Can Architecture Be Political?

Josh Landy
What can architecture tell us about the politics of its makers?

Ray Briggs
Does the shape of a prison express the opinions of the state?

Josh Landy
Can’t a flying buttress just be a flying buttress?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you via the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus, where Ray teaches philosophy and I direct the philosophy and literature initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today’s episode is generously sponsored by the Stanford Global Studies program. And we’re asking, Can architecture be political?

Josh Landy
Of course it can be political. It’s always political. Think about all those monuments to fallen soldiers or city hall buildings or public housing. Politics is everywhere.

Ray Briggs
Okay, it’s sometimes political. But isn’t it sometimes just, you know, pretty buildings?

Josh Landy
I don’t know—those pretty buildings didn’t just pop out of the ground. Somebody built them. And so they express that person’s values.

Ray Briggs
Yeah sure, they express values. But why do those values have to be political? Maybe it’s a Frank Lloyd Wright, and it’s communicating to us about the beauty of nature. What’s political about that?

Josh Landy
I’ll tell you what’s political about that. It’s that you got to own a Frank Lloyd Wright, which means that you’ve got a few bucks to throw around. And hey, maybe you want the passers by to admire you for living in your designer castle.

Ray Briggs
But that’s not what the architecture is saying. You’re just talking about the conditions that make it possible to buy a house like that in the first place.

Josh Landy
The politics isn’t just about buying the house. It’s about building the house. I mean, if there weren’t any rich people out there to throw money around, tThere wouldn’t be any Frank Lloyd Wrights.

Ray Briggs
What are you talking about? It’s easy to imagine a world we’re just everybody gets a nice house. You know nature lovers get garden houses, tech lovers get all the mod-cons, people with a fear of heights get bungalows. In that world, there’s nothing at all political about living in a Frank Lloyd Wright.

Josh Landy
Okay, sure in that lovely world, but hey Ray, come on, that’s not the world we’re living in. In our world, every architectural style makes a clear political statement.

Ray Briggs
Oh, yeah. Like what?

Josh Landy
Well thinkable that neoclassical architecture that imperialists love so much, impressive columns, massive ceilings, huge steps from which the Dear Leader could deliver a speech down to the serried masses of the hoi polloi. Very different from congressional debate chamber, right in a congressional debate chamber. Everyone’s literally on the same level. That’s democracy loud and clear.

Ray Briggs
Wait Josh—you just said columns are imperialist. But think about those lovely Ionic columns at the National Gallery in Washington DC. The designers of those columns chose them specifically to represent democratic values. They’re supposed to remind us of ancient Athens.

Josh Landy
Well, I didn’t say that political meanings always the same. It can change over time. But whether it’s imperialism or democracy, buildings always represent some political value.

Ray Briggs
By that logic, everything is political. Birds, bananas bottlecaps—is there nothing that isn’t making a statement in your worldview?

Josh Landy
Well, maybe bottlecaps, but not birds, buildings aren’t like birds. They’re designed by people. They involve tons of money changing hands, and they sit in the same place for decades or centuries. taking up space. A single building can affect the lives of millions.

Ray Briggs
Okay, that’s true of the city hall or a sports stadium. But what about a little cottage at the end of a cul de sac? That’s just a cute little place for someone to retire to and write the great American novel. It affects the lives of what maybe dozens.

Josh Landy
Okay, but what’s your little cute cottage made of> Maybe it’s full of lead paint and asbestos. Maybe it’s made from wood taken from an old growth forest. Maybe it’s super energy inefficient and contributing to climate change. You can’t escape re politics is going to find you even at the end of your cul de sac.

Ray Briggs
No, I just didn’t have to be like that you can build your cottage on a sustainable materials and you can build it well. And at that point, it’s just a great place to live. End of story. So no, you have not convinced me that architecture is always political.

Josh Landy
Well, maybe our guest will convince you. It’s Vladimir Kulic Professor of Architecture at Iowa State University,

Ray Briggs
And maybe our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Holly J. McDede, will help us think about what it really takes for architecture to express different political values—whether those values are love of authority or love of nature. She files this report.

Holly McDede
In recent years, Republicans in Congress have pushed to mandate a single style of architecture in Washington.

