See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/358963273

An Aesthetic of Collapse: Alternative Form, Disorder and Indeterminacy A

Conversation with Jack Halberstam

Article in Architectural Design · March 2022

DOI: 10.1002/ad.2801

CITATIONS READS

0 152

1 author:

Viola Ago
Ryerson University
8 PUBLICATIONS 0 CITATIONS

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Viola Ago on 03 October 2023.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 Viola Ago

An Aesthetic
of Collapse
Alternative Form,
Disorder and
Indeterminacy
Jesse Mockrin,
Some Unknown Power,
2018
A Conversation with
In this work, Mockrin zeros in on
a small detail from a Baroque
Jack Halberstam
painting of Samson and Delilah,
cropping the characters into
androgynous and anonymous
figures engaged in a suggestive
ritual. The painting was used
as the cover art for Christopher
Chitty’s Sexual Hegemony (2020).
The enigmatic image adds a
quality of erotic indeterminacy.

114 115
Guest-Editor of this
AD Viola Ago discusses
societal norms and the
aesthetic of collapse within
architectural discourse,
and the links between
physical spaces and the
social structures they
support, with distinguished
author and Columbia
University Professor
Jack Halberstam, who
argues that existing
social and architectural
structures have inbuilt
inequalities and that
‘collapse’ is a better
paradigm than ‘repair’
in bringing about social,
gender-based, financial
and material equity.
116
According to Jack Halberstam, notions of what is normal
and abnormal, natural and unnatural, what is acceptable
As Halberstam points out, some political regimes have
encouraged and made homosocial bonding consistent with
that the house within which other forms of relations might
flourish is registered as impossible, or unthinkable
and what is not, are societal constructs, embedded in the
very structure – including the architectural structure – of our
patriarchy, and in others the blurring of the homosocial and
the homoerotic is cast as the enemy of patriarchy: ‘It is evident
or undesignable’.
‘I think the goal is to try to understand how it is that
societies. In relation to individuals, he says that ‘one way in
which you produce social norms is by giving examples of
that homosexuality has played very different roles over the
centuries than just as a kind of foil for a normative order of
we see the world, how that vision has been produced and
condoned by a certain ideological order, and then where
people who are in violation of those norms. Just the same
way that a system of law works by producing the category of
being’. He believes that it is important to understand that
the systems of classification used to create such binary logics
the points of resistance or pressure might be.’ Halberstam
describes the work of James C Scott, the American political
the criminal.’ The resulting binary systems are implemented
by ‘a set of discursive mechanisms which are then supposed to
are more complex and inter-related, fluid and wide-ranging
than is generally understood, suggesting that questions
scientist and scholar of comparative politics, who describes
the geographies of global power and identifies subtle and
do the work of propping up an order of things that is seen as
natural, inevitable and unquestionable’.
might be asked not only about the artificial and untenable
binary classifications of gender and identity, but also about
momentous modes of resistance.2 His work ‘forces us to
also see the modes of domination that are masquerading
Notions about sex and gender are a classic example of
such a binary system. Although a variety of biological sexes
the larger systems and structures that define the rightness
or wrongness of every aspect of our lives according to the
as an inevitable order. These might come in the form
of efficiency, streamlined structure or the symmetrical
naturally exist, Western culture acknowledges only two –
male and female – and the idea that sexuality and gender are
priorities of various social orders, and about how to resist
them: ‘The systems that govern us are full of holes and full
organisation of space favoured by Le Corbusier, and other
modern architects. The logic of power is inscribed into the
limited to binary options is threatened by the existence of
homo- and bisexuality and the multiple gender identities that
of contradictions, and we have to be wild and cunning in
response.’ In this context, Halberstam defines ‘wild’ as ‘a
layout of European capitals, as well as places like Brasilia,
in Brazil.’ These city designs are based on grids, feature huge
fall between ‘man’ and ‘woman’: ‘In order to enforce a certain
orientation to a reproductive order, there must be a kind of
zone of indeterminacy, and unnamed mobility, a method
of declassification’ that offers sources of opposition to
boulevards and classically designed buildings, and register a
level of pomp and monumentalism that seems to suit a major
negative category against which the reproductive mandate
comes into being.’
modernity’s orderly impulses.
‘I would say that queer theorists haven’t paid enough
city even if and when it suppresses social life within it. As so
many urban theorists like Jane Jacobs have argued,3 urban
The category of the ‘natural/unnatural’ became the
classification by which male homosexuals were cast as
attention to the idea that we aren’t just governed by laws and
regulations about sexual contact and conduct. We are also
planning has too often been an impediment to good living.
Le Corbusier, in particular, offers an example of someone
somehow at odds with European civilisational systems
towards the end of the 19th century: ‘God and religion began
