KANTIAN FOUNDATION

The production of architecture in Modernity, understood as the process of translating ideas into material, is a conceptual framework whose origins are found in 18th century metaphysics. It is here that Kant re-centers the subject as the champion of being, equipped with an aesthetic ideology which empowers the self as fundamentally autonomous, yet capable of recognizing the beautiful and sublime in a way that unites him with the similarly free subjects that surround him as a “community of feeling subjects” (Eagleton 75). If on the one hand the rationalization and secularization of the Enlightenment despiritualizes the individual,  and the reactionary skepticism of empiricism slips into a solipsism which relativizes ontology into obscurity, then Kant strikes a profound note of reciprocity between subjectivity and objectivity which resounds through the 19th and 20th century, indeed into the present, as the foundational way of thinking. It is the ways in which Modernity appropriates the Kantian imaginary, the particularities of conflicts and crises between the subject and his capital--which drive the materializations of capitalism and the bourgeois which define our current built environment. The spaces between Modernity’s myriad dualities--culture and industry, subject and object, ideology and practice--can be engaged with the Kant’s aesthetic ideology to provide a mode entry into thinking critically and historically about design and architecture as the articulation of encounter between the subject and nature. It comes as no surprise that as Kant affirms these two mutually exclusive yet independent domains, the territorial imperative of the social exalts the role of technology’s capacity for dominion, specifically its ability to control the uncontrollable. From the extolled i-beam of Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram building, to Le Corbusier’s “machine for living,” Modern architecture’s rhetoric focuses overwhelmingly on the conflation of instruments of regulation and building. In challenging the success and productivity of this attitude, we can propose an alternative reading, found by example in the architecture of Adler and Sullivan--the originators of the Modern movement in America--as they integrate technology into turn of the century warehouses and attempt to control nature’s most entropic element: air. ‍

FREEZING VALUE‍

After an investment of $1,500,000 and a useful life of eleven years, their warehouses were demolished. The cost of progress has seldom been higher.

‍- Carl Condit, The Chicago School of Architecture

‍The Chicago Cold Storage Exchange, built on the Chicago river in 1891 for the emerging cold storage industry, was at the time of its construction “the world’s largest cold storage facility” (Osman 7). An innovation in the new and lucrative market of freezing perishable food items and, more to the point, their associated market value, the building was a triumph for the profiteers that sought to “support speculation through futures contracts analogous to those used for grain at the Board of Trade”  (Osman 4). Adler and Sullivan, appropriating the cooling technologies developed by the transport industry, synthesized systems of coiled expansion pipes and compressed ammonia, absorbing the entrails of industrialization into the a civic architecture of “texture and geometric purism” (Condit 135). Hailed as  “a company of wizards,” the architects managed to absorb technology completely and realize a building where  “no view revealed the mechanics buried in the basements, no gap disclosed the cooling apparatus that rose up through the wall cavities, and all the changes in supply and demand negotiated by the commission merchants at the Cold Storage Exchange were hidden deep inside the warehouse mass.” (Osman 7)

If we acknowledge the production and consumption of food as a process of negotiating energy between ourselves and our environment, and recognize the different ways in which these negotiations occur as a reflection of our values , then the cold storage facility typology can be seen to radically revise the nature and limits of our subjectivity insofar as it revolutionizes material culture. Adler and Sullivan’s temples of storage are an early, albeit romanticized instance of a phenomenon that is by now now globally ubiquitous typology whose main characteristic is “an interior environment defined by temperature, humidity, and technical dependability produced spaces in which commodities could retain their identity through time.”(Osman 3). By providing the apparatus to conceptualize the full spectrum of nature’s produce simply as signifiers of value in national trade networks, the architect of the cold storage facility destabilizes the limits between the subject and his environment. Prior to refrigeration, there existed a palpable reciprocity between harvesting and nourishment, a seasonal cycle attenuated by the time scales of growth and perishability. This close relationship between the consuming body and the affordances of its environment is synonymous with a subjectivity whose limits occur at the encounter of the labouring body and the natural environment  from which it extracts nutrition. The scale of this agrarian subjectivity stretches as the finiteness of perishability and its material culture are pushed towards the infinity of frozen storage and its isotropic networks of exchange value. The liberation from the time-consuming processes of direct subsistence from nature of course allows the subject to engage in other secondary and tertiary economies, thereby proffering the potential for becoming bourgeois, but in doing so dissolves the previously compact reciprocity of the subject and his environment, expanding it into a more abstract and entropic realm. Architecture in this case does not necessarily act as the actual material interface between the subject and his environment, but rather assimilates technology into the built-environment-at-large in a way that sublimates subjectivity into a more entropic and increasingly volatile realm of determined structures that are “so thoroughly formal and abstract in their operations that they seem to stand at an immense distance from the realm of sensuous immediacy, superbly autonomous of the chance combinations of matter that they throw up” (Eagleton 318).

