In 1969, ‘The Architects' Resistance’, a collective of students from Yale University, Columbia University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), published a manifesto titled ‘Architecture: whom does it serve?’
With this manifesto, the group sought to place the practice of architecture in a broader economic, social and environmental context than the one taught in their university lecture rooms. In just two and a half pages, we find a powerful call to reclaim a more social and ecologically conscious architecture. It unambiguously denounces the role architecture played during those years as a practice in service to those in power while adding that “the architect's submission to the system begins with the belief that they possess special skills and knowledge that are inaccessible to the general public.”
In the text, The Architects' Resistance also explains that such a bombastic and superior stance was reinforced by the idea that there are “those 'special' things that only architects know,” which enable them to ignore the real value of the profession and hide behind this way of thinking. In consequence, architects avoid taking on the true role they should play within society, which is to be not saviors but allies of the people who inhabit their buildings and cities.
To put this into context, it should be remembered that the end of the 1970s was a time marked by civil movements, amongst which we can highlight: the Vietnam War protests; the movement led by the Black Panthers in the United States against the structural racism suffered by the country’s black population; and movements in a number of countries demanding greater awareness from their governments of the environmental disasters being caused by capitalism on a global scale.
On 23rd April 1970, just one year after the publication of ‘Architecture: whom does it serve?’, a demonstration took place that brought together more than 20 million people in the United States alone. With the slogan "Save Our Planet”, made a strong call to action to protect the planet, instigating the creation of what we now know as Earth Day. Despite 'The Architects' Resistance’ group’s denouncements, some in the profession still played a visible and important role in all these movements due to their involvement in the social, political, and economic spheres. For example, for the first “Save Our Planet" campaign, the architect Buckminster Fuller designed a set of postage stamps—with 175 million stamps printed—illustrating the problem of global environmental pollution. Together with Roy Lichtenstein, Georgia O'Keefe, Edward Steichen, Ernest Trova, and Alexander Calder, he also created a collection of posters around the theme of protecting the water, air, wildlife, people, and cities.
Since the 1980s, however, and the arrival of predatory neoliberalism, led mainly by Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, architecture has forgotten this activist facet. In fact, it participated fully in the uncontrolled race for economic growth, private profit, and individualism that characterized the economic policies of those years, pushing to one side the profession’s commitment to a wider social vision promoted in the previous decade. Examples of this social perspective are to be found not only in the United States, but also in Europe, for example through the participatory processes popularised by Giancarlo De Carlo in Italy, and in Latin America with projects such as mutual aid cooperatives built in Uruguay between 1968 and 1975.
It is important to remember that the global arrival of neoliberalism in the eighties changed not only architecture but also the role of universities, leading to the privatization of knowledge that Franco 'Bifo' Berardi describes in 'The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance' (2012) as "the submission of research to the narrow interest of profit and economic competition.” Since then, universities, including architecture schools, have been complicit in this privative system, which only rarely responds to the social complexity in which we live.
In this context, it is valid then to ask whether architecture serves society today. It is not an easy question - although it might seem so - and in order to answer it, we must first ask ourselves what we understand by ‘society’. Perhaps the best way to do this is to abandon any conventional lens and see it as if through a kaleidoscope, which shows us a perception of society that includes that diversity of species that together with us also inhabit, transform and affect our cities, our small world. I am talking about trees, the wind and the dry leaves that dance to its rhythm, the birds, the ants, and sometimes the wild boar [PDF]; but I am also talking about video surveillance cameras, electromagnetic waves, sounds—those we like, such as birdsong, and those we do not, such as the noise of the garbage truck. In 'Queering the City: una sonorientación', Katayoun Arian calls this a queer political ecology, a concept within which the word ‘queer’ must be understood in all its complexity, that is, an ecology that defies all possible categorization and that, therefore, includes all races, sexualities, genders, social classes, and languages; or as José María Torres Nadal describes it, "the city as a political space full of different bodies, different sexualities, new and mutating matter, living entities that sometimes argue and fight with each other and other times make love”.
Then I look around me and I feel optimistic: we are living a moment of change that invites dissent—as well as some necessary friction between human beings and all those non-human ‘others’ that accompany us on this journey—which also enables us to regain architecture’s sense of agency in the urban space that is our field of action. I recently remarked upon this optimism in my text for the ‘Twelve Cautionary Urban Tales’ exhibition catalog, in which, just a year and a half ago, I wrote:
In the last year alone, streets all over the world from Lebanon to Santiago de Chile have welcomed a multitude of protests. Over these past months, we have seen how numerous cities in the United States have exploded and hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets to join the Black Lives Matter movement to protest against racial segregation and police abuses. In moments like this we realize that the city is also the air that we share, and that when that is denied to any one person, it is everyone's responsibility to reclaim it.
