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architecture action.com
• Post- seduction
• The invention of ourselves, the métier of the Empire
POST-SEDUCTION, The Invention of Ourselves, the Metier of the Empire
«Architecture Action» is both architectural firm and a research program on architecture. The
name refers to a manner of generating projects. Our firm operates in a traditional
environment : the French public works system. We publish, we curate and design
exhibitions, we build projects.
Today's topic is "POST-SEDUCTION, The Invention of Ourselves, the Metier of the Empire”.
Everything we produce transforms our behaviors and sensitivity. Each new IPhone,
cosmetic, software, image and spectacle modifies us. The objects compel us to incorporate
behaviors to meet the ideological needs of the market, but not only. Now we know that
objects change us – the hair stylists and the prêt à porter (ready-to-wear) of desire; and
accordingly, Architecture also changes us. How do we transform ourselves? I would like to
discuss with you today's tranformations and "how we change. "
I will try to demonstrate that this invention of ourselves is now a generalized occupation, and
already on the decline under its current form. It is difficult to say when, through a series of
microfractures, this unification of forces of the invention of ourselves started (30 or 200
years back?). Reciprocatingly, it is a situation we are about to quit, while being supported by
it; we challenge from within the way we invent ourselves.
Among other things, but like all script writers, architects combine production and a reflexive
approach of humanity. This invention of ourselves is permanently accelerated by modernity
itself. The architect fabricates everything like the fashion designer, the publicist, the
sociologist, the philosopher, the trend analyst, the product marketing manager, or the
elected politicians and their staffs. In this global profession, there is no essential difference;
one produces or analyzes the same issue with his or her own means, proper techniques,
professional earnings and economic interests. The transformation of the contemporary
subject is their function, which is neither good nor bad. To establish this link is to re-envision
the intellectual adventure that is Architecture. Architecture interrogates and constructs
society; it invents devices, forms and concepts, fostering the habitus, whose function is the
construction of the Others and not just buildings. All this in the era of reflexivity.
BEFORE. Sixty years agoArchitecture has moved into the world of manufactured artifacts
All the objects modify usArchitecture changes us
La ville qui fait signes - 13 Projets pour Lille 2004 - Architecture Action 2004
Each stage of capitalism has transformed the human being
Through consumption, and training the body to consume, the architecture has moved into a
wider world, where all the manufactured artifacts that build us can be found. The subject of
Architecture is this lover of tales recreating himself or this volatile decider of what is
desirable. During the last sixty years, the project has been gradually guided by the desire of
the consumable. The visible world has been invaded by the order to design products, a real
invasion of ludic products, driving the act of consumption. The recent items highlight their
ability to distract us or move us, in the realm of spectacles, in a highly festive society that
expresses itself in "public spaces" : these land invasions that mimic the leisure of the beach,
everywhere and especially in commercial neighborhoods and city centers (downtown areas)
qualified as «playful». This trait also characterizes all the art and design exhibitions: the
object must be funny, humorous, exciting. The "identity" is a surface feature among others.
Museums have seen their function transformed from a mission - to learn - to another -
learning to love and to consume.
Each stages of capitalism has transformed the human being. The Fordist man, physical and
active producer, could be identified to the Man with needs of the 30s, while the consuming
post-modern man had to learn to enjoy the renewal (replacement) of objects. All architecture
that claimed itself as « Modern », played with the idea of creating a "new man", « L’Homme
Nouveau » especially during the totalitarian 30s, but an idea coming from the French
Revolution, and later Saint-Simon and Fourrier or others. Then we will see that the Man with
needs was not considered as credible for the Capitalism of Consumption. Therefore, the
architecture of the 20th century has been a permanent invention of the contemporary being.
Dominique Rouillard showed how this story ended with the advent of radical architecture
(and in parallel that of Aldo Rossi) : for the first time the narrative was no longer focusing on
human happiness, through an architectural therapy. The human conditioning became the
very purpose of architecture as expressed by Hans Hollein with his pills and sprays to
change the environment: the drug, for the moment, killed Architecture. The Minimalist Man
is then replaced by the hero dealing with maximum sensations. The individual is no longer
this evolving real character but a pure fiction, a "lifestyle". To this « uncertain individual »,
narratives will be provided to fill the void. The capitalism of seduction is occupied with the
rebuilding of ourselves through perceptions and images : the house as well as plastic
surgery, sports, psychology, drugs, love and diets, readings and magazines, the overhaul of
its own history. Since the Marshall Plan, life is taken over by magazines that remodel us
each week, from healthier diets to home issues. The marketing manager, this vanguard
representative of a « liquid» society offers to identify ourselves with objects and their
advertisements.
