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Interview with Reinhold MartinLee Stickells & Charles Rice

Available online: 08 Dec 2010

To cite this article: Lee Stickells & Charles Rice (2010): Interview with Reinhold Martin, Architectural TheoryReview, 15:3, 324-331

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LEE STICKELLSAND CHARLESRICE

INTERVIEW WITH REINHOLD MARTIN:Utopia’s Ghost1

One of the recurring considerations in this

special issue is that of historicity: How does

historical specificity bear on architectural criti-

cism? How is the historian a critic and the critic

a historian? How does the anthologization of

history, theory and criticism produce occlu-

sions and exclusions? Apropos to these

concerns, in his most recent book, Utopia’s

Ghost, Reinhold Martin argues that: ‘‘Simply to

historicize postmodernism seems inadequate

and, in many ways, premature’’.2 Through a

close reading of buildings, projects and texts

from the 1970s and 1980s, the complex

intersections of temporality, ideology and

history at work in the production of post-

modern architecture are subjected to critical

analysis. With an eye to the implications for

writing architectural history and criticism,

Charles Rice (CR) and Lee Stickells (LS)

discussed the book with Reinhold Martin (RM).

CR: Temporality is an important theme in

Utopia’s Ghost. In the subtitle, Architecture and

Postmodernism, Again, there is almost an implicit

apology that you are reexamining a period

which is both very recent in historical terms,

yet something which architecture seems to

have ‘‘put behind it’’ quite quickly. Postmodern-

ism in architecture is thus both distant but yet

to be dealt with historically. How do you

understand the ‘‘timeliness’’ of your book in this

context?

RM: That’s the thing about ghosts; they show

up most unexpectedly. But what appears

untimely in one context might appear quite

timely in another. To the extent that Utopia’s

Ghost is addressed to audiences both ‘‘inside’’

and ‘‘outside’’ architecture, I do hope that its

untimeliness will appear timely when seen

from other perspectives. The fact that many of

the chapters began as responses to invitations

to consider a specific subject reflects shared

though perhaps latent concerns, which I tried

to articulate and draw out in the book as

a whole. Its major hypothesis regarding

ISSN 1326-4826 print/ISSN 1755-0475 onlineª 2010 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/13264826.2010.526089

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architecture’s role in the active ‘‘unthinking’’ of

utopian thought, however, is a direct response

to a vast blind spot around which historical

experience is organized in the present. The

systematic, almost technical training of the

imagination away from such thought was and

remains a travesty that is surely the most

enduring and deleterious legacy of postmo-

dernism. It has nothing to do with style,

historical citation, etc. It has to do with

education, culture, and politics. Much of the

impetus for writing the book came from

sitting on design juries and teaching studios in

which it was clear, time and again, that

students were simply unable to think struc-

tural change in the present. ‘‘Architecture or

revolution?’’ had ceased to be a question.

Not universally, but predominantly.

On the other hand, the book also responds to

the visible (and desirable) tendency, particularly

among younger scholars, to historicize archi-

tectural postmodernism. The period is cur-

rently being reevaluated and reassessed in a

variety of ways, from PhD dissertations to

museum exhibitions, and I very much look

forward to the new insights to be gained. I only

ask that we pause for a moment and

reconsider the terms under which such

historicizing is performed. The difficulty of

terminology (I have simply accepted the

currency of the term ‘‘postmodernism’’ despite

its contested status) is compounded by the

problem of periodization. In short, although

the modernist ‘‘crisis’’ was deemed by many to

have been resolved under architectural post-

modernism, what we actually see is its

persistence in altered form. It is clear, there-

fore, that architecture does not effectively

become ‘‘postmodern’’ until after 1989; that

is, after it leaves architectural postmodernism

behind, in favor of a new, pseudo-modernism

that finally represses the traumas of the Berlin

Wall, urban renewal, Vietnam, and so on in

favor of techno-triumphalism and the ‘‘global’’

hegemony of the markets. The result is a new

set of architectural languages untroubled by

‘‘history’’, that consolidate the symbolic victory

of Reagan–Thatcherism rather than reject its

apparent anachronism. In other words, the

‘‘digital’’ turn, which has finally succeeded in

neutralizing modern architecture’s historical

imagination.

