“Arrived at an undeniable impasse, architectural ideology renounces its propelling role in regard to the city and structures of production and hides behind a rediscovered disciplinary autonomy, or behind neurotic attitudes of self-destruction.”
   Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture & Utopia

“Alternative media at the form level of the products have a radical potential if they transcend their societal context and have the potential to subvert experience. In the case of critical forms, the subversion of the experience of capitalism is an indirect one, in the case of critical content it is a more direct one.”
   Christian Fuchs, “Alternative Media as Critical Media”

Thrashing Against the Veil was a research metalogue (in the vein of Gregory Bateson’s metalogues from the 1950s and 1960s) which investigates the intellectual and instrumental mediations of research into the foundations of architectural production. Focused as much on the materials and procedures as on the theoretical content of research, the abstracted and performative nature of the research process is interwoven within the critical frameworks being examined. Reaching into a tradition of reading and writing machines from medieval scholarship and document production, Daniel Liebeskind’s 1985 “Three Lessons in Architecture: The Machines”, and the unitized research documents of Karl Marx (Die Grundrisse) and Walter Benjamin (The Arcades Project), Thrashing Against the Veil addresses the intellectual interaction (thrashing) with the limits of knowledge creation (the veil) which divides speculation and theory from the “Real”.

Physicalizing an abstraction, the processes involved in Thrashing Against the Veil are materialized in space, providing a loose production network. Resources are provided for “mining” by the research interlocutor - texts are broken down into units of theory (quotes and otherwise), and then input into a computer interface which translates the units into both temporary visualized text on screen and permanently plotted units on a material substrate. Information, semiotically represented in source material, is converted and re-converted into “signifiers of voltage differences”, Hewlett-Packard Graphic Language, machinic operation, and finally return to a semiotic composition of research units via pen and watercolor paper.[1]


Responding to a deep history of technology interwoven within intellectual production, the demands and allowances of the unitizing and procedural processes involved have embedded effects which constrain and liberate the research output. The romantic idea of responding to a text affectually (a core tenet of un-inspected research) is deconstructed into material procedures, forcing the interlocutor to delimit the relevance of a resource text into sections, while expanding potential vectors of thought from each unit on the produced research plates. 

The composed plates of research units (quotes, questions, data) are a produced material object acting as a substrate for written responses by research interlocutors. One interlocutor may underline and highlight text while another may react textually while yet another may codify the research units through the plate collection. The result is a living material document of research and response, with the evolution of the plate set as an extension beyond the previous forms of unitized research achieved only through notebooks (Die Grundrisse) and incomplete manuscripts (The Arcades Project). 

The research plate set, with embedded multi-interlocutor responses, represents a material 1:1 production, which can then also be utilized in the preparation of thematic compositions. The compositional output takes a more normative form of research, creating clarified arguments from the aggregated units. The compositions circle around similar units of importance and attempt to construct fortifiable positions of theory: the argument is itself a design project. Between the production of the plate set and the subsequent iterative compositions, an overlaying process - a superimposition beyond response - allows for a critical layer over both the plate set and the compositions. 

The immaterial content of Thrashing Against the Veil concerns the ontological structures of architectural discourse and the “operative mechanisms” of architectural production.[2] Building from the history of ephemeral definitions within the discipline, “Architecture” is investigated as an institutional structure, rising to the dimensional quality of “the architectural”, its operational centering in “interiorization”, and the challenging of the architect’s role and possible modes of practice. 

The content of the research is itself an act of thrashing - a scurried attempt at loosening the strictures of previous research and theory - against a veil that divides architectural design from meaningful control over its context and the implications of its production. Rather than remaining satiated with Manfredo Tafuri’s pessimism, a new orientation towards architectural discourse is demanded through product and procedure.[3] Invoking the radical architectural lineage of Colin Ward alongside the post-structural political ontologies of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, new articulations of architectural production (the object, the discourse, the pedagogy, etc.) become formable through doing away with “ impotent and ineffectual myths”.[4] Simultaneously, Laclau and Mouffe provide a context of hegemonic tasks and roles which is readily applicable to the architectural discipline. Issues of architectural labor and the medial intricacies of computational design are also reachable through the thrashing of new articulations, drawing from the written work of Peggy Deamer, Douglas Spencer, Friedrich Kittler, Wendy Chun, and Alexander Galloway alongside the philosophies and critical theories of Hannah Arendt, Henri Bergson, Jürgen Habermas, Richard Sennett, and Timothy Morton. 