This cleavage between the “superbly autonomous” individual and its surrounding  “chance combinations of matter” is the dark side of Kant’s imaginary, as it reveals itself incarnate in Modernity. The aesthetics of the beautiful and the sublime, despite their value as paths to free and sensuous (inter)subjectivity, are marginalized to art as a precious, yet very contained, subset of bourgeois ideology. Mirroring this conceptual space of ideology is the concretized space of bourgeois social practice, within which architecture comes reside. The failure of Adler and Sullivan's Exchange warehouses on the Chicago river can be seen as architecture’s losing battle, as it attempts to materialize its ideologies into a city which remains indifferent to its ambitions and takes instead the tumultuous eruptions of speculation, profit, and economy as its productive principle. “The cost of progress has seldom been higher,” is a statement which refers to the tragic incompatibility between Adler and Sullivan’s refined aesthetics and Chicago’s ruthless speculation market. The Kantian subject, philosophizing behind the proscenium of his subjective judgement, is unable to articulate the contours of his imagination in the objective world, left to toil in the metaphysical, frustrated in recognition that  “facts are one thing, and values another -- which is to say that there is a gap, at once troubling and essential, between bourgeois social practice and the ideology of that practice” (Eagleton 82). 

This gap, reified in Chicago as the demolition of the Cold Storage Exchange and justified as the necessary “cost of progress,” is a phenomenon of catastrophe implicit in the dynamism of capitalist behavior. Erupting always in unison with the triumphs of development, crisis comes to define Modernity as the ugly bourgeois reflection of Kant’s seemingly salvationary metaphysics, an immanent image of destruction in the rearview mirror of progress, an insistent reminder as pervasive and scaleless as the spectered ideology to which it is tethered.‍

PARTITION‍

In Bourke-White’s images of partition, one characteristic stands out: the juxtaposition of scales, the grand and the immediate, the national and the personal. Distraught faces are set against grand vistas, blank skies, and historical sites. It is as if the partition had opened up a chasm that had swallowed all that mediated between the personal and the national, bringing the former into grating adjacency with the latter without the intervening layers of the social, the common, the familial, and the familiar.‍

-Ijlal Muzaffar, “Boundary Games”

The partition of the British Indian Empire into the sovereign states of the Dominion of Pakistan and the Union of India was political exercise of division, a territorial delineation of Islam and Hinduism and the materialization of a boundary game which created more than 12 million refugees and left more than 1 million dead. Administering the Indian subcontinent since 1858 through structures of property ownership, class hierarchy, and division of labor, the implications of capitalist imperialism come into focus as the British Raj make their exit.  As bourgeois social practice resigns itself from the sociopolitical landscape that it so radically restructured, the collective subjectivities of the Islam and Hinduism reemerge, yet without any of the “intervening layers” of social practice to negotiate their return to solidarity. As the British Raj resigns with the inscription of a line in the sand, it leaves the mark of its propensity for division, materializing schisms previously rooted the economics of labor into the explicit realm of territorial geography. It is as if Raj could not escape without somehow scarring the landscape to signify the division implicit in the structure of bourgeois social practice.

