I recently attended a seminar discussing two articles that I had read recently: "Johnathan Meades' on Zaha Hadid" and Alain Badiou's essay "This crisis is the spectacle: Where is the real?".
Architecture: The Real and the Represented
The architect's deliverable is the drawing, the banker's is the money. Both are only representations, abstractions of an idea of space and capital. In reading both articles, I was struck by how the narrative of each article was constructed: Whilst Badiou proselytises a pretty clear damning message about his take on capitalist financialism and its self-fulfilling destruction, Meades is more candid in his observations of Zaha. Sometimes pandering to her ego and sometimes critising her in a manner that borders on ridicule, the strength of his writing was how it left me to judge her for myself. Whilst Badiou is admirable for the clarity of his stance and its tendered solutions, Meades and Zaha offer neither. How very Miesian that his strength is his weakness. I'd like to be able to do the same in this post, but fear it turning into something of an unreferenced rant. Here goes...
Banking / Architecture: Mysticism & Myth
What struck me initially was the common esoteric mysticism and mythology that both the world's financial operators and creatives invent in order to market themselves and ensure their 'worth' to society is unquestionable. They differ in their approaches to these however: Financiers openly proclaiming a system of trading that they are only too happy to try to explain despite their blatent collapse into jargon-laden esotericism and consequential betrayal of the fact that they have very little control (let alone understanding of the game that they are playing). Conversely, architects deliberately abdicating any explanation lest it 'reveal the secrets' behind the magic that they conjure: If you thought that the Zaha of Meades' article was bad for not talking about her ideas, at least she has a website to view her work on: Think of how those torchbearers for architects around the world Herzog & de Meuron and the architect's architect Peter Zumthor eschew a website or contact information. The exclusivity of their cult is perhaps best indicated by the weight that their respective email addresses hold amongst prospective employees and clients alike, a quite deliberate manipulation of the world's perception. I mean, if someone seems like hard work to get in touch with, it must mean that they're worth it!
Making my way around Part 1 shindigs here since I returned to London last, I was regaled with a story of Zaha enforcing a single designer branded plain black dress shirt landed on every one of her employees' desks on the very morning that some big shot was to coming tour the office. Whether you believe the rumour that she then deducted the three-figure cost of each shirt from each person's pay cheques at the end of the month, so too I read in that bastion of boring tripe that is the AJ that Peter Zumthor is currently designing grey uniforms for his staff nestled in the picturesque swiss mountains to wear. Contrary to what they want you to believe, image and mythology is clearly everything for these guys if you even start to scratch beneath the surface of their reticence.
Local and Global Wars
I think the difference between apparent openness of the banks and the reticence of the architect stems from one concerning individual and collective. Architects are unique amongst all other professions in as much as there is no unifying code of approach to our creative discipline (as the free objectivist in me would like to believe there shouldn't), and as such practitioners of architecture revert back to mysticism as, frankly, architects believe that they exist in competition with one another and jargon seems a good way of setting oneself as different. The collective of bankers whom we pin our current economic mess on close ranks and don't even pointing their fingers at each other, claiming to be but symptoms of a society for whom money is an primarily an ends and not a mean, an approach founded in objectivism but against progress.
However, both the suit-clad drivers of the City of London's economic cogs and those heroic byronic architects share a common inherent social responsibility. The City of London contributes 22% of Britain's annual GDP and architects at least partially shape the spaces where we live. However, as architects we operate at a local scale and under the dictation of so many concerns beyond our locus of control that we have got away with an sustainably competitive existence and will continue to operate as such. The significant capitalist mechanisms in which we invest more than just money shouldn't have this tolerance: If we were to view each of the worlds' countries' economic microclimates as at war with one another, as architects fundamentally are, then we would lose the free trade principles that the financial markets are built upon. The individual's greed stemming from an hostility born from mutual and paranoid distrust of perceived competitors that bankers and architects share is what I'm thinking that the entire financial crisis between the real and the represented boils down to: Maybe a departure from Badiou's thought?
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