For all these reasons it seemed relevant to me to revisit the manifesto, ‘Architecture: whom does it serve?’ We find ourselves in a time of dissent in which the question "architecture, who does it serve?" could have an infinite number of answers, all right, all wrong, all contradicting and complementing each other at the same time. And within this seemingly chaotic diversity are common threads that can give us clues not on how to organize chaos, but on how to understand and inhabit it and, therefore, to learn "to stay with it." In her book ‘Staying With The Trouble’, Donna Haraway encourages us “to make trouble, to stir up potent responses to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places," while stressing the importance of being truly present in a society that has accustomed us to thinking always in relation to hypothetical futures. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing also shows us that there are multiple ways of 'inhabiting the present' in her book ‘The Mushroom at the End of the World’, taking as an example the Matsutake mushroom and its ability to react and adapt to uncertainty, through a fascinating history of inter-species relationships and collaboration from which we have much to learn.
And then I stop for a bit and look around me again and find projects like #XFORMAS, which Nicolás Valencia describes as "a model to put together”—as Julio Cortázar's '62: a model kit’—and I think of the tremendous potential architecture has to make that necessary impact within the social sphere, to the extent that we accept that those of us who practice architecture are just one more piece of this model to put together, a model always under construction that at no time can we consider finished, because when we believe that it is finished, social, cultural, environmental and economic realities will have already changed and we will have to reread the instruction manual and try to put it together anew.
That is why having many different voices participate in the conversations that shape this project—architects who have different professional experiences and have worked in different geographical locations—enables us to approach architectural practice from many very different ways of doing things, responding to the complexity of the world we inhabit and the society of which we are part. From the different fields of curatorship, pedagogy, academic discussion, publishing, and the building process and its relationship with the market, #XFORMAS is a project that responds correctly to what Donna Haraway calls “rare kinships”, where she calls for a multi-voiced and multi-disciplinary approach, saying, “we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations. … We become-with each other or not at all.”
In order to “become-with each other” we must also think about ourselves from other narratives and reinvent ourselves as architects; we must reject and unlearn a system that has become obsolete and explore new possibilities for those worlds that can and should come into being. This attitude should include demands to act and imagine ways of doing that are outside the status quo, as well as compromises. By breaking the pre-established rules of what ‘architecture’ has for many years been understood to be - a profession linked to privilege and positions of power, essentially focused on competitiveness and individualism - we are creating new fields of action and with them, assuming our responsibility as part of this future that is a continuous present, our responsibility to be part of a profession that responds to the need to work to achieve more affective, inclusive, feminist and intersectional environments.
That's why, looking back and reading manifestos like ‘Architecture: whom does it serve?’ and contextualizing them within the current moment through thinkers like Haraway and Tsing, I constantly ask myself: how can we find a balance between our global concerns and the care and affections that we need to share on a small scale in order to become-with each other? How do we find the balance between the different realities that coexist on our planet, in its infinite different contexts? The truth is, I don't have a very clear idea, but if I let my mind wander, I always come back to a word that I like a lot, both for its meaning and for its epistemology: ‘to conspire', a word that comes from the Latin conspirare, meaning ‘to breathe together’. In particular, since the beginning of the pandemic, which has even made us fear the breath of others, I wonder how to continue living, coexisting, sharing, and becoming ourselves. How to keep conspiring?
I suppose that some answers can be found if we learn to accept and face our vulnerability, accept the idea that we are navigating in uncertainty and therefore need more than ever to continue conspiring—breathing together, breathing with others—because in the end, all those 'others' are 'us'. And in this context, the visions and projects mentioned in the #XFORMAS conversations remind us that the present-future in which we are working is never written on a blank page. On the contrary, the blank page does not exist in architecture; critical thinking does not have an expiry date and therefore the role models, ways of doing and understanding architecture, the concerns of groups of students like those who signed ‘Architecture: whom does it serve?’ who rejected a dogmatic and closed discipline, are part of this ‘now’ into which our becoming-us as a profession fits. In their book ‘Now’, Comité Invisible clearly marks this difference by stating that “one can talk about life, and one can talk from the standpoint of life; one can talk about conflicts, and one can talk from the midst of conflict.” And this makes me think that in the past decades perhaps our mistake as a profession has been that we have got used to talking about architecture but not to talking from within architecture.
That is why I understand that the question 'Whom does architecture serve?’, posed over 50 years ago, still has no single answer. But perhaps a viable way to approach it is not, therefore, to talk about architecture, but to keep talking and above all, to keep questioning ourselves from the standpoint of architecture, from a fabric of intertwined ways of doing not only from design and construction but also from curatorship, sound, education, academic discussion, performance, publishing, and conversation. For me, this too is what it means to conspire.
This article was originally published in #XFORMAS of Doing Architecture (X FORMAS de Hacer Arquitectura. Dostercios Editorial, 2022) as "Architecture: whom does it serve?".