LS: The issues you describe involve various

mobilizations of architectural history and,

indeed, movement abounds within Utopia’s

Ghost: from the circulation of materials and

capital through multinational networks to the

architectural promenades of Le Corbusier ;

from feedback loops of development to cycles

and oscillations of history; from flows of

information to the recursive reflections of

mirror-glassed facades. Movement (or circula-

tion) seems strongly placed to form another

thematic, alongside those that already structure

the book?

RM: We have been told many times that today

we no longer occupy space, that artifact of the

late nineteenth century; instead, we occupy

flows. I largely agree with this, especially as it

pertains to spatiotemporal globalization. But

you don’t need to visit what’s left of the

nineteenth century arcades to recall that

capitalist circulation was a defining force for

modernism. We can therefore ask: What’s the

difference between the thematic of circulation

as it is developed, for example, by Walter

Benjamin in Paris, or by Fredric Jameson in the

Los Angeles Westin Bonaventure Hotel? One

answer would be the persistent need, each

time one refers to Jameson’s brilliant reading,

to attach the name ‘‘Westin’’ to the space in

question. This corporatization of spacetime

was not (yet) an issue for Benjamin. Likewise

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for the circulation of photographs of the hotel,

which are controlled by an overlapping set of

corporate interests, from Westin to Portman.

In effect, as an allegory of circulation, Benjamin’s

‘‘one way street’’ has become a suburban cul-de-

sac, both on the ground and in the image-

sphere. The circle, the ur-geometry of formally

utopian plans as well of ambivalent, Foucauldian

heterotopias like the panopticon or the panor-

ama (a key, mediating component of Benjamin’s

arcades), has come to describe a kind of

permanent orbit—a literalization of the term

‘‘globalization’’—that resembles nothing more

than a treadmill, going nowhere. Read allegori-

cally, this treadmill signals not the permanent

unfolding of catastrophe helplessly witnessed by

Benjamin’s angel of history, but the much-

proclaimed ‘‘end’’ of history and the normal-

ization of catastrophe (permanent war, perma-

nent emergency, etc.), which is to be found

copiously documented in today’s architecture

periodicals. Probably its most complete monu-

ment is Norman Foster’s pseudo-utopian enclave

of Masdar, in Abu Dhabi, suburb to the world.

The example of Buckminster Fuller’s ‘‘spaceship

Earth’’ is instructive in this regard. Not normally

associated with postmodern practice, Fuller’s

figure diagrams both circulation-as-orbit (in a

sort of total system) and as potential escape, as

in the many interstellar escapes (or exoduses,

or colonial voyages) that form a staple of the

science fiction literature that Jameson analyzes

so adroitly for its channeling of Utopia. Fuller

has become newly relevant as an avatar of

‘‘sustainable design’’, but what his work and

thought actually reveal is the paradigmatic

character of risk management in organizing

and rationalizing real and imagined relation-

ships between past, present, and future.

CR: The period you examine in the book is the

moment when architecture becomes reflexive

in terms of its historical and theoretical

relationship to its own discipline, and to wider

cultural practices within which it is situated.

What were some of the difficulties in reflecting

historically and theoretically on this period,

when reflexivity itself becomes the historical

and theoretical issue?

RM: Well, in a sense I’m arguing that, despite

appearances, architectural discourse under

postmodernism was insufficiently reflexive, if

by that we understand self-critical. Yes, the turn

toward structuralist and poststructuralist theo-

ry in the 1970s yielded a certain self-conscious-

ness regarding the categories we use. But by-

and-large, what passes for architectural theory

in postmodernism, especially the texts that

were taken up by critics like Jameson, Andreas

Huyssen, or Jean-Francois Lyotard, is more

symptomatic than reflexive. This goes especially

for the ‘‘gentle’’ or ‘‘retroactive’’ manifestos—

Complexity and Contradiction, Learning from Las

Vegas, Delirious New York, etc.—and the writings

of critics like Charles Jencks. For the most part,

these texts do not represent architecture’s

contribution to critical postmodern thought.

They are symptoms, evidence.

