ing the modernist project, also to improve it according to its own abstract ideals. Form itself was hyperrationalized, reduced to its most essential purpose. Calculated, or so it was claimed, for maximum performance and throughput. “Interaction design” proper was born, both sinister and progressive (in the image of both Taylor’s studies to minimize assembly-line movements and Louis Kahn’s studies of traffic patterns in Philadelphia). Formal aesthetics also emerged that mirrored this machine logic; functionalism became codified into design ethics of usability and later with it the formal application of persona typologies as design-research techniques.
But the machinic mechanization of programmatic efficiency was also in conflict with the cultural ethos of postwar society and its celebration of the individual. The question of who was using whom became increasingly more volatile, exploding even in the world’s cities in the late 1960s in a broad social and political revolt against the very logic of efficient function that opaque, rectilinear modernist corporate architecture embodied. Function became the enemy of possibility, gridded structure the opposite of open innovation. And against this backdrop, “program” became a dirty word. Its projective logic not only remained, however, but it also blossomed, less a script for organizational efficiency than a platform for speculative conceptualization of impossible alternative cities.
lenges of a hyperglobalized, increasingly mobile, and intensely capitalized economy, architecture finds itself confronting several paths and roadblocks at once, some formal, some genetic, some informational, some phenomenological, some performative—some having little to do with buildings as we might normally think of them.
Architecture critic Hans Ibelings describes architecture’s programmatic responses to millennial globalization as “ super-modernism.” He describes how the rate of change of occupancy, the requirements of flux and flow, the legal and financial constraints of the buildout, not to mention the sheer velocity with which information pushes people and goods through volumes and voids, has focused architecture’s expertise ( 1) to the blunt envelope’s requirements of a hyperperformative of high-performance spaces and super-brutalism (as volume and wedge) and ( 2) to the maximal intelligent, intricate, and interactive surfaces (as skin and screen).
In this, formally specific (and therefore static) programmatic solutions underestimate the contemporary speed of space and are replaced by cheaper, more flexible dumb sheds. Mutability of occupation through quarterly financial cycles wins out over specific frameworks, which become so much noise in the system and end up contributing friction and inefficiency. Anything that reduces flexibility that is anything but smooth (literally and metaphorically) is only decorative and unassimilated into the larger network of space, capital, and experience. Think of the difference between
May + June 2008
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