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Reclaiming Madrid's Plaza de Colón: A project by Fernando Quesada

By publishing the provocative project that follows by Fernando Quesada, Agglutinations seeks to introduce readers to the very interesting conceptual research being carried out by young architects in Spain.

Design Statement

“National Zoo” proposes the colonization of one of Madrid’s most prominent public spaces, the Discovery Gardens at the Plaza de Colón. It seeks to supplement the overscaled flag currently standing at the plaza with a series of aluminum sculptures; specifically, models of animals (elephants, dogs, chickens, and hens; swans, seagulls, and penguins) composed according to principles of Japanese origami. In so doing, the project hopes to defamiliarize the form and meaning of the Spanish national flag, raising questions about the foundations of Spanish national identity.

Postscript to "Critical Regionalism Revisited": A Response to Mark Gilbert and Bart Lootsma

Almost two weeks ago, we published Kenneth Frampton's "Critical Regionalism Revisited: Provisional Thoughts on the Future of Urban Design." In the postscript that follows, Frampton elaborates his position, reacting to criticisms posted recently by agglutinations.com contributors Bart Lootsma and Mark Gilbert.

I very much appreciate the responses of Bart Lootsma and Michael Gilbert, although I am left somewhat at a loss as to how our exchange can be meaningfully continued. I do not believe I am alone in thinking the culture of urbanism is largely a lost cause outside the historic core. Jean Nouvel, among others, has publicly made similar statements, and there is hardly anything Heideggerian about his discourse. Certainly, the vestige of the welfare state in Europe still justifies a certain optimism, particularly, say, in Scandinavia, where I am given to understand that the building of “out of town” supermarkets and shopping malls is now forbidden on the grounds that they destroy the socio-economic life of existing urban settlements at varying scales; so much, for now, for Wal-Mart! But, like Wal-Mart, Americanization goes everywhere as many are surely aware. The “think tank” publication produced by the British government in the year 2000 under the chairmanship of Richard Rogers, Towards an Urban Renaissance, gives one cause for hope in its recommendations for the next 20 years of planning policy in the UK, particularly when one reads the recommendation that two-thirds of the estimated need for 3.2 million dwelling units over the next 20 years should be built on existing brownfield sites, amounting, if I recall correctly, to some 45,000 acres in terms of now-vacant industrial land in the UK. However, carrying this plan out would entail a.) the central government restraining local municipalities from releasing greenfield sites for development and b.) subsidizing the detoxification of brownfield sites. All of this could happen, but I seriously doubt that Tony Blair’s (only too Americanized) New Labor will be easily brought to impose such draconian legislation. In short, as in the land-scarce Netherlands, there will nonetheless persist a policy of total suburbanization exactly as Adrien Gauze satirized it in a Venice Biennale (I forget which one) with little “green houses” scattered all of the place! When shall we finally say a long goodbye to the Mondrian landscape of The Netherlands? This brings us back to politics and to Chantal Mouffe who not long ago wrote:

There are many reasons for the decline of the political. But I intend to concentrate my attention on the one dimension I take to be particularly important, the lack of democratic forms of identifications... through which passions could be mobilized towards democratic designs and which would provide the basis for a vibrant agonistic (as opposed to antagonistic) debate as to the shape and the future of the common life…The blurring of frontiers between right and left that we have steadily witnessed in Western countries and which has been presented as a sign of progress and maturity is in my view one of the most pernicious aspects of the disintegration of the political dimension…[O]nce passions cannot be mobilized by democratic parties because they privilege a “consensus at the center,” those passions tend to find other outlets, in diverse fundamentalist movements, around particularist demands or non-negotiable moral issues that cannot be managed by the democratic process.

How exactly do we reenergize and reactivate the design professions and, above all, our digitalized, consumer society, politically speaking, given the way it is currently sequestered by the triumph of globalization? How do we recover the references we have lost or are in process of losing (and here I am not talking about the Heideggerian “loss of nearness”)? Of course, I still do believe that certain “guerilla actions” remain possible, through public transport, for instance, landscape, low-rise, high- density housing, etc., but both of you seem to have much more global projects in mind, the process and form of which remain unclear to me.

