Architecture is always Political – Part One

‘We would have brought architecture back to its proper calling, as the art of settlement, in which people build their shelters side by side, and at the same time create the public spaces that are the foundation of a durable community.’
Roger Scruton, ‘The Fabric of the City’ (2018)

Why is it that, after politicians, bankers and lawyers, architects have such a bad reputation among the general public?

From the Left, architects are held in suspicion or outright hostility as the tools of global finance, willing collaborators with corrupt municipal authorities, apologists for the predations of capital. From the Right, if anything, the contempt is even greater, with architects denounced as the avant-garde of a brutalist, hubristic modernism that has stripped our cities and towns of the layers of history and the particularity of place, both of which they have replaced with a homogeneous landscape of concrete, steel and glass.

And why, perhaps just as importantly, do the vast majority of architects appear to be resigned to this animosity, content to bury their heads in the latest gadgets for digital modelling and 3D-printing while the Tower of Babel they have built is everywhere crumbling into dust?

A typical example of this animosity was the criticism of contemporary architecture made by Tucker Carlson, the US conservative political commentator, in an interview in March 2024:

Postmodern architecture…is designed to demoralise and hurt you and destroy your spirit. Buildings that are warm and human and that elevate the human spirit are pro-human; and brutalism, for example, or the I. M. Pei glass boxes that crowd every city in the United States, those are not elevating. What’s the message of working in a cube in a room with a synthetic drop ceiling and drywall on the walls and florescent lighting ahead of you and no privacy at all? The message is really clear. You mean nothing. You are replaceable. You’re a widget in a bin awaiting assembly. You’re just a cog in a machine. You have no value. And everyone kind of ignores this — “Oh, that’s the way building have always been!” No, that’s not true. Architecture, and anything made by human hands, is the purest expression of the society that produced it. They’re a visible and tangible sign of who you are, not just as a person but corporately as a society. And if you live in a place that creates nothing beautiful, and doesn’t provide people with uplifting buildings to live and work in, that’s a very sick and dark society.”

Now, there’s a lot factually wrong with this statement — the architecture of IM Pei, for example, is neither brutalist nor postmodernist — which I imagine a lot of architects would point to in order to ignore Carlson’s bigger point; but this comment was widely circulated on social and mainstream media, and with overwhelming approval and agreement. It’s my impression, formed from multiple sources of public opinion — for of all the arts, architect is the one about which people are most forward in expressing their likes and dislikes — that the vast majority of people in the West, at least, would agree with Carlson’s opinions. And it’s my belief that architects must respond to his criticisms with more than dismissive comments that, for instance, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about or — as everyone who challenges the status quo is described these days — that he’s ‘far-Right’.

I. M. Pei, Fountain Place, 1445 Ross Avenue, Dallas, 1986. Photograph by Michael Barera, 2015.

That said, when conservatives start talking about how ugly modern buildings are it usually means they have their eye on the land on which they’re built — and I quote Tucker Carlson, as I do Roger Scruton for my epigraph, with this caveat. Conservatives never cared about the slum housing in which the working-class lived before modernism, and they don’t care about the aesthetics of where we live now.

In post-war Europe, Soviet Union, China, India, South America and even the United Kingdom, modernist housing brought more people out of rent poverty, unsanitary living conditions and financial dependency on private landlords than any other housing type in history; and compared to this achievement the offended aesthetic sensibilities of middle-class conservatives in twenty-first century USA (or UK) mean something between very little and absolutely nothing.

Architects, moreover, at least in the West, largely stopped designing public housing following the neoliberal revolution of the late 1970s, after which the housing of national populations was increasingly handed over to an increasingly financialised housing market, to property developers understandably devoid of motivation to flood that market with low price, high-quality products, to Design-and-Build contractors who regard architects as an expensive and unnecessary luxury, to speculators looking for a return on the investments into which they turned housing provision, and to the legislation made by industry-lobbied legislatures composed of landlords who assured housing prices kept rising through the successive financial crises they were partly responsible for creating.

But Carlson’s diatribe was about something else, something more than the progressive marginalisation of architects from decisions about the built environment in which we live today. His examples, significantly, are drawn from the architecture of the corporate sector that has homogenised the financial centres of every city in the world. And besides, isn’t architecture about more than just housing?

