural theoretician, Branislav Milenković. We start from their point of contact and seek to find a shift in the diverging discursive positions producing a parallax gap. By way of architectural drawing, we explore and theorise new possibilities opened up by the actual buildings: interstitial, intermediary, transitional spaces, and spatial in-betweens. We hope to demonstrate the pursuit of both meticulously planned and dynamically conceived spaces open for the unpredictable was not only a way to respond to specific Yugoslav socio-political realities, but that it fostered the capacity of architecture to accommodate the future population and socio-economic transformations.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Calibrating the Parallax View: Understanding the Critical Moments of the Yugoslav Post-Socialist Turn

Dukanac,

Milinković,

Bnin-Bninski

2024

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“…Following architects, historians and theorists such as Rossi ([1966] 1982), Benevolo ([1960] 1971), Tafuri ([1973] 1976 and Heynen (1999), I argue that architecture is not only an object to observe or simply inhabit but manifests desires and ideological forces, technologies, capital, labour, individual and collective imagination. Architecture is approached as a form of production and critique whose task is the framing of subject positions (individuals, collectives, communities, multitudes) and the construction of concepts (Hays, 2010).…”

Section: Typology and Entanglementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Architectural pedagogy for the Anthropocene: theory, critique and typological urbanism

McEwan

2023

ARCH

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PurposeThe aim of this article is to develop an architectural pedagogy for the Anthropocene. The author reflect on a project within a postgraduate architectural theory module to address the following questions: How can architectural pedagogy articulate critical modes of production that contribute to quality education in the time of the Anthropocene? What are the ideas, values and practices needed?Design/methodology/approachThe method employed is close reading of texts focussed on three areas: critical theory and pedagogy, political theory and the Anthropocene, and architectural theory and typological urbanism. These theoretical narratives are placed in dialogue with a reflection on a design research pedagogical project. The theoretical narratives and design research project seek to articulate the multidimensionality of critical education. The methodology enacted in the paper performs the pedagogy of the classroom.FindingsThe study yields compelling conclusions regarding the potential for rethinking the idea of typology under the pressure of the Anthropocene and of critical pedagogy combined with design research to take positions on urgent political and social matters. The author concludes with a toolkit of concepts, values and knowledge practices.Originality/valueAt a time when disciplines tend towards discrete specialisation, while the need for knowledge production is ever more transdisciplinary, this paper develops inventive techniques and conceptual frameworks for supporting approaches where different fields and ideas make contact as a collective task in the era of the Anthropocene. It updates theories of typology to address contemporary pressures.

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“…As a result, utopia becomes a realizable ideology (Tafuri, 1973); the state becomes the planner; the architectural ideology becomes the ideology of the plan; and the urban plan is institutionalized as the plan of development of the capitalist city, becoming a political instrument, representing the role of the state in the control of capital. Through its break with utopia, architecture is separated from ideology and it is left without any possibility of the development of ideology itself (Tafuri, 1976). Yet, what one should understand here, is that, architecture when it is most itself -most pure, most rational, most attendent to its own techniques -becomes the most efficient ideological agent of capitalist planification (Hays, 1998).…”

Section: 3mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…the building and the city) -is a representation of a political, economic, social and cultural reality. Considering this, the research topic is related to the understanding of architecture as metaphor for (re)creation and (re)production, and as language between ideology, morphology, power, aesthetics and technics (Benevolo, 1963;Tafuri, 1976;Thoenes, 2011). Here, it will be discussed about architecture's practice of 'hiding' that representative character, through architecture's formal, functional, technical, artistic and aesthetic aspects.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tirana Architecture Week 2020 - Conference Proceedings: Science and the City

2020

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Dear participant of Tirana Architecture Week, In his famous book ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ (1962), the American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn, coined the notion of ‘paradigm shift’, intended as a fundamental change in the basic concepts and experimental practices of a scientific discipline. In opposition to the activity of ‘normal science’, a ‘shift’ occurs when the current predominant paradigm, under which scientific activities are conducted becomes incompatible due to new phenomena, facilitating the research – and adoption – of a new theory or paradigm. We can also assume that, such a critical change is often driven by a ‘crisis’, a transitional moment where the appearance of new technologies, environmental conditions (ex. climate change), or political situations (ex. migration phenomena), requires the a drastic rift from the past and opens the way to a reformulation of the notion of the so-called ‘Modernity’. Indeed, according to the words of the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard: «Modernity … is what transforms crisis into a value, a contradictory moral, says Baudrillard, for it gives rise to an aesthetics of rupture». The history of Architecture and Design itself, can be also interpreted as a consequential stream of changes following the research of a new paradigm. The Industrial Revolution deeply influenced the work of professionals during the whole XX Century, leading to the appearance of an architecture that could be a response to the industry preferring a free and functional arrangement of bodies rather than typological preset; transparencyrather than opaqueness, points structures rather than tectonic configurations. In the last thirty years, with the development of computers and ICT technologies, another paradigm has raised and changed these disciplines from their inner structures. The IT Revolution has imposed itself as the central element for a new phase in all of architecture, and information hasbecome the essential component of a new way of designing and a new urban environment. A whole generation of architects has been dealing with the purpose of transferring the dynamic interconnection at the heart of IT from the digital world to a new reality of reactive, sensitive, interactivearchitectures. The aim of Tirana Architecture Week 2020 is to draw current research and design practices, as well as theoretical speculations on therelationship between the paradigm shifts in science and urbanism; in other words about the science and the city. Such mandate will be addressedin multiple scales and contexts, and from different perspectives within different fields of interest, directly or indirectly related to design, architecture, urban studies, sociology, environmental research, engineering, education and pedagogy.

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Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development

Cited by 43 publications

References 0 publications

Calibrating the Parallax View: Understanding the Critical Moments of the Yugoslav Post-Socialist Turn

Calibrating the Parallax View: Understanding the Critical Moments of the Yugoslav Post-Socialist Turn

Architectural pedagogy for the Anthropocene: theory, critique and typological urbanism

Tirana Architecture Week 2020 - Conference Proceedings: Science and the City

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