The included resources cross the domains of architectural, political, and media theory, however the orientation of Thrashing Against the Veil is purposefully open to any range of disciplinary or critical content. The reaction and interlinkage of disparate sources and inspirations is the main focus of the unit research plates, which allow for a flexibility of content connection well beyond that of the usual form of research production and review. The process and output is capable of critique and creation in the immediate form of the plate set, and the continued accumulation of research and response does not conform to a timeline or linear consumption, but rather a network or ecology of research production in constant reappraisal. 

[1] Friedrich Kittler is evoked here in recognition that each translation through digital technologies is far from a storage of semiotic information, but rather the mathematical codification of knowledge into electric pulse. In “There Is No Software,” Kittler writes, “All code operations, despite such metaphoric faculties as call and return, come down to absolutely local string manipulations, that is, I am afraid, to signifiers of voltage differences.”

[2] The focus of “operative mechanisms” is taken from Manfredo Tafuri’s Architecture and Utopia, in which Tafuri critiques the possibilities of architectural liberation from the ideological structures in which it is constructed. In discerning the transition of single architectural objects into the composition of the urban form, Tafuri remarks, “Thus our initial hypothesis is confirmed. Architecture as ideology of the plan is swept away by the reality of the plan when, the level of utopia having been superseded, the plan becomes an operative mechanism,” (Architecture and Utopia, 135).

[3] Specifically, the pessimism of Tafuri is taken again from Architecture and Utopia through his declaration, “For this reason it is useless to propose purely architectural alternatives. The search for an alternative within the structures that condition the very character of architectural design is indeed an obvious contradiction of terms,” (Architecture and Utopia, 181). While the logic of his argument is infallible, the process of recasting a context in which architectural contestation is possible is sited in a reorientation of terms. While I would certainly agree that the production of alternatives is precluded within “Architecture”, the positioning of “architectural” alternatives is the only path of promise.

[4] While Laclau and Mouffe are a resident reference of contemporary architectural discourse, the application of their work within the discipline itself is an overlooked action. Certainly their work on articulation, hegemony, and “the political” is directly related to the structures and procedures of the institutional “Architecture”, as well as any articulation of alternatives identities, procedures, or following of Tafuri’s direction: “Today, indeed, the principal task of ideological criticism is to do away with impotent and ineffectual myths, which so often serve as illusions that permit the survival of anarchonistic ‘hopes in design’,” (Architecture and Utopia, 182).

The Object Corpse

The corpse of Laura Palmer is found on a riverbank in the pacific northwest, wrapped in plastic, outside the town of Twin Peaks. Then begins an investigation into how she died, why she died, and who killed her. Of course, what Twin Peaks makes brilliantly clear is that Laura Palmer’s corpse is not the point. Even as Leland Palmer throws himself on the coffin at Laura’s funeral, the relevance of the material body is only found through the way it acts as a prism for the underlying set of mysterious relations and sinister operations of real (or illusory) importance. Laura Palmer is a doorway into an ethereal interaction with evil and the uncanny mundane, but the material corpse is a footnote of the story, not a center, even as the allure to fetishize Laura and her corporeal remnant seems too transfixing to let go. “There must be some meaning in that corpse!” demands the audience, and receives only a denial in return.

Now, let’s talk “Architecture”. While the noir-ish charm of Twin Peaks can hardly be applied to the architectural discourse, the oblivious object-fascination which constantly distracts and affects (seemingly the only site of “affection”) the actors and agents related to both issues is a thematic overlap. Throughout Architecture and Utopia, Manfredo Tafuri declares the architectural object dead, explains that the only useful understanding of architectural production is through its “operative mechanism”, then returns in mourning to the architectural object-corpse to check for a pulse once more.[1]

If architectural discourse has internalized the absence of critical functioning within architectural objects (thanks in most part to Tafuri), it certainly hasn’t released its object-fetishization. Everything in the process of architectural production is sifted through the sieve of the object in order to test, validate, or repudiate any form of meaning or material condition. The architectural practitioner is thoroughly convinced that the object is at the heart of “Architecture”, and the architectural theorist is equally happy to corroborate that misconception. However, the discipline has in every other regard transferred into being, as Tafuri positions, an “operative mechanism”.  If we are to heed Tafuri’s final direction and “do away with impotent and ineffectual myths, which so often serve as illusions that permit the survival of anachronistic “hopes in design”,”  the most ineffectual myth which must be deposed is that of the central importance of an object-corpse.[2] The only real utility in criticism or constructive theory of practice is within the procedures and affectations of architectural production, not in their material output. 

