Not the Last Word

Author(s): Mario Gandelsonas

Source: ANY: Architecture New York, No. 1, Seaside and the Real World: A Debate on
American Urbanism (July/August 1993), p. 62
Published by: Anyone Corporation
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41845582
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 NOT THE LAST WORD
The transcripts of "Seaside and the Real World: A Debate on American Urbanism"
reveal the expected faultlines dividing the panelists on each side of oppositions such
as architecture vs. urbanism, form vs. people, and object fetishism vs. public place.
There are also periodic breaks in the linearity of the discourse that interest me as
potential symptoms of questions that were not discussed but that could be relevant to
the content of the debate. In particular, at the end of the long session, one of these
symptoms emerged in Andres Duany's final statement. After saying, "It's not enough
to go for one afternoon," he repeated the phrase "you have to live it" five times. His
excessive emphasis on the need to "be there" brought to my attention the line
separating participants who had "been there" (to Seaside) from those who had not.
This symptom acted as a nodal point retroactively quilting a number of apparently
unrelated elements of the discussion. It also "placed" me into the transcripts and
videos of a conference I did not attend, about a place to which I have not been.
I would like to start with this question of "being there," but through a displacement.
Instead of people inhabiting places, I would like to discuss architecture inhabiting
different registers or places: first, the question of architecture inhabiting Seaside;
second, of architecture inhabiting the debate; and third, of architecture inhabiting
the city.
1. Seaside is a resort community, and therefore most of its inhabitant-visitors do not
live there. Almost everyone is a visitor who comes back periodically, who perhaps
would like to be there but lives somewhere else. Seaside is the "other" town for
these people. It is a fantasy, a construction where desire is staged: it is "pleasant,
interesting, and safe." This imaginary construction that resembles other towns is
what people temporarily enjoy, what makes them feel at ease "for a few days." The
experience of "buying the groceries, of seeing the kids operate, or of the neighbors
greeting you or not" are the different scenes missed by not "living it," which Andres
Duany thought so relevant to understanding Seaside. When Duany says "you have to
live there," he is pointing out the actors that inhabit the scene. He is not talking
about architecture, the formal-symbolic construction that produced the stage. At
Seaside the architectural construction found in the plan and the code is relegated to
the background. However, it is precisely that background architecture that generated
the emotions, the rejections, and the eruptions that broke, many times, the
discursive logic of the debate.
At Seaside, architecture is a mediator between the conditions of the stage and the
stage itself; between the suppression of history, of urban/suburban/exurban space,
and of class/race/gender warfare and the fantasy town that seamlessly hides these
suppressions with that which has been built. This is what Neil Smith saw through the
seams of the fantasy when he went to Seaside; he could not identify himself with the
image and went bird-watching.
Peter Eisenman has never "lived it," though his reaction shows that he has "been
there" - it is a place where he can look at himself and see the suppressions that
form the basis of his written work and his work on form: the suppression of history -
both recent and past - and the suppression of the political and the social. He could
not identify himself symbolically with Seaside, a place where architecture does not
appropriate the scene, where the scene is instead played by kids and neighbors and
not by architecture.
2. The term architecture appeared sporadically in the conference discourse. It was
absent in Plater-Zyberk's presentation; reduced to style by Duany; brought into the
discussion by Mark Linder; interrogated from a different practice by Smith; attacked
by Diane Ghirardo; and finally, emotionally claimed and ideologically appropriated
by Peter Eisenman (was not this the actual goal of this "debate?").
This was the register on which different practices - stylistic, ideological, critical -
were displayed. This is also the register on which the major split took place: the
effect of "avant-gardism" reduced once more a plurality into an opposition; the
violent denial of the past and its uncritical repetition occurred; and the production of
fetishistic objects and the recreation of an imaginary tradition became two sides of
the same coin or, perhaps, two sides of a Moebius strip, presented to us
simultaneously.
To believe that one can produce fetishistic objects and avoid the city, or that
architecture can escape it, is to remain trapped in "avant-gardism," the "infantile
maladie of modernism" - that is, in the fantasy of autonomy and the spontaneous
generation of novelty at all cost. This avant-gardism propelled the myth of the tabula
rasa and the belief that a new culture could spring from nothing. As Marcel
Duchamp said, "Man can never expect to start from scratch; he must start from
ready-made things like even his mother and father."