The short answer to that question is — no.

Across the world, it’s been estimated that we need to build around two billion new homes by the end of this century, most of them in the Global South. Architecture is, first and foremost, about one thing, and that is how to house the global working class in secure and sanitary homes in which they can afford to live. The vanity projects that litter the glossy magazines of the architectural press and to which the numerous prizes of the profession are invariably awarded, are irrelevant to the historical task architecture faces today. The question this poses is how we balance meeting this housing demand against the economic, social, environmental and political costs of doing so.

I say ‘we’, but I am not an architect, and the perception I have formed from outside the profession looking in is that by far the majority of architects regard architecture as a form of public sculpture, their interest in which is restricted to its formal and material qualities, and in which the organic intrusions of the people who work and live in it — Carlson’s ‘widgets in a bin awaiting assembly’ — are a necessary but unwanted distraction. It’s not by chance that, in the architect’s renderings with which they sell their visions to the client, humans are reduced to stick figures viewed from the architect-god’s heavenly point of view.

Part of the purpose of this book is to drag that viewpoint down to ground-level and take a closer look at the consequences of this elevated vision on the people who have to walk and live on its streets. To do so means — has meant for me — revisiting the history of modernist architecture, and asking why and how it has attained its current reviled status not only in the perception of the public — represented, however inaccurately, by Carlson’s criticisms — but also in the statements of those architects who justify its demolition to make way for their own projects, which have universally abandoned modernism’s claims and with them the social and — I would argue — socialist dimension of architecture.

* * *

Walter Gropius, Hansaviertel, Berlin, 1957. Photograph by Andreas Grothe, 2019.

It was in 2014, I think, on what was not my first visit to Berlin but the first in the company of an architect, that we debated the contrasting merits of the Interbau (International Building Exhibition), the showcase of social housing designed by some of the foremost modernist architects — including Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Oscar Niemeyer and Alvar Aalto — that opened in West Berlin in 1957, and the Stalinallee (now Karl-Marx-Allee), the showcase of the housing of Soviet (a merger of socialist realist and neo-classical) architecture built in East Berlin between 1952 and 1960. It was only then that I realised that modernism should be judged not by its extraordinary achievements in poetry, literature, painting and theatre — by the works of Eliot, Joyce, Picasso and Brecht — but by its architecture. This was something of a surprise to me, because for the past twenty years or so I had studied and then taught courses in modernism in the discipline of art history, and my focus had very much been on modernist painting at the cost of the achievements of modernist architecture.

That said, the basic premise of modernism — in architecture as in art, literature, poetry and theatre — is the same: that through it the world could be changed for the better — and better, above all, for the common man. No other movement in European art had ever had such a vision, or made such a claim. Setting aside the extravagant assertions made in the numerous manifestos that accompanied and came to characterise modernist movements in art, literature, poetry and theatre, only architecture could possibly hope to realise that claim in practice. And it is by its housing, above all, that modernism must be judged.

Walter Gropius, Siemenstadt housing estate, Berlin, 1931. Photograph by Geraldine Dening, 2018.

My book, Architecture is always Political, is partly about formulating the terms in which that judgement can be made, and why they are so different from the terms in which, over the past forty-five years, the history of modernism has been distorted by the ideology of neoliberalism. But I also want to address why architects have progressively conceded the forum in which these terms were formulated by the architects and theorists of modernism. Even to state as much is to draw attention to the lack of architectural theorists worthy of the name among today’s architects. Contemporary practitioners have produced little more than parroted attacks on the failures of modernism at the behest of developers and municipal authorities, alternating with self-pitying lamentations for their absence of agency and how they have become no more than increasingly overlooked employees of the building industry. And in these complaints I hear the ready-made excuses for the profession’s collaboration and compliance, not only with the building industry but also with the economics and politics driving it.

Hans Sharoun, Panzerkreuzer housing estate, Berlin, 1930. Photograph by Geraldine Dening, 2018.