shaped and constrained by, for example, the understanding of
what a domestic interior looks like.’ Halberstam explains that
who married fascist sentiments and sympathies to a sense of
design that abhors the random or disorderliness: ‘In terms of
to diminish as a structuring force of society by the end of
the 19th century, but while we may no longer have believed
where a domestic interior features a kitchen, a dining room,
a ‘master’ or primary bedroom, and two ancillary bedrooms,
architecture, Le Corbusier, who was at various moments a
fascist sympathiser, understood that you could govern people
in God, we did still believe in nature, and where it was no
longer compelling to say “you are sinners”, that language was
‘the shape and form of the family house is just a given such through design.’
replaced with “you are unnatural”.’
The Inconsistent Logics of Domination
However, just as classifications are flexible, so society’s
relations to homosexuality have varied greatly throughout
the ages. Halberstam cites Christopher Chitty’s book
Sexual Hegemony (2020),1 which addresses the history
of sexuality in relation to property relations, economic
crises and political institutions within a capitalist system,
and explains that homosexuality serves different functions
at different times rather than just acting as a subversive
undercurrent to power relations. Chitty explains the
function of homosexuality historically by returning to
Renaissance Florence, 19th-century Paris and London
and 20th-century New York City. But Halberstam has
made similar arguments about the contradictory logics of
Cyprien Gaillard,
homosexuality using fascist masculinity as an example. Pruitt Igoe Falls,
As Halberstam proposes: ‘Fascist parties turned a blind film still,
2009
eye to homosexuality at certain moments when they
wanted to encourage a certain kind of male bonding and Gaillard here creates a
filmic juxtaposition of
cultivate a sense of the contaminating influence of women’. Niagara Falls and a night
The misogyny of Nazism mandated that women serve as shot of a housing-estate
building in the Sighthill
reproductive vessels and domestic subjects, but that men neighbourhood of Glasgow,
keep a distance from the softening influences of the family Scotland, evoking the
iconic demolition of the
home. This constructed forms of masculinity suited to the Pruitt-Igoe complex in
production of ‘a fighting machine’ and created homosocial St Louis, Missouri, in
the 1970s, identified by
environments in which ‘homoerotic bonds became the glue Charles Jencks as the end
of the fighting force’. of the Modernist project.
117
Changing Spaces to Change Frameworks
Halberstam believes that the upending of normative categories
and ideologies issues challenges to structures of sex, gender,
race, class and patriarchal systems in the form of debates
about the mismatch between bodily forms and the built
environment, acts of sociopolitical anarchy such as the
removal of racist monuments, and a growing understanding
that changing the physical spaces with which and within
which we live also changes the social structures they support.
He says there are historical models for what people are
proposing: “Where a system of oppression is installed, a
system of resistance rises up to meet it –there is no force
without a reaction – and yet resistance may not come in easily
Wai Think Tank,
Palace of Failed Optimism,
2013–14
This inverted ziggurat is a theoretical project for a
repository for architectural utopian thoughts and
schemes throughout the whole of architectural history.
118
View publication stats
recognisable forms or idioms.’ This is another lesson from
James C Scott’s work, and he calls these counter-intuitive
forms of opposition ‘weapons of the weak’. Although often
misunderstood, aesthetic acts of refusal that challenged
existing political frameworks, such as those of the American
anarchitect/artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–78), have
opened spaces for new political vocabularies to emerge.
In the early 1970s, Matta-Clark, a trained architect, began
making cuts into already dilapidated structures and made
it his goal to bring structures to the point of collapse. And
this was at a time when parts of New York City were falling
down and derelict, while in other corners of the city increased
private ownership set the terms for a booming real-estate
market. Some neighbourhoods had become ghost towns filled
with abandoned buildings and rubbish-covered sidewalks,
other neighbourhoods, like the Bronx, were ablaze due to
fires set deliberately by greedy and corrupt landlords: ‘The
city looked like it had been bombed, and instead of saying
“we need to clean up this city”, Matta-Clark’s work seemed
to push in the opposite direction to help the city fall down!
What would it mean, he kept asking, to bring a structure to
the point of collapse?’
Matta-Clark took aim at a system that prioritises property
ownership and profits over the basic, universal need for
human shelter, and offered potent critiques of the discipline
of Modernist architecture in which power and a high-
modernist sensibility is embodied in the structures designed
by the architects. Such figures literally built the world and,
to quote James Brown, ‘It’s a man’s world’, a white world,
and a world for the rich and privileged. Matta-Clark called
his counter-architectural, site-specific cuts into abandoned
buildings, and other forms of anarchic or creative destruction,
‘anarchitecture’. Halberstam says: ‘I’m writing about Matta-
Clark within a project on the aesthetics of collapse. He wanted
to find the point where a structure is just barely standing,
