Selfish Anti-Architecture
Authorship in architecture seems inescapably tied to selfishness, an attribution generated by the readers irrelevant of the author’s intentions. This critical text explores anti-architectural authorship as performative, representational, genetic, scripted, novel, intentional, agent, paradoxical, and selfish. Cedric Price, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Carlo Ginzburg, Peter Cook, Andy Warhol, Banksy, Frans de Waal, Maynard Smith.
SELFISH ANTI-ARCHITECTURE: THE TRUE VIRTUE OF AUTHORSHIP
The Fun Palace (1965) was, for Cedric Price, an essay on temporal transformation, inventing a performative language able to be spoken and read differently by multiple users at diverse times and in unique situations. Price’s “attempt to disavow architectural authorship” was more than simple professional provocation, focused around the agency of the people of Paris and providing opportunities for what was indeed necessary for change.1 Price, in his self-assured role as ‘anti-architect’, was in fact creating a text of empty signifiers through a newly developed socially interactive machine, a catalyst for Rogers and Piano to evolve into the Centre Pompidou in 1976. Although he was never the sole author of the Fun Palace, its attribution as a seminal building for high-tech architecture inescapably follows Price.
Roland Barthes, in his essay Death of the Author notes that when the author is considered central, he or she is conceived as the paternal ancestor, origin, and past of their creation. Writing, or in the case of architecture, design, is regarded as the recording, representation or depiction of the original thought of the author.2 Architecture, therefore, can be distilled simply to an external representation of the idea. This somewhat primal reaction can be explained through Richard Dawkins’ attribution of evolutionary theory to societal conventions: the meme.
Following genetics, architecture is, in effect, the genetic analogy to cultural dissemination – selection, variation, and replication – the phenotypic effect of a meme. In genetics, phenotypic effects (or phenotypes) result from a combination of genes and their environment. An extended phenotype, as first discussed by Dawkins and Dennett, is the bodily manifestation of a gene: the effect that a gene, in comparison with its alleles, has on the body via development.3 Therefore, memetic phenotypes, or memeotypes, exist as active copies of external representations in culture (like art, architecture, music etc…) and play an essential role in memetic replication and cultural evolution.
The key here is that authorship, therefore, gives birth not to existence but rather to a representation of existence, explained well by Mathews:
Anticipating Derrida’s concept of différance, Barthes notes that the text is itself an ordered assemblage of pre-existing ideas and texts, rather than the emergence of a wholly original and unprecedented creation out of nothing.4
The Fun Palace perfectly illustrates the architect’s essential role as scriptor of an otherwise chaotic assemblage of readymade, off-the-shelf components that litter our consumerist culture today. To extend the text metaphor, the architect’s role as scriptor is to compile the elements necessary to communicate the representational content of his idea, and then withdraw.
Likened to Ginzburg’s need for extraction as essential in evidence analysis in his essay Checking the Evidence: The Judge and the Historian, here the withdrawal allows the author to attempt an objective stance on his own time.5 Archigram, for example, often employed the guise of scriptor in many of their paper-architectures including Peter Cook’s Plug-in City. A mega-structure with no buildings, the Plug-in City was conceived as a massive framework into which dwellings in the form of cells or standardised components could be inserted. Here, the machine had taken over and people were the raw material being processed, the difference being that people were meant to enjoy the experience. This practice of scripting differs authorship to the people, but since it is a novel idea, the scriptor is always synonymously tied to it. Does this then tie authorship to novelty?
It is interesting to note that the examples included so far in this critical text are all, in some way, permanently tied to their intentions of anti-authorship. Modern artists committed to anti-authorial stances like Warhol are often regularly celebrated for their acclaimed ‘original’ work. Even celebrated guerilla graffiti artist Banksy, who’s true identity has remained a mystery for almost two decades, has enjoyed immense international success for his work. Although these samples may perhaps lean towards the concept of anonymity rather than anti-authorship, they do offer a glimpse at society’s obligation to commemorate novelty as a way to describe something fresh. In their novel proposition of the substitution of the author by a textual anonymity, both the Fun Palace and Barthes’ essay have surprisingly become elevated to the status of canonical text, inescapably associated with their respective, if reluctant authors.6 Is the development of a canon, or intention, then therefore tied to authorship?