History Channel
High atop the Acropolis in Athens, Greece stands one of the most magnificent and most aesthetically pleasing structures in the world: The Parthenon

Holly McDede
Under a proposal called the “Beautifying Federal Civic Architecture Act,” architects who design federal buildings will be asked to use principles from Greek and Roman antiquity.

History Channel
The design the spacing of each stone is so perfect that it inspires just to look at. The proportions are so exact. For a large building, it is an amazing thing, and it lifts the spirit upward.

Holly McDede
In 2020, former President Donald Trump also drafted an executive order titled “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Aain. He’s not alone in his fondness for Greek and Roman architecture. The alt-right corners of the Internet are all about seeing Spartan culture as the hallmark of Western civilization.

Hadas Steiner
I think, you know, when you get nostalgic, you start to get political ideologies in disguise.

Holly McDede
Hadas Steiner is professor of architectural history and theory at SUNY Buffalo. She often asked her students whether they think architecture is political, and their responses tend to change with the times. But from her perspective…

Hadas Steiner
I think that architecture is inherently political, because it engages with social, political, and cultural constructs.

Holly McDede
That’s even true of deconstructivist architecture of the 1980s and 90s that promoted the absence of harmony or symmetry. But Steiner says architects can’t hide from politics.

Hadas Steiner
Like the old adage: to be apolitical is also to be political. And the deconstructionist movement was highly politicized in its desire for neutrality and to disassociate itself actually from more right wing politics in deconstruction and literature.

Holly McDede
Architecture that expresses a set of political values doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Architecture that tries not to destroy the planet is good. You can find all sorts of examples of sustainable design, which is about reducing harm to the environment. Buildings made out of mud rather than steel or concrete places like Basel, Switzerland, where green spaces are mandatory a new buildings with flat roofs, a nonprofit in Norfolk, Virginia deliberately built their headquarters on a floodplain that’s expected to be submerged in the coming decades because of rising tides. 13News Now, a local station, reported on that.

13News Now
Instead of trying to fight the floods, it’ll welcome them allowing for space to flow underneath. It’ll have features like a special stormwater roof that will collect and store rainwater to be reused in ways inside. It will be able to sustain higher winds. Also, it’s good for wildlife in the area, they’re incorporated into the plan.

Holly McDede
The nonprofit has agreed to demolish the building and leave once the water takes over. SUNY Buffalo’s Hadas Steiner says architects are paying attention to social movements and expanding the definition of architecture.

Hadas Steiner
You can open up that the way we use the environment, right architecture to the all the ways using the environment and the new technologies that enable those things. I think we can see optimism for the future.

Holly McDede
Back at the US Capitol, there’s that push to go back to ancient Greek architecture. But another kind of movement is also underway. Washington appears to be rolling out clean energy rules adopted almost two decades ago, President George W. Bush had passed a law that included a mandate that new federal buildings be free of fossil fuels by 2030. So there’s still time for the architects to get to work on that before the political tide turns again, and we ended up back in ancient Athens.

History Channel
How were the ancient Greeks able to build something that looks so perfect?

Holly McDede
For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. McDede.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that fascinating report, Holly, I’m Josh Landy, with me is my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs. Today we’re asking, Can architecture be political?

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Vladimir Kulic He’s professor of architecture in the College of Design at Iowa State University. And he’s editor of “Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948, to 1980,” which is based on an exhibition he helped curate at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Vladimir, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Vladimir Kulić
Thank you for having me.

Josh Landy
So Vladimir you started your career as an architect. But then he went on to become a historian of architecture. Now, of course, I’ve got nothing against the academy. But why did you choose to make that shift?

Vladimir Kulić
Well, I lived through a complete collapse of society, socialist Yugoslavia, as you may remember, was destroyed in a series of wars. In the 1990s, I was in my 20s. As a student and young architect, as you can imagine, that was not exactly the best time to practice architecture, there was more being destroyed and built. On the other hand, everything was changing in the way we related to our built environment, the regimes of ownership, the meanings of buildings, the occupation, everything. And that became something that drew me to study and in a way to explain my own past having grown up in a country that disappeared at the time.