The architects of modernism, like modernist architects, did not go hat in hand to the developers and politicians of their day and ask them, politely, whether they could have some funding and land to build their personal vision of an art museum. Instead, they created a discourse of modernist architecture, took over the forums in which to promote it, founded the movements in which to disseminate it, and set up the practices in which to realise it. And they did so not in the service of corporate capitalism but in response to the historical necessity of housing the working class of the world. Their answers were developed, initially, after the Great War, in the small-scale experiments in modernist architecture by which they proposed to transform the cities of nineteenth-century Europe; and then, after the Second World War, in the large-scale reconstruction of a devastated Europe that created a model of housing provision that would eventually be exported across the world — with the inevitable compromise of its architectural vision and modernist principles.

Roland Korn, Marzahn housing estate, Berlin, 1970s. Photograph by Simon Elmer, 2016.

The ideology of neoliberalism that formed governments in the West in the 1980s and went on to colonise the rest of the world has been so intent on attacking and rejecting this discourse — with post-modern architects eager to demonstrate their readiness to inhabit the space this ideology has cleared for the profits of capitalists — that the profession has forgotten that modernism has not been replaced with a discourse of postmodern architecture that never advanced beyond a Mannerist rehash of the rappel à l’ordre, but with the terminology of finance capitalism. Architects have yielded their discipline — both its practices and its discourse — to a financial sector that cares nothing about housing and nothing about making the world a better place — except for those who speak its language. Indeed, the readiness with which architects collaborate in the denigration of the achievements and hopes of modernist architecture comes across as ill-disguised excuses for their own complicity in the decline of the profession and discipline into the public contempt in which it basks today. Without underestimating the task confronting architecture in reversing this decline, part of the purpose of this book is to contribute, in some small way, to formulating the terms on which architects can begin to take back their discipline, the discourse in which its future will be formulated, and the practices in which it can reclaim its duties. No-one — perhaps not even architects themselves — will deny that it is past time they did so.

What are those terms? They are not formalist ones, composed of the rhapsodic paeans to materials and forms with which our architectural journals attempt to distract themselves from the content and function of the latest oligarch-funded museum, oil-sheikh-funded stadium or corporate-funded office tower. Nor are they composed of the bad faith with which architects complicit in the neoliberalisation of housing provision attempt to excuse their complicity with the tainted vocabulary of ‘supply and demand’, ‘regeneration’, ‘affordable housing’, ‘shared ownership’, ‘mixed tenure’, ‘community-led development’, ‘cross subsidisation’ and all the other lies with which the current housing crisis has been manufactured. Nor are they the terms of neoliberalism itself, which affects to believe — sincerely or not — that there is no alternative to a financialised housing market, and that the best architects can do is design formally innovative vanity projects for the corporate world in the hope that, in exchange, it will toss them a few coins to build an art pavilion on the wasteland where once we lived.

The terms of a future architecture that can take root even in the unyielding terrain of the present are material ones, in which housing is built in order to meet its use-value as homes for the residents who need them, and not their exchange-value for the investors who own them; in which land is used in order to meet public demand for communal amenities — whether that’s housing or parks or public infrastructure — not to increase the profits of developers from private investment; in which policy is made to turn housing into a human need accessible by law and by price to everyone, and not to encourage speculation in a commodity inflated by global investment and then protect it from losses when the bubble bursts.

The terms in which architecture can reclaim its duties, in short, are those of a socialist architecture, about which I have written elsewhere. This book is not about those terms. Rather, it documents and demonstrates why they alone can drag us from the impasse architecture has reached and the increasingly dire consequences it is having across the built environment. Unfortunately, contemporary architecture is as far from adopting these terms as it has, perhaps, ever been, distracted as it is by the latest ideology to come off the dream factory of capitalism to shore up its falling profits.

* * *

In May 2024 I attended a conference held in the Department of Architecture of one of the world’s most highly-ranked universities. The keynote speaker and guest of honour was the Undersecretary of Housing in the municipal government, and he led us through a schematic and not entirely sincere account of his ministry’s attempts to develop and adapt different housing ‘typologies’ — as architects misdescribe them — to the changing housing needs of the city since the 1950s, when the first low-cost housing was built by the housing authority. Although he said nothing about the residents whose homes and communities had been or were being demolished and broken up to make way for successive developments in ever higher towers and densities on the city’s remaining land, he appeared sincere in his concern with improving both residential and communal facilities and spaces for the city’s residents. And as a guest of the department, he clearly expected to hear of new innovations and ideas to that end from the room full of architects at the city’s highest-ranked university, to whose extremely generous salaries the people of that city contributed through their taxes and therefore — I imagine he would argue, and I would agree with him — have a right to receive something in return.

