CRISTIANO LUCHETTI

PHILOSOPHY AND AESTHETICS OF ARCHITECTURE

 ARCHITECTURE AS PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY: THE AESTHETICS OF CONTEMPORARY METROPOLIS

Romano Martini , Cristiano Luchetti

Abstract. This paper aims to highlight the dynamics that are significantly determining a reformulation of the urban settings of contemporary cities/metropolises. The urban transformations induced by the recent cultural globalization drastically transformed the classical repertoire of urban typological archetypes (avenues, squares, public spaces, etc.) with which the modern and western notion of cities was defined. These types constituted the spatial vocabulary of the social and community experience through which the urban context could be ordered and organized. We will begin the study with a brief examination of the notions of City / Polis versus Civitas / Metropolis, looking at the logic of their historical transformations, and, in this light, we will examine the notion of architecture as a theoretical and practical discipline. Architecture, indeed, is above all, a perceptual event regarding things, places, and built spaces, and it substantially responds to a visual and tactile code. A receptive experience can take place only in "public" and in forms of collective participation. The issue of the modern relation between masses and art is still very relevant Walter Benjamin's analysis: «Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collective in a state of distraction. The law of its reception is most instructive.» We will proceed with analyzing theoretical and aesthetic parameters that are often not ascribable to the typical "western modernity" ones. Indeed, such an urban phenomenon of contemporary transformation is predominantly taking place in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and South America. In this perspective, the proposed study will further focus on the analysis of the Emirate of Dubai, which, due to its swirling urban development, represents, both an an-archetype and a paradigm for the urban configuration of the nowadays World /Global-Cities. The "always new" and "artificial" city of Dubai is still capable of portraying its urban style and telling its own story, although one could use the notion of "generic" as in Rem Koolhaas' definition. A term that is, indeed, entirely appropriate to the contemporary way of producing urban spaces according to the fetishistic logic of the "integrated spectacle," as described by Guy Debord. The case study of Dubai allows us to bring to the surface, urban strengths and dynamics that, initiated by the contemporary process of globalization, contribute to form a planetary "sensitivity" and "taste." By circumscribing our analysis to the material dimension of the city/metropolis, this paper aims to contribute to a reflection on the current processes of construction and production of contemporary aesthetic perceptions.

Index terms   |  Urbanism; Global Cities; Architecture; Dubai; Capitalism; Middle East

Introduction.

We live in an era that reached a peak in the urbanization of the world never seen before: the way of thinking, building, and living in today’s cities, assume an unavoidable relevance in understanding the contemporary global scenario.

«The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire. The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights» (Harvey 2008).

This contemporary scenario is not always homogeneous nor unitary. At the international level, its characters show more than one parallelism with the vertical/hierarchical rearrangement of urban spaces and places formed by social relationships within the perimeter defined by capitalist valorization. The model of "globalized cities" seems to develop, showing characteristics in partial uniformity with the planetary setting. This situation requires a critical reflection on some aesthetic models that seem to tend to become dominant concerning the architectural-urban configuration of the city/metropolis, whose stake is inevitably meant to be political.

 Aesthetic Experiences.

The city is a privileged, often exclusive, place for the constitutive expressive dimension of our power of being "generic" (Marx 1968, 107-150). The human being is a potential being who, as such, creates his habitat, primarily through the transformation of sensible matter (see: Virno, 2002; Ciccarelli, 2018). Every expansion and limitation of this potentiality becomes the matter of a specific aesthetics policy that includes certain economic-social relations. We assume an apportionment/distribution of the "sensible" matter – being the visible (and the invisible) of spaces, times, and activities, thus establishing the communal experience -, aesthetics are combined with politics.

The politics of the sensible (or «sensible politicity») establishes ownership of spaces and times of social labor. A certain aesthetic "partage" arises - since ancient Greece - at the source of the political order:

«Aristotle states that a citizen is someone who has a part in the act of governing and being governed. However, another form of distribution precedes this act of partaking in government: the distribution that determines those who have a part in the community of citizens. […] Plato states that artisans cannot be put in charge of the shared or common elements of the community because they do not have the time to devote themselves to anything other than their work. They cannot be somewhere else because work will not wait.» (Ranciére 2016, 12).

