Page 67 - Studio International - September October 1975

forces of production, they constitute
harmless forms of private expression.
We shall therefore briefly consider the
ambiguous particularities of the
relationships between architecture and
politics."
16. These have been well-researched
in the past few years. The role of
architecture and planning has been
analysed in terms of a projection on the
ground of the images of social institutions,
as a faithful translation of the structures
of society into buildings or cities. Such
studies underlined the difficulty
architecture has in acting as a political
instrument. Recalling a nostalgic and
attenuated cry of the Russian 1920's
revolutionary 'social condensators,'
some advocated the use of space in terms
of a peaceful tool of social transformation,
as a means of changing the relation
between the individual and society by
generating a new life-style. The 'clubs'
and community buildings they proposed
not only required an existing
revolutionary society but also a blind
belief in an interpretation of behaviourism
according to which individual behaviour
could be influenced by the organization
of space. Aware that spatial organization
may temporarily modify individual or
group behaviour, but does not imply that
it will change the socio-economic
structure of a reactionary society,
architectural revolutionaries looked for
better grounds. Their attempts to find a
socially relevant, if not revolutionary role
for architecture, culminated in the years
following the May 1968 events, with
`guerilla' buildings, whose symbolic and
exemplary value lay in the seizure of
urban space and not in the design of what
was built. On the cultural front, plans
for a surrealistic destruction of
established value systems were devised by
Italian 'radical' designers : this
nihilistic prerequisite to social and
economic change was a desperate attempt
to use the architects' mode of
expression in order to denounce
institutional trends by translating them
into architectural terms, ironically
`verifying where the system was going' by
designing the cities of a desperate future.
Not surprisingly, it was the question of
the production system that finally led to
more complex and realistic proposals.
Aimed at redistributing the capitalistic
division of labour, they sought a new
understanding of the technicians' role
in building, in terms of a responsible
partnership directly involved in the
production cycle, thus shifting the
concept of architecture towards the
general organization of building
processes."

17. Yet it is the unreal (or
unrealistic) position of the artist or
architect that may be its very reality.
Except for the last attitude, most
political approaches were suffering from
the predictable isolation of schools of
architecture that tried to offer their
environmental knowledge to the
Revolution. Hegel's Architecture, the
`supplement,' did not seem to have the
right revolutionary edge. Or did it ? Does
architecture, in its long-established

141