Instead, over the next two hours and half-a-dozen presentations he was presented with something resembling artists’ slide shows of their recent projects. These included a digitally-modelled bridge for a rural village assembled using local construction techniques; a 3D-printed concrete ground floor for a disassembled and reassembled house, also in a rural village; an architectural solution to water access for another rural village; permanent extensions to the tents of nomadic tribes cleared off their resources-rich land into urban conurbations; and a Daniel Libeskind pastiche built on the corner of an urban street from which unauthorised vendors had been evicted.

Afterwards, the conference mediator asked each presenter to describe their ‘dream project’. At the time I thought it a silly question, but the responses changed my mind. One architect responded that his dream project was one without the limitations imposed by the client; another said her dream project was one in which she could express herself like an artist; another said one in which he would make a profit. To be fair, one said it was the limitations of architecture in the real world that he was interested in, rather than the dream of escaping them; but not one of the architects said their dream project was to build, for example, housing in which the people who paid their salaries could afford to live comfortably, securely, affordably and communally. They regarded themselves, rather, as artists, and their art, which just happened to be architecture, was about them and their artistic vision.

By then the Undersecretary for Housing had left — he said — for a pressing engagement; but although he was polite and said he had enjoyed the presentations, I could imagine him returning to his office with a shake of his head and the conviction that the Department of Architecture in the city’s premier university had exactly nothing to offer in the way of solutions to the problems facing his office. Architects like to complain — they did so in the course of the conference — that only two percent of residential buildings are designed by architects. Based on this conference, it’s not hard to understand why. Even more than their own professional vanity and social myopia, it is with the missed opportunity afforded by such rare and fleeting meetings between architects and executive power that this conference was guilty.

I don’t mean to single the department or the architects out for special censure. In the decade during which I’ve been writing about architecture I’ve come to realise that this is very much the norm in the attitudes of architects to their profession and practice. Indeed, I would say that this attitude is a prerequisite for the professional architect, whether one focused exclusively on architectural practice or one also engaged in academic study. In this book, I say a lot about where this attitude comes from, how it is cultivated by the teaching of the discipline, developed in its institutions and practices, entrenched in housing policy and legislation, and about who and what it serves.

As an example of this cultivation, the conference was called ‘Architecture and Culture’, yet the word ‘culture’ was used only a handful of times over the two hours, and then usually in the phrase ‘material culture’. This is used in architectural discourse to refer to the materials of a particular culture, such as, as it was in these presentations, the ethnic culture of a people or tribe. As a former art historian, however, I had attended the conference hoping and expecting to hear a discussion about the local and global cultural contexts in which architecture is being made today — perhaps something like a response to the accusations made against the profession by Tucker Carlson. And, in a way, I did. But instead the word ‘culture’ was replaced by another word that has come to substitute for it in all cultural discussions across the West, and not only about architecture. That word was, and is, ‘sustainable’.

It didn’t surprise me that all but one of the five architects used the word ‘sustainable’ in their presentations, most of them several times. One referred to her own work as a ‘sustainable practice’ because it used locally-sourced materials; another referred to the immensely complex digital models he used to build a pavilion as a ‘sustainable mode of construction’ — although how the villagers were meant to access this technology he didn’t say; another described the natural air-flow he had designed in a youth-correction facility deliberately deprived of air-conditioning by its Catholic administrators as a ‘sustainable solution’. One — the designer of the tent extensions — made his entire presentation about sustainability, with a full complement of references to ‘sustainable models of urban growth’, a ‘sustainable and decarbonised future’, and a warning about ‘unsustainable homes exposed to climate risk’.

Now, this is, of course, the discourse of environmental fundamentalism to which every architect, it would appear, has unquestioningly subscribed, and which, it might be argued, is the dominant cultural discourse in the Western world. No architectural practice — ours included — can go a week without receiving an email inviting them to ‘Unlock Net Zero’. As this conference demonstrated, this means that, by couching their brief proposals in the discourse of climate ‘crisis’, architects are more likely to receive funding, even if that means building parametric pavilions so complex they must be cut by lasers for impoverished villagers who could probably rebuild half their village for the cost of such art projects.

