On Not Being Governed - Dave Hickey

My smaller, more specific agenda here is to address a moral eccentricity that pervades American high architecture, the ABC principleABC standing, in this case, for Anything But Commercial. This principle holds that a really serious, well-connected, metaphysically sound architect in the early 21st century will work for any government, however repressive; any corporation, however predatory; and any private client, however reprehensible, rather than just design a department store. Institutional architecture is about walls and control, about keeping out time and change, aliens and foreigners. Commercial architecture is about no walls, about that eight-foot space of human interaction that encloses the planet. the only explanation I have ever been given for this pedagogical deficit was offered to me by an architecture professor who explained that professors were bound to be commercially disinterested. Leaving aside the fact that architecture professors are not commercially disinterested, I must note that commercial disinterest applies to making money. It doesnt mean that youre not supposed to be interested in commerce itself or its products. As any economist can tell you, academic life provides an ideal platform from which you might exercise an interest in and influence on the commercial world without the taint of self-interest. I really think it is dangerous to equate the wish or the process or the job description with the act because, in truth, there are no artists, no architects, and no men of letters. There is only art, architecture, literature, and a lot of hapless, confused people trying to make objects or texts that will someday be recognized as art or architecture or literature by the citizens who make those decisions well after the fact. It is not architecture because an architect made it. It is not art because an artist made it. It is not literature because a writer wrote it. Architecture is the consequence of a building having been made and subsequently valorized. It is not a privilege of the title, and the whole idea of accepting the mantle in advance of the act mitigates ambition and cheapens our endeavors. All this Utopian romance has returned to us, I think, because contingency and dynamic systems are hard to teach and heartless, and as a consequence, practice in its presentness is dead. The flowering of American culture in the 50s and 60s withered as the present was transformed into a damaged site that we would fix tomorrow, or maybe next week. And since this fix was perpetually deferred, the future, as imagined by a coercive bureaucracy, took precedence. And its hard to work while youre waiting for Utopia, because optimism and joy are verboten. They are, after all, attributes of the imperfect present and not the perfect future. They are manifestations of a presumption that the future can be handicapped like any other bet. Real optimism, in fact, doesnt even require that you win your bet. Ones position today is empowered by not being governed by an implacable future. If we all drown tomorrow when a giant tsunami covers Cambridge, today will be none the worse.

So we have Utopia back, but not, I must note, a dynamic Utopia. We have a kind of suburban, Pre-Raphaelite utopia that is little more than pessimistic nostalgia for a failed idea. The surest sign of this is that there are no new utopias There are socialist Utopias, Marxist Utopias, and a selection of faith-based Neverlands, all of which are showing their age, and all of which imagine the future as a world run by large, central institutions. So if we are preparing our students for this future and we are Marxist Utopians or theocratic Jesus freaks, we will teach them to make institutional architecture. That is the normal thing to do. The courthouses, churches, art museums, and Kunsthalles we will teach them to build all these so they will be ready when the revolution comes. I, however, am betting on a different future. What I see is an ongoing collaboration and antagonism between the imperatives of institutional and commercial culture. What I hope for is that neither side wins. What I wish for is that practitioners of architecture will learn from the distinct attributes of the corral and the souk. What I fear is that the post-critical will throw out the baby with the bathwater, that it will become the post-theoretical and the post-intellectual. If this happens, we are lost. We are mere academics and mere businessmen, and there will be no reason henceforth to call anything architecture again.