Toward a Theory of the Architectural Program

Abstract

Recent proposals and debates over architectural redevelopment of Ground Zero have highlighted way in which, over last two decades, public role of architecture has been gradually reduced to symbolic and emblematic. Its forms of expression are no longer closely tied back to urban issues and physical planning questions that, from Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) to Team X, Neo-Realism to NeoRationalism, Rotterdam to Internationale Bauausstellung Berlin (IBA), once energized and mediated practice of urban architecture. The questions that have arisen around ethics and aesthetics appropriate to a site marked by disaster and catastrophe have thrown into relief drawbacks of an architecture overinvested in symbolic form and individual meditation on memory. Many discussions of proposals for reconstruction, indeed, seemed to bear out Guy Debord's 1964 anticipation of an allpervading spectacle culture. The difference, expressed by Hal Foster with reference to perceived effects of new and dramatic designs such as that for Guggenheim Museo Bilbao by Frank Gehry, is that thirty years ago Guy Debord defined spectacle as 'capital accumulated to such a degree that it becomes an image, ' but the reverse is now true as well: spectacle is an image accumulated to such a degree that it becomes capital. 1 The issue here is, once again, one of program, a word all-but jettisoned in high days of postmodernism and deemed irrelevant to architectural meaning since discrediting of seemingly narrow functionalism of modern movement. In revisiting this concept, one of oldest in history of professional architecture, there is no intent to invoke program in limited functionalist or political approaches of early modernism, nor even in revived typological and diagrammatic forms of late modernism. Rather, a contemporary sense of program would imply radical interrogation of ethical and environmental conditions of specific sites, which are considered as programs in themselves. Such programs might not privilege architecture in conventional sense, but stimulate development of a new environmentalism construed according to what might be called technologies of everyday. Such a new environmentalism would not imply a subservience to green building mired in static response of existing economies and primitive technology, nor would it follow static contextualism of new urbanism mired in nostalgic response to a false