The ever-changing capitalist production will shape the perimeter of conflicts between multiple powers, as well as their specific spatial "form."

 Architecture and ideology.

In principle, one could say that Architecture is a world conceived in its materiality defined by buildings, cities, territories, and landscapes. Therefore, as practice-oriented knowledge, architecture takes charge of showing the world as constructed or designable – a world/Kósmos. Indeed, the «visual, tactile, and functional evidence» is the most noticeable characteristics of architecture.  It assumes the unquestionable primacy in the common and everyday spatial experience of societies and communities: «Architecture is above all a material fact, » that is, «things and places, built spaces, substantially "tactile". » (see: Assennato 2011, 15-16; Benjamin 2000, 45). Its intrinsic ideological value, precisely because of its eminently perceptual artificial essence, should, therefore, first, be verified.

Manfredo Tafuri has admirably shown how theories, techniques, and practices of architecture have historically taken shape within the continuous "impersonal" reproduction of capitalist relations. Architectural ideology, referred to building techniques, to the relationship between forms and volumes in urban morphology, and to design theories, is formed within the transformations of the relation of production. It seeks the constituent elements of its own "materiality": in the symbolic codes of production and in the organization and capitalist exploitation of living labor (see: Tafuri 1976; 2007).

Arranging/Ordering: City and Metropolis.

«Philosophers have thought of the city, they have brought to language and concept urban life» bringing it back under the dominion of the logos. Logos means, above all, the reason that aims at reflecting an order (Kósmos). Logos is thus, a legislative and authorizing reason deployed on nature (Physis) for the creation of the human world. This concept leads to an unavoidable practical and political ordination: «To the organization of the city itself can be linked the primordial whole of urban form and its content, of philosophical form and its meaning: a privileged centre, the core of a political space, the seat of the logos governed by the logos before the citizens are “equal”, the regions and distributions of space having a rationality justified before the logos (for it and by it) » [see: Lefebvre, 1968]. The noun Kósmos and the adjective kósmios ("dignified," "honorable," "decorous") shows an evident similarity with the verb kósméo ("putting order," "adorning," from which "cosmetics") (see: Dal Lago, Giordano 2014). Is, therefore, the ancient polis the "original" place for the conjugation between art and power, aesthetics, and politics in the name of an order, (and a partage,) of the production of the sensible?

Polis and Metropolis.

Giorgio Agamben clearly distinguishes the only apparently homogeneous notions of City and Metropolis. In ancient Greece, metropolis, when compared to the "city/polis, meant a political and, at the same time, spatial relationship. «The citizens of a polis who left to found a colony were curiously called en apoikia: distancing/drifting away from home and from the city, which then took on, in relation to the colony, the character of Mother City, Metropolis» (Agamben 2007).

The notion of Metropolis then, call for a spatial, social, and political relationship characterized by the fundamental characteristics of mobility and dynamism. It «has a strong connotation of maximum dislocation and spatial and political dis-homogeneity, as that which defines the relationship between the state, or the city, and colonies. In addition, this raises a series of doubts about the current idea of the metropolis as an urban, continuum and relatively homogeneous fabric. » (ib. - emphasis added).

In the XVIII century, the paradigm of power as the prerogative of the sovereign authority, transformed into the paradigm of modern bio-power: «So I would say that the metropolis is the dispositif or group of dispositifs that replaces the city when power becomes the government of the living and of things. [The] government always has this schema of a general economy, with collateral effects on the particulars, on the subjects» (ib.)

With the imposition of a «metropolitan spatialization» a de-politicizing tendency is put into action, reaching the extreme point in which private and public short-circuit in absolute indifference (see: ib.). The bio-political paradigm of governmental power must be conceived as a predominantly economic form of governance of men and things, which determines a neutralization of urban space inhabited by public subjects, or citizens.

Metropolis and Civitas.

According to Massimo Cacciari, unlike the Greek model of the polis, the Roman civitas politics is entirely independent of a natural ethic. (Cacciari, 2009)

The polis was the place of ethos and ethnos, since it provided a home to "people," housing a lineage (génos), thus, sinking its roots into belonging to a tradition, to a language, and to other characteristics that defined its uniqueness and unity. The inhabitants of the polis were so-called polites, because they developed their politics around the city agorà, through direct participation in the governance of the common ethos (see: ib.). Indeed, Plato and Aristotle were concerned about the polis not expanding or growing larger than specific territorial dimensions.

