Architecture vs Planning 2022
The practice of architecture is inevitably inscribed into power structures and the architect’s agency is consequently circumscribed by these structures. Architects invariably experience a certain sense of claustrophobia working within these frames, and habitually try to revolt in one way or another, to expand their own agency.
The keyword, from the architect’s point of view, is agency; the ability to transform the world through one’s action, to make a difference. For the architect whose practice seems overly restricted by various frames, agency is achieved through doing architecture differently. Architectural agency, from such a perspective, requires sidestepping, outsmarting, rubbing up against, or blatantly transgressing the frameworks of architectural production. As the position of the architect is subordinate to those power structures defining the frames, the architect adopts specific tactics (navigating situation by situation) rather than strategies (working towards an overall plan). Tactics are, as Michel de Certeau reminds us, the tool of the powerless while power works through strategies. Yet, it is fairly obvious that such an easy duality is ill-suited to architects and architectural practice. In one way or another, the practice of architecture is in the crushing majority of cases precisely an exercise of power, a reterritorialization, which places the architect in a position that must be described as awkward when s/he turns to tactics; architects have, after all, been instrumental in the exercise and literal entrenchment of the powers that be (rather than their usurping) since the Renaissance, or longer.
The last decades has seen what could arguably be called a “tactical turn” in architecture (and art). This tactical turn appeared after modernism. In architecture, culminating in a turn from theory to intelligence (Michael Speaks). This is on a fundamental level a shift from strategic knowledge to tactical knowledge. In this “turn”, the ambition to change the world has also become tactical. This is exemplified in the celebration of the temporary, and the popular use of words such as “guerilla”, “zwischen”, “alternative”, “norm-breaking” or similar for tactical interventions. Equipped with tactics rather than strategies, architects view themselves as underdogs and set out to claw out agency within, against or outside the frames of an overall oppressive system, a system, we may add, that different architects define differently.
This is not unproblematic as architects acquire whatever agency they have through the very frames they seek to oppose, from the resources of their clients. The exception here is architects who act partially or entirely outside existing power structures through exploiting tactical opportunities, sometimes with a critical agenda.
One key book outlining the rules of the tactical turn is Spatial Agency, published in 2011. Herein, the authors set up a new role for the tactical architect as a spatial agent, i.e., an agile agent with the agency to effect change through acting consciously through, outside, in-between or against the frames of restrictions presented by the system. The authors’ agent is aware of the systems within which s/he has to act, but sets out to use these to his/her advantage, working toward an implicit vision of a better world and thus effecting long term transformation of society. The book contains a catalogue of practices that have acted tactically in relation to power, including a broad range of practices in architecture and beyond. Since the book’s focus is on agency, it does not necessarily differentiate between the different frames in relation to which architects orient themselves in order to acquire it. Is there, I am inclined to ask, not a distinction between those who try to circumvent the rules of capitalism and those who set out to circumvent the rules of, say, the planning system? Is not resistance dependent on what in fact is resisted? And, in extension, is the planning system a suitable adversary for the architect carving out a highly personal space of action?
I know more than one planner who would emphatically disagree with such a bundling together of the planning system with other systems circumscribing architectural agency. At times, I am sure, the systems appear indistinguishable, but most planners I know consider themselves civil servants with an explicit democratic mandate, as opposed to architects who act on the behalf of a specific interest or a vague community of interested parties. Architecture taking aim at planning is ultimately a critique of spatial politics of the state. The legitimization of such a critique is the conviction that the state fails in looking after the interests of certain societal groups, and that protest through spatial action is the best way to address this injustice.