Ray Briggs
So Vladimir, one of the things you’ve written about a lot in your career as a historian is socialist architecture. What exactly makes that kind of architecture socialist?

Vladimir Kulić
Well, I get this question a lot. I would say that the only thing that’s a distinguishing factor in relation to socialist architecture is the regime of ownership, that it does not belong to a larger capitalist environment of private ownership of land, where architecture is considered primarily as real estate, but as, especially in terms of housing as a right as a social good. Everything else is completely negotiable. architectural styles, forums, materials, technologies, I can always throw it to the counter example, if you want to get into an argument.

Ray Briggs
Oh, that’s so interesting. So So I think kind of naively, when I think about socialist architecture, I picture a particular style that’s got like lots of concrete and not many fancy decorations. Is that style not socialist?

Vladimir Kulić
It’s not uniquely socialist, you had the same style, which actually originated in postwar France and Britain, being applied all over the world, including in this country. And if you look at the former socialist world, there are all kinds of other styles in parallel or prior or after that the modernist avant garde of the early 1920s, was something quite different as it originated in the Soviet Union, only to be replaced by Stalinist socialist realism, this very kind of pompous, historicist, classical style, then we move towards this for the lack of better term brutalism of the 60s and the 70s. And then in the 1970s, and 80s, we see a complete shift towards something that, in some ways is very much akin to what was happening in this country. So no, there is not not a single style at all on the country.

Josh Landy
So this is something that interests me and confuses me a little bit, which is that on the one hand, there’s no particular style that goes along with socialism, and straight. So socialists can look like a lot of different things and a lot of, you know, a given architectural style. For example, those neoclassical buildings can go along with different ideologies. But on the other hand, it seems like some things some architectural features are really suited to certain movements, for example, that the huge staircase that the Dear Leader looks down from on to the adoring public that seems really well suited to a certain kind of authoritarianism. And as Churchill was saying about the Houses of Parliament, the structure of a debate chamber seems pretty well suited to democracy. Do you believe in that at all? Do you believe there are some architectural features that are very well suited to some ideologies?

Vladimir Kulić
Hmm, not really. I think they the way in which we use architecture can vary greatly. Yes, authoritarianism might prefer forms that highlight hierarchy. That highlight distance, on the other hand, just looked at the Capitol Hill, right, and the enormous stairs on Capitol Hill that are associated with a building that’s supposed to represent democracy. So as as I said, I will always find a counter in example, to go against your argument.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about the political nature of architecture with Latimer Coolidge from Iowa State University.

Ray Briggs
Do you ever wish that your city were designed to serve people better? When you go sightseeing, do you think about the politics of historic buildings? Can beautiful architecture embody a troubling ideology?

Josh Landy
Form, function, and fascism—along with your comments and questions, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Talking Heads
Don’t you worry about me.

Josh Landy
Could buildings make life easier for everyone? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re asking whether architecture can be political with Vladimir Kulic from Iowa State University.

Josh Landy
Today’s episode is generously sponsored by the Global Studies program at Stanford University. And you can join Vladimir and other panelists for a conversation about “Monuments to Nostalgia” on Friday, October 27, at 12 noon pacific, part of the Global Dialogues series. More information about this online event at the Global Studies website, sgs.stanford.edu.

Ray Briggs
So Vladimir, earlier Josh and I were discussing the politics of architecture. He said it’s always political, and I disagreed. So which one of us is right?

Vladimir Kulić
Well, it depends on the perspective, from the perspective of fish in the water, you can claim that your little house is your private thing that has not much to do with a broader political system. But to use that well known philosophical phrase, I would argue that architecture is always already political, the fact that you have a block of land to build a house is absolutely the product of a very particular political system, that there’s a certain system of labor that’s necessary to build the house adds to that, and so on and so forth. The trick with architecture that makes it very complicated to study is that it’s political in many fundamental ways. We usually think about the representational qualities of architecture, that architectural styles and forms, etc, are meant to send certain political messages at us, right, think about all of the institutions, monuments, and so on. But there are other really important ways in which architecture acts politically.

Ray Briggs
So what are some of those ways?

