Journal #18

money & design

Edited by Andrew Miller, Garyfallia Katsavounidou,
James P. O'Brien

Contents:

Andrew Miller
Introduction

Ioanna Theocharopoulou
Architecture and Advertising: Terms of Exchange? Arts and Architecture, 1944-1950

Keller Easterling
A Short Contemplation on Money and Comedy

Sandy Isenstadt
Little Visual Empire: The Visual Commodification of Landscape in the Real Estate Appraisal Industry, 1900-1992.

Kazys Varnelis / Rocio Romero
Postmodern Permutations / Sampling Linux

Mark Jarzombek
Molecules, Money and Design: The Question of Sustainability’s Role in Architectural Academe

Aslihan Demirtas
10 Francs

Christopher B. Leinberger & Robert Davis
Financing New Urbanism

Nina Chen
Moving Design for Lives Sans Terre

Eric J. Jenkins
Utopia, Inc: Czech Culture and Bata Shoe Company Architecture and Garden Cities

Garyfallia Katsavounidou
Public Space / Private Money

"design & money" An Introduction:

Architecture presents a curious stance with respect to money. The profession can be traditionally identified with the arts, and adopt an avant-garde pose of opposition to the demands of commerce and industry. But at the same time it remains tied to the forces of patronage and production. This disjunction may help to explain the cycles of alliance and critical reassessment that have characterized the relationship of architectural ideologies to capital.

Reconsideration of the relationship between architecture and capital may indeed be re-emerging from the long endured haze cast by Tafuri’s assiduous critique which alleged the general impotence of architecture under capitalism. Whether one was to the left or to the right, whether one bought his critique or not, architectural history already clearly shows Tafuri’s mark. Architecture culture of the 1970s and 80s has already indulged in its rebound affairs - trysts with semiotics and deconstruction - well after its post Bauhaus divorce from the real. Postmodernist architects have also already illustrated another conceptual relationship: a plastic return to capital, to the façade, to the corporate image or to the past, in quotes. But such wink-wink involvement of design with capital-as-the-client leaves little more than the provocative insight to consider Philip Johnson as "the Leni Riefenstahl of corporate architecture."(1)

Already edge city architecture has been taken over the top by Rem Koolhaas "riding the wave." To the Citywalks, theme parks, and entertainment architectures have already gone our Jerdes, our Graves, and the Sports and Entertainment Divisions of our major firms. And our stunning form-makers, Holl, Gehry, Libeskind or Herzog & deMureon, are already freed by the privileges of the signature, the museum commission and the invited competition. But what occurs in the project where such categories - entertainment architecture, signature building - are not present to provide explanations or excuses for the work? What remains of the space of practice where each architect must articulate a relationship to capital on a project by project basis?

The work in these pages indicates that meaningful exploratory activities of history, theory and practice do remain: in probing the various places where the relationship between design and capital has not already been determined, or can at least be subject to review. Eric Jenkins surveys the case of the Bata Shoe Company. Reinforced by the democratic Czech culture of the 1920s and 30s, Bata merged a progressive architecture and a utopian urbanism in its corporate planing policy. The built results occupy a space between the mere provision of a corporate identity and the real provision of a corporate culture in which people - employees - could dwell. In the present, Nina Chen considers the itinerant nature of employment today, a condition associated with the effects of globalization. In Chen’s design we are offered a prototype on the theme of movement and dwelling. The elements of a traditional concept of home are here replaced by a system of tools, enabled by technology, that offer a new kind of personal space – a mobile home for a working, but perpetually transient, populace. In Chen’s design environment, speed and adaptability increasingly trump permanence without destroying those elements one might call home.

