PAVILION

like the market simply takes over from the
state in providing for the basic needs of
the population (which even the developers
admit is impossible for the city as a
whole), this scheme has built into it a
curious urban and architectural contradiction.
For it does not so much resolve
the underlying class conflict as abstract it
into a general principle. A vivid example
of this is to be found in the pair of luxury
high-rise residential towers designed by
the architect Hafeez Contractor on a
slum-rehabilitation site in Mumbai’s
Tardeo neighborhood. This is not a particularly
accomplished work of architecture,
and indeed, for Hafeez Contractor architecture
is a game that is played to win
rather than a refined art form. In this
case, the game involved making the SRA
legislation work on the site by balancing
the socio-economic demands of the luxury
real estate market against the political
demands of slum dwellers. The result is a
monumental fissure running right through
the site that divides the very wealthy from
the very poor. The architecture of the
building, which consists mainly of overwrought,
neo-Deco ornamentation above
and functionalist regimentation below, is
used simultaneously to produce and to
cover up this fissure. But more importantly,
despite the domineering posture of the
project’s twin towers, their architecture
and that of the “rehabilitated” slum over
which they hover stand starkly separated
from one another not only for their contrast
of garish to humble, but essentially,
for their contrast of an architecture (that
of the towers) that attempts to communicate
and another architecture (that of the
tenements) that does not.
Conventionally, this would be described
as a contrast of figurative to abstract. But
it would be more accurate to describe the
project’s stark, built-in divide as the result
of an abstraction of another sort—a higher
level of abstraction comparable to the
abstractions of credit. Since credit, as we
have just been reminded, is built around
trust, belief, and a quasi-religious faith—
in this case, the faith that the real estate
market will resolve the city’s housing crisis.
Moreover, the classic movement from
use value to exchange value is turned on
its head here. Exchange value, in the
form of luxury real estate, is made to
seem capable of yielding surplus use
value, in the form of the utilitarian tenements.
This inversion, which is also the
principle according to which many “public-private”
partnerships work, naturalizes
the politico-economic proposition underlying
the SRA legislation, by repositioning
the slum dwellers (and by extension, the
“public” at large) as beneficiaries from
whom the markets ask only trust and
faith. Enabled by the state, the market
thus takes over as the biopolitical agent
par excellence, and the slum dwellers are
caught in a double bind of paternalism
and primitive accumulation. In terms of
urban realpolitik, they are also pitted
against one another and forced to
engage in Faustian bargaining for additional
square feet based on the leverage
acquired by holding out. Thus the slum
rehabilitation scheme taken as a whole
can be described as a fetish: a quasi-religious
object with seemingly magical powers
that, like Fuller’s equally metaphysical
domes, is the product of rational calculation,
rather than its opposite.
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It is uncontroversial to suggest that, in
cities like New York but also around the
world, architecture has more generally
become a kind fetish for the speculative
real estate market. What may be more
controversial is to say exactly what this
means. Since for architecture, it means
buildings that inspire faith. In other
words, it means iconic buildings, the
degraded form of which these Hafeez
buildings are paradigmatic.
The culture industry in which such buildings
operate is managed aesthetically by
a broad spectrum of producers, at the far
end of which stand any number of “signature”
architects, such as Jean Nouvel or
Frank Gehry. And while the associated
phenomenon of accomplished architects
working with large developers is not particularly
new, during the first decade of
the twenty-first century it has been elevated
to a new kind of norm. Rather than
being the exception (marked, for example,
by the association between I.M. Pei
with the developer William Zeckendorf in
the late 1950s), the thought that architecture
as an art form is not only possible
under the global real estate markets, but
is actually stimulated by them, has
become commonplace. The most articulate
architect working on or around this
problem remains Rem Koolhaas. But
here too, even Koolhaas’s self-conscious
irony is limited merely to reflecting the
mainstream identification of architecture
with finance capital, as in his firm’s imaginative
yet quite accommodating parody
of the market-driven desire to maximize
residential floor areas under strict zoning
regulations in a recent proposal for 23rd
Street in Manhattan.
Faced with such a juggernaut, we are
forced to ask how architecture actually
works—especially as an artwork
designed for the urban real estate market
by architects like Koolhaas. But I have
already alluded to the beginnings of an
answer, and therefore to the beginnings
of what we might describe as a philosophy
of the contemporary city written from
an architectural perspective. Today,
architecture still works the way it has for
millennia: as a fetish, an object with special
powers, the prime example of which
is a religious object, like the hundreds of
temples, churches, and other religious
monuments that constitute the foundation
of any given architectural canon, whether
Western or otherwise.
But what does it mean to understand the
relationship between architecture and
capital as, at least in part, a religious
one? It means, again, that this relationship
is not just a matter of patronage (the
developer as client) or of analogy (that,
say, the virtuality of contemporary architecture
somehow mimics the virtuality of
contemporary finance), though both of
these are factors. Nor does it simply
mean that Architecture (with a capital A),
costly though it is, is now considered
profitable, along the lines of a model
promising higher returns per square foot
that was actually invented in the 1980s in
Houston by the developer Gerald Hines
in collaboration with Philip Johnson.
Instead, it means that, as with Hafeez
Contractor’s SRA scheme, architecture
has become more than just a useful
object turned a commodity in the earlier,
Marxian sense.
Under the conditions of European industrialization,
Simmel and his interpreters,
including Frankfurt School critics like
Benjamin and Kracauer, took up the
increasing degrees of abstraction of the
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