The flip side of a tabula rasa that suppresses the past is the return of this past in the
form of fantasies that propose the reversibility of the historical process: for instance,
the belief in reviving the corpse of an architecture as dead as the city killed long ago
by industrialization.
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3. Finally, not having "lived" for some time in the American urban practice, I want to
deal with the question of architecture "not being there" - in the city, in its
discourse, and in its practice.
The city has been the object of architectural desire from the moment architectural
discourse was established. As such it has always eluded the architect, it has always
been unreachable. In its pursuit architecture can only approach the city, though "it
never gets there." It is too slow or too fast; it rebuilds the past or projects the future
but can never insert itself into the present.
As the object of architectural desire the city is supposed to fulfill a fundamental lack
in architecture, which always focuses on the building as object. "From the position
of Architecture as a critical practice, the City looks at Architecture from Without."
(Agrest) The theory remains beside its field of vision and redefines it, again and
again, through history: in the baroque, in the Enlightenment, in early 20th-century
modernism, and now the radical restructuring brought on by the global informational
city.
The choreography of desire flows back and forth from architecture to the city, from
the architectural to the nonarchitectural, and then back from the city - the
nonarchitectural - to architecture. In this space of flows imaginary and symbolic
architectural constructions are assembled.
What was the direction of the flow of desire in this debate? It is clear to the observer
but opaque to the subjects. Eisenman does not realize that when he completes the
movement toward the object fetish, the city is symbolically lost. This magnifies the
lack of its resonance in his architecture, which becomes an acritical scenography.
Duany and Plater-Zyberk do not realize that when they complete the movement and
arrive at Seaside, their destination, architecture is symbolically lost. However, as
they made clear in their discussion, they never intended Seaside to be about the
scene of architecture; rather, it was to be the place for "living" in public space. This
brings us to the political question of the relationship between architecture and the
city, which should be discussed in terms of strategy and tactics.
The historical role of the relationship between architecture and the city has not been
to better the city or architecture but to provide urban laboratories for critical practice
in the urban realm. The establishment of the urban lab is a political matter of the
empowerment of the architect to create the conditions for architecture "to be there,"
to inhabit the city.
The difference between politics and architecture and the need for a political strategy
to establish places of experimentation - the need for the design of urban
architectural strategies - was lost in the debate. These strategies entail planning
the deployment of the architectural discourse and positioning the architect in the
territory of urban planning. As such, they are sequences of moves that enable the
architect to create and occupy positions in urban practice. Seaside needs to be
understood in that strategic context. It has to be seen as the first step that allowed
DPZ to generate other labs. Seaside, as a tactical move, made it possible for
architects, if not for architecture proper, to "be there."
The lab establishes a site of responsibility for the architect in regard to the future as
well as a place that endows the past with new resonance. Once the urban lab is
established, it must become a space for radical exploration and questioning of the
city, an impossibly unattainable object. Otherwise it ceases to be a lab.
Seaside represents gains and losses in the relationship between architecture and the
city. Architecture as a symbolic production, as a practice of inscription, has been
lost temporarily at Seaside. However, what has been gained is of enormous import:
a step toward changing the conditions in which practice is played out.
There is no architectural writing in the absence of the city or when architecture is just
about the design of apolitical object fetishes. We can only produce a contemporary
architecture if it is at the same time a contemporary urbanism, and there is no
urbanism without a political, urban architectural strategy. However, the stage of
architectural writing needs to be occupied by an active practice of inscription. As
long as we acknowledge the radical impossibility of this desire, we may be able to
disseminate architecture in the city.
Mario Gandelsonas is a principal ofA&G Development Consultants in New York.
Bibliography
Agrest, Diana. Architecture from Without. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.
Agrest, Diana and Mario Gandelsonas. "On Practice," International Architecfi
(London: 1979).
de Duve, Thierry. Nominalisme Pictural, Marcel Duchamp et la modernité. Paris:
Editions de Minuit, 1984.
Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.
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