In the light of the tactical turn, I think it is worthwhile sketching out the field of architects who are orienting their practice in opposition to the planning department. From their perspective, the planning department is usually understood as a retrograde bureaucratic behemoth serving the interests of the rich and powerful through imposing inhumane and incomprehensible rules on those who actually try to improve the city (citizens and especially architects). This is a perspective we recognize from the 1960s, from the SI, and not least from Non-plan, the proposition formulated by Cedric Price, Reyner Banham, Paul Barker & Peter Hall in 1969. Their proposition entailed that certain towns in the UK should simply abandon planning, and the hypothesis was that these would become vibrant centres of human life. Planning, as a discipline, has of course changed radically since those days. Just as the architectural discipline turned on the modernists who came before them, so did planners who also started reading Jane Jacobs, Jan Gehl, Kevin Lynch, Bill Hillier and all the others. This change appears to at least partially have gone unnoticed by the architects orienting themselves against planners with the righteousness as if they were taking aim at Robert Moses when planners are considering themselves tacticians and agents rather than an executive part of the larger structure of control.
On a sidenote: this leaves us with interesting questions: If (even) planners, who, by older definitions, would be the very embodiment of structure, consider themselves as tactical agents – who is in fact in charge of structure? Is the dirty secret of our neoliberal world order that there is no ownership of a system in relation to which everybody is a tactician, favouring intelligence over theory thus proscribing any change to the system?
We are left with two incompatible images of the planner: the patriarchal bureaucrat regulating all life out of the urban environment, serving the interest of the few while ignoring the plight of others and the image of the well-meaning civil servant who through their own tactics (rather than strategies) manage to function as a kind of doorstop against the worst excesses of financialized capital cheered on by politicians. A quick look into the matter suggests that the latter image seems more accurate, however, the former, of course, makes a far more compelling enemy to revolt against, and hence it is the patriarch bureaucrat who is presented as the target of critical architect talking back to planners (see here, including the comments section). This critique seems misguided. At the same time, planners have their blank spots as we all do, and they do regularly fail to take the interests of less privileged groups into account, which, of course, is a universal malaise rather than a defining characteristic of planners.
With this dual image of the planner, we return to architecture, specifically architecture as a critique of planning, that is: architectural form presented as explicit critical commentary on the institution of planning. I am specifically interested in architectural projects that do not so much sidestep planning, but rather engage with it in various ways. Again, this is a tactic reminiscent of art practices engaging with a critique of the institutions of art from within those very same institutions. There is a lineage back to Marcel Duchamp, to the conceptual art of the 1960s as well as contemporary artists like Superflex and exhibitions like “Don’t Embarrass the Bureau” (Lunds konsthall, 2014). Critique from the inside, so to speak, would ostensibly be well suited for architects who invariably find themselves inside the system of planning. Yet, it has to be said, that this type of practice is better suited to art-projects of a temporary nature within a specific institution. The physical extent of planning is the city, and the changes architects make are of a long-term nature. To make a comment on a specific institutional context at one moment does then seem to me to be rather short-sighted.
Another problem with adopting this artistic practice into architecture is that architecture is also a business venture, and distinguishing critical commentary from sheer opportunism is difficult. One example: are we to think of SHoP’s 2003 The Porter House, where the architect and client acquired the air-rights of a neighbouring building, and the architects then leaned their own building over the next one as commentary on the peculiarities of the planning system or as opportunism? Perhaps this is a distinction that is better left unexplored. Another project teetering on the same line is MVRDV’s WoZoCo in Amsterdam, also from 2003. The project, a slab with cantilevered boxes containing extra units, allegedly derived its form from the incompatibility between the planners’ maximum footprint and height and the density required by the client. Again, we do not necessarily need to categorize it as either critique or opportunism, but tentatively view the two as connected from a tactical perspective.
The tactical turn contains other projects that are more art-oriented and thus frame their work in a critical rhetoric rather than the solutionism characterizing MVRDV and SHoP. One example is French Lacaton Vassal, whose practice habitually takes aim at various institutions. One example is Place Léon Aucoc, a project from 1996 where the architects question the brief requiring “embellishment” and the architects ended up proposing to do nothing, to leave the square as it is. This can be read as a critique of the drive to upgrade and fix that which is not broken that arguably is a tendency today, but also of the architectural discipline’s impetus to always propose a building, whatever the problem. Another example is their social housing project for Mulhouse, Cité manifeste from 2005. Here they bring their principle Plus (to give clients more than they ask for) to bear on social housing. As a result, they end up questioning the formulae used by the state to calculate space for its tenants. How much (or how little) space is reasonable to provide inhabitants?