Vladimir Kulić
Well first, as I said, you need to build architecture on the land, right. And the way how we own in us in distributed land is is fundamentally political architecture structures, the way in which we live, right, it sort of organizes us, it sets boundaries, or opens up possibilities for a movement, which is also fundamentally political question, especially on the level of the city on the urban level. And then also, architecture is a deeply material practice that depends on certain regimes of labor, right, and is embedded, much more so than any kind of other field of cultural production in the world of economy. And of course, economy and politics are very, very closely related to each other. Right. So that’s another really important aspect.

Josh Landy
So I wonder if we could divide types of architecture into sort of three categories, where one is real overt, overtly political stuff, right? The kind of artists is basically only political and is clearly stating something like a monument for example, or, or a war memorial or pyramid or something like that. And then the second category, Arctic architecture was also political right, so that it’s not designed to be political, like a monument is, but as you were saying, a moment ago, look, you know, the way it’s built, where it’s built, what kinds of movement it allows, or doesn’t allow public housing, schools, prisons, and then a third category where maybe it’s not political, or it’s really lightly political, which would be like raise culdesac example from the beginning. You, you build your little cottage, at the end of a cul de sac, it’s not there as a monument for people to come and admire. So that seemed like a good division of things, you know, going from things that are really in your face. This is the ideology of the state. This is what we want to believe all the way down. unto Well, yeah, it matters that there’s private ownership of land. And it matters that there are people who are paid to build it, and so on. But it’s not as directly in your face political as the as the monuments.

Vladimir Kulić
Mm hmm. That’s a, I would say that’s a good attempt. But again, right, the counter examples are always the ones that spoil the story. Here’s a counter example, directly from my own experience. In my own research, this is something that I have I have written about the one thing that in terms of architecture production has attracted worldwide attention from my part of the world from Eastern Europe, but especially from the former Yugoslavia, or the monuments to World War Two, which also conflated the commemoration of socialist revolution, and so on, so forth. This is making the rounds has been making the rounds in the social media, in various photographic monographs, and so on for more than than a decade, well over a decade. And usually, the theoretical explanation, the interpretation attached to these images of these buildings is precisely your first category, that these are the ultimate political monuments that buttressed the regime, and that there are now empty forms that mean nothing, because that political regime has disappeared, maybe to some degree, that is true. On the other hand, these monuments or commemorate huge numbers of actual deceased people, and to a lot of people, these monuments are really important in their personal lives, because their family members, their friends, etc, would have been commemorated by them in these include even monuments to concentration camps. So these things are always very closely intertwined. It’s very, very difficult to separate them. So I don’t think that this sort of attempt to define degree of political engagement in architecture always works.

Ray Briggs
I really liked that point. And I’ve counterexample from another direction, which is I grew up in the suburbs, and the suburbs are kind of easily drivable to the city, but you can’t get public transportation, where I grew up very easily. There are all these like very similar houses that are designed for nuclear family is, and so people think of that as not political. But those both seem like really politically loaded choices that are kind of traced back to things like the invention of the automobile, and Henry Ford trying to sell a bunch of automobiles. So I would argue that the differences go the other way, too.

Vladimir Kulić
Absolutely. And, you know, if we push further in that direction, the emergence of American suburbia was, first of all enabled by this, as you mentioned, Henry Ford, by the American industry, pushing the state towards the creation of the highway system. And then the much darker sides to it is that the suburbia as they were originally conceived in the 1950s, late 40s, and the 50s, were also very exclusionary, and more specifically on the racial basis. So this is a fundamentally political aspect of that seemingly innocuous neutral type of architecture, which is anything but political.

Josh Landy
Okay, but come on. Earlier, you were saying that there’s no particular a one to one relationship between an architectural style and an ideology, or are you saying something a little bit different right now?

Vladimir Kulić
Not really, because when you look at suburbia in terms of style, you have all kinds of you have an entire world of of styles. If you just look at the Levittown, right, the prototype of American suburbia, the 11th company was selling houses in different styles, right? In a way it is sort of just the dressing on the very particular form of the inhabitation in the ownership and production, right where style is really something that you know, is is the flimsiest, the most ephemeral part of the building and of the larger architectural system.

