In Union Square in New York City there stands a statue of George Washington on horseback. After the planes crashed into the World Trade Centre, sending the tallest buildings in New York tumbling, Union Square became something of a rallying ground for peace activists. Washington’s raised hand somehow ended up brandishing a peace flag, and the same emblem appeared on the flank of his horse. This and many other flourishes of popular architecture quickly vanished, as the city, and the country were swept up in marshal themes and a new push to war.
New York is not alone in hosting fine equestrian statues, where statesmen and generals pose on horseback, combining a wide field of vision, a capacity for action and the status that the horse has implied since antiquity. Many cities have them. Hence the proposal, which the Letterists borrowed from the Belgian surrealist journal Naked Lips, to gather all the fine horse-borne gentlemen of stone and bronze from around the world and assemble them in a single desert. Here they would form a single cavalry, perpetually charging against an invisible enemy, rather than charging against each other and obliging the rest of us to follow suit.
It says something about the ambitions of the Letterist International that this is one of the least impossible architectural projects they ever endorsed. Beginning with the Letterist International, the Situationists want to consciously and collectively create a new civilization. They want to bring together the arts of political economy, love and urban planning. Theirs is an adventure which began with the notion of bringing bricks and mortgages together with the design of ambiences and relationships They wanted to experiment with behavior, decoration, architecture, urbanism and communication to create situations.
In the twenty-first century certain districts of the overdeveloped world – downtown New York, for example – became a playground for the idle rich. Their predilictions call into being an architecture of play – but of play entirely conceived within the constraints of leisure. What can be built are parodies of the architecture dreamt of by the Letterist International. “Décor determines gesture: we will build passionate houses.” They did not mean 24 hour nightclubs in the Meatpacking District, with bottle service. “Architecture must become thrilling. We cannot take more restrained building ventures into consideration.” That sets a reasonably high standard.
Contemporary architecture got there ahead of them. The sleek glass apartment buildings that sprouted all over New York were not the austere concrete boxes for warehousing the masses that the Situationists so reviled. These are glass boxes for retailing to bankers, fund managers and the spuriously rich. These are people with millions to spare but an unacknowledged anxiety that they must be hip, stylish, cool. They want confirmation that they have that intangible it-ness that money can’t buy. They want to be unique, and if they can’t be unique they want at least to have something unique. Architecture can help, here. Unlike almost anything else you can buy, a building has to be somewhere particular. It has an address. The cool building, on the cool street, in the cool neighborhood, in the cool city.
And so, there are people to sell it to them.∗ What they are selling is, oddly, a kind of high modernism – big glass windows, boxy walls, smooth and detail-free appliances – but with a layer of expensive finish stuck on top: marble counters, Wittgenstein door knobs. Its an architecture for a new kind of homelessness. It’s not as if the old kind has gone away. There are still people lost their jobs, whose families broke up, who got addicted to something, who have mental illness, a disability, who got expensively sick, or who just plain couldn’t see the point anymore. But now there’s a new kind of homelessness as well. An expensive, well dressed homelessness, comfortable and with good hair. And yet which just doesn’t belong anywhere.∗ For the old kind of homelessness, the latest thinking is to just give people homes. For the new kind, it is the home itself which produces the homelessness.
“Architecture really does exist, like Coca-Cola: though coated with ideology, it is a real production, falsely satisfying a falsified need.” That there is a materiality to what is false, and something false in the materiality I experience is a crucial component of Situationist thought, although later theorists will have the temerity to claim it as an original thought.
“The demands that the modern era allowed to be formulated have yet to be synthesized, and that synthesis can only be situated at the level of a complete way of life.” The charm of the Lettrists is that everything points, at one and the same time, to impossible ambitions, and to canny insights that could be instantly recuperated. “The next revolution in sensibility can no longer be conceived of as a novel expression of known facts, but rather as the conscious construction of new emotional states.” They are “…searching to create new frames of behavior free of banality as well as of all the old taboos.” Their ambition is to “to build beyond the decomposition in which we, like everyone else, are completely involved.” It will become, increasingly, a negative project. “We have invented the architecture and the urbanism that cannot be realized without the revolution of everyday life…” It expands from the creation of the text or the artwork to the level of the ambiance, to architectural form. Finally to the transformation of all of space and time. The Situationist project does not begin in totality, but rather discovers it in everyday built form. “The collective task we have set ourselves is the creation of a new cultural theater of operations.”
“Even if during a transitional period we temporarily accept a rigid division between work zones and residence zones, we must at least envisage a third sphere: that if life itself…” To propose an impossible architecture, which can function as a critique. To the extent that fragments of this program succeed, and find their way into built form, they fail. They fail as critique. They lose their negative edge and become mere facts. Critique exists in fragments of experience of existing built form and concepts of impossible built form – nowhere in between.