The Missing Link: Architectural Culture and the Neoliberal Turn
The decline of socialism, together with the utopianism related to political and economic realities since the 1970s, fostered the emergence of neoliberal ideologies and new architectural aesthetics. These aesthetics were simultaneously developed into dissimilar and even contradictory branches of postmodern architecture, as well as into planning ideologies closely tied to notions of locality and anti-modernist sentiments. However, these economic and aesthetic ideologies have won limited attention in architectural historiography.
The ambiguous understandings of “neoliberalism” further contribute to this scarcity. Here we follow and expand David Harvey’s definition—“a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”1 Since the 1970s, almost all Western states, later joined by their socialist counterparts, have embraced some version of neoliberal theory and practice, including deregulation, privatization, and withdrawal from various areas of social provision.
The historiography of modern architecture has traditionally been shaped around questions of style and form, while generally ignoring other external and everyday aspects of the arduous and costly venture of building. Since the 1970s, this stance has been reexamined in ongoing attempts to expand architectural histories to include an analysis of financial and real-estate decision-making processes, such as Manfredo Tafuri’s Architecture and Utopia (1973) and Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York (1978).2 However, these examinations have remained focused on the independence of the architectural expression, leaving the role of the economy in shaping architecture underdiscussed. Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s cultural understanding of late capitalism, as well as Harvey’s description of “fictitious capital” as a collective formal yearning for stability after the economic crisis of the 1970s,3 more recent architectural historians have sought to develop the relationship between space, architecture, and neoliberal economies.4 Others examined how architecture under neoliberalism “hits the ground” and intervenes in the “political narratives, organizational conditions, and cultural dynamics” of places.5
While acknowledging the historiographical gap, much contemporary research has been reluctant to offer new ways of examining the role played by the economy or broadening the scope of architectural research. Thus, when it comes to our understanding of historical developments, the missing link of economic features in architecture is still understudied. However, technological advancements mean that architectural historiography is now better able to embrace multidisciplinary approaches and rigorous processes of economic analysis in relation to the built environment. Such approaches can improve our limited understanding of how these two fields have interacted through time.
1 – David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2.
2 – Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976) [1973]; Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
3 – David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 292.
4 – Reinhold Martin, Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Peggy Deamer, ed., Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present (London: Routledge, 2014); Douglas Spencer, The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How Contemporary Architecture Became an Instrument of Control and Compliance (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).
5 – Kenny Cupers, Catharina Gabrielsson, and Helena Mattsson, eds., Neoliberalism on the Ground: Architecture and Transformation from the 1960s to the Present (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), 5.