The loss of “Architecture” referring to the output object is understandably controversial, of course, though only in the same affective manner which takes over Deputy Andy while photographing the newly found corpse of Laura. Seeing that “Architecture” as an object doesn’t involve its construction, occupancy, or embedded labor, the loss of the object-commodity as a central focus of architectural production comes as little more than the recognition of conditions which have already been altered. Fetishization of the designed object output has been a distraction from the operative mechanisms where architectural contestation rightly takes place.

As Agent Cooper sits in the Red Room through a dream, he is accompanied by The Man From Another Place and a cousin. The Man From Another Place asks, “But doesn’t she look almost exactly like Laura Palmer?”, before adding that “She’s filled with secrets”. In the Red Room the image of Laura Palmer is taken to be more than a corporeal form. The cousin is more than Laura Palmer, the combined aesthetic, relational, and performative nature of Laura Palmer and her deeper relevance to the story - as a vessel and cipher. Here the distinction between the material corpse and the immediate operative importance of Laura Palmer is provided, yet cannot be taken back to the waking world of action.

In architectural discourse the architectural object is spoken of as if one were always addressing the Red Room immaterial form rather than the de-mystified corpse. The conversion between immaterial and material object forces a loss of immaterial importance, leading to the alienation of the architect from the intersectional importance they attempt to project onto the project. In place of the dead Homecoming Queen, “Architecture” limits its gaze to the object in static isolation, having just been manifested and just before it begins to decay. The manifesting (construction) is a web of material and labor operations, which distract from the beauty of the cold object, just as decay demonstrates an entropic inevitability the static object cannot resist. The autonomy of architecture is a vein of argumentation deeply set within the discipline which isolates “Architecture” in a discrete moment - one within which no action or inaction is effective and no alternative is possible. 

But the little black box of this moment - the object corpse - has its inputs and outputs. These inputs and outputs are evidence of futility if one remains in the box. They express why ideology is superimposed, why uneven development is unavoidable, and why the structure of the box cannot change. But, in leaving our domain of architectural discretion through those operative mechanisms, the escape from the box is the escape from futility. If the “search for an alternative within the structures that condition the very character of architectural design is indeed an obvious contradiction of terms,” the point is stop remaining in the structure.3

The immanent focus of criticism and architectural theory, beyond the “doing away of ineffectual myths”, is to construct and operate its own mechanisms of resistance. These mechanisms of resistance must be oriented against “Architecture” and its object-corpses. Here is the only place for creating meaningful difference in architectural production. Otherwise, we are spinning Tafuri’s wheels.

The architectural call for participation in design processes has never been based in good faith. Even with Sherry Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation as a base, ontologically describing the levels of citizen involvement in design planning, there is little interest in a shared definition of participation in architectural production.[1] Instead, a semantic game of cat and mouse is played, with one central assumption from the side of the architectural practitioner: we know best. The tactics toward operating on this position of knowing best have been mutable, translating the statist mechanisms of Haussmannization into directed planning and design participation, with the terms of “participation” being stretched and concentrated at will. 

The upmost rung of Arnstein’s ladder - citizen control - is specifically a point of architectural opposition, a pole around which architectural discourse has rotated since the burgeoning modernist utopias. This polar repulsion is hardwired into the construction of the architectural profession. Lebbeus Woods’ “Freespaces”, which describe a vision of citizen controlled architectural productions, intuitively provide the insurmountable shift between a professionalized architectural discipline and full participation. “Money will not pay for freespaces” Woods writes, “because it is not avalable to those who by necessity are independent of its sources.”[2] The economic division between a comprehensive participatory environment and the architectural practitioner is a chasm which cannot be crossed. Simultaneously, with the avid research into the bottom-up logics of the South American favelas, the transitional units of nomadic cultures, and alternative forms of historically citizen-controlled design processes, the architect (as formalist, as organizer, as theorist) seeks to internalize these organizational relations while negating the methods of participatory production which creates them: even if you built it, we can understand it better. 