Yet, the capital of this genre of critical architecture is, I would argue, Berlin. Not only does the city pride itself on its contemporary art scene, Berlin’s relationship between architects and planners since reunification has its own highly controversial history. 1991–2006, the Berlin Senate planning director (Berlin is both a state with a senate and a city) was Hans Stimmann, who continued on Josef Kleihues’ concept of “critical reconstruction” that served as the framework for the IBA 87 and developed it in a more conservative direction. Stimmann imposed a series of aesthetically motivated restrictions on new buildings, such as stone façades, vertical and regular fenestration, and that architects respect the block structure of the city. This led to an infected battle throughout the 1990s, which has gone down in history as Der berliner Architekturstreit, documented in a book with the same name from 2010 written by Florian Hertweck. As a result, Berlin architects sometimes view planners with a certain resentment, and use architecture to comment on the inconsistencies of planning, and at times elect to design their architecture as a statement to planners. As the Berlin planning regulations were primarily concerned with the building exterior rather than interior, these are visible in the façades.
Two Berlin examples (I am sure there are plenty more, but these are the first two I came to think of) are Arno Brandlhuber’s 51*55 (which never ended up being constructed), and Barkow Leibinger’s “Tour Total” for the French oil giant, completed in 2012. Both are examples of architects being both tactical in relation to and providing built commentary of planning regulations. Brandlhuber’s 51*55 was a proposed conversion of a 1960s housing block sitting between two listed buildings and opposite the Neue Nationalgalerie by Mies van der Rohe. The architects feared they would have to conform to the façades of the 19th century buildings on either side, so they produced a fake issue of the magazine Bauwelt presenting a fake Mies van der Rohe building, which was Brandlhuber’s proposed building, draped with Mies’ Friedrichstraße tower’s façade, which thus became the proposed façade, as a (critical) comment aimed at those who invariably argue in favour of conservation and adaptation to historical context. Historical context, then, the architects tell us, does not automatically imply Gründerzeit, but may well mean adaptation to the Neue Nationalgalerie.
Barkow Leibinger’s tactic in dealing with the planning department is different, but also uses the façade to make a comment, or to outwit planning. With Berlin building regulations so focused on the façade – remember: stone and regular standing fenestration) – Barkow Leibinger saw a loophole. Since the façade is presented in a drawing, while it is experienced as a three-dimensional object, there was wiggle-room in this discrepancy. In this sense, Tour Total both adheres to (in letter) and transgresses (in effect) the planning regulations. In a façade drawing, the towers façades do consist of stone and are subdivided into regular standing fenestration. However, by extruding the concrete grid in a three-dimensional pattern, the architects achieve a façade that seems almost dynamic depending on how the light falls on it. While this is not explicitly critical of the planning regulations – I have not come across any statement to that effect from the architects – the façade can be read as a comment on the “flatness” of the regulations themselves, and how to find agency by approaching a façade as a three-dimensional object.
I am convinced that there are thousands of projects that work through tactics in similar ways, making small, sometimes rude comments to the planners. It is a curious form of critique, but it is a far more concrete and local form of critical architecture. Rather than addressing capitalism, power relations, architecture’s deep grammar, Nervenleben, or something else, it is a practice that does make architecture local rather than global, one that, perhaps inadvertently, posits the planners as co-creators of the of architecture in a relational mode. Whether this interplay between architects and planners produce architecture beyond the quick rhetorical points scored by the architects is a more difficult question. After all – architecture is built to stand for a long time, to be experienced in “distraction” as per Walter Benjamin, and those able to read the wittiness of the architectural project would presumably be relatively few to start with, and fewer still over time.