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about architecture and politics with Vladimir Coolidge from Iowa State University. Vladimir, your your point about the kind of racism of a lot of suburban The design, at least in its origin, kind of raises another big question for me, which is this stuff like city planning and the placement of highways. Does that count as architecture too? Is that part of the stuff whose politics we’re arguing about right now?

Vladimir Kulić
That’s a great question. You know, you brought up at the beginning of our conversation, the issue of architectures, utopian potential, right. This is my now interpretation of what you said earlier, that architecture has the potential to change the world. And it was, for a long time, sort of a structuring motivation for a lot of what we now call modern architecture that emerged at the turn of the 20th century architecture is really a tool for creating a better world. The failure of that of those attempts, right, the utopian aspirations of architecture have been condemned for the past 50 years, however, is not necessarily just the product of of architecture, but also of its specific application in different political systems.

Josh Landy
Yeah, I mean, that makes sense to me. And I’m certainly convinced by you that, first of all, that some architecture that was designed with maybe good intentions, didn’t live up to those intentions, but also that much architecture wasn’t designed with good intentions, or perhaps wasn’t designed with enough thought at all. And some of the things I think about in this context are, for example, high rise buildings for for full of low income apartments like the Grenville tower in London as a case in my home country, I think about quite a lot where there was a big fire and 72 people died. And, you know, it seems like in a case like that, the quality of the architecture itself, the quality of the building materials, that’s sending a pretty strong signal about the values of the society of what you know, where people where the state is choosing to invest its resources, does that seem like a good example to use?

Vladimir Kulić
Absolutely. Grenfell tower is a really kind of notorious case. But the question is, who where do we assign the blame, right, because the Grenfell towers fire really need to look into details, right, the Grenfell tower fire was due to a very particular insulation that was chosen at the moment of renovating the tower and chosen because it’s cheaper, right, even though as it appeared later, it was known that it was not the best thing to use. Here’s another example that goes in line with this kind of widespread condemnation of modern architecture and of high rise towers. In relation to social housing, pre Tygo, perhaps the most notorious example of modernist housing complex, falling apart, right? Pre tiger in St. Louis, was a famous neighborhood, designed by Minoru Yamasaki, Japanese American architects, who would later go on to build the World Trade Center, the Twin Towers in in New York, a modernist housing built in order to resettle the segregated African American neighborhood that eventually pretty much socially collapsed, where it became unusable as architecture and so on. And in the early 1920s. The 1970s was touted as the destruction in 72. When the state eventually decided to destroy it was touted as the moment with modern architecture died. As you know, this myth survived for a very long time until finally, scholars and very importantly, filmmakers started looking into this question. And it turned out that the collapse of the pre Diago was really the product of the state withdrawing the funding for maintenance, which led to pipes bursting to elevators not working to the corridors being dark and so on. So again, it’s fundamentally political question where the failure is not about the architects part. It’s about how we relate to architecture in political terms.

Ray Briggs
So, if you have a working architect who’s trying to make design decisions about a building like this, and they think the people paying for the project or commissioning the project, have really questionable ideas. How much responsibility? Do they have to push back? And how much responsibility do they have to deliver what they’ve been told to deliver?

Vladimir Kulić
Well, one thing that I tell to my students is that architects cannot stop being citizens, and that they, their responsibility towards society does not stop when they acquire a commission for a building. In that sense, it can be very difficult to practice. And some architects will refuse to design projects that they consider unethical, others might be willing to do. So others might be pushed by economic pressures, economic pressures to do so which is, again, kind of a political pressure, as well. So it’s a tough situation, you know, architects for a very long time, because of these, this utopian impulse that emerged with modernism sort of thought that they can actually change the world. But I very often argue that they really need to get off of their high horse, because the responsibility is not only on them, the what they designed is going to be embedded in the broader political economic system and used in all kinds of predictable ways. That said, society also perhaps needs to start listening more to what the architects say. And conversely, stop blaming them for all of the failures of architecture, again, because it is often the product of broader pressures.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re asking, Can architecture be political, with Vladimir Coolidge from Iowa State University.

Ray Briggs
What would architecture look like in a truly egalitarian world? How should the authorities go about redesigning our landscape? Can architects change our political future?