Following the displaced refugee out of India and into Pakistan, it is in the housing colony of Korangi, near Karachi, Pakistan, that we can trace the reconstruction of a repressed identity. Here, the postwar planning strategies of Echocard and Doxiadis, the centralized military government of Ayub Kahn’s Pakistan, and the ambiguous identity of the refugee conflate into the ideology of the plan. Commissioned to deploy his “new culturally specific form of modernism” (Muzaffar 153), Ecochard brought to the table an experienced set of planning skills, polished and praised by the CIAM. The scheme he proposed, in collaboration with the centralized powers Ayub Kahn, was in equal parts a political and a design project that consist of phased “spatial frameworks that transform the inhabitants as they traverse the modernization process” (Muzaffar 157). Following the construction of an infrastructural framework, provisionary shelter is initially provided, followed by single-story houses clustered in low-density green, and finally multi-story slab housing. In incremental steps, plot coverage is reduced and floor area ratio increased, pre-figured for the ultimate goal of total modernization: “the scheme outlines a process of evolution whose final form is already vis.ible. The inhabitants are caught simply in the process of filling in the details (Muzaffar 157).” In a process of disassembly, reassembly, and densification within a fixed and limited boundary, the refugees are conceptualized as orphans, adopted and placed into a sort of collective incubator, a controlled mechanism for transformation into fully functioning Modern subjects, eventually capable themselves of extending this pattern of ideological reproduction and the proliferation of Modernity. This sort of identity hack, carried out through the introduction of increasingly modern typologies, reveals a novel relationship between subjectivity, design, and the objective world. In contrast to Adler and Sullivan’s brittle realizations, cast from the realm of their subjectivity and into the external domain of rude and practical economy, the various typologies specified by Ecochard’s Korangi project graft a new subjectivity onto the refugees: in the former architecture emerges out of a subjectivity, whereas in the latter a subjectivity emerges out of architecture. Echohard’s plan short circuits the refugees ability to reconstitute their own identity, depriving them of the chance to experience a phenomenal representation of their self. Instead, he wedges an architecture of the Other between the refugee and his environment, installing around the displaced subject a new aesthetic ideology to be entered, owned, and carried forward. It is ultimately the explicit nature of this wedging and the overt quality of the processes of transformation which prevent the realization of the plan, leaving the project open for a less visible, more nested strategy for developing the modern. 

In contrast to the prefigured totality outlined by Ecochard’s limits, Doxiadis specifies an alternative dynamic of development, rejecting the explicit nature of the earlier plan that relegated the responsibility of transformation to phased state interventions, Doxiadis suggests that the refugee be his own agent of change, presenting the displaced subject with a path to modernization built on inner growth rather than acquired manner. Urbanistically, the plan rejects any contained centripetal morphology and proposes a settlement that is “to grow linearly over time out of its present site, and direct the growth of the entire city of Karachi” (Muzaffar  162). Through decentralizing the geometry of the urban plan, and imparting it with an organizational principle of continuous, linear, and organic expansion, Doxiadis de-articulates the presence of regulation while maintaining the centralization of power in the social sense, emptying its location in the spatial. The systems of administration are synthesized into the urban structure as a sort of ubiquitous muteness, thus providing a milieu for the refugee to act as the agent of his own change:‍

What might appear as a contradiction--the dual focus on centralized authority and disseminated application of power--actually formed the very mode through which power was preserved. Such contradictions didn’t undo power but made its stable exercise possible. The dissemination of state authority is premised on the framing of the refugee as a subject in transition between tradition and modernity. Although seen to be dislocated in the modern national landscape, [he or] she is not simply claimed as a subject in need of rigid control. Rather, [he or] she is presented as subject who possesses the potential of modernization herself. The state simply serves to emancipate this potential. The more the state is able to serve the role from afar, the less it is susceptible to constrain the refugee’s capacity to constitute a seamless link between tradition and modernity (Muzaffar 165).‍

