The Practice of Possibility. Transforming Reality with Architecture

One of the central questions in the discussion on architecture today is whether in the time of globalised capitalism it is still possible to maintain a critical position toward the market-driven structures and practices that so dominate social and cultural activity today. The core of this question could be summarised thus: is it still possible to pursue architecture as a practice of transforming social reality?

The problem – and strength – of globalised capitalism is that it is able to turn every search for radically different possibilities, every attempt at transgressing its limits, into the reinforcing of its own system. No amount of excess poses any danger to capitalism, just the opposite: capitalism literally feeds on excess. Every radically different position represents a new potential market niche. Every critical statement is potentially a new popular phrase, and in the next step, the next new brand. There are different answers to this question. Some architects don’t actually see any need for maintaing a critical position in architecture. For them the task of architecture is to “stimulate and satiate consumers’ desires”. Others understand architecture as a practice of transforming reality but only its own, architectural reality. They see no obstacles for such a practice in the time of globalised capitalism. The advocates of the third position, however, insist that architecture is a practice of transforming social reality at large. But they see no possibility for continuing such a practice today, in a time when everything is subsumed to the same logic of the market. There is also a fourth position, according to which in today’s world of growing social injustice and poverty, architects should give up their “architectural ambitions” and get involved in the project of improving living conditions for all.

In the lecture I will show that these different answers are indeed only variations of the same: they all accept the given social and architectural reality as the only possible framework within which one can think and work. The choice that these answers seem to offer is indeed a false choice. It masks the dilemma of the true choice, which is not the choice between acting within the given framework in this
way or that, but between accepting – or not – the actual framework of the given. Is this framework really our faith? I propose that this framework is not our faith, and that there is another possibility. This possibility could be described as the practicing of architecture as architecture. My thesis is that architectural thought and practice is already, by definition, structured according to the logic that implies an interruption of the predominant logic of profit, techno-science and market regulated enjoyment. This means that insisting on practicing architecture (as architecture) is a necessary condition that needs to be fulfilled in order that architecture continues to work as a practice of transforming social reality.

Petra Ceferin
Ph.D., is an architect, director of Zavod ARK– Institute for Architecture and Culture and currently a Guest Professor at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Ljubljana.

She graduated from the University of Ljubljana and received a Master of Architecture and Licentiate of Science degree from Helsinki University of Technology. She continued with her doctoral studies at the Helsinki University of Technology, and the University of Ljubljana, where she received her PhD degree in 2003. In 2007/2008 she did post-doctoral research as a Fulbright scholar at GSAPP, Columbia University in New York.

Petra Ceferin is the author of the exhibition and book Constructing a Legend: The International Exhibitions of Finnish Architecture 1957-1967 (Helsinki, 2003), co-editor (with Cvetka Požar) of the book and lecture series Architectural Epicentres: Inventing Architecture, Intervening in Reality (Ljubljana, 2008), and the author of the book Transforming Reality with Architecture: Finnish Case (Rome, 2008). She is also a contributor for several architectural magazines, a lecturer on architecture, and the author of several critical articles and essays on modern and contemporary architectural production.

She is a recipient of the Bruno Zevi Prize for critical-historical essays on architecture (2008). Currently she is working on her next book that
deals with the question of the possibility of architecture as a creative practice in the age of globalised capitalism.