Norman Bel Geddes (April 27, 1893 – May 9, 1958)
But the object is de facto under the domination of the narrative. The injunction to recount
replaces the object.
These analyses done by all those numerous individuals involved in this promotion, emerged
when consumption set itself up in Europe and developed throughout the process that lead
from a collective progress to self-survival. The architect has changed. We knew it, but the
habit of consuming came, and we learned to love and to laugh at objects. Relying on its own
foundations, Architecture, mostly escaping this reign of objects, now became distractive: a
set of signs among others in the realm of media industries. An architect must have a full line
of products available, in all sizes. Logically, Architecture turned unconsciously and
definitively towards the invention of « lifestyles », i.e. the very program of the consumer
society as advocated in magazines. Museums reflect with accuracy this transfomation with
the expansion of design and the disappearance of architecture. "Lifestyle" is the keyword to
fully understand Architecture. The organization of judgments that arose on the facades and
decorations of the domestic architecture of the 19th century could be the starting point. Very
early on, Architecture was conceived in terms of distinction, taste and lifestyle, with the clear
consciousness of the loss of sense in Architecture introduced in private commissions . Villa
architecture can be read as a social code, as transparent as the description of a fashion
style. "Severity without wealth, wealth without ostentation, here is what the architect had
said in harmonizing the dissolved hues of its decor. » It is like reading the system of fashion
by Roland Barthes. The control of codes of taste and architectural effects is also part of
architects’ domain.
The whole architecture of the 20th century is fused by the diffusion of lifestyles. The clients
will decide which "lifestyle » suits them best. In Paris, the lifestyle takes the form of a
collective gym class: pure, hygienic and simple, a late-Modern being, always a little bit on
the move but not too much. The touted lifestyle is the one of a human being en masse,
statistical, and opposed to the individual, a romantic figure. This being deprived of
unconscious does not watch the images nor turns on himself. In Vienna, one contemplates
oneself, at home, in the theatre of the family drama. In Frankfurt, modernity annihilated any
attempt to define the individual as such, especially if one sought to define oneself through
objects, furniture or interior. No one object can any longer represent us, to invent oneself is
to ultimately look like the rest.
We know that the habitat has been replaced by a machinery to repair one's "technical" self.
From this point of view, today's architecture is particularly regressive and instead requires
us to live in tagged, easily identifiable objects . This is why we must resist the objects.
ed. de la Villette, Paris 2004
It is difficult to date what I am talking about and make a difference with the present time. For
example, Paul Nelson, a French architect of the 30s, stated the Glass House by Chareau
was a "machine that multiplies the sensations of life", a definition which still stands. The
glass house was a reconstituted loft, the reconstructed decor of an industrial building where
the art scene of the Boulevard Saint- Germain was performing, in a strategy similar to that of
Ludwig II of Bavaria in the Venus Grotto, sitting in a boat alongside his two swans. Ludwig II
of Bavaria built the permanent decor of the Overture of Wagner‘s Tannhäuser. Architecture
remains this revolutionary device "to multiply the sensations of life," to envision the world in
a different way after passing through the experience of the house. Chareau had a clear
awareness of the role his glass facade was to play: that of a wall as thin as a tent, an
invisible veil that separates interior and exterior. This visual cancellation of the wall indicated
indeed that one must live among the world and not be isolated from it, to live "freely" within
the city, as in-habitants of the cities. For Architecture Action,our firm, only Architecture that
invents and questions our ways of living and perceiving is worthwhile. That is how
Architecture resurrects this interrogation of ourselves.
Tents and caravans. The Earth remains habitable only if we do not stay too long, the habitat
has to be ephemeral. Buckminster Fuller's site is the world territory. Fuller’s homes gradually
resembled the Earth.
All these modernist narratives and the ones that follow, still commented on, are narratives
on lifestyles. But they differ profoundly from current accounts, which come down to
narratives about objects, and, therefore, to somewhat limited experiences which generate
little knowledge about ourselves. Architecture proposed ways of being and living through a
stage, invented a world. Architecture was a stage where life takes place. Architecture
creates situations, builds situations or, as we write, Architecture is a device. But now this
device of objects is very limited and not a stage including the actor.
That said, the "device" is the manner of arranging to create an effect but not limited to that
effect. "Device" is an effective term to study the contemporary society. « Device » describes
everything that transforms us, and how it transforms us, like artifacts, buildings, clothing,
make-up, as well as organisational strategies.
