In these uncertain and gloomy times, it is nice to have voices in architecture that are both forward-looking and filled with humor. If you are looking for such an entertaining (and somewhat acerbic) distraction, I recommend Narrative Architecture: A Kynical Manifesto (NAI010 Publishers), by the architects Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski. Leavened with Photoshop drawings that combine the romance of mythological landscape painters such as Le Lorrain and Poussin with the reality-bending visions of the Modernist masters from Le Corbusier to Rem Koolhaas, Hon. FAIA, this book professes to be a manifesto, but one that does not take itself so seriously. Or so the authors claim, although their Marxist-tinged language reveals a more trenchant critique.
Garcia and Frankowski’s model is not Vitruvius or even Le Corbusier, but rather the Greek philosopher Diogenes. He went looking for honest men with a lantern he kept lit in broad daylight, slept in a wine jug, tried to live like a dog (attempting to bite his critics and defecating in public), and mocked all authority, from civic leaders to Plato. Based on their understanding of Diogenes’ thought and life, Garcia and Frankowski propose an architecture “that bites the Mask of Ideology away (like the Diogenescan Dog) and laughs at the sight of the unveiled allegorical face of a deadly serious (and at times immovable) discipline.” Their biggest enemy is not any particular style or kind of architecture, but a discipline that makes absurd claims
to make the world a better place without challenging social, economic, or political powers, to be critical without questioning the status quo, to create spaces for ‘the people’ while people cannot participate in the process to think and make architecture, to argue for a sustainable architecture while building more, to plan ‘smart’ cities that are ‘condemned to be stupid’, to pursue ecological architecture while destroying the ecosystems at an unprecedented rate—Architecture remains stuck in its ideological impasse.
Instead of offering a real or concrete alternative, they tell stories—a technique they have used before, offering visions of idealized objects floating through a utopian world on their WAI (What Architecture Is) Think Tank website, and also writing fairy tales for children. (When they taught at the School of Architecture at Taliesin, where I helped hire them as visiting teaching fellows several years ago, they used similar methods to evoke imaginative responses from students.) They tell some of their narratives using images of ruins of classical civilization mixed with schemes, usually on a large scale, for new cities or ways of living that dot the history of modern architecture. They can also be whimsical in their approach, combining shapes derived from a variety of sources, from the tortured skyscrapers that have risen around the world in the last decade thanks to computer-aided design, to aviaries and fragments of surrealist paintings.
Garcia and Frankowski believe that Modernism in its most abstract, large-scale, and functionalist form is nothing less than an attempt to plan and control reality, and is therefore allied both to capitalist economic systems and totalitarian impulses. They also think that it serves as propaganda and marketing for those political and economic systems (“Too late to be its inventor,” they say of one of its masters, “Le Corbusier settled for creating one of the strongest brands of the Modern Movement… ™”). When that whole system led to the Second World War and other excesses of violence and control, they argue that something called the “apres garde” (as opposed to the avant garde) was born out of the ashes of the atomic bomb.
Since then, they argue that the trademark Modernism of the 1920s and 1930s has become intertwined with what the authors see as its alter ego, surrealism, to produce reversals and contradictory proposals. They point out that the floating cities envisioned by the likes of Yona Friedman, Archizoom, Archigram, and Superstudio, and built in fragments by the members of Team X, are nothing but mirror images, unrooted pieces, and unmoored versions of the endless ranks of high-rises and identical slabs that the modern masters proposed as utopia and that turned into the dystopic modern city. Just as consumerism became the opiate of the masses, keeping the production engine of capitalist societies going, so architecture manufactured images of itself, its solutions, and its dreams to satisfy the market for concrete utopias.
Instead of being “cynical” about this, Garcia and Frankowski try to recapture what they think is the original meaning of the word, using the spelling “kynical.” They propose, in their “Kynical Manifesto,” a “Narrative Architecture” in ten points. It starts with great verve, although it then settles into considerably repetition:
Write a subversive story about architecture and the city. Expose the system behind buildings and zoning laws; behind Redlining, and gentrifications, and whitewashing and smart crapstractions. Reveal the accumulation of wealth and its relationship to form, matter, and space. 2. Construct a philosophy of jokes without being facetious. Reveal through humor whatever is wrong with Architecture, from education to practice… 3. Piss against the ideological wind…
The manifesto ends with a somewhat desperate call: “Reveal an honest architecture. And if you can’t find it, write your own subversive story about architecture and the city.” They proceed to offer up their own contributions, in a technique that echoes manifestos by the likes of Robert Venturi and Koolhaas. If the projects they feature to support their claims, though beautiful visually, fall short of the mark, that is only par for the course.
The lack of proof does make me, as in so many recent theoretical explorations of architecture (including the Postorthographic age I recently wrote about), despair as to whether we will ever see a reintegration into the discipline of speculation, proposals, and dreams of what architecture could or should be. I will keep lighting my Diogenescan lamp and continue the search.
Aaron Betsky is a regularly featured columnist whose views and conclusions are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine nor of the American Institute of Architects.