Capitalism has an immutable drive to make for all things an equivalency so that they can be traded. This appalling truism is addressed in articles by Sandy Isenstadt, Christopher Leinberger and Robert Davis. Isenstadt offers a historical analysis of how the real estate appraisal industry came to quantify the intangible concept of "view" as a measure of the economic value of buildings and land. This increased ability to quantify characteristics of the architectural site paralleled and perhaps even drove a waning influence of modernism and a rising influence of standard development practices in American architecture and urbanism of the twentieth century. Leinberger and Davis precisely address the effects these prevailing development practices have today on innovative proposals for alternative or sustainable developments. They indeed point to a solution to make innovative developments more viable. It is achieved however, not though changing design practices, but through changing those of the accountant and financier. Explaining how the discounting methodology of modern finance discourages mid to long-term investment, they propose a strategy that responds both to the market’s need for immediately realizable profits and urbanism’s requirement of time. As capitalism has come to view economic value in relation to time, Leinberger and Davis pinpoint the fact that standard development practices have sanctified financing methods that simply do not fit the timing of economic returns that can be expected from innovative or sustainable developments.

If capitalist financial practices indeed find sustainable design to be its most sober alternative, it could indeed "capture the middle" of our economy as a whole. And with the rise of Al Gore, Environmentalism, and their implicit moral imperatives, Sustainability at the center is indeed a looming possibility for our cultural and political economy. Mark Jarzombek warns of the perils of such a movement. He argues that capitalism’s eventual impact on critical theory can be foreseen in its successful association of the Sustainability Movement with architectural academia. In the emergence of this moral imperative tied to efficiency and the dubious measurement of energy consumption and recycling, he sees a new grand narrative that can ultimately transform and subvert contemporary critical discourse. Kazys Varnelis is concerned both with contemporary critical discourse and with practice. In a return to Frederic Jameson’s outline for a postmodernism of resistance, Varnelis activates the space between theory as autonomous and theory as a well to which a practitioner can return to reinforce a position. The work of Rocio Romero here is a case in point. Romero literally invents a site for a non-privileged practice within the digitally circulated images of our prevailing avant-gardes work. Inspired by the operating program Linux as an antidote to corporate influence on the creation of design, Romero introduces a methodology grounded in decentralized production. She explores how the syncretic process can be extended from building components to aesthetic concepts hacked from an avant-garde.

It is well known that the Case Study House Program of the 1940s in California explored the space between the so-called custom-built home of the developer and the residential commission of the single architect. Here Ioanna Theocharopoulou looks at that Program, and at how the editorial and graphic choices of the journal Arts and Architecture articulated the symbiotic relationship between design and the advertisement of building commerce. Theocharopoulou analyzes the trajectory of this relationship between modernist prototypes celebrated in the journal and its advertising constituency of building material manufacturers.

By contrast, the complete misalignment of art and patronage opens the opportunity the for critical commentary in Aslihan Demirtas’ notes on notes. Demirtas explores the representation of architecture on money through a juxtaposition of the Le Corbusier 10 Franc Swiss banknote with the architect’s ideology. The analysis of money as both a tool of exchange and a carrier of symbolic meaning is extended to include the ideological foundations of its design. And in her own article, Garyfallia Katsavounidou reinstates the problematic relationship between private interests and the public realm in the making of urban space.

Finally, Keller Easterling puts a sardonic spin on capitalism’s claim to the mantle of economic "efficiency." The rhetoric of efficiency coexists with its perpetual miscalculation, especially evident in the retail industry. Easterling sees an opportunity for subversive critique in these places where architectural forms can come to exaggerate, in unexpected ways, the oddball outlets for the classic overproduction of capitalism.

The relationship between architecture and money is as old as the profession, and globalization seems to be a further intensification of the capitalist objective to find the liquidity present in all qualities and quantities of human relations and things. But still: while capitalism demands that an innovative concept be compatible with basic market precepts, it demands nothing of the content of its message. And it is perhaps the market’s indifference to what is not or cannot be quantified that still holds the greatest implications for architecture. For as market theory expands across the spectrum of human activity, the two ever more constricted bands remaining outside its reach – the priceless and the valueless – are precisely where issues of personal responsibility, ethics, and point of view in design lie. If design is a discourse about such intangibles, capitalism has not yet found a way to demand the comparison of those values within a definitive frame of reference. Surely meeting the demands of the market are now part of the designer’s job. But before during and after that task, the designer’s personal responsibility is still exercised in its fullest. When capital views cherished beliefs and innovative ideas clothed in only their attributes relevant to a market evaluation, before casting blame on its gaze, it may very well be those innovative beliefs themselves that are found wanting.

footnote:
(1) Benjamin Buchloh in Artforum, January 1997, p102.

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