Two faces of the architectural call for participation in the 1970s are outlined by Tahl Kaminer in The Efficacy of Architecture. Of the reasons for architects to embrace citizen participation, “the first, and major, is that the empowerment of citzens in decision-making reagrding the built environment is a value - is just - in its own right... while the second suggest that the involvement of citizens guarantees a quality of built environment,”.[3] The counterposition against citizen control being the concern that “the ‘empowered’ citizens, it is presumed, would merely select more of the same rather than usher in radical change,” the specter of architectural practitioner as knowledge source is central to both views.[4] In optimisim the citizen is generative source which will aid us in our pursuit, and in pessimism the citizen is weight around out necks, unable to make the rational decision in their own interest. It is clear that both positions which Kaminer transcribes are oriented toward a professionally controlled mediation of the citizen participant, and the outcomes are to be valued from the perspective of the professional as designer and community patron: we know what is good for you. 

In terms of manipulation - Arnstein’s lowermost rung - the development of cybernetic theories in architectural planning, as well as the siting of architectural design in the sphere of circulations, modalities, and programmatic infusions - Gilles Deleuze’s “smooth space” interpreted into architectural process - have confoundingly based a dialogue of participation on the complete absence of user involvement.[5] Whether in the derivations made from the favelas or from second-order cybernetic models, architectural searches for organizational methods have centered around agencies far from the citizen. 

In The Architecture of Neoliberalism, Douglas Spencer writes “What architects want from complexity are rules of governance. Organizational truths located in an irrefutuable materialism. The ‘laws’ of natural systems and the ‘orders’ of complexity.”6 Specifically in the Zaha Hadid Architect’s BMW Central Building, Spencer deconstructs the methods of wielding complexity to construct homogeneity. Quoting BMW executive documentation, “All workers will encounter and communicate with one another on equal terms in a deterritorialized environment: ‘The idea is that you have a wide range of activities happening together in one space. There’s a mix of blue- and white-collar areas, which prevents an exclusive domain from being established’.”[7] 

Participation is suddenly an activity which happens within curated design, and one which is itself intended for corporate and individual benefit. Outside of factories, the same logic and intent is used in office design, commercial design, and community design. Spencer describes this design intention as a type of “affective” labor within architectural production, which “produces or manipulates affects such as a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or passion.”[8] Affective labor has been thoroughly internalized and de-politicized in architectural process, taking the form of humanitarian philosophy, commercial strategy, or experiential optimization: we know what makes you happy. 

Before the cybneticiziation of architectural discourse, or perhaps in an epochal parallel, the same subversion of participatory utility can be seen in Tafuri’s Architecture and Utopia: “When the experience of the crowd became - as in Baudelaire - and endured consciousness of participation, it served to make general an operative reality, but did not contribute to its advancement.”[9] Citizen participation, an operative reality without operative application, is paradoxical and mundane. Conjointly in Jürgen Habermas’ The Structural Transformations of the Public Sphere, the public sphere is a collective site of potential rational-critical debate, nascently open to the novel bourgeois class, but incrementally subverted by the rise of “publicity” as a means of coopting the public sphere in order to artificially construct public perception.[10] Habermas’ “publicity” was itself paradoxical and parasitic, dependent on the validation of the public sphere as a participatory and unmanipulated environment, but operatively focused on the very manipulation which would invalidate its host. The participatory presence of the masses generates the site and reason for controlling the masses - perhaps the central issue of political and organizational thought since the revolutions of the enlightenment. 

Of course, full-throated calls for citizen participation still abound in planning and design, intending the form most connotated with the community meeting which would entail the Therapy, Informing, Conultation, and Placation rungs from Arnstein’s ladder. These modes of participation are not actively malicious, nor are they progressive or radical. The community meeting is a half-hearted feigning of interest in the Habermas’ public rational-critical debate with a thumb on the scale. The activity of convincing communities of design decisions is moreover a twin act of soothing one’s conscience while stroking one’s professional ego: we know best, but we’re willing to explain. 