where collapse and form cave into each other. He was
architecturally finding the place where that structure could
collapse and then hold.’
It is important to Halberstam to think about what it would
mean politically to bring a system to the point of collapse:
‘That’s a more interesting question right now than “how do
we fix things?”. I know about the eco-responsible orientation
to repair right now and I’m not against repair. It’s just that if a
system is broken and the exploitation is built into that system
as a kind of structural condition, you repair it in order for it
to continue to do its exploitative work.’ If repairing the system
is not the answer, he says, then destroying it is. ‘We must be
more like the diggers and the levellers of the 17th century
who sought to unmake the early forms of capitalism they saw
going up all around them in the form of enclosures and the
private sequestering of public space.’
There are, of course, no guarantees that, having seeded the
ground of opposition, the next thing one does will not become
the force that needs to be confronted by the next generation.
However, Halberstam believes that it is a mistake to assume
a defeatist logic in which capitalism always and everywhere
wins: ‘You know, one does not come up with interventions
by worrying endlessly about whether as soon as you’ve
scripted something different, it will be co-opted.’ He says that
it is very possible that we could come up with new designs
that could just become new forms of domination. Concepts
like ‘failure’ and ‘collapse’, after all, are as much a part of
business self-help languages as they are part of a vocabulary of
resistance. ‘But it’s also possible, as many utopian architectural
projects have offered, that we could imagine living otherwise,
precisely by designing space with other goals in mind than just
privacy, domestic, calm, nuclear families and so on. I am very
interested in what design can offer for rethinking social life
and social worlds.’
And at the same time, he says it is important to be
suspicious of aesthetics: of beauty, straight lines and symmetry.
‘Sometimes when we’re engaged in the work of opposition, we
may very well be, in fact, complicit with the order of things
and we have to not get caught up in the romance of rebellion.
Because when that happens, we become a new vector by
which the everyday repeats and confirms.’ The alternative
worlds created by artists and activists such as Matta-Clark
and as documented by the photographer Alvin Baltrop
(1948–2004) did not emerge from utopian visions, but out of
gaps in the crumbling structure of the city.
Baltrop, who photographed the homeless people, criminals,
artists and primarily the underground gay culture that eked
out an existence among the derelict and semi-collapsed
shipping piers along the Hudson River in New York, was
gripped by the grandeur and danger of the architectural
setting: ‘Baltrop gives us another answer to the question of
how to bring a system to the point of collapse, and that is by
changing the relationship between figure and ground. In many
of his photographs the images of the human bodies are tiny
against the backdrop of the massive structures that are slowly
declining, collapsing and falling in and on themselves.’
A Shift in Focus
By ‘shifting our attention from foreground to background;
from figure to ground; from body to architecture’, we are
offered productive pathways for thinking politically against
the grain of world building efforts. ‘And I think that at this
moment of environmental crisis, it would serve us well to
invest in an architecture that could figure out how to unmake
the world, how to unbuild, how to bring down, how to level,
equalise, horizontalise,’ reimagining the structures of luxury
and draining property of its value.
Once an ideological shift has been actually brought about,
Halberstam argues that different kinds of directional strategies
will open up more ideological and physical space for us to
see what happens next: ‘What if we shift our gaze and shift
our orientation to space, not just to have a new postmodern
architecture that is about slashing and cutting dead space,
and tumbling architectures as opposed to straight lines and
symmetry, but to figure out how to work against the climate
crisis that we have built ourselves into, that is both capitalist
and environmental.’ He says that ‘we need small strategies that
are manageable within a local context, and that people can
commit to, and in order to get there, you first have to change
people’s minds’. This is where the aesthetics of collapse comes
in; art can address reality and act as a catalyst to open up a
space in which to create positive change. Early opposition
to capitalism and to enclosures were ferocious and intense.
Now, just as then, people do not need to simply lie down and
accept that new world order. 1
This article is based on video-conferencing calls between
Jack Halberstam and Viola Ago in July 2021.
Notes
1. Christopher Chitty, Max Fox and Christopher Nealon,
Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the
Rise of the World System, Duke University Press (Durham,
NC), 2020.
2. James C Scott, Seeing Like a State, Yale University Press
(New Haven, CT), 1999.
3. Jane Jacobs, The Life and Death of Great American
Cities, Random House (New York), 1961.
Text © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 114 Image
courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery; p 115 Photography by
Vincent Tullo, reproduced with permission; p 117 © Cyprien
Gaillard. Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers; p118 © WAI
Architecture Think Tank
119