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The Somnambulant Practice of Postmodern Architecture Ali Aslam Felicity D. Scott. Architecture or Techno-utopia: Politics After Modernism. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007, 304 pgs, 29.95usd (hardcover), ISBN 978-0-262-19562
"Each time you ask yourself," confessed architect Rem Koolhaas in a June 8 2008 New York Times Magazine article concerning the overnight emergence of cities like Dubai and Shenzhen and the potentially new forms of civic organization they represent, "Do you have the right to work on this scale if you don't have an opinion about what the world should be like? We really feel that. But is there time for a manifesto? I don't know."
Koolhaas' modernist forerunners felt none of his unease. For them architecture was an intrinsically political undertaking, both in form and in practice. The choice, posed by Antoine Le Corbusier in Towards A New Architecture, was between "Architecture or Revolution." Like many of his generation, Le Corbusier believed that new technologies and materials, especially the application of mass production techniques to construction, would yield better living through design. Modern architecture promised a clear vision of the good life that only a perfected politics could possibly rival. The vision offered was persuasive. The precepts of the so-called "International Style" informed designs of a great many low-income public housing projects, intended to promote equality and health, and office buildings, from which great wealth would be generated and managed, around the world.
But if the vision had been persuasive, the reality was less so. The response of many "postmodern" architects, critics, and theorists to the failures of modernism was to emphasize architecture as an autonomous activity. Critics on the right and the left theorized the practice of architecture as an activity without social or political purpose. Although they differed in their reasons, conservatives like Charles Jencks, libertarians like Colin Rowe, and Marxists like Manfredo Tafuri shared an understanding of architecture emptied of its utopian aspirations. The unanimity of this historical narrative allows architects like Koolhaas, in his Delirious New York, to judge architects like himself who refuse political responsibility and instead concentrate on formal innovations, "radicals."
Felicity D. Scott's Architecture or Techno-Utopia: Politics after Modernism is frustrated with this depressive turn and seeks to return to the question of politics now ignored by architects....