Josh Landy
Building a future that’s good for everybody—plus commentary from Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Madness
Our house, that was where we used to sleep.

Josh Landy
If it’s your house, in the middle of your street, is there anything political about it? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Vladimir Kulic from Iowa State University, and we’re thinking about architecture and politics. Today’s episode is generously sponsored by the Stanford Global Studies program.

Josh Landy
So Vladimir, there’s a thing we’d like to do every so often on this show. And that’s make our guests the czar of something rather. So today, with the powers vested in us by KALW, Public Radio, we’re going to make use czar of architectural design. What’s the first thing you’re going to change as czar to help bring about a better future?

Vladimir Kulić
Ooh, that’s a tough question, because I’m not sure. What’s the Tsar Tsar’s powers all. You know, as I’ve been trying to sort of argue throughout this conversation, architecture is so deeply embedded in the broader cultural economic system, that to really fundamentally change the way we inhabit the world would require the changes that go far beyond just the question of architectural design. That said, you know, if we’re just consider the current political and economic system, there are some little changes that we could perhaps try to enforce starting with, perhaps not making architecture hostile, which is often the case, right? We often see this in public space, where there are little spikes on horizontal surfaces or hand arrests on benches to prevent people from sleeping on them. I would say we could sort of extrapolate this on a larger scale and make cities more permeable, less enclosed, less hostile to outsiders, and so on. On. And one thing that really would greatly change the situation in this country would be amping up significantly. The investment in public housing.

Ray Briggs
That all sounds really great, Vladimir. I’m wondering, do architects have the power to make these changes? And if not, who does have the power to make them?

Vladimir Kulić
Well, I would say that architects first of all need to embrace the fact that they are that they are at the same time citizens, and that they need to work on both fronts of designing better buildings, but also creating conditions for the design of better building. So in some ways, architects themselves need to get more politically engaged. Here’s a current example, something that every architecture schools, a school in the United States, and probably in most of the world, teachers now and is at the center, really, of our pedagogical efforts is the question of our relationship towards the environment, how we use the resources, how we create the buildings that are going to help us deal with climate change, and, and so on. This is something where the entire profession is putting a lot of efforts. On the other hand, the way in which this question is understood is often technolon, reduced to the technological dimension. And the question, as we know, is ultimately fundamentally political. So rather than architects just focusing on inventing new design techniques and technologies to make buildings more more sustainable, I would argue that they also really need to get more political about pushing the system towards creating better conditions for producing a more sustainable built environment.

Ray Briggs
So if I’m just one person trying to like fight with my employer, I’m probably not going to get very far. So if you’ve got one architect who says I refuse to design hostile benches, the employer might just fire you and hire somebody else to do it. So it seems like some kind of collective bargaining will be really helpful, or their efforts underway among architects to band together and kind of agree on on methods for making the world better?

Vladimir Kulić
Well, yes. And on multiple fronts, and in a way you suggested the form of unionizing. Right. This is something that in the past decade or so, has become a burden, one of the burning topics in the architectural profession where it has started dawning on architects that they are workers, too, we have seen this kind of fundamental shift over the past couple of centuries were from kind of the figure of the gentleman architect who is already independently wealthy and practices architecture as a as a hobby towards increasing professionalization. And the decreasing sort of social and cultural status of architects were now most of people are employed in large offices, and are really workers, laborers. And this sort of class consciousness is something that, in a way, is developing among architects. On the other hand, the architects in this country, at least do have an organization, the American Institute of Architects, that has been pushing for changes, both in terms of the status of the architectural profession for greater inclusivity of the profession, as well as a better relationship towards the environment, and in which in which we build these efforts. Sometimes falter, but there is kind of a growing sense within the profession, I would say that it needs to become more politically conscious and active.