Does knowing best in itself limit the possibility of citizen controlled design processes? Of course not. As agents of architectural knowledge, one can just as easily advise a citizen syndicate as one would a development corporation. The defenestration of citizen control comes with the conception of our disciplinary: we know best is actually a form of this is ours. It is this more true drive which causes the internalization of citizen organized spaces like the favelas: not only can we can we understand what you’ve done, it is ours to apply. Otherwise, what was the point of all that education, all that experience, and the money spent of the business cards? This territorial claim of the architectural practioner is quite silly. First, as Marx would point out, there is a difference between a person’s professional roles and their personal agency. A claim over ability to comprehend and articulately manifest designed space is not defined by professionalisms, even if the provided opportunties are mediated by a professional structure. Second, the architectural practitioner is in control of relatively few of the decisions involved in planning and design. Basing the discipline’s ego on the claim over knowledge and practice of sites and programs given by clients, regulations given by the state, and methods determined by construction industries is bordering on delusion, yet that is what we’ve chosen to do. Our knowledge and action claims seem little more than affirmations in the mirror: we are in control, we are in control, we are in control. 

Of course, if there were fully citizen-controlled planning and design processes, we would be the citizens of our communities, which would provide us the opportunity to exercise some of that accumulated knowledge of architectural production. Not as architects - there’s no real agency there - but as the participatory mass: we are united, we are in control.

Delegitimizing Architecture

“... architects, like teachers, are victims of ‘role-inflation’ and we cannot expect more of them than that they do their job competently, though in the course of doing so they may very well become ‘anti-architects’ in the same way as some very competent and thoughtful teachers become ‘de-schoolers’.” 
   Colin Ward, Introduction to Vandalism

The positioning of “expanded modes of practice” as an emancipatory effort gives me pause. How can expanding modes of production, without the accompaniment of new methods for challenging or negating that production, be liberatory in and of itself? On its own, “expanded” practice merely isolates the architect further through a simplistic fascination with the positive and negative powers of that role: the Snidely Whiplash architect binds the user to the railroad, and the Dudley Do-Right architect unties the victim through valiant courage and cleverness. The subtext is that within praxis the architect has control. Yet, we end up mugging to the public like Genie to Alladin under the control of Jafar. The power of our production is hard to direct when the limits of practice are pre-determined by forces outside of our purview. If only Alladin could magically release of us of our bondage... Unfortunately, he can’t, or won’t. 

Expanding practice to involve more NGO involvement, for example, or elevating community participation in project planning - or whatever other fixation on ‘alternative programming’ as architectural content - is merely an escape to more veiled forms of capitalist control. This fate is clearly demonstrated by the rise of philanthropy as an economic sector. Expanded modes don’t challenge the central modalities of practice which create inequity or legitimize structural power, but rather defer guilt and buy time - more time to envision the Howard Roark ideal of the digital age. 

We do not need more modes of engaging in creative practice. We need counter-modes for de-legitimizing architecture. We need methods for problematizing land valuation (or even private property). We need forms of negating capital expectations of the city. We need robust methods which fortify architectural labor against architectural management. We need techniques for delegitimizing the vast amount of the built environment which controls and diverts its population. Opining on how “expanded practices” can fight the housing crisis or gentrification crisis or any other crisis in the built environment wantonly ignores how central those crises are to all general modes of practice. We don’t need expanded architects or expanded architecture. We need anti-architects and anti-architecture. 

When Manfredo Tafuri points to the modernist turn in the planning of the city, the true level of Le Corbusier’s operative ‘Plan’, and the transcendence of the architect from object manufacturer to system organizer, there is a sharpness to his words. The architect as organizer, or contemporarily as trans-managerial agent, is rarely so scornful an accusation. In fact, in releasing the claim to the medieval master-builder role, the organizer role has been a proud declaration from the discipline, whether in the internal recompositions of the neoclassicists, the utopic modernists, or the digital era of rule-based agent processes. Even in terms of standard practice today, the architect as organizer of the consultant team (organizer of labor processes and outcomes) is claimed without a tinge of poison in one’s voice. The underlying attraction of ‘organizer’ as role of the architect is obvious - organization is the exertion of control, and the architectural subject is validated through the wielding of control.