Voluntary Prisoners: A Review of Superstudio: Life without Objects (2003)

by Casey Mack

With Central Park’s 26 thousand trees soon to be available as backrests for 823 acres of wireless internet, it is hard to disagree that Peter Lang and William Menking’s Superstudio: Life Without Objects (2003) is timely in the way it takes the work of this important Italian architecture group and puts it back on the table. Indeed, Superstudio’s work anticipated many organization patterns and structures in our society today. It recognized that we were entering a nomadic and mobile age in which one can “plug and play” as easily in an open meadow as in a closed apartment. It saw that the outdoors could become our new indoors.

Although many of us are familiar with Superstudio’s signature projects, the history and context of their work have remained largely mysterious. Thankfully, this book helps correct this situation. It was not the book I was hoping for (a point that I’ll get into in a moment), but it still provides useful information. Peter Lang’s piece, for example, analyzes Superstudio against the backdrop of Florence’s preservationist oligarchy, its haphazard reconstruction efforts, and its incipient Americanism after the Second World War through to the early 1970s. Meanwhile, William Menking’s essay clarifies Superstudio’s endeavors relative to other Italian practices like Joe Colombo and Archizoom included in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1972 exhibition, Italy: The New Domestic Landscape.

My main criticism of the book centers on the fact that it does not quite carry out what it set out to accomplish. Lang and Menking write in their introductory essay that “[w]hile this publication is not intended to become a catalogue raisonné on the works of Superstudio, it has been conceived as a work of consultation and reflection.” The book is indeed not a catalogue raisonné, but nor does it provide sufficient in-depth, critical analysis to be a work of consultation. More surprisingly still, there is a lack of images and illustrations in the book (not helped by its small format) which prevent it from being a work of reflection. For example, only six of their Twelve Cautionary Tales for Christmas (1971) are accompanied by their rendered views, and all unfortunately lack their beautiful analytical drawings. Many other items in the book appear without commentary or title, leaving the impression that, like religious icons, it is enough to hang Superstudio high up on the wall and be content with mute reverence.

Excessive reverence is ironically another problem I found with the book. The editors write in the introductory essay that there is “[n]o better moment […] to turn back the pages of history to that previous era when a similarly ample crisis ripped through the world economies: welcome to Italy in the 1960s, a time of boom and bust; of war and resistance; of dreams and despair.” I share in this enthusiasm, but at times it appears that this very passion leads the editors awry. Superstudio’s work is timely, but not because it represents a radical break with the past. On the contrary, in projects like Life/Supersurface Superstudio exhibits a primeval nostalgia for wholeness and unity that is quite different from the ‘negative utopia’ usually sold as the office’s main product.

I would also take issue with the subheading of the book, “Life without Objects.” This characterization suggests a reading of Superstudio that places it in league with nihilistic groups like F.T. Marinetti's Italian Futurists. But such an interpretation only tells part of the story. Admittedly, Superstudio’s co-founder Adolfo Natalini did desire “the destruction of [the object’s] attributes of ‘status’ and the connotations imposed by power.” But he also saw Superstudio's mission as one of forging peace; he articulated a vision of “Existenzmaximum” that “harmoniously” developed tools and technologies already at our disposal.

I end with an anecdote. In the recent documentary on the Cultural Revolution in China, Morning Sun, one interviewee comments that those who preach continuous revolution as Mao did in fact kill revolution. With this phenomenon in mind, we should note a perhaps surprising quality that Superstudio mentions repeatedly in this book: serenity. What the techniques and technologies of serenity actually might look like still remains to be seen.

Casey Mack is a New York-based architect and critic.

Interview with David Harvey: Questions about The New Imperialism

by Nader Vossoughian

In his recently published The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003), geographer and social theorist David Harvey makes the case for a "New Deal" brand of imperialism in which the responsibilities of government are carried out by a “benevolent… coalition of capitalist powers.” Against foes of globalization, he argues that the effects of global capitalism are undoable, that advocates of social reform must learn to work within the framework of the marketplace. By the same token, he remains critical of American foreign policy, whose objectives, he argues, have been shaped to a large degree by the neo-liberalism of the moderate left (think US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin) and more recently by the neo-conservatism of the right (think US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld). In the interview that follows, I ask Harvey to elaborate on his views, particularly on the point of how he distinguishes his vision from those articulated by peer intellectuals of the political left.

Q. In The New Imperialism (2003), you do not seem to argue against imperialism as such. In fact, you seem to see it as unavoidable in the world today. Could you perhaps elaborate on your position? How would you distinguish your own vision of imperialism from that espoused by the current Republican administration?

