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24

The Avant-Garde in Time of War

All architecture is political.

By marshaling and distributing resources, organizing social space, and orchestrating encounters, architecture is the medium through which human relations are given dimension. Since 9/11, images of assaults on buildings and cities have become ubiquitous symbols of political action, surrogates—in a war without corpses—for our own corporeality. As we watch the war on Iraq unfolding in real time on TV, we are introduced to a modified, militarized, urbanists’ discourse, different from our own, but filled with mirror images of architecture’s techniques.

To accomplish the ends of this new “war-fighting ecosystem,” cities must be stripped of their character as human settlements and re-measured. If by al-Qaeda, the city becomes Satan’s lair, the habitat of devils; if by our own military, it becomes an urban space simply devoid of habitation. We see the city with the brutal objectivity of “aim points” and “target sets” for weapons so accurate they can be remotely aimed—from across the street, from Qatar, Florida, or from outer space—at windows. Because their precision is “beyond belief,” in the words of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he can celebrate a strategy predicated on the easy technical classification of good buildings and bad (surrogates for good people and evildoers), and direct retributive fire to its targets from satellites hundreds of miles away. The clean and distant imagery—from the World Trade Center collapsing to the row of mushroom clouds rising over Baghdad—is equally depopulated for those who perpetrate and for those who observe. The message is not simply that we cannot miss, but that no one really gets hurt.

The media make use of architecture’s tools as well. Each network employs global imagery from one or another simulation shop to extend its own panoptic reach. As we zoom in on Baghdad from a position in space, a fabulously detailed computer image of the landscape seamlessly morphs into an aerial photo of the city, then back to a CAD rendering of the presidential palace to be taken out. At the scale of the city, sinister installations are clearly marked—Saddam Airport, Baath Headquarters, the Planning Ministry—so we can map and assimilate both the networks and points of evil, ready for the acupuncture to be administered by our unfailing Tomahawks.

Like their civilian counterparts, military planners are experts at zoning. After the first night of Shock and Awe in Iraq, on March 20, the architectural and urban plans became more detailed. Stretching for several miles along the Tigris, a neighborhood of evil was introduced to us: a continuous concentration of the architecture of the Saddamite regime, an area of darkness, precisely redlined to become a pyrotechnic cauldron, ready for its close-up from the roof of the Al-Rashid or Palestine hotels. Dots on the map suggest that we have administered the appropriate corrective dose only where it is needed. By pathologizing in advance all that we hit, the noisome problem of collateral damage is obviated: it’s just urban renewal. Indeed, according to an op-ed piece by Daryl G. Press in the March 26 New York Times, Baghdad is particularly well designed for invasion. Lacking tall buildings and laced—unlike Grozny or Mogadishu—with broad boulevards, the city’s terrain is not, as Press writes laconically, “ideal for urban defense.”

To justify the war, Bush repeatedly elided 9/11 and the attack on Iraq as cause and effect. There is something striking in the coincidence of the planning endgame at Ground Zero with the violent site-clearing and promised reconstruction underway in Iraq. Already, the Times had reported that the administration had invited Bechtel, Fluor, Halliburton, Parsons, Washington (successor to Morrison-Knudson), and the Berger Group to bid on billions in projects via an accelerated process. “Bechtel would be proud to rebuild Iraq,” a spokesman is quoted as saying, and surely they would be proud to get a piece of the action in downtown New York City as well. Iraq will require its own development corporation, and the administration is suggesting that these contracts will be supervised by an “interim authority” (shades of the LMDC and the Port Authority), only answerable upward. War becomes the extension of planning by other means.

Our own response as architects has been uninspiring. Architecture’s political voice speaks in many tongues, and there is no reason to assume that our views—never mind our styles of expression—should be uniform. To the contrary, the idea of liberty (and of its product, difference) is the repudiation of the single voice. At the same time, this expressive latitude does not mean a world of endless relativism, one in which the defense of principle is made moot by an idea of tolerance that reduces social relations to a Hobbesian jungle of pure opportunism and anything goes. In particular, we look to our avant-garde for a riposte to power, for our own targets of opportunity. Avant-gardes always harbor the political, the idea of the overthrow of the status quo. To escape mere nihilism, though, there must be some integral vision of the good, however obscure its forms at present. Unfortunately, our response to the destruction of the idea of the city by neoliberal globalization or by neocolonial warfare has produced little constructive speculation about urbanism’s future. Having seen the looming disaster, too many of our most talented have simply embraced it: many architects are becoming proponents of the sprawl and the one-size-fits-all mentality that is strangling the earth.

But what ideas of the good city are truly worth defending? And how can the architectural avant-garde use its quiver of innovation and transgression to defend them? For me, the city confronts four major challenges in realizing its future, all of which have implications for form. The first of these is sustainability, the idea that numbers and resources must be balanced in order to conserve and enhance the health of both cities and the planet. The second issue is access. This entails the just distribution of global resources and the “freedom of the city” that is a fundamental right of urban citizenship. The third is the defense of privacy from the multiplication of techniques of surveillance and manipulation that prevent us from freely forming and maintaining our sense of self. Finally, valuable living cultural and physical ecologies must be preserved. No intelligent form of urbanism can neglect the defense of its historic successes.

