Post-Capitalist Architecture

Abstract

In the last decade, the stability of Western capitalism as the foundation of the American political economy has been called into question. What Francis Fukuyama projected at the end of the Cold War as "the end of history" - Western liberal democracy as the epitome of humanity's social evolution and mode of governance - has resulted in the present predicament of a borderless global exchange of resources directed by capital gain at the expense of sociocultural stability. Our democratic institutions seem impotent to resolve the adverse consequences of capitalism that have led to new apartheids directed by structural inequality between those who are able to manipulate the free market to their advantage, and the majority who exist to support the failing system through over-consumption.

Perhaps it is time to reexamine the politicization of the built environment as a construct that either promotes, rejects, or remains indifferent towards the negative social consequences of global capitalism. While acting as a passive agent of market forces, architecture has been exiled from a realm of critical social influence that democracy has rejected in the name of the unlimited freedom of the individual, the rejection of collectivism, and the infallibility of an unregulated economy. Likewise, the roles of Utopia and Paper Architecture have been disempowered as outcasts of the current value system, and rejected by the mainstream due to an inability to generate a profit.

The contemporary potential for architecture to establish an effective resistance against ingrained economic disabilities is in its ability to contain a contentious relationship between capitalism and the built environment, confront coercive and violent organizations of public and private space, react to the exploitation of labor and resources, and weigh unequal distributions of environmental risks and benefits. A post-capitalist architecture looks beyond the short-sighted object of capital gain with unexplored juxtapositions of use to simultaneously address fundamental human needs of dwelling, community, and meaningful work. Through thee formations, the individual is actualized as a member of a truly egalitarian society.