Even worse than such middle-class indifference to the housing needs of the working class is that the discourse of environmental fundamentalism — which, as this conference exemplified, is the dominant culture of our epoch — is not the locally-sourced, culturally-indigenous, materially-sustainable, community-led (etc.) discourse they imagine or pretend it to be.

On the contrary, environmentalism, as it is spoken today, is a corporate discourse. Developed by the most powerful companies in the world behind the facade of transnational technocracies like the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, the discourse of environmental catastrophe is imposed by national governments via the funding and revenue streams through which public institutions and private companies alike receive the financial ‘incentives’ to repeat its rhetoric at every level of our society.

When architects, as they do today, position every aspect of their practice and profession in relation to what they have been convinced — through the same financial incentives — is the overwhelming exigency of imminent climate catastrophe, they become not merely the instruments of global capital they have been for the last forty-five years and more but also, in addition, collaborators in the corporate mechanisms of Sustainable Development Goals, Carbon Credits, Environmental, Social and corporate Governance Criteria, and all the other apparatuses of the globalist coup that has been carried out behind the facade of environmentalism.

These new criteria, by which every architect who wants a commission must now abide, have as little bearing on the amount of suddenly world-ending CO² in the atmosphere as yet another architect’s pavilion built from sustainably-sourced materials will have on the changing surface temperature of the globe.

Even if we accept the figures provided by the sellers of climate catastrophe, on which there is no consensus outside corporate-funded United Nations agencies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we might reflect that, since CO² makes up just 0.04% of the earth’s atmosphere; and carbon emissions produced by humans make up 33% of that, or 0.0132% of the atmosphere; and carbon emissions produced in the UK, for example, make up 1% of that, or 0.000132% of the atmosphere; and the building industry makes up 25% of carbon emission in the UK; then this means that stopping all building in the UK, not only all construction but the sourcing, manufacture, transportation and disposal of all materials used in construction, which would mean ceasing the construction of every house, hospital, school, road, railway and every other element of public infrastructure in the sixth largest economy in the world, would effect 0.000033% of the earth’s atmosphere, or 0.33 parts per million. If, as geologists who measure the carbon content of the atmosphere over billions of years have argued, humans only contribute to 3% of carbon emissions, the final figure is 0.000003% of the atmosphere, or 0.03 parts per million.

Either way, it is on such absurdities that architects have abandoned the task of housing 2 billion people and committed themselves, instead, to the chimera of Net Zero, which if realised would impoverish, starve and kill many more people than that.

What the contractual criteria of environmental fundamentalism do, rather, is increase the control that global corporations and the technocratic organisations of world governance they hide behind have over not only us but the provision of our needs — which includes housing. Neoliberalism turned those needs into a market and that market into a stock exchange for financial speculation by global capital, ensuring the crisis of housing affordability that has become a global phenomenon; but the stakeholder capitalism being forced upon us now by the discourse, institutions, programmes, legislation, agendas, treaties and technologies of environmental fundamentalism is increasing that control to an extent that we still cannot envisage, but which deserves the description ‘totalitarian’.

Architecture, perhaps, is playing no more than its usual subservient role in this globalist coup — no different, in agency, from the one it has played over the last forty-five years of neoliberalism. Indeed, as one of the architects at the conference said to me afterwards when I raised these issues with him, if architects are to be anything more than witnesses to their own replacement by Design-and-Build projects and now Artificial Intelligence, they first have to win the funding to do so, and that means speaking the discourse of environmental fundamentalism to those with their hands on the levers of power, even if doing so means making their grip stronger.

This is not the only point on which I disagree with the arguments with which architects justify their roles as tools of finance, collaborators with power, apologists for capital. Most of my book, Architecture is always Political, is about why I disagree; and in part two of this article I will look at the role of architects in their most inexcusable guise as the dress-makers of finance capitalism. This is, admittedly, the most extreme depths to which the profession has fallen, but both the egoism and the servitude of this role tells us something about where architecture is now.

Simon Elmer is the author of Architecture is Always Political: A Communist History (2024) from whose preface this article is taken. His recent books include The Great Replacement: Conspiracy Theory or Immigration Policy? (2024), The Great Reset: Biopolitics for Stakeholder Capitalism (2023), and The Road to Fascism: For a Critique of the Global Biosecurity State (2022).

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