            The will to organize has vastly extended from there, cultivated through the ascension of ancillary theories of complexity, having forsaken any ability to morally contain the ramifications of architectural production. Douglas Spencer, in The Architecture of Neoliberalism, notes that this casting off of ethical claim has led to architectural discipline which can only “endorse what ‘works well within the framework of existing relations’, and only find its validation in making these function more effectively through the managerial ‘cunning’ of organizational complexity.” Whether through the form of construction technique or material assemblage, the architectural passion for organization - the building process, the ration of complex modularity, or the table of consultants - is the true emergent practice in reaction to the discourse over architectural autonomies. The process of organization, the focus on a field of items to arrange compositionally, is symptomatic to a greater loss of organizational authority which lies at the center of the architectural act.

            When Lebbeus Woods describes the terms of the architect’s organizational role as being a “functionary in a chain of command who most important task (from the standpoint of social institutions) is to label otherwise abstract and ‘meaningless’ spaces with ‘functions’ that are actually instructions to people as to how they must behave at a particular place and time”, there is little more control for the architect than there is for the foreman. Instead, the architect is merely an operative extension of control, wielded by those whose organizational powers are much more materially rooted; Woods strips the architect of even the small amount of administrative agency provided by Tafuri, and casts the architect in technocratic fashion. The same technocratic fashion is used by the average architect in explaining away the faults in a given plan or system over which they see themselves as organizer - “Yes, it doesn’t work, but that’s what they want, so that’s what we have to give.” The wants of clients, the wants of a structural economic system, rational or otherwise, are weighted objectives which are taken into account within the organizational process and often override any issues that might confront their elevated position.

            At an even further extension from an organizational center, Colin Ward’s view fo the technocrat-architect limits even the grandiose betrayal felt by Woods in the total loss of control within organizational operation. Ward, in discussing the school architect, states the architect is “asked to produce a building reflecting current educational theories - although these may change between the inception and completion of the structure, and although those who brief him may have quite different ideas from the people who actually teach in the school.” The architect is a bureau-technocratic operator, who is asked to do quite a lot from both directions but can really only do a functional job within strict material and spatial constraint. The architect can “try their best” or otherwise take advantage of their residual flexibility, but there will not be a unanimously praised resolution, because the architect’s role is the space between antagonistic roles external to their own. In Ward’s definition of the architect, there is less pathetic servitude in the form of the kingly advisor, and a more bureaucratic role - the architect as organizer in the same way that the clerk organizes the official documents.

            David Cunningham provides an in between sort of architect, melding the knowing release of Woods with the mediator autonomy of Ward. In his essay “Architecture, the Built and the Idea of Socialism”, an inclusion in Nadir Z. Lahiji’s Can Architecture Be An Emancipatory Project?, Cunningham describes architects as having capitulated to what can “only be regarded as a ‘realist’ surrendering of the other dimensions of building production (program, organization, and so on) to developers, engineers or various other ‘consultants’; a ‘surrendering’ that would seem to accompany a simultaneous shrinking, at an urban level, of the ‘architect’s role’ to a ‘form of city-branding, addressing the packaging of buildings and cities rather than their (social) content.” These simultaneous attenuations of the architect’s role are in reaction to the weight of previous social responsibilities, along with the increase in system complexities external to architectural production. Relegated to partialized design purview, the architect’s organizational load is refined from spatial policy decisions into the tactics which articulate pre-made decisions of planning and foundational organizations. In Cunningham’s conception, the architect acts as Ward’s bureaucratic functionary, but is able to maintain a courtly position in the imaginary.

            Of course, the architect, their role, and the totality of architectural production has always been observant to the machinations of the external - political economy, structural power, and cultural momentum have always played a natal influence on the built environment. Fighting against the concept of influence is returning to the even less “realist” ground of “architectural autonomy”, which is not - and shouldn’t be - the point of reexamining architectural production within an intersectional or post-structural framework. Instead, the orientation of architectural discourse needs an alignment which focuses on the processes and methods of practicing and thinking alternatively.

            Reaching again to Tafuri, the “search for an alternative within the structures that condition the very character of architectural design is indeed an obvious contradiction of terms.” This positions the role of the architect as a central reinforcement of socio-political structure and economy, thus making it an irrevocably conservative role in socio-political system production.