Evidence of what? Of the material, discursive

reorganization of the field, of the city, and of

the bourgeois imagination such that Las Vegas

or Rockefeller Center appear as models rather

than as problems. Though I only imply this in

passing in the book, Rockefeller Center, like the

Westin Bonaventure (its distant descendent), is

interesting in this regard. In many ways it is a

model of the type of genuinely cosmopolitan

urbanity that accompanies capitalist develop-

ment, as Koolhaas suggests. But in order to

become this, the regime signaled by the name

‘‘Rockefeller’’ (think: Standard Oil) needs to be

naturalized, taken for granted. This is not just a

matter of the client or patron; it is built into the

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architecture, as I try to show in the case of

Philip Johnson’s skyscrapers. This is where

Tafuri remains crucial. Though he does so in

different terms, he rejects this normalization or

naturalization, and instead offers a genealogy of

the skyscraper that reveals its ambivalent status

as a centerpiece of what today we would call

the neoliberal consensus regarding the city.

Intellectually and in practice, it is our respon-

sibility to challenge this consensus.

LS: Questions of architecture’s power seem

important here. You write ‘‘At the threshold

of postmodernity, aesthetic experience—in-

cluding meaning, affect, and the representa-

tional codes they entail—is coterminal with

the sphere of production and with the

organization of everyday life’’.3 This proposi-

tion undermines conventional readings of

postmodern architecture as a retreat into

games with aesthetic languages. Is it fair to

suggest that such a reinterpretation is critical

to your reclaiming for architectural thought ‘‘a

decisive role in the analysis, interpretation

and critique of power’’?4

RM: Yes. The further inside you go, the further

outside you get. Following Foucault, I under-

stand the critique of power as, in part, a

topological problem. But rather than empha-

size the interplay of utopias and heterotopias,

which I think in any case remains vague in

Foucault, I explore power’s paradoxical or

counterintuitive topologies. Despite Tafuri, there

is no ‘‘retreat’’ in postmodernism; there is a

rewriting of the rules of the game. It only looks

like a retreat when seen from the point of view

of the avant-gardes, that is, from the point of

view of militant, authorial intent. Coincident

with the rise of postindustrial or immaterial

labor more generally, the labor of the architect is

now, strictly speaking and in a material, infra-

structural sense, primarily aesthetic. This means

that Tafuri’s ‘‘boudoir’’, in which architecture

becomes a parlor game, is really a laboratory, a

sort of live/work homeoffice, in which intellec-

tual labor comes to resemble nothing more

than ‘‘serious fun’’, as they say in Silicon Valley. All

you have to do is visit one of Venturi and Scott

Brown’s, playful, posthuman laboratory buildings

and you’ll see what I mean. It’s science fiction,

pure and simple.

The most obvious contemporary manifesta-

tion of this is the figure of the signature

architect. Is Zaha Hadid a function of the

parlor (at the Architectural Association) or

the boardroom (in Abu Dhabi)? In what sense

does it make sense to hold these spaces

apart? This doesn’t mean that they collapse

into one another. They are, in a sense, related

in the way that the two ‘‘ends’’ or ‘‘openings’’

of a Klein bottle are related, through a sort of

inside–out extrusion. This is not to reduce the

agency or authorial intent of an architect like

Hadid to a mere symptom of systemic,

claustrophobic enclosure presented as the

very diagram of openness and porosity. It is to

try to reposition authorship, or gamesman-

ship, on a new playing field that more

accurately corresponds with reality.

What would it mean to understand signature

architecture, and the signature architect, as a

product of the laboratory? In fact, this

laboratory would probably resemble nothing

more than the sort of lab that Venturi and

Scott Brown have become so adept at

designing, where architecture’s genetic ‘‘signa-

tures’’ are carefully codified and subject to

controlled mutation, in an otherwise ‘‘humane’’,

altogether corporate environment, with or-

ganic coffee on every floor.

CR: In some ways, the disciplinary and

academic context of Utopia’s Ghost is the

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recent debate around critical and post-critical

or projective practice, about which you have

written for Harvard Design Magazine.5 To what

extent was the writing of Utopia’s Ghost

motivated by this debate? Are the American

schools still factionalized in those terms?

RM: I cannot speak for American architecture

schools in general, but like most American

political discourse, the term ‘‘post-critical’’ is

an embarrassment. I therefore apologize for

my role in inadvertently helping to keep it in

circulation, even with critical intent. The article

to which you are referring is really about

neoimperialism after 9/11, and the role of

‘‘culture’’ therein. Its first version was written

for an interdisciplinary newsletter published

by the Center (now Institute) for Compara-

tive Literature and Society at Columbia

University, of which I am a longstanding

member. I felt that I needed to demonstrate

that, despite the manifestly reactionary role

that architecture was playing in the interna-

tional public sphere in the morbid and deadly

response to 9/11, this was, as they say, a

‘‘teachable moment’’. The article was, in that

sense, an apology to critical theory for what

supposedly vanguardist architecture had come

to represent, and an explanation of how this

had come to be. Because, you will recall that

in the fertile, cross-disciplinary debates around

postmodernism, architecture (and architectur-

al ‘‘theory’’) had come to occupy a privileged

position, as both Exhibit A and as a playful

form of cultural therapy with occasional

gestures toward theoretically informed criti-

cality.

