I must admit writing a blog is a daunting experience let alone giving a criticism on two essays by 2 writers not so well-know within the architectural academia (unless you are familiar with the Architects Journal writings and French leftist philosophy related to the May 1968 riots in Paris)on two topics that have become too frighteningly familiar by now: the global financial crisis(and its still rippling effects) and Zaha Hadid's works.
But how do you connect the dots that join the two, seemingly, I mean financial crisis versus Zaha Hadid or rather her personality and her works or Badiou versus Meades. Thecommon thread that binds the two writers that I find is atheism. The former is a communist thinker while the latter is a ardent champion of secularism. But then again, my knowledge is too shallow to debate on issues of theology or ideology. And here, we are more concerned with history and theory of architecture (the history bit is a deceit and the theory bit is not so theoretical!)Nevertheless,if both articles are put under closer examination, a common theme emerges concerning hyperreality and the real, the complexity and incomprehensibility of financial market and architectural parametricism and the separation of a system in finance and architecture (both of which are autonomous in its rules and manipulations) with regard to society at large.
Badiou described the recent global financial crisis as a disaster movie being played in front of us. The main actors are the major politicians from the advanced economies and their counterparts that ruled the bond markets, investment banks and the rating agencies. But this belies the true human drama, the real as he claimed - the truth of misery which one bears witness among the lives of everyday people. Much of this is of course reflected like a staple diet ad nauseum from the tabloid to serious journals and newspapers. So to frame it in more concrete terms, the financial crisis has destroyed a lot of businesses, crippled retirement savings and investments and the lives of the majority who are not involved in the crisis but were made to bail out the banks and the financial institutions as they were considered too big to fail.
Much of what Badiou had to say is informed by his leftist ideology shaped by thinkers like Guy Debord who was the founder of Situationist International. In Debord's theory, bureaucracy, mass media and capitalism and its myriad permutations are considered as 'spectacle', a kind of brainwashing whereby commodity and consumerism replaces authentic human relationship and independent thought. It is true in the sense, that what the financial sells and represents are vague fantasies or illusions dressed in fanciful terms like CDO's(collateralized debt obligations),CDS(credit default swaps) bond yields etc. Ordinary mortals like us would not be able to grasp such a complicated subject like this.
If we compare the complexity of financial markets, one begin to draw parallels with incomprehensibility of Zaha's works which many find quite stupendous, voluptuous or out-of-this-world, stuffs of which dreams are made. Even Zaha herself sometimes failed to articulate in lucid and plain English her thought processes with regards to her designs. I am not surprised that without experiencing her architecture, many layman would find her expressions a bunch of goobledygook. As Jonathan Glancey from the Guardian, reacted as a reaction to Roger Scrutons unfair claims against modernist architects like Zaha, "architecture can only truly be understood by experiencing its physicality, rather than whatever theory might underpin it."
To be fair, many famous architects in her stature, regardless of their sex, sometimes have not fully understood what they have designed or the spatial effects that the buildings produced. One can argue that this is similar to great artists who are often stumped for words to describe their masterpieces. But that does not mean that these wondrous spaces have always failed in their role to serve the end users, in terms of aesthetics to delight the senses or their usability. Also, Meades pointed out that much of what Zaha's designs stand for represents originality or artistic vision that has been tested and won in competitions and as a reaction against the blandness of the copy-cat style of post-modernism and New Urbanism. If we always copy history, where goes the future and how original can the present be?
Both modern financial and architectural sector are in the words of Jonathan Meades “smugly hermetic world”. We are familiar with the players but we cannot describe the games that they play. What do common people know about sub-prime loans, securitizations and parameticism and constructivism? The world of jargon is so beguiling it can fool all of us. Also both the architectural and financial worlds are 'spectacles' in the form of big businesses - expensive museums to a wealthy collector are bond and shares to a high-flying investor. Their complexities are only matched by the amounts or money and energy that are invested in the manufacturing and creation of their products.
A redeeming feature in the Meades' article is the fact that it has been given a rather rationalistic outlook despite Meades many attempts to be rather subjective and to paint in poetic terms what Zaha's works actually means. He seems to be very sympathetic to the cause of modern architects (Zaha I presume subscribes to most of modernist ethos) in the face of classically-biased post-modernist ideology of Prince of Wales and his acolytes. However, in very emotional terms, Badiou seems to think that the communist past is an answer to the financial woes that the world is facing. Although it is important to remove the greedy and corrupt alliances between politics and capitalism, relying to the good-old days of pure philosophical thinking as a way of finding solutions to human problems and destroying both democracy and financial institutions that are centuries old and have proved effective though flawed would not do us any good .
Perhaps Zaha has made concrete fantastic architecture and relished in giving them brush strokes of metaphors and fantastic innuendoes which seem vague. Like the complex world of the global economic system, in terms of bringing down to social denominator, we are at loss in terms of expressing them in real feelings and human terms.
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