The project of modernity was, in part, a project of liberation: from tradition, from the load-bearing wall, from fixed plans and from inherited forms of construction. Architecture sought greater freedom to organise space according to the new social and technological possibilities of the twentieth century, shaped by—and, in part, demanded by—the post war socialist project.
Yet the freedom gained from these constraints produced
another kind of constraint. As architecture became detached from the social
institutions, civic structures and state that had helped generate architectural
types, generic buildings became easier to transfer from use value to exchange
value. Homes, workplaces and civic buildings could increasingly be abstracted
from their particular uses and reduced to as transactional “assets”. What began
as a liberation from construction gradually became a constraint of finance.
The story that follows is therefore not simply one of
technological progress or architectural style. It is a story of how one form of
freedom created the conditions for another system of constraint: from
construction to flexibility, from flexibility to genericity, and ultimately
from genericity to financial viability.
THE GIFT OF PROMETHEUS // FROM CONSTRUCTION TO GENERIC:
The terrace, courtyard house, townhouse, mansion block and
mews were not simply formal inventions. They emerged from combinations of
structure, climate, land, culture and patterns of inhabitation. The type was
knowledge accumulated into form. Before the modern structural frame,
construction and architectural type were deeply intertwined. The masonry wall
determined the depth of the building, the size of openings, the relationship
between rooms and the way buildings met the street. Construction generated
architecture.
Dom-Ino disrupted this relationship. By separating structure
from enclosure, it made the plan potentially free: walls could move, façades
could become independent and interiors could be reorganised without
fundamentally altering the structural system. What had once been a specific
architectural type could increasingly become a generic container.
But this liberation did not begin with Dom-Ino. The elevator
had already begun to transform the economics of the city. In 1853, Elisha
Graves Otis introduced the safety brake that made passenger elevators viable;
in 1857, the first permanent Otis passenger elevator was installed at the E.V.
Haughwout Building in New York. The elevator did more than liberate the city
from height. It transformed height into value. By making upper floors
accessible, it allowed a fixed plot of land to support an expanding quantity of
rentable or saleable space. Chicago and New York became laboratories for this
new vertical economy, as technological advances and rapidly rising land values
encouraged increasingly tall buildings. The elevator therefore removed not
only a physical ceiling but an economic one. Once height could be converted
into value, the limit was no longer the plot but how high capital could build.
The structural frame extended this transformation from the
scale of the city to that of the building. If the elevator made vertical
accumulation possible, the frame made the resulting volume increasingly
flexible: structure could be separated from enclosure, plans reorganised and
façades detached from the logic of load-bearing construction. The subsequent
development of reinforced concrete, steel frames, mechanical systems and
curtain walls intensified this separation. Structural grids could be repeated,
services concentrated and envelopes applied independently. From Berlin to
Beijing, London to Riyadh, buildings could increasingly be produced through
variations of the same underlying proposition: grid, core, slab and envelope.
This is where Rem Koolhaas's Generic City becomes
significant. Writing in the 1990s, Koolhaas recognised that globalisation was
producing cities increasingly detached from the burdens of history, identity
and particularity. The Generic City was not simply an accusation of
architectural sameness; it was an attempt to understand a new urban condition
in which genericity itself became an advantage.
THE TROJAN HORSE // FROM GENERIC TO AN ASSET
As cities became increasingly integrated into global systems
of finance, property became more than a physical necessity. It became a
principal vehicle through which capital could be stored, invested and
reproduced. Reinier de Graaf has written extensively about this transformation,
particularly the position of real estate within contemporary capitalism. The
building acquires a second identity: not simply as a place, but as an asset.
A home, office or hotel can simultaneously be land value, an
income stream, collateral, an investment product or a development opportunity.
Once architecture enters this financial system, its characteristics are
evaluated through a different vocabulary: floor area, efficiency, yield, rental
value, construction cost, finance, risk and residual land value.
The present day shell-and-core building is the perfect
expression of this condition. Its value lies in its neutrality: a structural
frame, core, envelope and basic services can be delivered without determining
precisely who will occupy it or how it will ultimately be configured. That
neutrality makes the building transferable. It can be sold, leased, fitted out,
subdivided, reconfigured or converted. The more standardised the floorplate,
the easier it becomes to price, compare and finance.
The separation of structure from architecture produced the
flexible building. Globalisation extended this logic into the generic city. Financialization
discovered the value of buildings that could be transferred, adapted and
reproduced with relatively little friction. The free plan became the
flexible floorplate; the generic building became the financial asset. The
building becomes something that can be modelled financially before it is built.
And this changes architectural selection.
THE CURSE OF MIDAS // FROM ASSET TO VIABILITY
No one needs to outlaws the terrace, abolish the courtyard
house or declare the mansion block obsolete. Land value, construction cost,
finance, yield and risk quietly decide what gets built. A type that requires
more circulation, a less efficient floorplate or more complex construction
becomes harder to finance—and eventually harder to build. Nothing is
prohibited. It is simply made unviable. This is the market’s quiet “coercion”:
it does not tell architecture what it cannot be. It determines what can afford
to exist.
Nothing is prohibited. It is simply priced out of
existence. This may be one of the most powerful force shaping the
contemporary city because it operates without appearing to make an
architectural decision.
HOUSE OF CARDS // WHAT DO WE LOSE?
Consider the terrace. Its value does not lie simply in the
repetition of individual houses, but in the relationship between party walls,
front doors, gardens, street frontage and density. Courtyard housing, mews,
perimeter blocks and mansion blocks similarly derive much of their value from
relationships between building, street and collective space. These forms are
not necessarily inefficient. They are simply efficient according to a
different logic.
That distinction matters because the development model can
privilege the measurable efficiency of the generic floorplate over qualities
whose value is distributed across the urban whole. When that happens
repeatedly, types can disappear without ever being declared obsolete. The
financial model has therefore become an architectural editor. It does not
merely determine whether something can be built; it increasingly influences what
kind of building is worth building.
Can a courtyard compete with the tower? Can a terrace
achieve contemporary densities? Can the perimeter block, mansion block or mews
be made compatible with contemporary construction and finance? More
fundamentally, can the value of a street, a threshold, a garden or a particular
relationship between public and private space be recognised when it does not
translate neatly into a development appraisal?
Perhaps this is the deeper tragedy of the contemporary city.
The problem is no longer simply that certain forms are unfashionable or
inefficient. The economic system increasingly determines the limits of
architectural possibility and imagination before architecture even begins.
SISYPHUS // END OF HISTORY
The trajectory from Dom-Ino to the Generic City and finally
to the financially optimised building is therefore not simply a history of
technology or style. It is a history of increasing abstraction: first
architecture from structure, then the city from place, and finally the building
from architecture itself.
Here Manfredo Tafuri’s (Architecture and Utopia: Design
and Capitalist Development 1976) darker reading of modernity becomes
relevant. For Tafuri, architecture’s heroic claim to transform society
increasingly collided with the realities of ever assimilating Capitalist
development. Its critical ambitions were absorbed into the very system it
sought to challenge. What appeared as architectural freedom could become
another instrument of production.
The load-bearing wall constrained architecture; the modern
frame liberated it. Globalisation made genericity desirable. Capital made it
profitable. And perhaps, in Tafuri’s terms, this is where architecture
confronts its own “end of history”: not the disappearance of architecture, but
the exhaustion of its claim to produce radically different possibilities
outside the logic of the market and in service of society.
Architecture
escaped the constraints of construction only to encounter the constraints of
capital.
