planning of cities, nor even that there are basic natural needs, since it is increasingly
absurd to try to distinguish them from new needs induced by the market and therefore
superfluous, not natural. It may be that as a philosopher I am particularly sensitive to this
loss of ‘foundation’, but I believe that, at times, it may also be experienced by architects
and planners as they reflect on their work. I know that often one receives a commission
for a determinate project and then works from models. But even in this situation, it is
increasingly difficult to find clear-cut and convincing criteria to which one can refer.
Those concerned with planning cities accept that planning does not appeal to ideal
guidelines and work instead in the knowledge that it is a contractual matter. It is in all
cases a question of social rhetoric, of exchanges, deals, the planning of what one is
setting out to do and its conciliation with that which is already there, that is, of taking into
account so many variables that one can no longer speak of a plan.
In keeping with this idea of planning, architecture is sometimes defined by ‘strong’
aesthetic criteria: it is a matter of creating a good project and a beautiful building. The
notion of ‘beautiful’ in this instance cannot be referred back to Kant’s aesthetics,
inasmuch as beauty is not defined by objective criteria and there are no models one has to
measure up to—as, for example, there are in classicism. What, then, is the criterion?
How, in the situation described here in a philosophical-sociological manner that has
hardly anything to do directly with the projective activity of architects and planners, can
one imagine the activity of projecting, the working conditions of the architect or the
planner? It seems to me that here, in analogy with philosophy, the only way of finding
criteria consists in appealing to memory or, as Heidegger says, to Ueberlieferung, to
handing down. We possess no criteria that may be traced back to the rational structure of
man, the world, nature or anything else; not even to the inevitable, providential or
rational, course of history. In philosophy as in architecture, we have nothing by which to
orient ourselves but indications that we have inherited from the past. This view is not far
removed from Wittgenstein’s notion of language games, which are precisely domains of
rationality in which the rules in force are given by the game itself. From Wittgenstein’s,
and to some extent Heidegger’s, point of view, our existence is defined as a multiplicity
of language games, or games in a broad sense, having an internal normative character that
we have always to confront, and which says something to us, regardless of whether we
modify, accept or reject the games themselves. The rationality we have at our disposal
today, in the epoch of the end of metaphysics, is no longer like this, at least not if one
accepts the presuppositions I have just described. There are rules of games in force or, in
more Heideggerian terms, there is an Ueberlieferung, a handing down, that issues from
the past, but not only from the past. It may also issue from other cultures, other
communities in this multiplicity of communities of values that come to light in the world
of the simulacrum. It is the proliferation of the simulacra that shows the simulacra for
what they are, and their proliferation amounts to minorities, disparate and ethnic groups,
etc., having their say—which is precisely what occurs in the world of generalized
information.
Does handing down, in this wide sense, offer up a meaning? Can it signify something
more precise and detailed at the level of the project? In conclusion, I shall put forward,
very briefly, three ideas that are really no more than consequences that may be drawn
from these premisses.
Rethinking Architecture 144