Capitalisms Influence on Architecture

Introduction

Architecture is subconsciously affected by contemporary ideology. In the recent past, it is affected by capitalistic thought as evident in Manhattanism, where congestion and hyper-density mark the islands growth in the early 1900s at the same time as when people took to the notion of capitalism and applied its ideas of demand-supply, uniformity, and scale to the built environment. This paper will describe how architecture has been affected by capitalism, and discuss how capitalisms influence on architecture is good and bad; finally, it will explain how architecture has lost its agency and follows the contemporary political economys direction.

How Architecture is Affected by Capitalism

It is the famous dictum of Sullivan that form ever follows function. Tasked with creating skyscrapers that could represent the capitalist impulse at the driving heart of Americana in the late-19th and early-20th century, Sullivan sought to produce buildings of scale while simultaneously elevating the consciousness by enhancing the works with some aesthetical beauty. However, as time wore on and the more aggressive characteristics of capitalism prevailed, form became more and more the slave of function. The capitalist ideology overtook architecture.

What is the capitalist ideology? Essentially, the ideology centers on the idea of a free market, in which private owners produce goods and services to compete with others in the marketplace. The goal is to obtain a profit through fair competition. One of the major flaws in capitalism is that it can lead to excessive risk taking, rampant greed, and corruption via cronyism. Adam Smith believed that so long as people act virtuously in the marketplace, capitalism should function sufficiently well. However, the whole of human history is a story of virtue competing with vice, and in many instances vice has a devastating impact on that story. Capitalism provides no safeguards or guarantees against vice. Indeed, the vicious zero-sum game often played in global capitalism is evidence of this rather serious flaw.

In architecture, Manhattanism is linked to capitalism in terms of its excessiveness. Koolhaus refers to this excess as hyper-density or as a culture of congestion.[footnoteRef:2] New York City is the best example of Manhattanism because of its dense, mixed-use buildings, which offer both vitality and chaos in the urban setting. Manhattanism was an effect of mass transportation, real estate speculation, and the rise of the dense and vertical city; Richard Ingersoll states that in New York, municipal authorities imposed the limit of the floor area ratio of future buildings to 12:1 and proposed five different prescriptions for the heights of street facades according to the type of street.[footnoteRef:3] Laws requiring stepbacks for large commercial buildings were implemented to allow a modicum of daylight to reach street level. It was this combination of towering commercial skyscrapers in an urban jungle of block units that characterized Manhattanismand it is the chaotic intertwining of the gargantuan and the exotic with the mundane and the insipid in a densely populated and developed urban setting that effectively gets to the heart of Manhattanism. [2: Rem Koolhaus, Delirious New York (Monicelli Press, 2014), 4.] [3: Richard Ingersoll, World Architecture: A Cross-Cultural History (Oxford University Press, 2018), ch. 18.]

As capitalism has spread around the world, so too has Manhattanism in architecture, with major cities on a global scale adhering to the architectural model provided by New York City. The architecture in New York City reflected the various growth stages of capitalism in the 20th century, starting with the first skyscrapers that began to be developed at the end of the 19th century, often built by big business leaders in steel, finance, and consumption, but developed by the leading lights in architectural design. Neo-gothic, art deco, modernism, and post-modernism all followed in turn over the decades in terms of design features, which reflected changing ethos under the capitalistic umbrella. All of these designs have in turn contributed to the concept of Manhattanism. Critics view Manhattanism as the architectural representation of capitalisms inherent flaws, with Manhattan itself acting as a nonstop consumption palace pushed to the extreme, which to its many critics (critics of capitalist corruption, or critics of liberal identity politics) can only lead to inevitable disaster or eventual decline.[footnoteRef:4] [4: EDBC, Not So Delirious New York, EDBC, 2020. https://www.edbertcheng.com/blog/not-so-delirious-new-york]

According to Koolhaus, Manhattanism is an architectural laboratory wherein metropolitan living and architectural experimentation come together in a collective environment, supplanting the natural environment for a kind of factory of man-made experience. Manhattanism promotes the fantasy of a man-made world, totally divorced from nature. The density, ecstasy and blueprint of its architecture is rooted in the idea of the modern culture of capitalism in which man has the freedom to compete, to excel, to own, and to create in myriad and often chaotic forms that are all nonetheless grounded in a systematized grid that allows the experience to develop.

