Crucial question-what is an inconsistent pattern? The cities of an experimental culture will be formed on inconsistent patterns, and will produce them. These will be their chief products, the result of a way of living driven by the need for clarity on shifting landscapes of the ephemeral.
Within the historical and hierarchical city, the heterarchical city-the free-zone-is constructed. This is one level of inconsistency. But there is a deeper one-within the heterarchical city, another city of unknown shape and substance is constructed-the city which cannot be named. Its inhabitants are those who do not fit patterns at all. Their names are known, but beg to be forgotten. Experimentalists in experience, they leave no forwarding address.
Politics of construction: who designs, who builds, who owns, who inhabits? The architect who designs building types is a pyramid builder, who follows the hidden forms already inscribed by those expressing and dominating others, and who benefit by conventions, conformity, and all adherence to the rules of the normative. The inhabitants are on the lowest level of the game. They receive what has been given, yet bear all the weight of the superstructure above. Who are the inhabitants?
The architect who designs building non-types-the freespaces of unknown purpose and meaning-inverts the pyramid and creates new ones. Each inhabitant is an apex, placed on end, a point of personal origin. Each pyramid expands into a void of time, seeking its base, its terminus, that would render the volume whole, total and coherent. But the base recedes before the advancing volume of experience, resisting completion. In the indeterminate darkness of the void, many pyramids interpenetrate and dissolve, one into others. They form a flux, a matrix of indeterminacy, an inconsistent pattern, a city of unknown origin and destiny, a politics not of being, but of becoming. Ontogenetics.
Social justice is not an issue of masses, but of individuals. If the mass is satisfied with its salutes, but an individual suffers, can there be justice-in human terms? To answer 'yes' is to justify oppression, for there are always people willing to lose themselves in a mass at the expense of some person who is not willing to do so. To construct a just society, it is precisely this lone person who must first receive justice. Call this person the inhabitant. Call this person yourself.
No one wants to discuss the relationship between architecture and politics. It is an unsavoury subject. All those politicians, all that rhetoric, mixed with the timeless verities embodied in the noble forms of architecture. Yet the resistance to enter this discussion is not noble at all. All architects are deeply involved in their work with the political, whether or not they admit it to others, or to themselves. Most architects in this highly commercial era, who accept commissions and clients that affect public life, are in fact committed to supporting political systems. Only a handful work against it, because they believe it is regressive in terms of architecture or society, or both. It is no wonder that the majority of architects avoid the political implications of their work. They believe themselves to be creators, or innovators, when in actuality they are nothing more nor less than the executors of a physical and social order designed by those institutions presently holding political authority and power.
The practice of architecture today is protected from confrontation with changing political conditions in the world within a hermetically sealed capsule of professionalism, which ostensibley exists to protect its high standards from the corrupting influence of political expediency and merely topical concerns. Architects themselves are complicit with this lie to the extent that they know it is enforced by the very institutions and individuals who commission the buildings they design, and who have a profound economic and social interest in maintaining a status quo in which they hold highest authority. Professionalism separates architects from people and their need to change the conditions of their existence, which is the essence of all politics. Far from protecting high standards of architecture, this separation impoverishes architectural work, reducing its productions to tokens of power, at best, and-at worst-to instruments of destruction.
The best architects today have few commissions, or none at all. Of course, they want to build, but are dismissed by the institutions and individuals most threatened by the actual content of their work: an explicit manifestation of the will to change the conditions of existence and the architectural means to do it.
It is only recently that I have begun to speak and write about the essentially political nature of architecture, much to the disapproval of friends and colleagues who think the most worthy architecture is above politics. I, too, would like in a time-capsule of 'unageing intellect', as Yeats wrote of his beloved Byzantium. But-like him-I am unable to do so, an am compelled more and more to live and work in the precise, often painful dimensions of the present. Since 1985, my projects have been a step-by-step immersion into the world as it is-not as I, or Yeats, or anyone else who by nature is idealistic, might wish it to be. With increasing decisiveness, these projects propose new social structures, implemented by new urban forms and architectures, intended to be realised within existing cities. They are inherently political, both in their rejection of existing social forms and proposal of new ones. The vagueness of the new ones has been intentional, as they are essentially anarchical societies, lacking in centralised political structure, centring instead on 'the individual' as the irreducible atom of community and culture.