            Regardless if the organizational role of the architect was taken to be a path toward executing authoritative control or emancipatory process, Tafuri’s strike is fatal. In terms of ethical or progressive production, the architect’s role is as righteous or evil as the structure in which it exists, and one can but hope to practice in an adequate structure. Actively pursuing radical practice would imply searching and choosing to engage with locales and alternative socio-political structures throughout the world. Erik Swyngedouw elucidates this point in “On the Impossibility of an Emancipatory Architecture”: “Transgressing the ideological fantasy that permits architecture to cover up the negative emptiness of its own foundational core does require emancipatory architects to re-engage with the political moments that already brew in the interstices of actually existing urban practices; places where a large number of insurgent architects are already prefiguring new forms and modes of living in common that point towards embryonic re-politicization.” While this may lightly ring as call to hope, the futility of waiting and engaging where opportunity has already formed is a reaffirmation of the impotence of architectural production.

            For the radical, this is the elegy of emancipatory opportunity. The architect as organizer is handmaiden to capital power and the architect as functionary is a cloth. Little is to be expected from further cultivating this sort of role relation, which is the most potent inspiration behind allowing David Cunningham’s attenuation of responsibility to take place in order to focus on the interesting minutia of Grasshopper, corner details, or seamless LED screen implementation. However, the constraining or liberation of the architect’s role is beside the point when it comes the relation between radical, emancipatory, or liberated architectural production. 

            It is now important to distinguish the pointedly exclusionary definition of what we mean by the architect’s role, as well the operative of that role - the architect. Beyond the different roles that the architect might perform, the architect is not presently, nor are they discursively, defined as the general architectural professional. Rather, the architect is the singular decision-maker or tandem decision-makers of an architectural practice. The design architect, the draft architect, and even the architect signatory do not perform the architect’s role, even as much as their work might contribute to the role of the architect. Abandoning any legal or regulatory definition of the architect, it is clear that there are many more roles of architectural labor than that of the referent architect. When architectural discourse invokes “the architect” the totality of the discipline has historically identified with the position, but this “common sense” connection is beginning to be contested. The differences between the operative power of “the architect” and those involved in architectural labor are surfacing as rupture in professional and disciplinary unity.

            Fundamentally, a specific fissure within this unity comes in the form of recognizing alternate forms of labor which coincide with the architect’s role. Even in a simplified structure of the architectural design office, the architect-director - who would have unique claim to the architect’s role - also takes on managerial and acquisitional roles in addition to being one of Tafuri’s organizers or Ward’s functionaries. If we are to continue deconstruct the condition of the architect’s role in such terms, it is unavoidable to recognize that the role is not encompassing - management and acquisition are not subsets of architectural work - nor is it primary - management and acquisition are not inferior to the architect’s role with which they coincide. The architect’s role is functionally and definitionally discrete.

            Taking that the architect’s role deals with management, architectural labor - all those who work in architectural offices as non-decision makers - subsequently deals with subordination. Architectural labor also deals with a full assortment of alternative roles which support the acquisition process, coordinate with non-architectural subsidiaries, and general technocratic modes of labor. More importantly, architectural labor and the architectural work which is produced are not unitized moments of the architect’s role, but can be seen as operations and outcomes which form in combination to provide a platform of work on which the architect’s role is performed.

            What this line of argumentation opens up is the gap between the architect’s role and the architectural role. If the architect is not taken to encompass all forms of architectural production, but merely operate in reaction to a synthesis of architectural labor and products, then the limitations of the architect’s role are also not encompassing of architectural production en masse. The relation of architectural labor or other architectural agents to the architect’s role is unfastened. This is a compositional break which can be seen as an emerging hegemonic gap within the architectural discipline.

            In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe describe the character of ‘hegemony’ as a struggle to cover a double void left by the inability to explain moments of socio-political cohesion in forming a unified goals and worldviews by either teleological or chaotic reasoning, (Laclau & Mouffe, 13). Laclau and Mouffe critically build from Antonio Gramsci’s definition of the hegemonic process as that “by which a ruling class makes its domination appear natural by installing the presuppositions of its own worldview as the common sense of society as a whole.”, (Fraser, 10). In “Architecture” the disciplinary worldview has thus been constructed on the presuppositions of architect-agency in the form of the totalizing “architect’s role” and a necessarily corresponding negation of political agency under the terms of capitalist professionalism. First and foremost, this lack of professional agency is due to the historical exclusivity of the architectural act as a bourgeois task of social (symbolic and material) construction, rooting the worldview into the same ideological engagements.

