Abstract (Against the Post-Political: Reclaiming the Critical Project in Architecture) Ross Exo Adams 17 September 2012 Working

Title: To Fill the Earth: Architecture in a Spaceless Universe

To pose the question of founding a critical project in architecture requires one to ask in which world architecture resides today. If it is no longer accurate to describe that world as the city, as some have conjectured, what is the spatial order which today brings architecture into visibility? What status does architecture have within it? Over the course of the twentieth century, the category of the urban has become a dominant topic of discourse approached from various perspectives. Urban Sociologists in the 20s and 30s took it up as a novel, modern framework in which the city could be assessed in scientific terms, revealing the economic and demographic distribution of society in space, patterns of movement and models of city growth. Geographers, more recently, have taken a broader perspective of the urban as the sphere of uneven development, the theatre of modern warfare, the general condition of a rapidly urbanizing global society. Architects, who are perhaps most directly involved in urbanization itself, tend to fetishize the urban, treating it as a condition of pure potentiala milieu of intensity which architecture is meant to capture, modify, celebrate. In all cases, however, the urban is depicted as a backgrounda naturalized, ahistorical horizon whose own consistency always appears insufficient in itself. It is a condition which can only be qualified by an agency external to it. Thus it appears benign, apolitical. But what precisely do we mean when we speak of the urban? Can such a neutral category bear a political ontology of its own? What could this mean for the fate of a critical architectural project? Identifying an array of exemplar texts and projects, this essay will explore a genealogy of the urban in order to reveal its historically specific emergence as a dominant spatio-political order one which today determines the majority of the worlds space. It will look to reveal a rather contradictory nature of this category: for every identity contained in the urban, its negation can be found coexisting within it. The urban is both the city and something absolutely opposed to it, something beyond it; it is simultaneously antithetical to the rural while also that which reproduces it within; it is at once the product of modern artificial processes, while also cast as the innate, natural condition of mankind, a transhistorical essentialism rooted in the heart of humanity itself. Indeed, the urbans strange ability to contain every identity and its negation is a reflection of its totalizing inclusivity: it is a material order aspiring to universality and, as such, it appears as a domain without an outside to itselfa pure interior whose endlessness corresponds to the scaleless expansion of its grid. Today, a clear and irreconcilable chasm has separated the historical figure of the city from the advancing condition of the urban presentbetween a historically fixed, highly politicized site and the ongoing expansion of a technologically administered spatial order. More than simply an apolitical background of contemporary life, I will argue that the urban is violently anti-political. Within this realm, the relationship between architecture and its urban context is permanently tempered by an evermore aesthetic demand: far from occupying a political role it once may have had, architecture today, takes on a predominantly aesthetic role in its endless play of indifferent differences.