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Architectural Theory Review

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Interview with Reinhold Martin

Lee Stickells & Charles Rice Available online: 08 Dec 2010

To cite this article: Lee Stickells & Charles Rice (2010): Interview with Reinhold Martin, Architectural Theory Review, 15:3, 324-331 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2010.526089

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LEE STICKELLS AND CHARLES RICE

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INTERVIEW WITH REINHOLD MARTIN: Utopias Ghost1

One of the recurring considerations in this special issue is that of historicity: How does historical specicity bear on architectural criticism? How is the historian a critic and the critic a historian? How does the anthologization of history, theory and criticism produce occlusions and exclusions? Apropos to these concerns, in his most recent book, Utopias Ghost, Reinhold Martin argues that: Simply to historicize postmodernism seems inadequate and, in many ways, premature.2 Through a close reading of buildings, projects and texts from the 1970s and 1980s, the complex intersections of temporality, ideology and history at work in the production of postmodern architecture are subjected to critical analysis. With an eye to the implications for writing architectural history and criticism, Charles Rice (CR) and Lee Stickells (LS) discussed the book with Reinhold Martin (RM). CR: Temporality is an important theme in Utopias Ghost. In the subtitle, Architecture and Postmodernism, Again, there is almost an implicit apology that you are reexamining a period which is both very recent in historical terms, yet something which architecture seems to have put behind it quite quickly. Postmodernism in architecture is thus both distant but yet to be dealt with historically. How do you understand the timeliness of your book in this context? RM: Thats the thing about ghosts; they show up most unexpectedly. But what appears untimely in one context might appear quite timely in another. To the extent that Utopias Ghost is addressed to audiences both inside and outside architecture, I do hope that its untimeliness will appear timely when seen from other perspectives. The fact that many of the chapters began as responses to invitations to consider a specic subject reects shared though perhaps latent concerns, which I tried to articulate and draw out in the book as a whole. Its major hypothesis regarding
ISSN 1326-4826 print/ISSN 1755-0475 online 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13264826.2010.526089

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architectures role in the active unthinking of utopian thought, however, is a direct response to a vast blind spot around which historical experience is organized in the present. The systematic, almost technical training of the imagination away from such thought was and remains a travesty that is surely the most enduring and deleterious legacy of postmodernism. It has nothing to do with style, historical citation, etc. It has to do with education, culture, and politics. Much of the impetus for writing the book came from sitting on design juries and teaching studios in which it was clear, time and again, that students were simply unable to think structural change in the present. Architecture or revolution? had ceased to be a question. Not universally, but predominantly. On the other hand, the book also responds to the visible (and desirable) tendency, particularly among younger scholars, to historicize architectural postmodernism. The period is currently being reevaluated and reassessed in a variety of ways, from PhD dissertations to museum exhibitions, and I very much look forward to the new insights to be gained. I only ask that we pause for a moment and reconsider the terms under which such historicizing is performed. The difculty of terminology (I have simply accepted the currency of the term postmodernism despite its contested status) is compounded by the problem of periodization. In short, although the modernist crisis was deemed by many to have been resolved under architectural postmodernism, what we actually see is its persistence in altered form. It is clear, therefore, that architecture does not effectively become postmodern until after 1989; that is, after it leaves architectural postmodernism behind, in favor of a new, pseudo-modernism that nally represses the traumas of the Berlin

Wall, urban renewal, Vietnam, and so on in favor of techno-triumphalism and the global hegemony of the markets. The result is a new set of architectural languages untroubled by history, that consolidate the symbolic victory of ReaganThatcherism rather than reject its apparent anachronism. In other words, the digital turn, which has nally succeeded in neutralizing modern architectures historical imagination. LS: The issues you describe involve various mobilizations of architectural history and, indeed, movement abounds within Utopias Ghost: from the circulation of materials and capital through multinational networks to the architectural promenades of Le Corbusier; from feedback loops of development to cycles and oscillations of history; from ows of information to the recursive reections of mirror-glassed facades. Movement (or circulation) seems strongly placed to form another thematic, alongside those that already structure the book? RM: We have been told many times that today we no longer occupy space, that artifact of the late nineteenth century; instead, we occupy ows. I largely agree with this, especially as it pertains to spatiotemporal globalization. But you dont need to visit whats left of the nineteenth century arcades to recall that capitalist circulation was a dening force for modernism. We can therefore ask: Whats the difference between the thematic of circulation as it is developed, for example, by Walter Benjamin in Paris, or by Fredric Jameson in the Los Angeles Westin Bonaventure Hotel? One answer would be the persistent need, each time one refers to Jamesons brilliant reading, to attach the name Westin to the space in question. This corporatization of spacetime was not (yet) an issue for Benjamin. Likewise

