PAVILION

metropolis in which the outlines of an
entire epoch could be discerned in distorted
form, have not simply been frozen
into the opaque mirror-worlds of postmodernity
so poignantly captured in the
self-referential corporate hotel. As
Jameson intimates but does not fully
develop, they have been displaced onto
a different plane, to which architecture
provides only indirect access. So we cannot
be content to compare the hotel lobbies
of Pudong circa 2000 to the hotel
lobbies of Berlin circa 1930. Instead, we
must read architecture and urban form
not only as tangible, material evidence of
the abstraction of modern life, but also as
abstraction itself.
Take Mumbai, or New York. In many
ways these two cities epitomize the workings
of what we can call the financial
imaginaries of globalization, which we
can think of as a modification of what
Simmel called the Nervenleben, or “mental
life,” of the modern metropolis.
Financial imaginaries are cultural constructions
through which circulate other
cultural constructions, like “money,”
“credit,” and “architecture.” All imaginaries
belong to the realm of social practice,
and my use of the term relies on its development
in the work of such figures as
Cornelius Castoriadis, Benedict
Anderson, Arjun Appadurai, and Charles
Taylor. Taylor in particular has emphasized
the practical dimensions of what he
calls “modern social imaginaries” in making
sense of social institutions in a way
that enables these institutions to work.
The “economy” is one such institution,
but the workings of what we can call “the
imaginary institution of architecture,”
especially with respect to the sociallyproduced
experience of the “economy”
as a collective, social institution, is still
not very well understood.
To begin with, we must be clear what we
mean when we expand the notion of
social imaginaries—which again, I take to
mean all of those everyday ways in which
a society imagines itself as a society—in
the direction of cultural or aesthetic practices
like architecture. Like social practices,
cultural practices help to define
what we mean, for example, when we
speak of finance capital, which is widely
understood as a key factor in shaping
“global cities” and “mega-cities.” Finance
capital courses through skyscrapers and
slums alike; its presence or absence
defines these physical forms but is also
defined by them. As the raw material out
of which what Appadurai has called
“finanscapes” are made, finance capital
is much more, but also (by virtue of its
abstraction) much less, than the sum
total of the material goods and services in
which it ostensibly trades. It is, strictly
speaking, imaginary, though in a very real
and practical sense rather than in the
sense of a mere ideological illusion. It circulates
differently in Mumbai, New York,
or São Paulo, constructing relationships
between cities while defining each city’s
relative uniqueness, and the different
conflicts and communities that each city
harbors. In this and other respects, architecture
and urbanism form one element
in a complex network of cultural practices
that make financial globalization—and,
by extension, its crises—not only visible
but also imaginable (and therefore possible)
to begin with. Or to put it more bluntly,
in today’s cities, the construction and
circulation of cultural meaning through
architecture and other aesthetic forms is
a primary characteristic of political-eco-
nomic processes, rather than a secondary
effect.
In this give and take, site-specific particulars
constantly trade places with general
axioms, in a process that can best be
described philosophically. Here I again
refer to Simmel, whose work contains
much in it that can be called philosophical.
In particular, Simmel’s famous essay
of 1903, “The Metropolis and Mental
Life,” extrapolates a set of principles
regarding the modern (and for him,
Western) metropolis in general, out of the
empirical qualities of early metropolitan
life. These qualities include permanent
restlessness, nervous energy, mechanical
movement, and a heightened sense
of abstraction associated with the money
economy. For Simmel, these elicit a sort
of archetypal psychological reaction on
the part of the metropolitan subject,
which he calls a “blasé attitude.” And in
an equally important essay of 1908,
Simmel designated as the bearer of this
attitude “the stranger,” a prototypical
urban figure who, as Simmel says,
“comes today and stays tomorrow,” without
ever really settling down or fitting in.
These ideas were, in turn, based on
arguments that Simmel had developed in
his magnum opus of 1900, The
Philosophy of Money. There, he argued
that the forms of abstract monetary
exchange associated with industrial capitalism
found their social equivalents in a
generalized objectification of everyday
urban experience that reflected “the calculating
character of modern times.”
Recent events in the world markets, tied
as they are to the financing of real estate,
should make clear enough the contemporary
relevance of Simmel’s philosophy of
“money,” though it should be equally
clear that today we are speaking of a
credit crisis rather than a monetary one.
But it would be a mistake to limit one’s
understanding of these events, and of the
historical context in which they have
occurred, to a kind of crude economic
determinism, whereby harsh economic
realities have finally broken through the
phantasmagorical screens of globalization
materialized in such metaphysical
constructions as “iconic buildings” and
writ large in places like Dubai or Abu
Dhabi. Instead, we might look more
closely at those architectural and urban
ciphers in which the logic or syntax of the
global economy, which we can now
describe as the syntax of credit, becomes
visible. Because, far more than in
Simmel’s time, during the recent phase of
accelerated growth, relationships
between two forms of abstraction, architecture
and credit, have structured our
understanding of the contemporary city.
In New York as elsewhere, one result of
this discursive restructuring has been the
elevation of the private real estate developer
to near-mythical status, as occurred
in the wake of 9/11 with the intense
media attention lavished on the World
Trade Center’s developer-owner, Larry
Silverstein. And, as also occurred with
the subsequent architectural competition
for Ground Zero, this fetishizing of the
developer has been accompanied by a
comparable elevation (if we can call it
that) of the architect to the status of a
kind of movie star, especially in the case
of the so-called “signature architects”
who now populate the international
scene. Generally, the relationship
between these two phenomena is very
poorly understood: the rise of the devel-
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