But of course, in the context of the intensely

parochial ‘‘debate’’ going on in architectural

circles, the article (‘‘Critical of What?’’) could be

seen as more polemical. And it is. I still have to

say that any group of architects who could

publicly describe their not-so-distantly neo-

Gothic proposal for Ground Zero as a

‘‘cathedral’’ (again, with Johnson in the back-

ground), complete with ‘‘uplifting’’ aesthetic

effects, had to be living on another planet.

Because, unlike the present vitriol directed

against the construction of an Islamic cultural

center nearby (ongoing as we speak),6 their

authorial intent was not to contribute to the

Holy War. Or at least, I hope and assume that

it wasn’t. But, like the now discarded ‘‘winner’’

of the grand prize in the made-for-reality-TV

‘‘competition’’, they did anyway. We need to

know how this was and remains possible. That

is one way that historical and theoretical

analysis can help. All of the architects in the

Ground Zero sweepstakes were either prota-

gonists of architectural postmodernism, or its

progeny.

LS: The advocating of a ‘‘post-critical’’ archi-

tecture in the last decade often framed

writing (conflated with theory) as an appen-

dage to the project—as less than ‘‘real’’. In

contrast, writing, and the discursive, seem key

to the kinds of architectural thinking carried

out within Utopia’s Ghost. Could the call within

the book ‘‘to think the thought called Utopia

again’’ be seen, amongst other things, to

involve a reimagining of the material effects of

architectural writing?7

RM: Needless to say, writing is a form of

practice. It takes time, costs money, etc. But we

do not need to apologize for doing theory.

Instead, we need more vigorously than ever to

argue for its necessity, partly because theory,

too, has been professionalized, normalized.

Every architectural history conference I have

attended in the past decade has been

peppered with theoretical terminology. Which

is fantastic, a real victory of which we should be

proud. But it is also cause for concern, for with

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the obligatory footnote comes complacency.

So I don’t want to justify the work of theory

solely on the grounds of its productivity, its

usefulness, for example, in framing the more

‘‘legitimate’’ and ‘‘productive’’ (and equally

necessary) work of historical reconstruction.

Rather, I want to insist that we must continue

to invent new and troubling ways to theorize

architecture precisely because they get in the

way. They disturb, perhaps redirect, and maybe

even transform historical tendencies. Because

that’s what postmodernism is; it is a discourse

that coincides with a historical tendency. My

‘‘post-critical’’ colleagues will complain that this

is just more of the same old stubbornness that

gets in the way of actually getting anything

done. On the contrary, it is historically

necessary to keep the possibility of structural

transformation alive, or at least undead (as

they say of ghosts), rather than accede to the

deadly, phantasmagoric ‘‘realism’’ of an unac-

ceptable present.

But already this terminology is a little

obsolete, a little anachronistic, which is a

mark of its true postmodernity. For it has

become increasingly clear that we are enter-

ing a new, more ‘‘humane’’ phase. In recogni-

tion, for example, of the paradigm of risk

management that I argue underlies architec-

tural postmodernism, we might ask of today’s

well-meaning advocates of ‘‘sustainability’’:

What, exactly, is being sustained? And, to

counter the pseudo-utopianism of sustainable

design, we might call for the return of a

genuinely utopian consciousness capable of

thinking relationships between ecology and

economy, such that the demise of the welfare

state (another hallmark of postmodernism) is

not celebrated as a victory of the ‘‘natural’’

forces of capital, but understood as an

ominous warning that demands a critical,

anti-nostalgic response from all sectors. Until

now, architecture has led in the celebrations,

churning out innumerable, sophisticated, ico-

nic, crypto-religious monuments to the gods

of capital. Now would be a good time to

secularize the architectural imagination,

and learn to think of counterforms, counter-

narratives, counterstructures, and counteror-

ganizations to those that have colonized the

planet.

