Part III

Size, Image and Architecture

of Neo-liberal Era

Foreword

Mehrdad Hadighi
The four essays that follow define neo-liberalism in contrast to and in the context of
political liberalism and apply that definition to economic theory, urban marketing,
religious architecture, and urban landscape. As the foreword to these essays, I will
contextualize neo-liberal and post-professional within the discipline of architecture.
How did we get here? How did architecture, a discipline grounded in the material
world, built with human labor, became one at the service of the image?
First, we know that Le Corbusier, perhaps the best-known twentieth-century
architect, was not only a master architect, but also a master image-maker. His
long-standing collaboration with Hungarian photographer Lucien Hervé documents a
careful and meticulous attention to the selection and dissemination of photographs of
his buildings. He recognized that not only did the buildings matter, but perhaps even
more so, their images mattered. Not artistically motivated, yet as powerful, was the
collaboration between Adolf Hitler and his chief architect, Albert Speer. These two
examples should leave no doubt about the potential of architecture to serve marketing
and political aims, if centuries of service to religion and monarchy had not already
proven it. Architecture as image is certainly not a neo-liberal phenomenon. However,
the developments in architecture and philosophy in parallel with the recent economic
liberalism, experienced in the post-Reagan era, have led to an elevated, perhaps even
extreme, context for architecture to serve a purely political or economic end.
For better or worse, architecture has had to “work out” ideas through materi-
alization. It was, and still is today, in this dialogue between ideas and materials that
architects find and define meaning in the world. This engagement of the material
world was imagined by philosophers to be a betrayal of the purity of ideas, as the
material world was considered to be subservient to the realm of pure ideas. The
sources of this hierarchic divide between materials and ideas may be traced back to
Plato, the philosopher of ancient Greece from fifth Century BC. Plato, in his
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dialogue Phaedrus, designates ground, groundedness, and the material world as

inferior to the heavens, elevation, and the im-material. He goes further to state that
within the im-material, there is even a purer state, that of reason, pure reason, totally
im-material and in-tangible, without color or shape.
The subservience of architecture to pure thought remained the context for archi-
tects until the Renaissance, when architects of the time tried to distinguish and elevate
design from its product, the building. The surge of the arts and the elevation of the role
of the artist resulted in a division within the work of the master builders, a split into two
differentiated, hierarchized activities. More precisely, the design and the construction
of architecture were separated from one another. The master builder as the designer/
artisan/builder was split into the Renaissance architect and the stonemason, or builder.
The architect was and is, even today, responsible for the creative aspects of the design,
the communication of that design; and the builder is responsible for the execution of
the design. As a result, the architect is no longer physically engaged in the construction
of buildings and hence not involved in the materialization of ideas. The simultaneity of
the intellectual labor and the physical labor of the master builders was split, so that
today, the architect is responsible for the more “noble” intellectual labor, and the
builder is responsible for the more “ordinary” physical labor. Architects bought into
Plato’s critique, and in fact, redirected the discipline away from materialization, and
seemingly concentrated more heavily on ideation. This shift, however, could only
happen through the mediation of representation, through drawings of buildings. Here,
the mediation of material and labor were replaced by the mediation of representation.
Architecture is replaced by the image of architecture.
This deliberate division and hierarchy within design still exist today, where the
product of the work of the architect is not a building, it is a representation of
the building, its image. The architect produces drawings, the blueprints from which
the builder manufactures the building, or renderings, which “sell” the project. The
architect works in reference to the building, and not on the building. The architect
works on paper and off-site. As a result, the architect is primarily concerned with
the appearance of the building, that which could most readily be reproduced and
represented. Add to this the legal constructs around architecture which prohibit the
architect from involvement in means and methods of construction, and you have a
total divorce of materialization from ideation within architecture.
Although there have been many changes and transformations within the disci-
pline of architecture since the Renaissance, much has remained constant. In par-
ticular, the role of the architect as a designer who is divorced from construction and
whose primary concern is the appearance of the building. The first major shift away
from this bifurcation of ideation and materialization happened during the modern
period. As early as the industrial revolution and the buildings of the era produced in
iron and glass, materials played a central role in the development of ideas. During
the early twentieth century, the German Bauhaus movement was the first to couple
ideation and materialization once again and produce educational pedagogies around
materials, processes, forms, and construction. Their project laid the foundations of
built work through the 1970s and also became the educational norm in schools of
architecture.
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Due to modernism’s inability to address urban concerns, a resurgence of

pre-modern tendencies in the 1970s led to what became known as “postmod-
ernism.” This era in architecture, once again, reinforced the divorce between
ideation and materialization in ways never before experienced or imagined. In the
pre-modern world, structural concerns enforced an alignment of the building
structure, envelope, openings (windows), partitions, and so on. With the advent of
modern materials and construction technology, this necessary alignment became
unnecessary, hence making building form independent from all of the technical and
spatial systems that hold the building together and make it perform.
In essence, this opened the way for the representations of buildings that were
drawn and modeled in the atelier, to be recreated in a different scale, at the building
site. This not only reinforced the divide between ideation and materialization, but
also pushed architecture into the realm of pure appearance, size, and image. One
could argue that this is exactly the final and expected the result of the paradigm into
which architecture was launched during the Renaissance. The so-called neo-liberal,
we could argue, was already imagined during the Renaissance. Cut from all its
material, labor, constructive and structural ties to its foundations, and with its
established historic ties to power and money, architecture was ripe to serve as the
instrument of the economic neo-liberalism that began in the 1980s.
For architecture to truly evolve, it must address this divide between material-
ization and ideation. It must conduct all of its explorations in the space between
ideas and materials. The distance of mediation between ideas and materials must
become the space of exploration. Works of architecture must study production of
ideas and materials as simultaneous and intertwined activities, using ideas as tools
for the understanding, analyzing, dissecting, and inventing materials and methods
of constructing, and construction as a method of testing the limits of ideas. Works
of architecture must therefore be bound to the reciprocations and circulations
between the intellectual realm of idea and the physical realm of materials.
Architecture, if it is to make any evolutionary change, must critically engage the
absolute of ideas and the reality of materials and labor as a woven and simultaneous
act. It is only there that we may be able to resist becoming an instrument of power,
economic, political, or otherwise.