My work has developed and changed in the past ten years, precisely because change and development of the forms of knowledge-and their effect on social and political structure-are its principal themes at both the scale of the building and the scale of the city. In my projects for Four Cities of 1981-82, AEON of 1983-84 and A City of 1985-86, Euclidian geometries were woven into rational two-and-three-dimensional matrices of cyclical-or recursive-transformations. I felt that a limit was reached by the rational formalisms of these studies, which placed them, finally, too much in the realm of deterministic idealisation-they were incompatible with what became my own understanding of the nondeterministic nature of knowledge, and with it, the necessity of indeterminate anarchical social and political forms. In the Centricity project (1987), I introduced into a city of many centres-an already anti-hierarchical city-geometries of a more indeterminate nature, flowing from a hidden source of unpredictable change- call it 'the mystery of human inventiveness'-manifest in the always restless and unpredictable thoughts and desires and actions of individuals. In the projects that followed-Underground Berlin (1988), Aerial Paris (1989), Berlin-Free-Zone (1990), Zagreb-Free-Zone (1991), and Double Landscape, Viennal(1991)- this experiment was continued with one crucial, and obvious, difference: actual cities form the rationalised, over-determined matrix, while free-zones and freespaces-as I have come to call an architecture of indeterminacy-form the matrix of unpredictable possibilities for culture, social and political transformation latent in human knowledge and invention. In all these projects of the past ten years, there is an impulse towards a new comprehensiveness, without the old necessity for a totality, a complete, predigested wholeness. These projects have the ambition to be a 'second nature', a fully realised, but deeply indeterminate human nature-a terra nova.
My emphasis on 'individuals' in the projects and my writing about them has left me open to criticism for being a right-wing thinker and architect, one who is not interested in issues of overall social justice or reform, but only in an elite who might occupy privileged positions of power and authority, by virtue of their self-serving ruthlessness, their solipsistic exercise of inventive faculties and capacities. I was shocked when this charge was made to me by a member of the audience at a symposium last year. But, to some extent, this is a just criticism, at least to th extent that heterarchy-the political form these anarchical projects seek to establish-can become the soil for authoritarian regimes, which are always cults of a particular personality. But I am against all authoritarian regimes, and against all authoritarians. I am interested only in the authority of individual acts and moments on a continually shifting landscape of acts and authority-the landscape of the free-zone.
On this landscape, no individual holds authority for long, because individual acts are ephemeral. There is, in this, an existential beauty, the type of beauty that cannot be grasped and held like a commodity, in fact, beauty which does not pretend to be eternal and universal. On a landscape of ephemeral beauty, no form and no individual holds authority for long, because no institution-political, social or culture-exists to codify authority.
The role of architecture on this landscape is instumental, not expressive. It is a tool extending individual capacities to do, to think, to know, to become, but also to pass away, to become an echo, a vestige, a soil for other acts, moments, individuals.
Existential beauty is destroyed by the impulse to possess, to own, to contain, to hold fast, therefore to dominate. Expression is possession, the manifestation of a lust for domination. Any attempt to express in a form an idea to it is an attempt to arrest the idea in time, to control it beyond its life. I despise all such 'expressionism', and none more than that which appropriates ineffable symbols, archetypes-in fact, types of any kind. These are the most vain and tyrannical attempts to eternalise the ephemeral.
My emphasis on individuals focuses on their autonomy, which has meaning only within the context of heteros-an other. Dialogue is an essential aspect of heterarchy, as are other forms of interaction between people, and between people and things, such as buildings and spaces for living and work, such as the city itself. By contrast, in the hierarchical city-the city of the hieros, the holy-dialogue is always overshadowed by the monologues of authority, which issue from the apex of social and political pyramids of authority in the city and filter down, 'trickle down' (to borrow an infamous term of economics from the American Right) to the broad base of the city's life. In the hierarchical city, it is possible to imagine one simply 'being in it', utterly alienated from others-but in the heterarchical city, while one may choose to be isolated, the free flow of dialogue, unimpeded by monological authority, makes alienation unlikely. The difference between the hierarchical and the heterarchical city is the difference between being and becoming.
