The Powers of Architecture

Abstract

The current crisis in architecture's effectual and significative power is the result of historical processes which have boon analyzed (by the Left) as the development of industrial capitalism and (by Foucault) as the development of technical-instrumental power. These processes have led to the loss of the authority of the divine referential, of the authenticity of the object, and of our sense of historicity. To recover the power of meaning (beyond mere instrumentality, nostalgic sentimentality, and power emblems), the communicative relations between spatial structure and human life-praxis must be investigated critically. Only then will architecture and urban space contribute their hermencutic power to the retrieval of the human potential to appropriate the world, The powers of architecture consist in (a) its ability to influence the spatiotemporal articulation of life-praxis and thus to condition one's fundamental relations to the world and to oneself, and (b) its ability to communicate to us about this world and ourselves, In a period of retrenchment and loss of nerve, the relative functional indifference of architecture can become an opening through which one may glimpse more humanizing relations with others and with nature, More specifically, the powers of architecture can be deployed to implant counterpractices resisting depowerment in the societal context, As part of economic praxis, architecture and urban structure can make possible and can communicate self-determined multiple uses and the life-values involved in them; as part of politics, architecture can encourage direct communication and local action and negotiation; as part of culture, architectural and urban space can open paths to reconstruct and reexperience the fundamental qualities of nature and the societal other, and it can allow us to reappropriate the world by enabling us to open up a horizon for new values and corresponding new forms of praxis; and finally, against the city conceived as an abstract network of instrumentalized powers, architecture could pose the open and articulated city, in which proximity with relatedness safeguards what cities historically have contributed to life-praxis and in which space is a liberative significant component.