Josh Landy
I’m in favor of all these measures, right? So using more environmentally responsible materials, making buildings open to more people more accessible, thinking about the impact on the community, all of these things, but I have to say, you know, part of my hopeful vision of the future includes there being a political architecture there being spaces for architecture, that isn’t really about ideology and and really is just there to be beautiful, you know, like to think about the autonomy of art and what and I say this not just you know, as a namby pamby professor of literature, but also also for political reasons, because you think about what Theodor Adorno the Frankfurt School philosopher said about art generally, he said, Look, it’s basically the one tiny island in the sea of capitalism, that’s kind of holding out against all of the purposefulness all of capitalism’s drive to make everything useful, right? And, and sort of economically advantageous, and it reminds us what freedom could be like so, so I, I’m with Adorno, in thinking, You know what, that’s one of the things we should protect, even for political reasons, protect a space for there being things that are beautiful, just for the sake of beauty. I think that’s, that’s one of the reasons why you see in war sometimes, you know, an aggressor, refusing to bomb certain buildings in another country, because they are architecturally important and beautiful. If they really were only about their political significance, you’d think they’d be the first thing that got bombed. So what do you think that? Should? Could we still make a little bit of a space for the DNO just for the aesthetic for the aesthetic and are thinking about architecture?

Vladimir Kulić
Oh, yes, absolutely. No doubt about about that. And you are absolutely right, to describe, you know, to bring up Adorno and this idea of the little oasis that show us the possibility of a different world. And that is that is where really the potential of good design lies under certain circumstances. On the other hand, you know, if we keep our eyes on these small prizes, right, the question is, do we let everything else be taken over by the instrumental rationality of capitalism, that that kind of minimizes these little these little oasis? And the question is also who has access to these little oasis of beauty that’s, that’s another important aspect. That’s fundamentally political, too.

Ray Briggs
So in, in the topic of who has access, we haven’t really talked about disability access for architecture yet. In the US, we have the Americans with Disabilities Act, kind of revolutionising how stuff gets built, you know, it’s not perfect, but it’s it’s, I think, affected things like curb cuts and elevators and hallway sizes. What do you think is the best direction forward for making sure like all kinds of bodies can access spaces?

Vladimir Kulić
Well, here’s another fundamentally political question to write. I’m not a specialist on this question. And I’m a bit anxious to get into this discussion, because I have very good friends, my very good friend, Bob, Vander Lieberman Lieberman in Oklahoma is, is the specialist on this topic, have really worked on this for a long time and have studied it very, very carefully. Ada, of course, is now one of the requirements in architecture, education, and in practice, as as well. But it can also be criticized for all kinds of ways in which it in itself excludes some bodies that were not that were not considered in it. So this is absolutely a developing discourse and the developing consideration in in the architectural profession, and I imagined that we will be seeing even more discussions in the coming years.

Josh Landy
I hope that’s true. And, of course, we’ve got so many questions in front of us that are these burning questions in relation to architecture, and politics, for example, Confederate monuments, what do we do with those names on buildings? Do you have any thoughts about the sort of the very burning questions of the day around issues like that?

Vladimir Kulić
Well, you know, these are fundamentally political questions that are for everyone, not just for me as an architectural historian, because they really concern our status as citizens. And these are the questions where these cracks emerge that really gives us the view into how architecture is political in the most obvious way. So I’m glad that you brought them up because I think in a way they are really making my point about how architecture is always political.

Josh Landy
Vladimir, this conversation has been both useful and beautiful, just like a good building. I want to thank you so much for joining us today.

Vladimir Kulić
Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.

Josh Landy
Our guests has been Vladimir Kulic, Professor of Architecture in the College of Design at Iowa State University, and editor of “Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948 to 1980,” an exhibition he also helped curate the Museum of Modern Art. So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
I’m thinking that when I walked down the street today, I’m just going to look at all the buildings and I’m going to think about how they got there and how they affect people’s lives and maybe how I might design them better if I were in charge of them.

Josh Landy
I agree had exactly the same thought thinking about this stuff that it’s it sort of opens up the built environment to us in a totally different and really important way. So wow, what a great guest. We’re gonna put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
And on Friday, October 27 at 12pm, you can join the Stanford Global Studies program for an online event in their Global Dialogues series, “Monuments to Nostalgia.” This event will feature today’s guest, Vladimir cooledge. More information at the Stanford Global Studies website, sgs.stanford.edu.