LS: The responsibility you identify, for challen-

ging that ‘‘naturalization’’ of a neo-liberal

consensus and the related blindspot within

architectural education, brings me directly back

to Fredric Jameson and his Archaeologies of the

Future. Jameson argued that we must retain a

properly impractical utopian impulse (as he put

it, an ‘‘anti-anti-utopianism’’), in order to keep

clear a space for oppositional thinking.8 The

formal ‘‘flaw’’ of utopian thought instead

becomes a rhetorical strength, in that it ‘‘forces

us precisely to concentrate on the break itself:

a meditation on the impossible, on the

unrealizable in its own right’’.9 The approach

you advocate appears to position critical

historical writing as very important to counter-

ing the ‘‘almost technical training of the

imagination away from such thought’’. It seems

a wonderful irony that such writing practices

might be critical to an artistic, or architectural,

utopian impulse?

RM: Yes, I would say so. Though I would not

necessarily distinguish between the two

‘‘guilds’’ here—that of history/theory and that

of design (or ‘‘practice’’)—since in a sense

the training occurs at a deeper level. In

respect to Jameson’s thesis, as well as to any

other account that treats postmodernism/

postmodernity as a structural transformation

in the organization of knowledge, including

the knowledge of possible futures (or of their

‘‘impossibility’’), we would have to consider

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both writing and designing as specific

forms of thought, each with their own

protocols, that are equally subject to

the naturalization of otherwise historical

developments.

Still, to the extent that history/theory writing

in architecture is a degree or so removed

from the exigencies of professional practice, it

may offer more space to maneuver. Here, I

think that the professional expectation that

theory provides a script for design ought to

be vigorously challenged. Instead, we might

look more closely at concrete institutional

practices, such as the teaching of history in

architecture schools and other curricular

matters. The old debate over ‘‘operative’’

versus ‘‘non-operative’’ forms of scholarship is

a distraction at this point. The issue is the

shape of the discourse, and how it interacts

with other discourses, particularly around

shared problems like the naturalization of

market values. Different channels through

which to articulate these issues may open

up at different times and in different contexts.

It so happens that today, for various historical

reasons, the contemplation of positive, struc-

tural change through architectural design in

the traditional sense has been largely fore-

closed. But that does not mean that the

consequent division of labor—theory as

‘‘critical’’ or utopian, practice as ‘‘realistic’’—is

here to stay. This, too, is a historical

development that is subject to change.

There is also a (usually tacit) narrative today

that is reorganizing universities from the

ground up. It runs like this: ‘‘Professional

schools and other sites of applied knowledge

represent the future of the university,

financially and otherwise. The humanities

and other ‘under performing’ endeavors

(including the writing of history) must adapt

to the new constraints imposed by the

markets by becoming more ‘efficient’, more

‘productive’, and/or more ‘innovative’’’. In that

sense, the tensions (sometimes productive,

sometimes not) with which we are familiar in

architecture schools are characteristic of the

university as a whole, and they are in the

process of being reframed. The real-world

consequences of this reframing are well

known. I only want to emphasize that this

is not just another move in the age-old game

of critical versus applied knowledge. It

emanates from a rearrangement of the

playing field that is authorized by a brutal

and thoroughly spectral ‘‘realism.’’ The utopian

function of the university as a world apart,

always-already compromised and ambivalent

to be sure, is itself in danger of vanishing

altogether.

Notes

1. This interview was con-ducted via email duringAugust and September of2010.

2. Reinhold Martin, Utopia’s

Ghost: Architecture and Port-

modernism, Again, Minnea-

polis: University ofMinnesota Press, 2010, p. xi.

3. Martin, Utopia’s Ghost, p.xvi.

4. Martin, Utopia’s Ghost, p.xii.

5. Reinhold Martin, ‘Critical ofWhat? Toward a UtopianRealism,’ Harvard Design

Magazine, 22 (Spring/Sum-mer 2005): 1–5.

6. This refers to the publiccontroversy in August

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2010 over Park51, the Mus-lim cultural center pro-posed on Park Place, twoblocks north of the formerWorld Trade Center site inlower Manhattan.

7. Martin, Utopia’s Ghost, p.179.

8. Fredric Jameson, Archaeolo-gies of the Future: The Desire

Called Utopia and Other

Science Fictions, London,Verso, 2005.

9. Jameson, Archaeologies of

the Future, p. 232.

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