On an exponentially urbanizing planet, the construction of new and sustainable cities is an urgent necessity, and we haven’t risen to the challenge. Given the struggle between the goals I’ve listed and the pressures of a winnowing globalization and militarization of culture and control, the challenge is both how to build these cities and how to find the means for their individuality. Neither nostalgic visions nor the depredations of planning left to the ineffable wisdom of the market will do: not only bombs obliterate. This assault puts the premium on artistic invention, for the creation of a singular architecture that is sustainable, malleable, and beautiful.

And it is here that an engaged avant-garde becomes more crucial than ever. Two of our most celebrated avant-garde architectural firms have very visible projects in New York just now. Daniel Libeskind’s scheme for the reconstruction of Ground Zero and the exhibition of the work of Liz Diller and Ric Scofidio at the Whitney Museum, Scanning: The Aberrant Architectures of Diller + Scofidio, are widely celebrated as the best and most truly innovative we can do. But, seated comfortably in their institutional venues, do either of these firms have the potential for either clarifying shock or inspiring awe? Is there anything new here? The final Libeskind scheme is simply conventional, its putative avant-gardism occlusive rather than innovative, offering up poignant, if familiar, symbols to “balance” the real investment to be made and the major uses to which the site is to be restored. The grid will return, there will be shops on the street and in a vast mall underground, and millions of square feet of unneeded office space will be built. The program will be just as it was. Yet for the authorities, who were so roundly castigated for previous failures of innovation, the idea that they’re now actually thinking out of the box is bolstered by foregrounding Libeskind’s progressive credentials (established by referring to previous “avant-garde” work), by his hip costuming and self-presentation, and by the thick camouflage of angularities shrouding the architecture whose future may or may not be in his control. At the same time, the idea that this formal experimentalism might harbor a risky politics is defused by Libeskind’s sleeve-worn heart, by treacly recitations of his immigrant sagas, by the sudden appearance of an American Flag in his chic lapel, and by his grinning face as he rings the opening bell at the Stock Exchange, much like Michael Eisner or Martha Stewart.

At the Whitney, things are decidedly more promising. Diller and Scofidio have long worked with acumen and verve at the sites of crucial issues in urban politics. By addressing the rites of tourism, the media of surveillance, the rituals of domesticity, the alienation of everyday life, and the centrality of the body to architecture, their practice can be said to be genuinely critical. Canny in their combination of irony and sensuality—two of the cudgels historically used by the avant-gardes to browbeat cultural norms—these excellent designers, by responding to the threats of the virtual, continue to celebrate the prosody of the physical.

If I have a cavil with their work, it is with a certain failure to behave badly, and for their selection of targets grown long in the tooth. This is the old issue of how acceptable a message can be before it simply becomes part of the medium. Caught up in a hyperaesthetic critique, the work seems to pull its punches, dilating on ambiguity and mixed messages. But does anyone in the Issey Miyake generation actually iron (Bad Press: Dissident Housework Series)? Hasn’t the numbness of the robotic production line been better covered by Fritz Lang and Charlie Chaplin (Master/Slave)? Has anyone failed to observe the homogenization of tourism (Tourisms: suitCase Studies)? Must we still express superiority to simple folk who love their lawns or their vacations (The American Lawn: The Surface of Everyday Life)? Is surveillance really deconstructed by video monitors over the bar at the Brasserie? This is work that makes me long both for the rapier and for utopia, for the out-of-bounds, for violence or hilarity or idiosyncrasy.

The power of Diller and Scofidio’s project, though, is not its p.c. critique, but the form of its objectification. When the beauty is flat out—as in their tense suspension of Samsonite luggage in the Tourisms installation at the Whitney, or that stunning Blur building in Lake Neuchâtel at the Swiss Expo for 2002, or those intoxicatingly theatric choreographies (such as the Jet Lag multimedia play)—the longing for a better world finds focus. If the avant-garde is to have a utility beyond indulgence, it’s time for both excess and straight talking, for the surrender of irony and hair-splitting intelligence to a frenzy of demands for a better world. The strategy of the avant-garde depends, always, on too much, on some willing form of bad behavior, on blurring old certainties. But totalitarianism trumps ambiguity every time. War is the ultimate bad behavior and the canny politicians in charge of the current carnage—by constantly presenting themselves as an avant-garde, inventors of the “revolution in military affairs” and pioneers of a new “battlespace”—try to supersede their own savagery by giving it fresh form. We must do better than this. What’s needed now are clear propositions at the scale of globalizers, whole cities imagined from scratch, big chunks of alternative realities. Against the aesthetics of alienation and annihilation we must respond with fresh forms of survival and joy. Architecture must take the field.

2003