The device, a term used for as long as there have been architects, remained a tool of
control for Michel Foucault. It is mostly true with objects produced by capitalism. Any
computer product is a control and surveillance tool as well as a tool of alienation from one’s
own life, that gives us the illusion of being freer. An "illusory" conquest of the Situationists
Devices and reflexivity
Ludwig II of Bavaria . The Venus Grotto
The métier of the Empire
since the 50s : a "distractive" architecture could exist, as an immediate consequence of the
aestheticization of the world. It has been said that the reduction of Architecture to the status
of object has a meaning, which is of course to match the aestheticization of life. Playfullness
characterizes an architecture made out of objects. There was a prospect to design
architecture as objects that is typical of post-modernity. The architecture has taught us to
love the objects that we consumed. To love objects was a necessity instilled in us for the
sake of capitalism.
The difficulty is negociating the limits of the device, as it concerns itself to all the procedures
of acculturation, to anything that fabricates the contemporary being, that is to say all he
encounters. It is a concept as broad as that of habitus, as it examines the procedures that
create the habits and ways of being.
The ideal Architecture is a paradise: no property, an ideal climate, no sin, no theft, and
therefore no architecture. For example, transparency is a device to recall Happiness.
Denying the walls and replacing them with glass was like returning to Eden. On the contrary,
"The House of the Future" (Alison and Peter Smithson, 1956) was like a production of
atomic shelters promoted by Kennedy. Survival was their project, like a deferred suicide, a
daily renouncement of life. "The House of the Future" offers a plastified world,
decontaminated from the outside radioactivity as well as from any sexual arousal or future.
Properly fictional characters are installed in the « House of the Future ». They will be joined
by Constant’s « Desiring Man », the hippies of Superstudio, the naked heroes of Archizoom.
Architecture will have to deal with Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic man, impersonal and
transparent, with « no inside ».
In this shortcut to the invention of the contemporary being, ones says that Architecture
invents narratives for heroes while ordinary people live inside. The intimate connection
between architecture and a designed object appears as a lifestyle and an adherence to
consumption. In the society's experience of oneself, the architecture is a make-up case, a
curious cosmetic architecture, a both precious and disposable box (Opera de Tokyo).
Architecture as a make-up case. Do this imagery of a communicator interest us?
Architecture’s capacity to entertain, like here with the luxury and diposable make-up case, is
no longer relevent and outdated. The reason is that it does not commit us to conceive an
open and interrogative narrative, involving a transformation of the representations and
practices, like for bodies. Contaminated by the design of the product, Architecture has
become a world of objects to be contemplated with no challenges or to simply confirm the
necessity to love objects.
Rotterdam Architecture Biennale - Architecture Action 2003
Porte de Bagnolet - Architecture Action 2003
The CEO of Loréal is the best architect
We are interested in contemporary since it changes. We never wrote as much about
ourselves, about the individual and individualism. There's something of a globalized
enterprise, working with the same sources : Rousseau, Fourrier, Darwin, Baudelaire,
Deleuze, Nietzsche, Simmel, Marx, Weber, Benjamin, Adorno, Arendt, Veblen, Dewey,
Elias, Lefebvre, Debord, Foucault and Bourdieu, and others, always the same sources
globally listed to define who we are, beings turned into artefacts.
All industries work – in order to survive - to define ourselves, to say who we are, who we
want to be, how to dress, how to eat, and so forth ... There, Architecture, design, fashion,
film, all consumptions and medias, magazine of « savoir-vivre », marketing, trend setters,
the Situationists as well as Michel Foucault are combined. Included in this vast collective
enterprise, Architecture is therefore involved in this incredible perpetual invention of
ourselves. This phenomenon is amplified by the fact that we are becoming more educated
and informed, that the multitude is conscious of itself, thinking in real time about its own
transformation. This might be called the Age of Reflexivity. For these reasons, we now are
engaged in a revolutionary period. Henceforth, we are able to see how capitalism
transformed us and how we can manage our transformation.
Today’s man has eliminated the city to set himself up in the center of the system.
The question of the urban has been resolved, the car has instantly turned the whole territory
into a city. And suddenly everything is urban. No need to talk about urban sprawl, the
definition of the city has instantly completely changed. Ultimately, the city will disappear to
become a commodity like others, because the pivot is now the individual and not the city.
We will write narratives on the territory, and depending on their reception and effects, with
the help of a shared knowledge of devices and not from a discipline that would be urbanism.
We used to treat the city as a living being, like something sacred, that belonged to everyone,
when it is a product of the finance or cultural industry.
