Paul Virilio
French theorist and self-styled urbanist Paul Virilio (b. 1932) has pursued a long
involvement with architecture. A partner of Claude Parent, he explored for some time the
theory of the ‘oblique’, which has been considered influential in the origins of
deconstruction. Amongst his other early work was a study of the architecture of wartime
bunkers. Virilio was appointed director of the École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris in
the reforms following the events of May 1968, in which he took an active part.
Virilio is now known above all as a theorist of speed and time. Technical
developments in the field of telecommunications and transportation have led to an
erosion of the physical, to the point where ‘the loss of material space leads to the
government of nothing but time’. This has an obvious consequence for a discipline such
as architecture which has exerted its influence through materiality. In ‘The Overexposed
City’ Virilio explores a number of themes that arise from this condition. Symbolically—
but also practically—the city is no longer governed by physical boundaries but by
systems of electronic surveillance. Thus the city gate gives way to the security gateway at
the airport. Within the home too the traditional physical window gives way to the
interface of the screen. Everywhere architecture is going through a crisis as the hegemony
of physical presence is being eroded, and notions such as ‘near’ and ‘far’ have lost their
traditional authority—‘speed distance obliterates the notion of physical dimension’.
Virilio could be criticized for the utopianism of his futuristic vision, and for failing to
take sufficient account of the corporeality of the body in his thinking. Likewise it could
be argued that the homogenization of global communications, far from promoting a
simple placelessness, may have a counter-effect of a renewed celebration of the
specificity of material place. Yet there is an undeniable prescience in Virilio’s vision.
With the advent of the Internet, Virilio’s observation that the screen has become the city
square, ‘the cross roads of all mass media’, reveals the far-sightedness of much of
Virilio’s thought. In the age of cyberspace, Virilio has emerged as a leading theorist.
THE OVEREXPOSED CITY
At the beginning of the 1960s, with black ghettoes rioting, the mayor of Philadelphia
announced: ‘From here on in, the frontiers of the State pass to the interior of the cities.’
While this sentence translated the political reality for all Americans who were being
discriminated against, it also pointed to an even larger dimension, given the construction
of the Berlin Wall, on 13 August 1961, in the heart of the ancient capital of the Reich.
Since then, this assertion has been confirmed time and again: Belfast, Londonderry
where not so long ago certain streets bore a yellow band separating the Catholic side
from the Protestant, so that neither would move too far, leaving a chain-link no man’s
land to divide their communities even more clearly. And then there’s Beirut with its East
and West sections, its tortured internal boundaries, its tunnels and its mined boulevards.