 |
| Project: 1984 Air Strip One, MiniLuv Close-up |
Project 1984
For an architect, in the instant that he has undivided attention
of a patron with the power to realize his designs, literally nothing else
matters; not a fire alarm, not even an earthquake; there is nothing else to
talk about but architecture.
-Dejan Sudjic, The Edifice Complex
The fully developed ability to say No is also the only valid
background for Yes, and only through both does real freedom [begin] to take
form.
-Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical
Reason
City
Four
towers rise above the city like muscular trunks in a grass field. Their scale
obliterates any possible question about the intentionality of their disproportionate
size. The exaggerated disparity between them and the urban fabric could not
have been accidental. The towers were unquestionably built to be the main
focus, the sole objects of attention. They are by far the most important
buildings in the city. The towers deliver an explicit message of datum and
order. Visible from any point in the city, the towers exploit the potential of
architecture as iconography. They are archetypes of power.
These
identical concrete monoliths, three with facades perforated by square windows
and the other one solid like a hermetic bastion, soar until reaching six
hundred meters of height. Each tower represents one of the four governmental
ministries: love, truth, peace, and plenty.
Competition
The
towers did not always exist. For them to be completed an architect had to be selected.
The ministries joined to hold an invited competition for one architect to
design their four ministerial buildings. The contest called for a “series of
monumental structures that through their form, and their use of image,
outstandingly portray the values of society. Buildings capable of communicating
the permanence and importance of the institutions they host.”
A
group of the world’s most famous architects were invited to submit a proposal
for the project. Without
hesitation (how to resist the temptation of such an important competition?)
each designer proposed a series of buildings. Although varying in form, the
proposals recurred to a similar strategy: they were all architectural icons.
Some projects were typical signature trademarks, buildings that responded more
to a consistent development of the architect’s formal language rather than to
the specificity of the competition’s program. Other proposals adopted a more
generic approach presenting buildings with the predictable aesthetics of market-oriented
architecture. One of the submissions stood out because of its obvious simplicity.
Of all the projects it was the only one with four towers of identical shape,
consolidating the competition subtext with a single form to make the ministries
appear like omnipresent manifestations of power.
Following
the submission deadline, all the projects were displayed through a series of
exquisitely arranged public exhibitions containing conceptual plans, detailed
specifications, explanatory diagrams and all the physical models. Newspapers,
magazines, TV shows, and radio programs flooded the public with newsflashes and
continuous updates about the projects and the architects who designed
them.
Celebration
Bursting
the bubble of suspense, some weeks later the winner was announced. Following
the award ceremony the Almanac of Contemporary Architecture, the most
prestigious architectural publication, devoted twenty pages to the master architect
under the title “Project 1984” featuring his watercolors, ink drawings, pencil
sketches and some poetry verses from his sketchbook.
One
of the pictures from the Almanac displayed a group of figures, between them
members of the respective ministries, representatives of sponsor corporations,
the architect, and some expert advisors looming perversely over an
architectural model. The scaled model of the master plan included a reduced
version of the city, and from four different points of the almost homogeneous
composition of low rise buildings on the surface, stood four behemoth towers of
slender pyramidal shape and truncated tops.
Strategically
collocated at legible height, each one of the towers was engraved in the façade
with the slogan of the ministries in bold, capital letters: WAR IS PEACE,
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
Critical
Needless
to offer the remaining plot of a story of already known resolution; it must be
made clear that this story does not aim to defend the architect for either
cultivating his political naiveté or his opportunistic ambitions.
A
mixture between architectural fairytale and social nightmare, this story
imagines a preceding scenario for George Orwell’s political masterpiece 1984
(1949). It explores that perversely “ideal” moment on an architect’s career
when he finally has the opportunity to bridge the gap to fame and immortality
and construct the most prominent buildings in the city. That paradoxical
instant when the edifice of humanity comes crumbling down hammered by the same
forces that make the architectural chef d’oeuvre rise in the first place.
As
in 1984, architecture
has been a fervent accomplice to some of the most atrocious political regimes
in recent memory. In the 20th century alone, architecture shifter from Nazism
to fascism to communism to capitalism piling up a staggering amount of icons
that oscillate from extreme historicist kitsch to extreme refined modernism.
In
fact, a closer inspection of the historical relationship between architecture
and politics reveals that Iofan, Speer, and Terragni were not rare exceptions
of a beautiful profession in search for tools for better quality of life, but
the blunt symptoms of a discipline with the dangerous aim to achieve its
grandiloquent delirium at all cost.
How
can a profession whose education and practice –based on selling projects
through visual manipulation and redundant, subjective, apolitical rhetoric—
maintain a critical stance when the conditions in the real world are completely
fueled by politics? Is architecture the ultimate ideological anesthetic?
Cynical
In
this fictional prelude to 1984 it
is not coincidental that the architects were used as instruments for propaganda
and political control. With cynicism becoming systematically embedded in
the architect’s intellectual repertoire since his academic days, the mantra
that claims “architecture is architecture, and therefore should be judged as
architecture” has been rendering architecture as an apolitical tool to serve
politically charged ends.
In
the real world, unless we are ready to challenge the way we teach, think and
practice architecture, and consciously discover what tempts us to
contribute to whatever awfully detrimental projects are being planned by technocrats, CEOs and politicians,
and finally become prepared to substitute the prevalent unconscious cynicism of
the profession with a Sloterdijkean kynicism (the one that resists, provokes and subverts),
we may not only continue being faithful contributors to some of the most
dangerous regimes in the world, but we may even become the master
architects of Project 1984.
 |
Minitrue 1984
“The Ministry of Truth –Minitrue, in Newspeak—was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering with concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 meters into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGHT”
From George Orwell, 1984
|
.jpg)
Posts