In the classical Latin world, the city turned out to be the - "artificial" and not "original" or "natural" - product of cives (citizens). Apart from any original ethnic or religious determination, the Roman civitas was precisely the product of people belonging to different cultures and traditions, very different from each other, who established, by reuniting together, that they were subject to the same laws. Undeniably, the founding myth of Rome provides testimony of this. The Roman cives were somewhat bound together by a scope, a purpose, and by a common sentiment (Concordia) that expressed itself through the power of law, rather than being tied to an indigenous origin.

The Roman Urbs /Civitas, opposite to the "localized" polis, is dynamic (Roma mobilis). It permanently tends towards an imperium sine fine. Rome is Urbs who claims to become world, imposing "Concordia" by obedience to the "law," or rather, by transforming Orbis into Urbs. For this reason, the civitas is always "augenscens," it continuously "grows," reaching everyone, as everyone can potentially become Roman cives, being welcomed in the Roman Asylum. The civitas continually tends to overcome its "furrow" and therefore to extend its limes, i.e., exceeding the present static situation defined by the city boundaries. (see: ib.)

The model of the "civitas mobilis augenscens" radically reconfigure the problematic relationship existing between the identity-homogeneity of the polis and the deterritorialized-difference of its colonies, which, as Agamben mentions, was the specific quality of the Greek metropolis.

According to Cacciari, in the "baroque" age, the city was required to be simultaneously - and contradictorily - a place to satisfy the human needs of otium (dwelling) and a functional machine for the negotium (commercial, artisanal, and banking activities ). Subsequently, the irruption of the combined industry and market will lead to the creation of the Großstadt and then, again, to an indistinct urban realm: This is how the modern metropolis emerged. The metropolis progressively reduces social relations to fetishistic-mercantile ones: production, exchange, and consumption of goods and values assuming and maintaining the production /market nucleus as expansive propulsion (see: ib.).

Modern Metropolis: from State to market as a new “Kósmos”.

In the Paris of the XIX century, Walter Benjamin identified the genealogy of a new form of metropolitan life. He delineated the relationship between the capitalist mode of production and symbolic forms. During the Second Empire of Napoleon III a dual alternative was manifested to the strong state model: the market or the Commune. After 1848, Baron Haussmann, the "artist démolisseur" started an "urban revolution"(see: Benjamin 1995).

The “haussmanization” expressed a new urban space-time regime desired by the Bonapartist power:

«It corresponded to the tendency which was noticeable again and again during the 19th century, to ennoble technical exigencies with artistic aims. […] Haussmann’s efficiency fitted in well with the idealism of Louis Napoleon. The latter encouraged finance capitalism. Paris experienced a great speculative boom. […] To the phantasmagoria of space, to which the flâneur was addicted, there corresponded the phantasmagoria of time, to which the gambler dedicated himself. Gambling transformed time into a narcotic. […] Meanwhile, as far as the Parisians were concerned, [Haussman] alienated their city from them. They no longer felt at home in it. They began to become conscious of the inhuman character of the great city. […] The real aim of Haussmann’s works was the securing of the city against civil war» (Benjamin 1995, 157-158; see also: Harvey 2008 and Lefebvre 2014).

The concise experience of the Commune (1871) temporarily put the haussmannian "embillessemet stratégique" in crisis. The insurgents attacked and knocked down "the column of Vendôme,” and the monuments of "phallic-video-geometric" power (see: Debord 2004; Lefebvre 2014) in order to affirm an alternative way of living in the city.

After the bloody repression of the Communards, the new metropolitan form will reach a new stage of development. In the Ville Lumière, the artwork will begin to lose the "aura" that marked its distance from the masses. To distinguish itself, in the new historical-social conditions, it will have to find its value of exposure, of a predominantly mercantile representation. In the age of its "technical reproducibility," art finds its medium in the market, just as politics undergoes a distorted aesthetics establishing a new relationship with a massified "public." According to Benjamin: «Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collective in a state of distraction» (Benjamin 2000, 45; also see: Simmel 2000).

The new Kósmos/Order of modernity to which the agent individuals will later have to adapt will be the "spontaneous" (but imprescriptible) established through the rules of the market (Hayek 2000, 18 and 48 ff.).

