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The Architecture of Alienation: The Political Economy of Professional Education

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Interestingly, while 70 years elapsed between the public promulgation of The Communist Manifesto in 1847 and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917, The National Science Foundation Act of 1950 was passed only five years after the transmittal of Science: The Endless Frontier to President Truman. While reviewer Stephen P. Dresch hesitates to speculate on the significance of the more rapid institutionalization of the scientistic ideology, his more daring colleague Kenneth R. Janson has noted (in personal communication with Dresch) that "on an appropriately logged scale of compound growth of innovation, these gestations are equivalent [,and] indeed one could parameterize the process with just these data." Thus, Dresch offers, Janson's Law of Accelerating Institutional Realization of Ideological Potential: "The period required for institutional embodiment of a newly enunciated ideology is contracting over time (from seventy years in 1847 and five years in 1945) at a compound annual rate of 2.657 percent." This law implies that the time required for institutionalization of a newly enunciated ideology is halved every 25 years and 270 days; thus, an ideology propounded in the year 2000 will achieve institutional embodiment in one year and fifty days, and institutional realization will occur only one day after enunciation of an ideology on the 312th day of the year 2223. One can only speculate (indeed, hope) that the period required for the dissolution of an institutionalized ideology may be contracting at a comparable rate.

In this "gathering of fugitives"<A HREF="#n1">[1]</A><A NAME="t1"></A> David Clarke offers what might be viewed, superficially, as an eclectic set of critiques focused primarily on architectural education and practice. However, a discerning layman perusing these essays will slowly (and, for most, disconcertingly) recognize that Clarke's critique is not disjoint and eclectic but consistent and coherent and in its essentials applies to virtually the full panoply of the contemporary "literate professions"<A HREF="#n2">[2]</A><A NAME="t2"></A> and their related programs of higher schooling.<A HREF="#n3">[3]</A><A NAME="t3"></A>

While I hardly qualify for (or aspire to) status as a disciple of J&uuml;rgen Habermas, I have long been impressed by Habermas's distinction, in <STRONG>Toward a Rational Society</STRONG>,<A HREF="#n4">[4]</A><A NAME="t4"></A> between "theory" and "practice." Historically, Habermas argues, "theory" was concerned with the "immutable essence of things," while the conduct of practical affairs was "pragmatically practiced according to traditional patterns of skill." The chasm between theory and practice was indeed bridged, but only in an indirect manner: Theory "obtain[ed] practical validity only by molding the manner of life of men engaged in theory." The capacity to comprehend (and engage in) theory, to engage in the search for the "immutable essence of things," provided an ethical orientation to practical action and thus represented a sociocultural qualification required of those whose practical actions would have consequences for others. Knowledge of theory provided the moral sanction for practical action, while practical action itself relied primarily on pragmatic, instrumental, technical qualifications which were quite unrelated to theory.

The contemporary conception of the relationship between theory and practice is quite different. Theoretical knowledge as the prerequisite for the ethical exercise of practical power has been superceded by theoretical knowledge itself as practical power. Habermas characterizes this as "the overhasty subordination of theoretical work to the ad hoc requisites of practice." A principal consequence of this "overhasty subordination" is that theoretical knowledge can have practical consequence without having moral force or relevance.<A HREF="#n5">[5]</A><A NAME="t5"></A> At the risk of oversimplification, this issue impresses me as at the heart of Clarke's critiques of professional education and practice.

Most succinctly, what Clarke describes is a profession, architecture, which has become progressively more insulated from and independent of its sociocultural context. Having, by whatever means, succeeded in severing any organic links to the broader culture, it is left to its own devices. If there exist imperatives which contemporary architecture cannot evade, these are entirely internal to the profession, i.e., there exist no external, non- or extraarchitectural laws, standards or constraints to which architectural imperatives must conform.

What is not frequently recognized, however, is that the internal imperatives made possible by the "emancipation" of a profession, in this case architecture, are fundamentally arbitrary. In the absence of an external referent, any imperative is possible, and the choice of one over another (e.g., of one "school" of architecture over another) is correspondingly arbitrary. Architectural education, in consequence, becomes simply a process of inculcation of (or indoctrination into) one set or another of these arbitrary, decontextualized imperatives.

Thus, Clarke argues, convincingly and disturbingly, that the imperatives of contemporary architecture are impervious even to physical laws: A "design" can exemplify the internal imperatives of a school of architecture even if it cannot be built, if it cannot stand even if built, and if it cannot be lived or worked in even if it is built and stands.

These issues are more directly addressed in Clarke's <STRONG>Arguments in Favor of Sharpshooting</STRONG>.<A HREF="#n6">[6]</A><A NAME="t6"></A> The first two pages of that volume set the tone with a devastating opening salvo in which Clarke focuses his sights on Robert Venturi's house for his mother ["designed [...] to contain global rather than local meaning (oversolved)[,] [...] [t]hat error [...] compounded by using very cheap materials and construction (undersolved), the enormity of it all supposedly made inoffensive by a patina of wit. But the problems don't cancel, being in different categories, and instead accumulate. Mrs. Venturi has been as silent as one would hope a mother would be on such an issue [...]] and on Mies van der Rohe's house "for a hapless doctor named Farnsworth in Plano, Illinois" ["much the same thing in reverse, without the wit, [...] it ended up in court."]. Clarke summarizes his indictments in captions to illustrations of these two quintessential examples of contemporary architecture: <BLOCKQUOTE> Architecture as angst: aged widow Vanna Venturi's 1962 house by her son. Cardboard zips and zaps reflect 20th century existential miasma, including tortured stairs, for a woman likely seeking peace, quiet, and no stairs at all.</BLOCKQUOTE> <BLOCKQUOTE> Architecture as scientific reduction: Mies van der Rohe's glassy box with no screens or air conditioning in the land of brutal winters and torrid summers and many, many mosquitos. Client Farnsworth sued.</BLOCKQUOTE>

In this volume, Clarke's first essay, "Investment vs. Consumption Spending in U.S. Architectural Education," provides more than adequate evidence of the fundamental ignorance of a practitioner whose education has not extended beyond that of the "professional architect"; his second essay, "French Revolutions: Architecture and the Government," suggests that the situation in France is, if possible, even worse.

Stated somewhat differently, Clarke's study of architecture comes to conclusions very similar to those which I am reaching with reference to contemporary science. Operationally and symbolically, for the United States the Second World War marked a major change in the social, political and governmental perception of fundamental science.<A HREF="#n7">[7]</A><A NAME="t7"></A> From a highly decentralized and invisible activity, of at best secondary and indirect interest and concern to government, fundamental science emerged as a major force in its own right, one which, it was argued, could (and should) be channeled by government to achieve specific social (i.e., governmental) objectives. Ideologically, this fundamental change in the perception of science was forcefully enunciated by Vannevar Bush in <STRONG>Science: The Endless Frontier</STRONG>,<A HREF="#n8">[8]</A><A NAME="t8"></A> which might be characterized as contemporary scientism's counterpart to <STRONG>The Communist Manifesto</STRONG><A HREF="#n9">[9]</A><A NAME="t9"></A> of Marx and Engels.<A HREF="#n10">[10]</A><A NAME="t10"></A>

Thus, in an unfinished essay<A HREF="#n11">[11]</A><A NAME="t11"></A> I argue that there is a direct parallel between the perceived roles of "<EM>communists</EM>," as articulated