This issue of Footprint focuses on the post-war years and the negotiation of architecture with an ever more advanced consumer society within the context of welfare state redistributive policies. Industrial, productivist logic is mixed in this era with the biopolitics of the emerging late-capitalist spectacle, and with the shock and awe brought about by the expanding mass-media networks.
Many of the contributions to Footprint 8 highlight the need for an alternative to the options spelled out in the last decades in architecture – a ‘radical pragmaticism’ of sorts. Michael Müller, in his diagnostic essay in this volume, outlines the aporia of the current condition of artistic and architectural production, and Isabelle Doucet searches for a theory, while Fernando Quesada, Ross K. Elfline, and Nelson Mota contribute specific precedents of architectural trajectories that were never followed, ranging from Superstudio’s work to Siza’s Malagueira. Deborah Fausch returns to the debate between Denise Scott Brown and Kenneth Frampton in 1971; Isabelle Doucet reviews a book by architecture-activists BAVO, calling for a form of radical pragmatism instead of the polarity of ‘opposition’ and ‘appeasement’; and Maroš Krivý contributes a review of the exhibition Dreamlands at the Centre Pompidou. Consequently, the discussion of the 1960s avant-garde and mass culture leads to an understanding of the challenges contemporary architecture faces and to an outlining of concrete alternatives from the recent past.
Dirk van den Heuvel, Tahl Kaminer | Defying the Avant-Garde Logic: Architecture, Populism, and Mass Culture
Abstract 
Article [free PDF]
As an introduction to this issue of Footprint, which is dedicated to questions pertaining to the role, perception and valuation of mass culture and populism within the twentieth century, avant-garde discourse, this text presents a tentative framework that contextualizes and elaborates the questions at hand. It argues that the specific negotiation in the late twentieth century between the architecture discipline and the phenomenon of the consumer society, and especially mass media technologies, introduced a new, hybrid, and at times contradictory disciplinary discourse and practice, which defies the historic avant-garde logic as described by Peter Bürger. The editors argue that the re-investigations of the late twentieth century avant-garde vis-à-vis mass culture lead to a better understanding of the challenges contemporary architecture faces.
Michael Müller | Avant-Garde, Aestheticization and the Economy
Abstract Article [free PDF]
It would very much seem as though the avant-garde in post-war Germany had initially lost sight of the previously politically grounded programmatic narratives. Moreover, it seemed quite obsolete to insist on the destruction of the affirmative. After all, had it not been the Nazis who had pursued such destruction far more successfully than the avant-gardes before them, albeit with completely opposite goals in mind? For this reason, it seemed so compelling to regard the restoration of the avant-garde via the renewed recourse to the autonomy of art as an expression of an anti-fascist stance. The linkage of emancipation of individual subjectivity and radical social change called for by the avant-gardes now collapses once again. In the years that followed, the conservative cultural position repeatedly turned on attempts to closely link aesthetic innovation with social change. This taming of a recalcitrant art was followed in the early 1970s, after a brief intermezzo at the end of the 1960s, by talk of the failure of the avant-garde, before being subjected to outrageous defamation ten years later (particularly in architecture).
The question of whether today the universalization of the aesthetic has indirectly realized the hopes of the avant-gardes of an aesthetics of and in lived practice, will be the subject of my remarks.
Fernando Quesada | Superstudio 1966-1973: From the World Without Objects to the Universal Grid
Abstract Article [free PDF]
The Italian group of architects Superstudio entered the architectural scene in 1966 with the exhibition Superarchitecture, an ironical commentary on cornucopia and the consumption of design objects. Between that show and the publication of a serial project called Life, Education, Ceremony, Love, Death in 1973, they developed a thorough critique of design and the professional role of architects in information society. This essay traces the development of Superstudio’s critical project, the evolution of their formal repertoire and their operative instruments, studying their designs, projects and texts.
Nelson Mota | Between Populism and Dogma: Álvaro Siza’s Third Way
Abstract Article [free PDF]
In the early 1980s, Kenneth Frampton presented critical regionalism as an umbrella concept to frame some peripheral architectural practices that became instrumental to illustrate an alternative approach both to the modernist dogma and to post-modernist reactions. The architecture of Álvaro Siza was one of those marginal practices frequently used to illustrate that alternative position.