The quality of a city has, in a sense, moved from "material" conditions to "human"
conditions. The quality of a city is that of its inhabitants and therefore of the narratives they
have been told. But because consumption is intended to restore self-image, it can be
structured and soon replaced by a narrative.
After disappearing, the city has been replaced by constructed situations. The cities, the
resorts of the 19th century and amusement parks have been replaced by private cities, cities
50s: "The House of the Future" decontaminated from the outside radioactivityas well as from any sexual arousal
Jean Prouvé 1938
30s: The Earth remains habitable only if we do not stay too long,
of knowledge, eco-cities, slow cities, green towns, living-lab towns, friendly cities, thrill cities,
events cities or care cities, cities of solidarity, feelings cities, telecommunications cities, palm
or falcon cities and coming soon Star Wars episodes cities (Jean Nouvel for Paris), as well
as duplications of amusement parks or real cities at all scales. These stages, too remote
and not interlocked, will always be reinvented by the industry inventing ourselves, currently
reinforced in the urban field through city developers, real estate promoters and planners.
This industry is as performative, knowledgeable and cynical in the invention of cities as it is
in the invention of cosmetics. The CEO of Loréal is the best architect.
The future would then be the generalization of organized city stages. But these products are
not very inventive, quickly making these cities boring. Cities are on the same tracks as
movies, very few are good. We entered an age of stunning architecture where the sensation
is more important than the form and it led to an era of sensational urban planning. We have
to envision a larger-scale architecture and to integrate the idea that "the City" is storytelling.
The quick adoption of parks or greening efforts by urban planners as a lifesaver of their
projects is pronounced by the public survey generalizations as tools for urban planning
decisions. It is also the urban landscape as an communicating identity.
This is the question. What and how are we transforming when we take action on the urban,
the objects or the architecture? In a series of microfractures started long ago, our
relationship to our environment has completely changed and is being distanced by its
staging. We are no longer alienated to urban spectacle. Europe is no longer our city; it is a
urban stage equivalent to all others, equivalent to all screens and all projections. This
increasing distance has freed us from the seduction of objects, of Architectures and of the
branding of cities.
Everyone's obligation to invent themselves is a fact of our actual condition.
Obvioulsy, another character is being outlined as we speak, that of a generalized reflexivity
that challenges the messages of the metier of the empire. The urbanism we value proposes
fictions about how to live together or the invention of life at work, or the reintroduction of
politics, or the idea of a reflexive subject and therefore an architecture that occurs reflexively
in the interrogation of its action.
We can not ignore the observation of changes in lifestyles: an externalization of private
practices. Within a few years, a consumer-actor emerged. The life priorities of the highly-
educated characters will be increasingly defined individually. In a society where the learning
of hardware and software communications is an ongoing activity, experimentation becomes
second nature: to live is to experiment. Thus the passive consumer succeeds whereby a
Architecture as a make-up case
Architecture for men - Architecture Action 2002
consumer less attracted to the seduction of objects. To think "the Future" is no longer to
forecast, it is a banal and shared activity, a script-writing technique. The narratives are still
around and shared by all those who are inventing us.
In both the Empire and the society of post-seduction, our being is no longer defined by what
he admires but again by what he does. For Architecture Action, the experience, the
experimentation, the invention of a reflexive being is what steers Architecture. We are more
interested in discoveries of current conditions than in the always outdated, traditional
« emotions ».
We can imagine projects as experiments of uninhabiting, in order to understand what makes
a house unusable, like an operation to act upon oneself, a sort of cold transformation of
oneself. There is no question of feeling or emotion.
In "The House of Happiness, " a 2001 project, we picked the film that had to be there: «Le
Mepris». The rift between Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli after purchasing an apartment,
the break-up in the Casa Malaparte and the car accident provided the frame of a project.
The decision was not to design a project according to the scenario, but to project the movie
inside of a grid house whose interior was covered with mirrors. Outside of the model,
through round openings for viewing, we could witness the rise of contempt. The device was
filmed. It partly shows that Architecture is defined only by what is happening, and that the
project activity falls within these constructs and Instrumentation, design strategies arbitrarily
decided. The house which bore the projection had become round holes with specific and
legitimate. It partly shows in one hand that the architecture is mainly defined by what’s
happening within its limits ; and in another hand, that the project activity depends on these
mental constructs and instrumentalization, on some conceptual strategies arbitrarily
determined. With its circular holes, the model that housed the projection became specific
and legitimate, and probably a difficult experience for live.
Post-seduction
La maison du Bonheur, Architecture Action, 2001