Capitalism is directly tied to the development of technology, and it is technology that has enabled Manhattanism to thrive. The first great example of the influence of capitalist thought on the built environment is Coney Island in New York at the end of the 19th century. It was the development of new bridges and transportation in Manhattan that allowed Coney Island to be created.[footnoteRef:5] The electric lights, the fanfare, and the idea of an island offering a unique man-made experience represents Manhattanism in its embryonic stage.[footnoteRef:6] The Coney Island Bridge Company created the first artificial connection between the island nd the mainland in 1823. The railroad tracks followed a few decades later. Coney Island attracted visitors intent on seeking out pleasure and in the final quarter of the 19th century, a 300 foot tower was erectedthe Centennial Towerfrom which Manhattan could be viewed. The tower symbolized for Coney Island all the collective energy and self-consciousness that embryonic Manhattanism had to offer.[footnoteRef:7] The creation of the iconic Brooklyn Bridge then made Coney Island even more accessible and more important in terms of giving the people of the city a way to get to the idyllic natural setting that Coney Island offered along with its mix of urban fanfare. But instead of suspending the urban characteristics of Manhattan, Coney Island intensified them by becoming its own mecca of technological marvel, with its gravity-defying architectural towers and railroad loops and eventually the roller coaster. Luna Park in Coney Island became an electrified wonderland of towers and lights, with a lake at its center like the lagoon at the center of the Chicago Fair.[footnoteRef:8] In this manner, Coney Island became an architectural amusement park. But as Koolhaus notes, it suffers from the same self-defeating laws of capitalism: it can only skirt the surface of myth, only hint at the anxieties accumulated in the collective subconscious.[footnoteRef:9] The synthetic experience of Coney Island reflects the dream of American life and pleasurebut underlying it is the danger of the capitalist beast, capable of escaping and overtaking one at any moment; for that beast itself represents the perils of vicegreed, cronyism, and exploitationwhich haunt the capitalist ideology just like the flaws of Dr. Frankenstein haunt him in the person of the monster that he created. For Maxim Gorky, the socialist writer, Coney Island represented the freak culture of capitalist America: an absurd jungle of straight lines of wood, a cheap, hastily constructed toyhouse for the amusement of children.[footnoteRef:10] In other words, it was architectural distractionnothing serious or meaningful with respect to the sublime. [5: Koolhaus, 20.] [6: Koolhaus, 21.] [7: Koolhaus, 26.] [8: Koolhaus, 30.] [9: Koolhaus, 31.] [10: Koolhaus, 40.]

Another example is the art deco Chrysler Building in eastern Manhattan. Completed in 1930, it stood as the tallest building in the world at the time of its completion and is still the tallest brick and steel framework building in the world. It was itself a product of competitionemblematic of the capitalist ideology: it was the brainchild of Walter Chrysler, head of...

…does that mean architecture lost its agency then as well? The answer to this question is summarized in the answer of culture. What is the culture of the people and is it reflected in the art and architecture of the day? The great cathedrals of the middle ages were works of architecture whose agency was put into the hands of a powerful churchbut the church produced works that reflected the culture it sought to promote. Todays political economy promotes an uncertain culture in which the question of enrichment of the lives of the citizens of society appears to be ignored for the sake of continuing the dominant stride of the political economy. Thus, the Twin Towers became emblems of the political economyand they were struck by terrorists on 9/11 as a way of striking at the political economy.

However, all might not be lost. Tim Gough argues that architecture conjugates all sorts of things (flows, in the terminology used here) to create a surplus value beyond (or before) the capitalist surplus value that is only one negative instance of a broader positive phenomenon.[footnoteRef:19] In other words, architecture has the power to rise above the conditions in which it is produced to produce on its own merits something transcendent. Following this line of thought, it stands to reason that architecture can never be killed so long as architects possess the transcendent spirit and the public possesses something similar. But part of the problem is that capitalism erodes that spirit: all materialistic cultures erode such spirit. That is why Korody, on the other hand, suggests that in order for architecture to fulfill its potential it must be returned to the folk, outside the strictures of the political economy.[footnoteRef:20] Tafuri certainly sees the death of architecture at the hands of capitalist powers as a primary problem.[footnoteRef:21] In truth, the idealization of capitalism has undermined the integrity of the architectural formand this is reflected in the integrity (or lack thereof) of the culture. [19: Tim Gough, Flows of Capitalism, Flows of Architecture, Ardeth, 2018. https://journals.openedition.org/ardeth/638] [20: Nicholas Korody, Architecture After Capitalism, in a World without Work. Archinect, 2016. https://archinect.com/features/article/149935222/architecture-after-capitalism-in-a-world-without-work] [21: Manfredo Tafuri, Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology, In Hays K. M. (ed.) Architecture Theory since 1968. Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press, pp. 6-35. Translated from the Italian by Stephen Sartarelli, pp.21.]

Conclusion

Architecture over the years has subconsciously lost itself to capitalism, and this is due to the fact that the culture bred by capitalism is materialistic and dominating. The art and style found in the architecture of the early 20th century still possessed some of the old world culture, which emphasized grace, harmony and beauty. Yet the political economy that developed, culminating in the symbolic architecture of the Twin Towers, eliminated that emphasis. The germ of this destructive path can be found in Coney Island, which represents Manhattanism in its embryonic stagea chaotic mess of man-made experience, replacing nature with inelegant behemoths of design and technology. Today, developers and real estate industrialists dictate architectural discourse. Rem Koolhaass Manhattanism is an example of how this phenomenon transpired: it began with speculation and development, was supported by advertising, travel, technological advancements, and the deployment of capital for the purpose of creating a man-made experience. Now, that experience is less and less human because less and less attached to the natural order and beauty of the created world. It is a distortion of the form of architecture, which now only fllows a purely material function. Architecture today serves no purpose but to profit those who pay for it. Yet the architecture of the past served to profit the public through its aesthetic beauty, its cultural significance, its societal support, and myriad other ways. Today, architects must work for the developers and tycoons, industrialists and magnates who have the capital to support building projects. Their interest is not in serving the public good through architecture but primarily in serving themselves; thus,…