frustrating position that we would at least like to try to transcend, and my suggestions
now will be little more than that clumsy attempt, fraught with traces of that same
frustration.
I want to suggest that the political relationship of works of art to the societies they
reside in can be determined according to the difference between replication (reproduction
of the logic of that society) and opposition (the attempt to establish the elements of a
Utopian space radically different from the one in which we reside). At their extremes,
both these stances raise some questions: for example, can even the most undistinguished
work still altogether replicate or reproduce the hegemonic spatial logic? If we see it
allegorically as an example of that very spatial logic, are we not in the process of lifting it
from its context and making it somehow exemplary, even of the status quo? But does this
not amount to endowing it already with a certain aesthetic value? This is perhaps the
place to raise the Venturi question, as it were, namely, whether intellectuals can ever
really speak the vernacular. Or, to put it another way, is irony in architecture possible? Is
it possible, as Venturi suggests, to replicate the city fabric, to reproduce its logic, and yet
maintain that minimal distance that is called irony and that allows you to dissociate
yourself ever so slightly, but ever so absolutely, from that status quo? If so, it is clearly
that minimal distance that would allow your building to qualify as art, rather than as
construction. At the point of that minimal distance you could wage an argument against
absolute conformity, and could claim a certain implicit critical function for your work;
that it was not the same as the buildings around it but was just slightly different, and that
it put those undistinguished structures in perspective and judged them as shoddy and
worthless in comparison. But at this minimal, almost imperceptible point, replication
turns around into negation; only the ironic stance makes it possible for the reversal to go
unseen, since notoriously (and ironically) irony is by definition what can never be
definitively identified as being ironic. You have to be able to take it the other way as
well; the condition of irony is to be able to remain invisible as irony.
How then could a building establish itself as critical and put its context in negative or
critical perspective? The perplexity of our political reflections on architecture finds itself
concentrated in this question: since architecture becomes being itself, how can the
negative find any place in it? In the other arts, again, the negative is lodged in the very
medium and the material: words are not, and can never become, things; distance in
literature is thereby secured. Indeed, nowhere is Venturi’s argument more powerful than
in his critique and reversal of the project of a Utopian modern architecture, which sought
to create a radically different and other space within this one, and ended up producing not
buildings and dwellings but sculptures, falling inertly back into the space of being with a
vengeance.
Other more dialectical critiques of the Utopian (such as Herbert Marcuse’s essay On
the Affirmative Function of Culture) have argued that excessive Utopianism in a cultural
artifact ends up itself reproducing the system, and ratifying, reconfirming the uses of
culture as mere window dressing, a sandbox, an inoffensive area of sheer aesthetic play
that changes nothing.
On the other hand, the idea of Utopian space, the Utopian building, or even the
Utopian city plan, dies hard; for it alone can embody the political aspiration for radical
change and transfiguration. Even in aesthetic terms, it is hard to see how any ambitious
artist could elude the inveterate impulse to create something different, minimally distinct
Rethinking Architecture 246