In this paper I will bring together critical regionalism and its critique to explore the possibility of its role as a mediator between dogmatic applications of the modern canon and populism. Critical regionalism will be discussed within the broader frame of the redefinition of hegemonic relationships, especially postcolonial critique, and the relation centre-periphery. Using Siza’s project for the Malagueira neighbourhood in Évora (Portugal) as support, I will argue that the architect’s approach created a third way between populism and avant-garde, and represents a re-foundation of the avant-garde, where the gap between high culture and the everyday is shortened, through the use of a mediation strategy supported by the architectural project.
Ross K. Elfline | Discotheques, Magazines and Plexiglas: Superstudio and the Architecture of Mass Culture
Abstract Article [free PDF]
This article considers the groundbreaking works of the Italian Radical Architecture collective Superstudio (active 1966–80) with an eye to their complex and contradictory relationship to popular culture. Superstudio’s early pronouncements stating their abstention from building presaged their decision to investigate the radical potential of different non-tectonic mediums culled from consumer culture. Initially, the group embraced popular culture and mass-production for their ability to challenge the hidebound discipline of architecture, leading them to produce an assortment of interior furnishings designed to activate consumers to alter their own living spaces. Later, the group abandoned these pursuits in favour of utopian ‘paper architecture’ projects, simultaneously rejecting the reified consumer object while relying entirely on the magazine as a formal support, a medium fully ingrained in the world of consumerism. Eventually, Superstudio proposed a ‘world without objects’ in which the individual would have a more direct relationship to everyday life by pursuing nomadism and plugging into a networked grid covering the Earth’s surface. Once again, such projects were beholden to advanced information technologies spawned by late capitalism. Studying the neo-avant-garde gambits of Superstudio, therefore, allows us to understand the contradictions inherent in any attempt to contend with popular culture in all its paradoxical forms.
Deborah Fausch | She Said, He Said: Denise Scott Brown and Kenneth Frampton on Popular Taste
Abstract Article [free PDF]
During the post-war period, the nature of ‘the people’ and popular culture was a matter of intense interest to the disciplines of architecture and urban design. These issues stand behind a debate between Denise Scott Brown and Kenneth Frampton in the December 1971 issue of Casabella. The disagreement between Frampton and Scott Brown concerns three issues: the nature of ‘the people’, the character of popular culture, and the role of architects in relation to popular culture. Underlying this last issue is the question of popular taste: whether a debased devolution from that of the educated and cultured classes, or an embodiment of its own intrinsic principles.
Scott Brown defines the people in terms of a set of ‘subcultures’, diverse groups of persons with relatively uniform sets of behaviours, values, attitudes, and preferences, coexisting together in society. She terms the emerging post-war urban environments ‘the popular landscape’ and claims that the symbolic additions made to homes constitute a source of information about popular values, attitudes, and preferences. Frampton refers to the people in terms such as ‘the constrained masses’, popular culture as ‘engineered fantasies of mass taste’, and the urban landscape as ‘the alienated environment’ of ‘deculturated forms’, a ‘repressed consensus’ of ‘mid-cult kitsch’. The two also disagree about the role of the architect; Frampton is concerned about the loss of a connection of form to content and the reinforcement of alienation and conformity involved in the contemporary approaches to urban design; Scott Brown recommends helping ‘the people’ to ‘live in houses and cities the way they want to live’.
Isabelle Doucet | If We Are, Indeed, All ‘Embedded’, Then What to Do Next? A Review of BAVO’s Too Active to Act.
Abstract Article [free PDF]
This article reviews BAVO’s recent publication, Too Active to Act, Cultureel Activisme na het Einde van de Geschiedenis, which forms a critical analysis of cultural production and activism in The Netherlands. This publication is then used as an occasion to question, in more general terms, the possibility of a form of social engagement that is situated and embedded in the real, that is within the system [rather than processed through theory, ideology or oppositional critique]. It argues that, in order to address this question, one needs not just to question what practice can or should do (in order to guarantee criticality, for example), but one also needs to revise the meaning of being ‘marginal’ once we are within the system, and the role of theory in the ‘anti-theory setting’ described by BAVO.
Maroš Krivý | Curating the Urban Utopia of Fun
Abstract Article [free PDF]
The article reviews the exhibition Dreamlands, staged in Centre Pompidou, Paris in summer 2010. The exhibition's main theme is described as urban 'utopia of fun'. In relation to this utopia, the article suggests a field of contradictory positions within which the presented exhibits can be distributed. Curating of the exhibition is discussed in the next step. The inability to bring forward and map these contradictory positions is analysed as a main shortcoming of the exhibition.
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