Like Ecochard, Doxiadis seeks to produce a new subject  with his plan, but unlike his predecessor who designated singular moment of centralized revision, and in doing so projected a ready-made modern subjectivity, Doxiadis extracts the new identity of of his subject by providing him with an environment of affordances, embedding transformative functions into the settlement’s socioeconomic structures while regulating morphology through a homogeneous spatial distribution of centralized yet discrete instruments of control. This model of transformation can be said to be be evolutionary insofar as new forms of life (i.e. new modern subjects) emerge as the pressures of their environments (i.e. the settlement structure) naturally select and bring forth certain characteristics and equip them with an adapted set capacities and power to produce: Like Darwin’s finch whose beak form adapts to extract the seeds of a new island environment, the refugee in Doxiadis’s Korangi emerges into the modern as an adapted subject. Through integrating spatially minor yet socioeconomically significant “seeds” into built environment, Doxiadis teases out behaviors which participate in and contribute to a collective subjectivity of his own design. For example, the main feature of the settlement’s modular housing unit is a courtyard, integrated into the typology as a familiar element appealing to the refugee subject, but shifted slightly from the middle of the house to the edge or back of the house. This sleight of hand planning strategy appropriates the courtyard--an element of tradition and culture used as a shared social space to bridge age and gender--and refigures it into the plan as a potential for expanding the size of the home or providing storage for entrepreneurship. If Ecochard’s architecture produces a new modern subjectivity by wedging itself as a phantasm in between the refugee and his objective reality, then Doxiadis’s architecture can be said to function, in terms of evolutionary biology, as a pressure within the environment, extracting out of the refugee’s genotype and modern phenotype as a subjectivity adapted and attenuated to the objective reality of the settlement.

Doxiadis conceptualization of the city as a biological organism, however, produces an unsettling dissonance: If the refugee of traditions evolves into the modern subject in response to the nested ideological pressures  of the city (e.g. private/public partnership, property ownership, courtyard as unit of expansion), and the city itself is a biological organism -- what pressures drive the evolution of the city organism? Where precisely is the location and scale of environment and organism, the ecology of evolutionary pressures and the biology adapting subjects? If each element in the chain of forms is an organism adapted to next higher order of scale which supersedes it (subject, city, city to region, region to territory) what ultimately resides as the uber-environment which drives the morphology of the chain of forms? For Doxiadis, it is the “global integration” of a “stable networked world.”(Muzaffar 169) Internationally coordinated bourgeois ideologies ( are the end to which Modernization is the means. This necessarily requires, as we see in Korangi, that the model take as its most fundamental units the capitalist tropes of property ownership and shared public/private investments. This perspective of Doxiadis model -- a totalizing, albeit quasi-heterogenous global economy -- is a violation in the highest order of what constitutes the Kantian imaginary. Kant and Doxiadis both seek to unify the particular and the universal, and assign a special role to the built environment in doing so: the former produces an ideology of the aesthetic -- beauty and the sublime as the saviors of the subject’s freedom--whereas the latter appropriates the logic of biological evolution as the basis of a networked global economy in the most objective sense. Strangely, Doxiadis’s positionïng of the subject as the molecular unit of an infinitely pliable global network economy coincides with Kant’s sense of sublimity, only Doxiadis does not seek the salvation that Kant discovers through confronting this infinity through subjective reasoning, but settles instead on a cybernetic subject-object reciprocity as the basis of his technocratic aesthetics, 

LEAP-FROG

Doxiadis’s ideology lends itself as a useful lens for understanding the relationship of of man and his environment as a co-evolution of intimate inter-connectedness. Looking at the history of hydrology in California as a metaphor for Modernity’s relationship to the environment, we see capitalism's tendency to “center the subject in the sphere of values, only to decentre it in the realm of things” as farmers are driven by the bourgeois ideologies of property ownership and profit, instrumentalizing technology at all costs to regulate the unpredictability of hydrology and moisten their crops (Eagleton 92). The resulting droughts that inevitably followed, as crises and consequence of the subjects’ pursuit of bourgeois ideology, were overcome not through reconciling with the ecology of California or establishing a reciprocity with the affordances therein, but rather pushed towards the upscaling in technology.  Design in this context emerges as the subjective prefigurations of aesthetic ideologies colliding with capital and economy as the phenomenal representations of the subject’s self-interests that exist in the objective realm as the negative specters of subjective bourgeois ideology. As culture and industry spiral along the the vector myth of progress, additional organizations and centralizations of resources are required to surmount nature’s instability, coagulating into various forms of democracy and incorporation. Formed in this leap-frog game of ecological catastrophe and technological control, we find ourselves in California amongst the endless crystallizations of hydraulic infrastructures of a continental scale, bearing witness to the escalating stakes in the subject’s encounter with nature and leaving our subjective Kantian imaginations to wonder, as we gaze across the sublime environment of crisis before us: what went wrong?‍

“Here we are able to see etched in sharpest detail the interplay between humans and nature and to track the social consequences it has produced--to discover the process by which, in the remaking of nature, we remake ourselves.” (Worster 515)