The Journal of Architecture

ISSN: 1360-2365 (Print) 1466-4410 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjar20

The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How

Contemporary Architecture Became an Instrument
of Control and Compliance

Ivonne Santoyo Orozco

To cite this article: Ivonne Santoyo Orozco (2017): The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How
Contemporary Architecture Became an Instrument of Control and Compliance, The Journal of
Architecture, DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2017.1396728

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2017.1396728

Published online: 08 Nov 2017.

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The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How Contempor-
ary Architecture Became an Instrument of Control
and Compliance
By Douglas Spencer
London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2016
Hb ISBN: 978-1472581525
Pb ISBN: 978-1472581518
Pb, pp. 232, 30 ills
Liberating architecture, enabling neoliberal
environments
In The Architecture of Neoliberalism, Douglas
Spencer questions a dominant tendency in recent
architectural production that insists on seducing its
users with a host of flexible, complex and adaptive
spaces, and architectural strategies of self-organis-
ation. Training his focus on the work of practices
ranging from Reiser+Umemoto to Zaha Hadid, he
locates this tendency as one which concretised in
architectural forms and ideas in the early 2000s
but, as Spencer argues, it is also a manifestation of
a set of political-economic ideas that drove the
thinking of a school of economic thought that we
know today as neoliberalism. Whilst neoliberalism
may be a nebulous term, impossible to reduce to a
single narrative, it has been dominated by two dis-
cursive lines of thought: that of the Marxist geogra-
pher David Harvey on the one hand, who depicts it
as a restoration of class power in a global
economy, and Michel Foucault’s genealogical
account of ‘governmentality’ which, in the second
half of the twentieth century, formed itself around
an objective to eliminate direct state coercion by
turning to the market as a fundamentally self-organ-
# 2017 Ivonne Santoyo Orozco
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The Journal
of Architecture
ising principal of society. Spencer takes issue with
this division, though clearly is more influenced by
the latter in understanding the subtle intersection
of architecture and space with issues of conduct.
As he writes, ‘adaptability and flexibility appear
[…] as the qualities of conduct, the ethos that the
subject must cultivate in order to thrive in the com-
petitive environment of the market’.1 At the core
of the book is an effort to understand the morpho-
logical explorations of these architectural practices
in their attempt to ‘liberate architecture’ from the
‘impoverished tool boxes of modernism and post-
modernism’2 as indistinguishable from the consti-
tution of a new form of ‘environmental
govermentality’ typical of neoliberalism.
To unfold this argument, Spencer astutely ana-
lyses the spaces and ideas of architects such as
Patrik Schumacher, Greg Lynn, Mecanoo, NOX,
OMA, Zaera Polo, Farshid Moussavi, amongst
others. To follow this architecture is not only to
enter spaces that blend, flow, deform, immerse or
self-organise users in dynamic forms of spatial inha-
bitation; it is also to reveal an intoxicated historical
moment of unchecked market optimism. Like this
neoliberal society, according to Spencer, its architec-
ture ‘renounces critical opposition, and any possi-
bility of occupying a position of resistance’.3
Through their architectures, tropes and spatial con-
tortions, the boundary between the individual and
