response to germano celant's essay "radical architecture"
TRANSCRIPT
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Krissy Lunz
Response Paper 3
ARTH 285
5/17/10
“Radical Architecture” by Germano Celant explains not what radical architecture and
design are, but instead explains why they came about and their importance. Before the 1960s,
much of design and architecture was superficial, industrial, and served middle-class
consumerism. Production and consumption during this time was good, however, these two
processes had completely eclipsed the ideological and philosophical aspects of design and
architecture. Architecture had destroyed the landscape. Architects and designers became
controlled by the very things they had created; they were alienated from their own architecture
and objects. Celant, in this article, believes the inactiveness and complacency of architecture and
design can be changed by shifting the focus from building or object to the idea. Only in this way
is it possible to escape the alienating effect of production and the commercialization of ideas.
Celant talks about different mediums of architecture and design, and also about what can
be architecture. The patrons can be mediums. This is accomplished two ways: either by the
patrons altering the architecture through ideas when they aid in creating to architecture or design,
or by the patrons being used by the designers as a part of the architecture. It is the former that is
better, because the people have choices and are not alienated by their surroundings. Production
is also a medium, and is the most alienating medium, because it distorts the ideological and
behavioral messages of the program.
Architects can also be architecture. They can become engulfed in their medium or they
can establish themselves through conceptualization and as a result will not fall under the control
of what they create. It is the latter direction that architecture was beginning to move towards
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during this time. Imagination of the architect is a medium, just as much as the bricks of a
building are a medium. Imagination liberates people from the constraints of other mediums,
therefore liberating them from becoming controlled by their end product; the material does not
exist on a physical level, and therefore cannot alienate people, or will estrange people less. This,
according to Celant, is “architecture in its purest state,” something that Modernist architecture
strived to achieve but failed to do.
Celant is sure to mention that this new shift does not mean that concrete or physical
schemes cannot be formed. This is allowed if the intentions and ideas behind the finished
product will not be lead astray by consumerism or by capitalist, production-oriented society.
Many of Celant’s arguments have much in common with Eco’s Open Work, and probably
draw from his ideas of alienation from urban life. Eco says that humans create objects that
control us, and Celant says exactly this in the essay. Many of the megastructures created during
this time period have the idea of openness, that the user can change elements of the architecture
around in order to suit whoever lives or uses that space. A good example of this is Peter Cook’s
Plug in City (Fig 1), where inhabitants have cells that they put wherever they wanted to be. In
this structure the inhabitants would not be liberated, rather, they would become a medium for the
architecture. The idea of this was enjoyment, not necessarily freedom from the architecture like
Celant proposed.
Any work under the Italian groups Archizoom or Superstudio would be an example of
what Celant was talking about as far as architecture focusing on the ideological, conceptual
aspect and not on the physical end product. For instance, Archizoom’s No Stop City (Fig 2).
The endless city is climate controlled, and all the objects within the structure are predesigned by
Archizoom. Popular culture, consumption, and industry here are taken to the extreme. They
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hoped that this limitlessness would be liberating because individuals can create their own
housing and living situations without being constrained by already-prescribed architecture. (630)
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Fig 1: Plug-in City, Peter Cook,
1964
Fig 2: No-Stop
City, Archizoom
Associati, 1969