Entry 1

Is the project of modernist architecture an ideological one? There are several reasons to believe that the integration of social and architectural form touted by the agenda of modernist design in cities was a "utopian" project, or foiled-off a social utopianism that could equalize or balance the inequalities of social milieus assumed to be produced by material form (Tarfuri, Cacarci, Holton?). Modernist architecture depends on the symbolic function of design. When looking at public housing in the US this seems to be the ultimate irony of the foray: modernist design was successful, for the projects did become symbolic, if not monumental, in their denotation of a social condition. In this way, it would seem that the material produced the ideological to the greatest extent. The design of the projects produced an undifferentiated and equalized space, we can see this in images of housing projects from all over the US, measured, tempered, and strikingly the same. A project in St. Louis looks no different than one in Chicago, to one in Newark, or one in New York. At least when considering high-rise, superblock housing, modernist form achieved its symbolic goal.


Modernist architecture built symbolic transparency-stripped-down, mirrored, and exposed-into a new kind of opacity in its materiality. Building utopia took the construction of surfaces, walls and glass, whose substantive opacity was imagined to be the means of producing a kind of social transparency, an equality through ascetic form: a rational vision of social integration through urban design. This was an optical illusion to the extent that material surfaces were perceivable, that one could see through them and, as such, the could not produce differentiation or inequality because of a kind of democratic transparency. Such an architecture void of ideologies through a production of sameness (materially).

A unilateral sameness of poverty seems to be the ultimate success of the modernist high-rise building. As a reflection or symbolic of democracy the 1950s and 1960s, the early years of superblock public housing, triumphantly symbolized a utopian vision of a kind of social integration, one where affordable housing became available to those to whom it had before been out of reach. The ideology of home, for the poor and middle class especially, was project of cold war nationalism, symbolic of American citizenry and democracy. But the easy transference or translation of social-democratic values into architectural and urban form concertized a radical opacity; out of modernism's ideology and vision of social integration emerged a kind of antagonism within the folds of opacity it created. The housing project was never a natural or utopian form, but rather a constructed utopia that became symbolic not of urban integration but of social isolation, a viral and contained sickness of democracy that was an anti-ideology produced within the ideological reach of architectural modernism.


If modernism was an ideological program, then what happened after ideology? With attention focused specifically on high-rise public housing projects, how what happened after ideology failed? Or did it? In Holston's work, he considers the modernist city of Brasilia within an "imminent critique," one that analyzes it from within to better understand its social-architectural function. What does this mean, a dialectic approach? Is this the best way to ascertain the nature of the relationship between built form and the bodies within it?