travelling theory stephanie white
history politics
globalisation wrong paths
In Edward Said’s essay, ‘Travelling Theory’, he proposes that theory and ideas are mutable, mobile and culturally modified wherever they land. At their origin, they are often revolutionary, or reconstructive actions which are always in danger of being institutionalised and thus reified. It is this reification which pretends it has it right, which of course it can’t in our increasingly heterogenous world. Perhaps the core of a idea holds, but its lineaments, its outlines, are subject to accomodation and considerable change. For me this was so very easy to shift into an extended discussion of architecture. Unlike David Murray, trained in Sir Bannister Fletcher, I had been taught my fundamentals at an expatriate Bauhaus school at the University of Manitoba, where modernism and reductionism were the hallmarks of a ‘pure’ system that could be applied anywhere in the world, breaking apart or ignoring historic convention, climate, political systems and culture. The ultimate coloniser, modernity, was famously found throughout ‘underdeveloped’ countries. Political modernity: globalism, at present crumbling around our ears. Said discusses theory as it travels from one culture to another, from one era to one subsequent, from one city to another and another. Lucacs in revolutionary Hungary is translated by Goldmann in Paris, picked up by Raymond Williams at Cambridge. Echoes of the debate between class, capitalism and reification are found in Foucault and debated by Chomsky. It is a puzzle, and a game, tracking the lineage of an idea. Such mandarin lineages are common in architectural critique, as once famously drawn by Charles Jencks in a vast delta of streams, rivulets and islands where everyone was slotted into a position relative to every other architect between 1750 and 1977.
Buildings, unlike texts which can be shelved, archived and made inaccessible, are enormous material objects that carry the theory, the ideology and the practices of their making until they literally fall down. They are the ulitmate reification of the complex societies that produced them. They can be read as cultural textbooks and as such can be deconstructed. Is any of this helpful to one of the primary goals of architecture which is to provide shelter? Not moving forward no, but it does help in analysing why some models, Ville Radieuse for example, are structurally incompatible with changing politics of race, class, social contracts, environmental expenditure. These things were fixed, once, and built in accordance with. But they change, and the buildings are either too slow or to resistant to change at the same rate. Thus the models which reify social beliefs of, say, the 1920s, or the 1980s, or the 2010s do not progress, but stand on, decade after decade. We seem to tolerate this, as if theory — the relationship between people and their place, history and cultural production, buildings and their uses, doesn’t really matter as much as illustrations of consumption, the accumulation of capital, financial acumen, celebrity — all things architecture can mimic (the gold-plated escalator) but cannot bend to, say, a plague, or a catastrophic tornado, or a deep recession. It leaves me wondering how, at a deep root level, contemporary architecture is directed. It doesn’t help that modernist architecture is now uniformly named brutalism with all the violence inherent in the word brute , rather than the dry cleanliness of brut in its original French. Nor, in 2025, does The Brutalist , a mega-film about another tragically misunderstood twentieth-century male architect who heroically struggles in his fight for his vision . Alternative facts. There is a distinct anti-modern looking back to find earlier models to analyse in hope there is a path we overlooked and might revisit. This is both sentimental and nostalgic: make architecture great again.
54 on site review 46 :: travel
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