Josh Landy
Now, a monument to speed if ever there was one—it’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… The metaphor I’ve seen a lot: inside politics is like learning what goes into a hot dog.  It’s not pretty.  And yet we eat hot dogs, and argue about whether it’s okay to put ketchup on one.  And suddenly it’s not just politics, it’s politics with mustard, or get out.  Architecture, like other arts, is not immune from this. Especially if you get a building named after you when you retire from the Senate.  A building also represents the city where the building occurs, so it’s partisan in that sense.  The Empire State Building comes to mind.  I suppose it COULD be rebranded, and the Yankees COULD be sold to Atlanta.  The cold heart of prosperity is displayed, either way.  Wrigley Field still stands, but other stadiums come and go.  Both Raiders and A’s wanted a new stadium in Oakland, though the one they had seemed fine to me.  I mean Rome still has the same Coliseum, and it’s been a few thousand years.  What did the gladiators want, you know? Apropos, why don’t Oakland fans keep the stadium, and form their own pickup teams from the hood.  I mean really, do you want an Oakland team, or a bunch of fainthearted dopes just there for the money.  They all went to Vegas anyway.  A city full of secular cathedrals, none of which has a team.  Just slot machines.  And they don’t even take coins any more. Slot machines used to be little cathedrals where quarters live.  Not any more.  You’re playing with bitcoin, I think.  And if you win you’re paid in NFTs.  I think.  So casinos have an implicit political statement, about how capitalism works in the end times.  Soviet Russia and early 20th Century west were famous for ugly buildings made out of concrete, housing intellectuals, factories, bureaucrats, and political prisoners.  Later, America tried to go them one better by applying so-called liberal values to architecture and creating high rise forests of sub standard housing for poor people of color.  Of course some were grateful for a roof over their head, even though the elevator was broken, and they lived on the 12th floor.  Christians have traditionally built huge churches, many with flying buttresses, otherwise the weight of the ceiling would make the cathedral collapse.  Now we have megachurches, which are carved out Wal Marts wired for sound and video. I think. Soviets also replaced churches with buildings of their own design, so people could get married without the religion part, which just gets in the way of the new world we’re all building together, unless you’re in prison, which of course is a panopticon, to save on surveillance cameras.  Won’t catch on here.  We like our True Crime shows too much, which couldn’t even EXIST without massive surveillance footage.  The west is big on prisons too, but not so much on skyscrapers anymore.  We leave that to the Arabs, who think that Dubai might become a tourist destination. 110 degrees last week.  Bring the kids! The west focuses now on stadia.  As I said, every town worth its salt has one.  Until the earth catches fire, we’ll probably keep building stadia.  Big churches were, like, “Hey god look what we made?”  Stadia are more like, “Hey other cities, look what we made.  We have a volleyball franchise!”  Elsewhere, we downsize, we monetize our cars, our homes, we have buildings that are or look like shipping containers, where you can buy curated locally grown sandwiches from youth with sketchy beards.  Also, not to beat this dead horse, but if your town has a basketball franchise, what do you do when the team wants a new stadium in this downsize world, so they just move to Vegas, where stadia grow where grass does not.  Well the heat will do them in soon enough. In the meantime, what do you do with your white elephant?  The circus is dead.  Rock concerts dying.  Monster trucks, I guess.  Beauty pageants.  Prison camps.  Take a page from Pinochet.  Trump might be president again, and Trump Tower is kind of sad really.  No place for an auto da fe, and we might be heading back to those days.  In a secular kind of way, of course.  Whatever Trump doesn’t want to look at right now, put ‘em in the stadium.  Poke ‘em with sharp sticks.  Charge money.  Pay per view.  Sell souvenirs.  Every town will have one.  Jut a way to make money until the teams come crawling back.  Or maybe you could start a pickleball franchise.  Whatever the hell that is.  I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW San Francisco Bay Area and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2023.

Ray Briggs
Our executive producer is Ben Trefny. The senior producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura McGuire is our Director of Research.

Josh Landy
Thanks also Jamie Lee, Elizabeth Zhu, Emily Huang, Merle Kessler, and Angela Johnston.

Ray Briggs
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University, and from the partners at our online Community of Thinkers. Support for this episode comes from the Stanford Global Studies program

Josh Landy
And from the members of KALW local public radio San Francisco, where our program originates.

Ray Briggs
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

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