Post-city and Post-metropolis.

In the nowadays post-metropolis or city-territory, the urban space is more and more indefinite, homogeneous, and indifferent. It is real physical parametrization without historical-narrative "identity." In the metropolitan industrial cities, there were still points of reference as factories or other buildings around which productive activities orbited. In the contemporary post-industrial cities, buildings seem constructed without any coherent logic and any apparent planning. The speed of the changes that the current post-industrial production system requires imposes ultra-flexible upgrading capabilities, making permanent and long-lasting urban plans almost impossible (see: Cacciari 2009).

Rem Koolhaas describes as Generic Cities: «post-cities under construction on the site of the former city» where «there is no form, only proliferation» and that is subject to a «fascism without a dictator» that «pretends to unite but divides. Create communities starting not from shared interests or free association, but same statistics and certain demographic data, an opportunistic plot of vested interests.» (Koolhaas 2006, 37, 69, 80, 85).

In this abstract space, on which a territory appears to be "sine fine," post-metropolises can thus arise everywhere by exploiting «the now global tabula rasa condition.» (ib., 24)

At a planetary level, the late capitalism, de-territorializing finance, informatics, mercantile, and migratory flows, deprives the ex -"first world" of the geographical, political, and cultural privilege it has enjoyed for centuries. Koolhaas observes that «globalization transforms [urban] language into Junkspace.». In the Generic City, «new notions of metropolitan identity, the history of the city, and public space, are de-structured by a demonstration of how the metropolis become fractal, anomic, enormous and multinational. » (Negri, 2007).

Conclusion: Study-Case Dubai.

After his sensational debut in the world proscenium, Dubai willingly participates in the frenetic "race for height," happily assimilating the contemporary "global culture." Risen and grown at incredible speed on the "natural" deserted tabula rasa without encountering any hindrance or constraint of any kind arising from an absent - to be preserved - urban fabric, Dubai has imposed its relevancy on the world. Not unlike other global cities, the Emirate displays (in Guy Debord's sense) the spectacular image of its cityscape, which is "decorated" by iconic landmarks and spaces. Dubai exalts a celestial top-down/vertical axis of development. The wide range of gated communities, luxury hotels, skyscrapers (among the highest in the world), colossal shopping malls, and a mild tax regime, very favorable to corporations, are the real "oil" of an essentially devoted to consumerism-shopping metropolis.

J.-M. Huriot demolishes the dominant rhetoric that cloaks, captiously justifying it, the global competition to build "higher and higher" towers:

«They symbolize power. [...] They convey a clear, strong message of success, wealth, development and a dominant position on the global political or economic stage». The "race for height" is a preponderant element in the configuration of metropolitan urban areas of the new millennium. They satisfy needs for "densification" and centralization of functional urban streams, and at the same time, they maximize land value. » (Huriot 2012)

Dubai's urban language mostly emerges from an orientalist approach. It displays the simulacrum of an idealistic Middle East formal aesthetic. In this light, globalization provides the missing formal and typological characters through the replication of the uniqueness of "old" euro-western cities. It is a shopping for iconicity.

The competition toward the "highest," saw in the construction of the Burj Khalifa tower designed by Adrian Smith, a milestone for the urban identity of Dubai. Smith says: «Right now we're seeing in China and Dubai, and in other places, scenarios where the developer is building and looking at the entire vision, which is much larger than the tower itself. They will realistically make money on everything else except the tower, which they will probably break even on in 10 years because eventually, these buildings do make money.» (Smith 2013)

Through the design of towers, the architectural form can now enjoy its contingent aesthetic ecstasy. As a significant example, one could mention the under-construction Dubai Creek tower (aka Calatrava's tower).  It (symbolically) flaunts only or mainly on the height, with no relation to its volume, which is almost absent. One goal, however, is clear: to increase the land value of the surrounding buildable areas, as well as to attract investments. With almost no functions added, other than the voyeuristic observational program on the urban "spectacle" of Dubai, the tower exhausts its mission as building, and it becomes a pure capitalist architectural device. It saves money on its construction due to its "light" functional program but at the same time, maximizes real estate profits on buildings in the adjacent lots. Would it be the aesthetic architectural typology for the towers of the future?

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*All translations from italian to english in the text are by the authors