environment can finally be dissolved, and the indi-
vidual occupant is, in the mind of these architects,
finally set free. But, freedom is, of course, a
double-edged sword. From Friedrich Von Hayek to
Milton Friedman, the guarantee of individual and
1360-2365 https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2017.1396728
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market freedoms remain the core objectives of the
neoliberal project. However, just like the markets,
freedom too has to be created.
Not only that, as Spencer’s account suggests, the
pursuit of freedom also needs a physical armature:
spaces and environments in which it can be actively
experienced. And it is precisely here where the
folding, contorting, immersive spaces come into
view. Following Michel Foucault’s analysis of neoli-
beralism, Spencer argues that these spaces have
become a crucial site in which a new homo œcono-
micus was made both legible and, importantly,
‘manageable’ as an economic subject of control
insofar as he or she ‘responds systematically to modi-
fications in the variables of the environment’.4
Through Spencer’s reading, the architecture of the
last four decades appears as a crucial medium in
grounding a new modus operandi of neoliberal
power which, paraphrasing Foucault, governs less
by extending its realm of intervention through the
spaces in which subjects of power dwell—namely,
the urban environment.5 It is as such that, according
to Spencer, subjects become one with the neoliberal
world, or as he states, ‘the market comes to appear
as the way of the world, and vice versa’.6
What makes Spencer’s reading particularly novel
is that, rather than simply explicating Foucault’s
argument in space and organisational logic, he
shows how contemporary architecture seamlessly
hosts new conditions of labour, mobilising a new
culture of managerialism where work and life
seem to collapse into one another. For example,
through his analysis of the break-out spaces of
OMA’s CCTV tower in Beijing or the reorganisation
of the production line of Hadid’s BMW factory in
Leipzig, architecture appears to operate not only
through affective responses, but also through the
constitution of new modes of labour. In this way,
we begin to see that architecture is not only a
product of neoliberal modes of managerialism: it is
also one of its primary vehicles. Whilst in his
account much is said about contemporary architec-
tural phantasmagoria—Benjamin’s descriptive term
for the commodity fetishism of nineteenth-century
Parisian arcades—it is clear that, if there is indeed
an ‘architecture of neoliberalism’, it is only insofar
as architecture both communicates and enables
new modes of subject formation. The latter is
clearer as Spencer unfolds a complementary
reading of architectural case studies. Through a
close reading of projects such as Richard Roger’s
Pompidou Centre in Paris, FOA’s Meydan Complex
in Istanbul and Morphosis’ New Academic Building
in Cooper Union in New York City, he illustrates
the formation of new ‘subject positions’ from the
‘cultural or citizen consumer’ to that of the
‘student entrepreneur’ respectively. To borrow
Maurizzio Lazzarato’s argument, this strange breed
of architecture operates both as a sign and a
machine.7 It is both constitutive of subjectivities
not only through its seamless encounters of bodies
in space, but also through the participation of the
subject with the space itself.
And yet this argument is predicated on debunking
a form of architectural practice that, for years, capti-
vated the discourse, practice and the media that sur-
rounded it, inserting itself deeply in the imaginary of
the general public. It was an architecture that trans-
formed cities into what David Harvey refers to as
‘spectacular islands of wealth and privilege’.8 This