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for the circulation of photographs of the hotel, which are controlled by an overlapping set of corporate interests, from Westin to Portman. In effect, as an allegory of circulation, Benjamins one way street has become a suburban cul-desac, both on the ground and in the imagesphere. The circle, the ur-geometry of formally utopian plans as well of ambivalent, Foucauldian heterotopias like the panopticon or the panorama (a key, mediating component of Benjamins arcades), has come to describe a kind of permanent orbita literalization of the term globalizationthat resembles nothing more than a treadmill, going nowhere. Read allegorically, this treadmill signals not the permanent unfolding of catastrophe helplessly witnessed by Benjamins angel of history, but the muchproclaimed end of history and the normalization of catastrophe (permanent war, permanent emergency, etc.), which is to be found copiously documented in todays architecture periodicals. Probably its most complete monument is Norman Fosters pseudo-utopian enclave of Masdar, in Abu Dhabi, suburb to the world. The example of Buckminster Fullers spaceship Earth is instructive in this regard. Not normally associated with postmodern practice, Fullers gure diagrams both circulation-as-orbit (in a sort of total system) and as potential escape, as in the many interstellar escapes (or exoduses, or colonial voyages) that form a staple of the science ction literature that Jameson analyzes so adroitly for its channeling of Utopia. Fuller has become newly relevant as an avatar of sustainable design, but what his work and thought actually reveal is the paradigmatic character of risk management in organizing and rationalizing real and imagined relationships between past, present, and future. CR: The period you examine in the book is the moment when architecture becomes reexive

in terms of its historical and theoretical relationship to its own discipline, and to wider cultural practices within which it is situated. What were some of the difculties in reecting historically and theoretically on this period, when reexivity itself becomes the historical and theoretical issue? RM: Well, in a sense Im arguing that, despite appearances, architectural discourse under postmodernism was insufciently reexive, if by that we understand self-critical. Yes, the turn toward structuralist and poststructuralist theory in the 1970s yielded a certain self-consciousness regarding the categories we use. But byand-large, what passes for architectural theory in postmodernism, especially the texts that were taken up by critics like Jameson, Andreas Huyssen, or Jean-Francois Lyotard, is more symptomatic than reexive. This goes especially for the gentle or retroactive manifestos Complexity and Contradiction, Learning from Las Vegas, Delirious New York, etc.and the writings of critics like Charles Jencks. For the most part, these texts do not represent architectures contribution to critical postmodern thought. They are symptoms, evidence. Evidence of what? Of the material, discursive reorganization of the eld, of the city, and of the bourgeois imagination such that Las Vegas or Rockefeller Center appear as models rather than as problems. Though I only imply this in passing in the book, Rockefeller Center, like the Westin Bonaventure (its distant descendent), is interesting in this regard. In many ways it is a model of the type of genuinely cosmopolitan urbanity that accompanies capitalist development, as Koolhaas suggests. But in order to become this, the regime signaled by the name Rockefeller (think: Standard Oil) needs to be naturalized, taken for granted. This is not just a matter of the client or patron; it is built into the

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architecture, as I try to show in the case of Philip Johnsons skyscrapers. This is where Tafuri remains crucial. Though he does so in different terms, he rejects this normalization or naturalization, and instead offers a genealogy of the skyscraper that reveals its ambivalent status as a centerpiece of what today we would call the neoliberal consensus regarding the city. Intellectually and in practice, it is our responsibility to challenge this consensus.

that Tafuris boudoir, in which architecture becomes a parlor game, is really a laboratory, a sort of live/work homeofce, in which intellectual labor comes to resemble nothing more than serious fun, as they say in Silicon Valley. All you have to do is visit one of Venturi and Scott Browns, playful, posthuman laboratory buildings and youll see what I mean. Its science ction, pure and simple. The most obvious contemporary manifestation of this is the gure of the signature architect. Is Zaha Hadid a function of the parlor (at the Architectural Association) or the boardroom (in Abu Dhabi)? In what sense does it make sense to hold these spaces apart? This doesnt mean that they collapse into one another. They are, in a sense, related in the way that the two ends or openings of a Klein bottle are related, through a sort of insideout extrusion. This is not to reduce the agency or authorial intent of an architect like Hadid to a mere symptom of systemic, claustrophobic enclosure presented as the very diagram of openness and porosity. It is to try to reposition authorship, or gamesmanship, on a new playing eld that more accurately corresponds with reality. What would it mean to understand signature architecture, and the signature architect, as a product of the laboratory? In fact, this laboratory would probably resemble nothing more than the sort of lab that Venturi and Scott Brown have become so adept at designing, where architectures genetic signatures are carefully codied and subject to controlled mutation, in an otherwise humane, altogether corporate environment, with organic coffee on every oor. CR: In some ways, the disciplinary and academic context of Utopias Ghost is the