            Building further on the ontology of hegemony, Laclau and Mouffe provide the further definition of ‘hegemony’ as “more than a relation, a space dominated by the tension between two very different relations: a) that of the hegemonized task and its ‘natural’ class agent; and b) that of the hegemonized task and the class hegemonizing it,” (Laclau & Mouffe, 50). The traditional bourgeois architectural task, socio-material construction, has itself suffered in the bifurcation of the task from the class which enacts the task. In the mid-twentieth century specifically, the gender / race / class representation within the discipline increased in reaction to a former hegemonic challenge. The resecurization of the architectural worldview formed in parallel with what Nancy Fraser calls “Progressive Neoliberalism”, cataloging the moment in which neoliberal political economy fused with progressive social modes of representation.

            This hegemonic stability allowed for the emergent challenges to neoliberalism as an operational model to be diffused through increased inclusionary representation within the composition, operation, and imaging of neoliberalism. Specifically, this shift can be noted in the form of branding executed by United Colors of Beneton, and in the syphoning of traditionally critical energies into modes of integration, as seen in the “Lean-In” methods for women to attain power positions within neoliberalism. Fraser writes, “Only when decked out as progressive could a deeply regressive political economy become the dynamic center of a new hegemonic bloc.” In architecture, the increase of representation in university programs, critical journals, and design offices allowed for this bifurcation of class tasks and natural class agents to continue under the guise of disciplinary parity.

            Under current conditions, and specifically noting the failure of the architectural office to find a suitable or just economic model of labor and billing, the architectural task is a structurally ruling and control class task with a fully formed discrepancy between the class laborers which fulfil that task. Even within the structural assemblage of tasks, institutions, roles, and production of Architecture, it is important to again point out the most obvious internal deviation: within praxis, the productive labor-hours which are employed toward production are themselves an offset task site, being naturalized tasks of the architect as organizer, yet being performed by the architectural labor below. This point is obvious in that it parallels all forms of capitalist production, but remains veiled in the manner to which the architectural discipline has hegemonically supported the homogenization of values which don’t relate to the architectural labor’s historical interests as laborers. In the same manner that the US has held a hegemonic worldview that poverty conditions are temporary - each pauper is a temporarily disgraced millionaire - each architectural laborer is an architect organizer waiting in the wings, and so are willing to propagate their immediate conditions.

            Having been cultivated in the form of document-organizer and consultant-organizer for at least the time since John Soane, as explained in Katie Lloyd Thomas and Tiol Amhoff’s “Writing work: Changing practices of architectural specification”, this divide has structurally held due to the hegemonic articulation of the architect and the corresponding assumption of the architect’s role. The current instability of that articulation is to be expected, as the process of hegemonic formation is self-destructive, creating universality only within an expanded moment. In reaction to the deformation of the former architectural articulations and the crisis inscribed therein, new articulations are necessary - whether for a full securization of a hegemonic structure or for the temporary operation of the discipline if we are to (in Gramsci’s terms) wait for the “new [which] cannot be born.”

            In producing any novel articulation of architectural roles, one is tempted to reappropriate the unitary forms of past: the modernist social utopian into contemporary eco-utopian, the Zeitgeist manifester into deleuzian orchestrator of the emergent, the managerial organizer into labor organizer. The degradation of the architect’s role in its current form is not solved by another unitary form, and attempting to do so is unproductive. Instead, novel articulation comes in removing agents from the question. In terms of single agents with control over architectural production or the totality of architectural decisions and processes, there is no architect and there never was. The architectural discipline has enjoyed an expansive era of claim over an imaginary concept, but now is the time to release the concept of the architect in general. Articulation of the new architectural hegemony must deconstruct forms of personification previously intertwined with professional identities and examine architectural production in terms of networked processes and uneven agencies. Beyond being able to form that articulation currently, the basics of a new architectural ontology - just as new ontologies are necessary for any form of revolution - are immanently needed. It all must start with addressing the professed object of concern of the defunct architect: “Architecture”.