PAVILION

including the politics embedded therein,
demystifies the endgame that opposes
the street to the control room. Far from
harboring a ludic freedom diametrically
opposed to the panopticism initiated by
Haussmann, the street in all its iterations
has become a privileged realm of microphysical
surveillance. While the control
room (and the corporate-state apparatus
to which it is appended) is not merely an
a priori of despotic power; it is, like
Bentham’s empty tower, a vacuum with
theological antecedents, and therefore
subject to a demystification as thorough
as that accomplished by Zarathustra and
his mountain.
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About fifty years passed before interpreters
of modern architecture, such as
the historian Manfredo Tafuri and his colleagues
in Venice, most notably the
philosopher Giorgio Cacciari, had internalized
the Simmelian/Weberian analysis
of the modern metropolis. Ironically, perhaps,
by this time that very sociological
tradition had been transformed, particularly
in the North American academy, into
the systems sociology associated with
Talcott Parsons, or later in Germany, with
Niklaus Luhmann. Thus the asynchronic
character of strategic “interdisciplinarity”:
lines of thought engaged in untimely
exchanges. In this case, Tafuri’s and
Cacciari’s trenchant decodings of the
metropolis by way of the itineraries of the
modernist avant-gardes were made possible
by an earlier sociology of the city
that was at the time being absorbed into
the very same systems model from which
the Italians recoiled in the architecture,
city planning, and politics of their own
time.
Much was learned from these decodings
accomplished in the 1970s, which concentrated
on the fundamental negativity
of metropolitan experience, and hence on
the helplessness of the revolutionary or
reformist avant-gardes when confronted
with the full force of capitalist development.
Nevertheless, their historical field
of vision was restricted to the northern
transatlantic, and they did little to account
for the pulsating, dynamic globe that
echoes through the term “globalization.”
In the hands of someone like Fuller, who
remains an anomaly for many historians,
and whose eccentricities are paradigmatic
rather than exceptional, this globe was
a system of systems to be designed and
managed. In that sense, we might even
say that the geodesic dome and its
underlying databases are to the “global”
or “mega-” city what the arcades, street
signs, and curios were to the modern
metropolis. Not only because Fuller’s
dome optimized the mass production
techniques that Benjamin, reading the
architectural historian Sigfried Giedion,
saw in the iron and glass enclosures of
his Passagen. And not only because the
geodesic dome, as an air-conditioned
space frame built (more often than not)
for the military-industrial complex, represented
the purest, most Platonic instance
of the airy claustrophobia sublimated into
the glass-enclosed corporate lobby. But
also because it was, first and foremost,
an object of the architectural and urban
imaginary projected at the scale of the
planet, and realized in the great, cosmological
tradition of Western dome-building
since the Renaissance: an object that
was entirely rational and entirely magical
at once.
Understood as media, such objects can
be seen through to reveal the dynamics
of a world that otherwise appears exterior
to them. Gazing through them as we
might a crystal ball oriented toward past
and future at once, we find ourselves with
what seems like an entirely different set
of problems, posed from an entirely different
set of vantage points, from those
that confronted early twentieth century
metropolitan thought. Still, to learn from
that thought is to learn to read the control
room as though it were the street, and
vice versa. Architectural analysis can
accomplish this, but only if it updates the
toolkits inherited from the European
avant-gardes and their philosophers.
Among these is the device, and the phenomenon,
known as “abstraction.”
Abstraction is modern architecture’s
answer to circulatory capital, wherein the
supposed lifelessness of the commodity
form is given an aesthetic language of its
own. Not the Werkbund or even the
Bauhaus, but the Bauhaus Corporation,
which was set up to enable the circulation
of the various lamps, household fittings,
and pieces of furniture prototyped in
Weimar and later in Dessau, would be its
most fitting representative. Alongside this
in the urban realm might stand the
Siedlungen, or functionalist, middle class
housing estates built outside of Berlin
and Frankfurt during that same period to
train a multitude of Simmelian strangers
in the protocols of mechanized domesticity.
But how, if at all, does the abstraction that
we associate with modernization continue
to operate aesthetically in today’s
cities, and not only in those architectural
artworks characterized by a degree of
self-consciousness unavailable in the
urban scene more generally? Is this
merely a question of progressive,
sequential development, whereby the
synchronized, geometrical “mass ornament”
that Siegfried Kracauer found in
Weimar-era spectacles and the factories
that supported them, is now to be found
in the repetitive hum of business
inscribed into Shanghai, with the
Siedlungen replaced, in the imaginary
and on the ground, by the hundreds of
cities by which the urbanization of the
Chinese countryside is now being
accomplished? To be sure, there is
insight to be gained from such a transposition.
However, not only does its developmentalist
narrative (from Berlin to
Shanghai) leave too many symptomatic
assumptions intact, it fails to recognize
the historicity of abstraction itself, along
with associated concepts like disenchantment
(and re-enchantment), or alienation
and estrangement.
We could begin instead by collecting a
set of worldwide architectural “equivalents”
to circulatory, global capital and its
many outgrowths and mutations, in a
manner similar to what Fredric Jameson
has done with his Benjaminian reading of
the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los
Angeles. Still, though Jameson offers
many clues, we would not yet have fully
approached a central transformation in
the history of modern (and modernist)
abstraction. That is, quite simply, that the
mimetic relation between architecture
and the city, figured unconsciously in the
arcades and semi-consciously in the
Siedlungen, has become an apparent
non-relation. In other words, the relation
between architecture and the city has
become abstract. And the aqueous
dreamworlds of the modern, European
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