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LS: Questions of architectures power seem important here. You write At the threshold of postmodernity, aesthetic experienceincluding meaning, affect, and the representational codes they entailis coterminal with the sphere of production and with the organization of everyday life.3 This proposition undermines conventional readings of postmodern architecture as a retreat into games with aesthetic languages. Is it fair to suggest that such a reinterpretation is critical to your reclaiming for architectural thought a decisive role in the analysis, interpretation and critique of power?4 RM: Yes. The further inside you go, the further outside you get. Following Foucault, I understand the critique of power as, in part, a topological problem. But rather than emphasize the interplay of utopias and heterotopias, which I think in any case remains vague in Foucault, I explore powers paradoxical or counterintuitive topologies. Despite Tafuri, there is no retreat in postmodernism; there is a rewriting of the rules of the game. It only looks like a retreat when seen from the point of view of the avant-gardes, that is, from the point of view of militant, authorial intent. Coincident with the rise of postindustrial or immaterial labor more generally, the labor of the architect is now, strictly speaking and in a material, infrastructural sense, primarily aesthetic. This means

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recent debate around critical and post-critical or projective practice, about which you have written for Harvard Design Magazine.5 To what extent was the writing of Utopias Ghost motivated by this debate? Are the American schools still factionalized in those terms? RM: I cannot speak for American architecture schools in general, but like most American political discourse, the term post-critical is an embarrassment. I therefore apologize for my role in inadvertently helping to keep it in circulation, even with critical intent. The article to which you are referring is really about neoimperialism after 9/11, and the role of culture therein. Its rst version was written for an interdisciplinary newsletter published by the Center (now Institute) for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, of which I am a longstanding member. I felt that I needed to demonstrate that, despite the manifestly reactionary role that architecture was playing in the international public sphere in the morbid and deadly response to 9/11, this was, as they say, a teachable moment. The article was, in that sense, an apology to critical theory for what supposedly vanguardist architecture had come to represent, and an explanation of how this had come to be. Because, you will recall that in the fertile, cross-disciplinary debates around postmodernism, architecture (and architectural theory) had come to occupy a privileged position, as both Exhibit A and as a playful form of cultural therapy with occasional gestures toward theoretically informed criticality. But of course, in the context of the intensely parochial debate going on in architectural circles, the article (Critical of What?) could be seen as more polemical. And it is. I still have to say that any group of architects who could

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publicly describe their not-so-distantly neoGothic proposal for Ground Zero as a cathedral (again, with Johnson in the background), complete with uplifting aesthetic effects, had to be living on another planet. Because, unlike the present vitriol directed against the construction of an Islamic cultural center nearby (ongoing as we speak),6 their authorial intent was not to contribute to the Holy War. Or at least, I hope and assume that it wasnt. But, like the now discarded winner of the grand prize in the made-for-reality-TV competition, they did anyway. We need to know how this was and remains possible. That is one way that historical and theoretical analysis can help. All of the architects in the Ground Zero sweepstakes were either protagonists of architectural postmodernism, or its progeny. LS: The advocating of a post-critical architecture in the last decade often framed writing (conated with theory) as an appendage to the projectas less than real. In contrast, writing, and the discursive, seem key to the kinds of architectural thinking carried out within Utopias Ghost. Could the call within the book to think the thought called Utopia again be seen, amongst other things, to involve a reimagining of the material effects of architectural writing?7 RM: Needless to say, writing is a form of practice. It takes time, costs money, etc. But we do not need to apologize for doing theory. Instead, we need more vigorously than ever to argue for its necessity, partly because theory, too, has been professionalized, normalized. Every architectural history conference I have attended in the past decade has been peppered with theoretical terminology. Which is fantastic, a real victory of which we should be proud. But it is also cause for concern, for with