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was, and perhaps still is, an extraordinary architec-
ture, however one that, for the very same reason,
is removed from the lives of many. Perhaps if one
thing is left unexplored in Spencer’s account, it is
how neoliberalism might inhabit other spaces
beyond those of such high-profile architecture.
One wonders, how are neoliberal agendas to
operate behind the phantasmagoria, the shiny
iconic envelopes, the corporate façades, the pat-
terned envelopes and contorted forms that
Spencer so forcefully denounces. If this form of
architectural practice is indeed to serve as an
example of an ‘architecture of neoliberalism’, one
wonders what are the many other architectures
that equally animate neoliberalism—those that
perhaps lie behind the palaces of wealth and in
the infrastructural spaces that sustain urban life, in
the domestic environments or in the mundane
habits of city life. Perhaps, Spencer’s account is
simply an opening into the multiple spaces of neoli-
beralism.
And yet, we must not forget that the strength of
neoliberalism lies precisely in encrypting its work-
ings, in changing its face, in intermingling its individ-
uated calculations with everyday life. This is perhaps
why Hayek avoided at all costs issuing any public
manifesto9 that would define the aims of the Mont
Pelerin Society, the same group that was instrumen-
tal for the formation of neoliberal ideas in the late
1930s. As Spencer argues, following Pierre Dardot
and Christian Laval, neoliberalism might be defined
as ‘nothing more, nor less, than the form of our
existence—the way in which we are led to conduct
ourselves, to relate to others and to ourselves’.10 In
other words, unlike another form of power, and
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beyond a single socio-economic system, neoliberal-
ism has become a generalised condition of life for
much of the world’s society: a condition of extraordi-
nary heterogeneity yet which has become singularly
hegemonic. In attempting to draw out this argument
into other realms of human existence, one is left
wondering how Spencer’s argument might apply
to a kind of ‘everyday neoliberalism’11—one
excluded from the palette of examples he analyses.
If neoliberalism is as ubiquitous, amorphous,
elusive, and whose limits are ill-defined, then to
understand it better, we might have to look else-
where. As Foucault, interpreting Hayek, warns us,
neoliberalism ‘is a general style of thought, analysis,
and imagination … it is a living thought’.12
But of course, there is never enough space in a
book, and this one is certainly setting a foundational
stone in the enormous edifice of a project captured
in the breadth of Spencer’s title. The argument is
timely, the writing generous and yet provocative. It
unfolds the many accounts of the neoliberal
debate into a coherent and accessible argument,
extracting and recombining the disparate accounts
from that of Harvey to that of Foucault, as well as
other voices such as Dardot, Laval and Philip Mir-
owski. The book is not only a sharp critique of an
architecture that has subverted the eye, that has
intoxicated our sensory through its indiscernible van-
ishing points and complex surfaces; it is also a remin-
der that architectural critique is today more urgent
than ever if architecture is to mobilise new publics.
Indeed, the task is large.
However, The Architecture of Neoliberalism is a
reminder of the relevance of architectural critique
not only within the discipline, but indeed for
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anyone that finds him or herself lost in the myriad
dreamlike architectural worlds that now occupy
many cities. For all these reasons, it is both remark-
able and yet not surprising that this book immedi-
ately and very positively was reviewed in major
newspapers and widely circulated literary publi-
cations.13 What Spencer has achieved in this short
volume of architectural theory is to break out of
the disciplinary boundaries and expand architectural
discourse into a subject of public debate. In mobilis-
ing architectural critique, Spencer manages to call
for a broader awakening of a general collective con-
sciousness to our neoliberal condition. Standing in
resistance to Thatcher’s lingering mantra of ‘no
alternative’, critique, for Spencer, is always an
alternative opening towards political imaginaries
for an architecture to come.
Ivonne Santoyo Orozco
Iowa State University
Ames, Iowa, USA
(Author’s email address: ivonnesantoyo@gmail.com)
Notes and references
1. Douglas Spencer, The Architecture of Neoliberalism.
How Contemporary Architecture Became an Instru-
ment of Control and Compliance (London: Blooms-
bury, 2017), p. 23.
2. Ibid., p. 54.
3. Ibid., p. 56.
4. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the
College De France, 1978–1979 (New York, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011), p. 252.
5. Ibid.
6. D. Spencer. The Architecture of Neoliberalism, op. cit.,
p. 72.
7. Maurizio Lazzarato, Signs and Machines. Capitalism
and the Production of Subjectivity (Los Angeles, CA,
Semiotext(e), 2014).
8. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford,
New York, Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 157.
9. Ronald M. Hartwell, A History of the Mont Pelerin
Society (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995), p. 32.
10. Pierre Dardot, Christian Laval, Gregory Elliot, The New
Way of the World: On Neo-liberal Society (London,
Verso Books, 2017), p. 3.
11. Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste.
How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown
(London, Verso Books, 2014), p. 92.
12. M. Foucault. The Birth of Biopolitics, op. cit., p. 218.
13. Owen Hatherley, ‘The Architecture of Neoliberalism’ by
Douglas Spencer: review, ‘Privatising the world’, 12th
January, 2017; accessed online: https://www.
theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/12/the-architecture-
of-neoliberalism-douglas-spencer-review; Joseph
Henry Staten, ‘What Exists is Good: On “The Architec-
ture of Neoliberalism”’, 25th March, 2017; accessed
online: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/what-exists-
is-good-on-the-architecture-of-neoliberalism/#!