Dialogue precludes an entirely self-consistent system of thought or of architecture. Any such system is only monological, tautological, authoritarian, because it insists on belief above all else. Instead, I embrace systems admittedly incomplete, therefore tolerant of self-contradiction, self-paradox, self-reference, which-without dialogue-could not exist at all.
Heteros is the essence of the free-zone and free-space projects, hence also of dialogue and the politics that spring from it. These projects advocate the establishment of architectural activity that participates actively in dialogical political changes, assuming a role beyond that which architecture presently plays. It will not be enough for such an architecture to simply follow events and give them an appropriate architectural form. Rather, architecture must initiate events, even very aggressively foment them. The architect is not, in this case, a detached professional, upholding timeless values, but an instigator, an agitator, an active participant. One does not participate by following the crisis of change, but by being part of its initiation.
The architect's mandate for assuming such responsibility is, first of all, his or her mandate as a human being living in the contemporary world. The moral and ethical fabric of society has change today from blind service to a hierarchy of authority, in whatever form, to a conscious personal responsibility for the condition of the world and others in it. Thus, the basis for making architecture has also definitely shifted. Today it is more ethical to actively propose new ways and conditions of living in which one can personally believe, than to represent by architectural or other means those ways and conditions the architect considers diminished or degraded, or those that change has clearly rendered outmoded and regressive.
It is not possible to cooperate with the present economic and political systems for the design and construction of architecture inherently opposed to any form of status quo. The relentless commercialism characteristic of these systems works against the realisation of an architecture initiating change in exactly the same way as it does against change itself: by its appropriation as new status quo. An architecture of the new must grow from a new conceptual ground, one having to do with the dramatic and sometimes violent changes that mark the present era. A new architecture for an era of radical changes in private and public life must actively participate in the establishment of new economic and political systims for the design and construction of buildings, and for the continued transformation of human communities around the world. This does not necessarily mean that the architect must propose a new society, though it might. At the least, it means that the architect must propose programmatic elements within a client's building programme, to account for qualities for which the architect, not the client, is responsible. It certainly means walking away from commissions to design types of buildings that neglect or subvert these qualities. More rarely, it may mean walking away from a practice of architecture altogether, in order to pursue personal research or experimentation.
My projects are concerned with the invention of new conditions of living. They are deeply political in nature, yet anti-ideological, in that they do not follow a programme for social relationships established a priori. Instead they develop an architecture of continuous transformation for its own sake, thereby undermining the very possibility of dogma in any form. Fixed social forms dissolve in the turbulences of change in the spatial and temporal boundaries established by architecture, projecting a society fluid in form, wholly dependent on the poise and ingenuity of individuals continually confronting new conditions. This fulfills the ethical and moral emperatives explicit in the sceptical, even pessimistic, spirit of the present age. Responsibility for the condition of both self and the world is fixed in each individual being. No system can be trusted. Any ideology is a betrayal. Only through the transformation of self can community be established. Architecture becomes a political act of intensely personal meaning.
Architecture as an instrument of transformation embraces with equal intensity of feeling and thought all conditions of physicality. It has no taste for the metaphysical, but is relentlessly materialisitic. The visible and unvisible are terms referring to bands on the electromagnetic spectrum. Thus the self-referentiality of transformation is established, the recursive loop between invention and perception given its mechanics. The comforts of tautology and solipsism are voided by dialogue: individual existence is confirmed only by and in an other. By establishing boundaries, an architecture of transformation demands their violation.
As electronic technology extends perception of the invisible, the visible necessarily becomes more precious, more intense. The architecture of tactility cannot be separated from the architecture of ephemerality, either in concept or in implementation. Steel and the images on a computer screen are of the same material, perceived differently, each requiring the extremities inherent in their separate material presences. In my projects, architecture is an instrumentation of the ephemeral penetrates more deeply into the very small, the very large, the very far, the very fast. The dialogical play of architecture and technology is inevitably epistemological and social, personal and political.