Today the main influence on urban form is derived from the internationalization of investment, production and consumption beyond the traditional control of the state and nations and subject to competition and profit. This is facilitated by the new informational infrastructure. This new model created the conditions for a re-structuring of the old industrial model, which was for various reasons in crisis.
It provided a transformation of localities into flows and channels, in effect production and consumption without any localized form. Put it in another way, localized form that is not geographically and culturally determined. So for example, the components in this computer can be made anywhere according to economic expediency. Where they are made has no bearing on the meaning or the use of the commodity itself.
What shapes locale is the improvement of communities' efficiency in maximizing profit. In cases where this is not possible the community disintegrates. This disintegration can be seen where the flow of information is obstructed or non-existent.
Demolition is the unthought in architecture. This phase of the building process is often left to contractors whose role is merely to clean up.
Demolition is an active force of life in the city. Active because it is the structural gap in architecture without which architecture cannot have social and symbolic significance. In this sense demolition's significance is as a benign agent of renewal, which is how architects think of it.
A kind of masking is taking place here. Demolition, in the banality of the real, masks the deliberately deferred process of building and the possibility of renewal. In this process, demolition becomes socially and symbolically significant, significant for power because it sustains it, and significant for the social space because it deprives it of the potential for community. Power and the social space are synonymous. The real of social space is not demolition but building infinitely postponed. In this process demolition is reconfigured as the mask of power.
Architecture is a political and conflictive activity. The act of building is not to acknowledge or accentuate the potentiality of any site, but to sustain the symbiotic connection between mapped out ideologies and concrete structures. This has led to the abandonment of the site, nothing can escape this dynamic. Architecture negotiates and maps out this terrain, which is the social space’s immersion in banality in order to preserve itself.
Every thing has its Just So story; it is a law of evolutionary explanations that the chain of relative fitness’ that lead to a specialisation is related in a narrative form. So whence the origin of architecture?
Long ago when our simian ancestors roamed the savannahs of Africa there was no mode of shelter building, the open planes providing all that was necessary. Instead, there was hind-leg-extra-height, which increased the survey-able terrain and freed up the hands, some thing that would become very useful. And then there was the group to protect the individual. But there was no node onto which evolutionary pressures could act on to produce the adaptation ‘architecture’. There must always be something for evolution to act upon, whether a hand to become a wing, or a tooth to become a tusk. For our forefathers, there was nothing; life was fine without any desire to build like the beaver, the bird, or the spider.
Then came the wolf. We can only guess at the nature of our first co-operations, but we know that they became successful enough to bring our species closely together. We know the consequences for the wolf, from Great Dane to Chihuahua the close relationship has transformed the physical appearance and character of the beast. But what of the other half of the symbiotic relationship? The wolf had one thing to add to the mix: the wolves’ den. Here our joined paths start down their common road. 100,000 years of co dependence, if DNA evidence is correct, has brought us the poodle, and the skyscraper.
When Romulus and Remus were abandoned to the river Tiber, they were saved by a she-wolf who suckled them till the shepherd Faustulus discovered them. There is irony in the allegiance of wolf and shepherd in the saving of the founders of Rome. This dualism erupts in the quarrelling of the two brothers ending in the murder of Remus, and that the first inhabitants of this cradle of culture were criminals and slaves. Somehow the wolf is buried deep in the soul of architecture, and no matter how hard it tries to purify itself it remains there at its animal core.
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