In his work, Barthes notes the emergence of a new kind of writing, focused more on the reception and interpretation by the reader than on the origin and intentionality of the work. Any attempt to establish a singular meaning, he argues, diminishes the project and impoverishes its significance.7 For Price, this leads to authoring an architecture that can easily support a multiplicity of readings, the intention of which is to create a readerly ambiguity to frame different views. After all, “what is intentionality if not an aspect of authorship?”8
Mathews notes that it was only as Price began to enjoy a degree of fame and notoriety that he chose to adopt his anti-authorial stance. As with Barthes, this suggests that in order to dethrone the auteur, one must first elevate him to magisterial status. This propensity leads to the virtue of selfishness, as that attributed by Dawkins to genetic evolutionary theory. Conversely, psychologist Frans de Waal takes issue with those who equate selfishness with self-serving. He argues that "selfishness implies the intention to serve oneself, hence knowledge of what one stands to gain from a particular behavior".9 Here I argue simply that, as Dawkins attributes the term, selfish authorship arises out of the primal desire for survival. Architecture, like genes, develop evolutionarily stable strategies (ESS, a term attributed to Dr. Maynard Smith) to ensure the maximum possibility of transmission and reproduction.10 Authorship, therefore, holds the key to whether the transmission of any idea is successful, and therefore has to by default act selfishly (by always attributing an author) in order to survive.
This balance between authorship and selfishness brings with it a demand for agency; for socially activist architecture. Price’s goal in the Fun Palace was to enable architecture to adapt to the changing needs of society, and hopefully to enhance the quality of life of the people who experienced it. Might the motivation for such a ‘readerly’ architecture be seen as Price’s pursuit of a new social and political paradigm of democracy and individual agency? With implications of cybernetics and social control it is equally worth asking whether the attempt to establish users as the authors of their own architecture was a genuine effort to erase social boundaries, or if it was simply a gesture motivated by compassion. Authorship as agency tries to erase the persistent class-consciousness, but instead creates a cultural launching pad for architectural transmissions to flourish.
In the end, as Mathews concludes, Price made a noble attempt to give architecture its future and assert authorship to the reader. However, despite his responsibilities as the scriptor of his content, his deliberate attempt to create a ‘readerly’ representation continues to inescapably identify Price as the author of the Fun Palace. As an artifact of the goal of anti-authorial architecture, the Fun Palace is a perfect example of society’s compulsive need to attribute authorship to novel intentions. Perhaps, as evolutionary biologists and sociobiologists suggest, at a most elemental level, it is the selfish action of our genes for survival that ensures authorship in architecture cannot remain elusive.
1 Mathews, Stanley, Cedric Price as Anti-architect, Architecture and Authorship, Black Dog Publishing, 2007. p.142.
2 Barthes, Roland, Death of the Author, Image, Music, Text, Hill and Wang, 1978.
3 Dawkins, Richard & Dennett, Daniel, The Extended Phenotype, The Long Reach of the Gene, Oxford Paperbacks, 1999.
4 Mathews, ibid, p.144.
5 Ginzburg, Carlo, Checking the Evidence: The Judge and the Historian, Critical Inquiry, vol.18, Autumn 1991.
6 Mathews, ibid, p.145.
7 Barthes, ibid.
8 Mathews, ibid, p.146.
9 de Waal, Frans (2009), Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved, Princeton University Press, 2009. p.13.
10 Dawkins, Richard, The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press, London, 1976.
Selfish Anti-Architecture [First Prize, Essay Competition] © Robert van Lin 2011