A. I share with Marx the view that imperialism, like capitalism, can prepare the ground for human emancipation from want and need. In arenas like public health, agricultural productivity, and the application of science and technology to confront the material problems of existence (including the preservation of the environment), capitalism and imperialism have opened up potential paths to a better future. The problem is that the dominant class relations of capitalism and the institutional arrangements and knowledge structures to which these class powers give rise typically block the utilization of this potential. Furthermore, these class relations and institutional arrangements set in motion imperialist forms dedicated to the preservation or enhancement of the conditions of their own reproduction, leading to ever greater levels of social inequality and more and more predatory practices with respect to the mass of the world’s population (“accumulation by dispossession,” as I call it).

My argument is that, at the present moment, the US has no option except to engage in such practices unless there is a class movement internally that challenges existing class relations and their associated hegemonic institutions and political-economic practices. This leaves the rest of the world with the option of either resisting US imperialism directly (as in the case of many developing country social movements) or seeking either to divert it or compromise with it by forming, for example, sub-imperialisms under the umbrella of US power. The danger is that anti-imperialist movements may become purely and wholeheartedly anti-modernist movements rather than seeking an alternative globalization and an alternative modernity that makes full use of the potential that capitalism has spawned.

There are two sorts of solutions that seem possible today. The first consists of a radical overthrow of existing institutional arrangements and the re-structuring of political-economic practices in ways that confront and ultimately displace class powers as articulated through market exchange and capital accumulation. In the long run I believe that something of this sort has to occur if humanity is to survive without falling back into barbarism. There are multiple movements around the world in motion searching for some such alternative (as symbolized by the World Social Forum). These are full of interesting ideas and partial victories have been won. But I do not believe the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movement is currently strong enough or even adequately equipped, theoretically or practically, to undertake such a task. This then poses the question of what to do in the immediate present, in the face of a very dangerous political and economic situation. In my own view, there is only one way in which capitalism can steady itself temporarily and draw back from a series of increasingly violent inter-imperialist confrontations, and that is through the orchestration of some sort of global “new” New Deal. This would require a considerable realignment of political and economic practices within the leading capitalist powers (the abandonment of neo-liberalism and the reconstruction of some sort of redistributive Keynesianism) as well as a coalition of capitalist powers ready to act in a more redistributive mode on the world stage (a Karl Kautsky kind of ultra-imperialism). For people on the left, the question is whether we would be prepared to support such a move (much as happened in leftist support for social democracy and new deal politics in earlier times) or to go against it as “mere reformism.” I am inclined to support it (much as I support, albeit with reservations, what Luis Inacio Lula da Silva is doing in Brazil) as a temporary respite and as a breathing space within which to try to construct a more radical alternative. Otherwise, I fear a catastrophic beginning to the twenty-first century that will bring death and mayhem to even more of the world’s population than is now afflicted. The mass consequences of a capitalist collapse would be far more catastrophic now than in the past simply because of the way so much of the world’s population is now integrated into, and therefore in some sense crucially dependent upon, the functioning of the world market. It was for this reason that I argued for a new New Deal in The New Imperialism. In the long run, however, I believe the respite to be had from such a politics will be short, perhaps all too short. We therefore need to think alternatives and to begin building them now in the interstices of capitalism.

Q. How would you assess the position of left-leaning free-market advocates like George Soros, who have sought to combine economic liberalism with democratic reform. Are Soros’ goals realistic in your view? How are your views similar or different from Soros’ and others?

A. This question concerns, in very general terms, the issue of alliances that can be pinned together to realize reformist political goals. This is a tactical question in which all manner of oppositional forces, including dissident voices (like those of George Soros, Paul Krugman or Joseph Stieglitz -- if they really mean what they say) within the dominant classes, have a potential role to play. My own view is that we should have one foot firmly implanted within those conventional political movements that are prepared to take up the cause of reform and one foot implanted in the radical movements seeking more revolutionary solutions. This straddling of political positions can sometimes be uncomfortable or even unbearable. But I think it wise to recognize that reformists and revolutionaries can often make common cause in a particular conjuncture, the only discernible differences sometimes being the long-term goals rather than the short term actions. Given the political and military violence of neo-conservativism coupled with the economic violence of neo-liberalism, it seems to me that a powerful reformist movement deserves every ounce of support we can give it.

David Harvey is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City of New York. His books include Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (2001), Paris, Capital of Modernity: Paris and the Second Empire (2003), The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (1990), The Urban Experience (1989).