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the obligatory footnote comes complacency. So I dont want to justify the work of theory solely on the grounds of its productivity, its usefulness, for example, in framing the more legitimate and productive (and equally necessary) work of historical reconstruction. Rather, I want to insist that we must continue to invent new and troubling ways to theorize architecture precisely because they get in the way. They disturb, perhaps redirect, and maybe even transform historical tendencies. Because thats what postmodernism is; it is a discourse that coincides with a historical tendency. My post-critical colleagues will complain that this is just more of the same old stubbornness that gets in the way of actually getting anything done. On the contrary, it is historically necessary to keep the possibility of structural transformation alive, or at least undead (as they say of ghosts), rather than accede to the deadly, phantasmagoric realism of an unacceptable present. But already this terminology is a little obsolete, a little anachronistic, which is a mark of its true postmodernity. For it has become increasingly clear that we are entering a new, more humane phase. In recognition, for example, of the paradigm of risk management that I argue underlies architectural postmodernism, we might ask of todays well-meaning advocates of sustainability: What, exactly, is being sustained? And, to counter the pseudo-utopianism of sustainable design, we might call for the return of a genuinely utopian consciousness capable of thinking relationships between ecology and economy, such that the demise of the welfare state (another hallmark of postmodernism) is not celebrated as a victory of the natural forces of capital, but understood as an ominous warning that demands a critical, anti-nostalgic response from all sectors. Until

now, architecture has led in the celebrations, churning out innumerable, sophisticated, iconic, crypto-religious monuments to the gods of capital. Now would be a good time to secularize the architectural imagination, and learn to think of counterforms, counternarratives, counterstructures, and counterorganizations to those that have colonized the planet. LS: The responsibility you identify, for challenging that naturalization of a neo-liberal consensus and the related blindspot within architectural education, brings me directly back to Fredric Jameson and his Archaeologies of the Future. Jameson argued that we must retain a properly impractical utopian impulse (as he put it, an anti-anti-utopianism), in order to keep clear a space for oppositional thinking.8 The formal aw of utopian thought instead becomes a rhetorical strength, in that it forces us precisely to concentrate on the break itself: a meditation on the impossible, on the unrealizable in its own right.9 The approach you advocate appears to position critical historical writing as very important to countering the almost technical training of the imagination away from such thought. It seems a wonderful irony that such writing practices might be critical to an artistic, or architectural, utopian impulse? RM: Yes, I would say so. Though I would not necessarily distinguish between the two guilds herethat of history/theory and that of design (or practice)since in a sense the training occurs at a deeper level. In respect to Jamesons thesis, as well as to any other account that treats postmodernism/ postmodernity as a structural transformation in the organization of knowledge, including the knowledge of possible futures (or of their impossibility), we would have to consider

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both writing and designing as specic forms of thought, each with their own protocols, that are equally subject to the naturalization of otherwise historical developments. Still, to the extent that history/theory writing in architecture is a degree or so removed from the exigencies of professional practice, it may offer more space to maneuver. Here, I think that the professional expectation that theory provides a script for design ought to be vigorously challenged. Instead, we might look more closely at concrete institutional practices, such as the teaching of history in architecture schools and other curricular matters. The old debate over operative versus non-operative forms of scholarship is a distraction at this point. The issue is the shape of the discourse, and how it interacts with other discourses, particularly around shared problems like the naturalization of market values. Different channels through which to articulate these issues may open up at different times and in different contexts. It so happens that today, for various historical reasons, the contemplation of positive, structural change through architectural design in the traditional sense has been largely foreclosed. But that does not mean that the consequent division of labortheory as

critical or utopian, practice as realisticis here to stay. This, too, is a historical development that is subject to change. There is also a (usually tacit) narrative today that is reorganizing universities from the ground up. It runs like this: Professional schools and other sites of applied knowledge represent the future of the university, nancially and otherwise. The humanities and other under performing endeavors (including the writing of history) must adapt to the new constraints imposed by the markets by becoming more efcient, more productive, and/or more innovative. In that sense, the tensions (sometimes productive, sometimes not) with which we are familiar in architecture schools are characteristic of the university as a whole, and they are in the process of being reframed. The real-world consequences of this reframing are well known. I only want to emphasize that this is not just another move in the age-old game of critical versus applied knowledge. It emanates from a rearrangement of the playing eld that is authorized by a brutal and thoroughly spectral realism. The utopian function of the university as a world apart, always-already compromised and ambivalent to be sure, is itself in danger of vanishing altogether.

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Notes
1. This interview was conducted via email during August and September of 2010. 2. Reinhold Martin, Utopias Ghost: Architecture and Portmodernism, Again, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010, p. xi. 3. Martin, Utopias Ghost, p. xvi. 4. Martin, Utopias Ghost, p. xii. 5. Reinhold Martin, Critical of What? Toward a Utopian Realism, Harvard Design Magazine, 22 (Spring/Summer 2005): 15. 6. This refers to the public controversy in August

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2010 over Park51, the Muslim cultural center proposed on Park Place, two blocks north of the former World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan.

7. Martin, Utopias Ghost, p. 179. 8. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other

Science Fictions, London, Verso, 2005. 9. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. 232.

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