Architecture Against Architecture
by Roemer van Toorn, 1997
“The greater part of the critical tradition attempts to ignore the spectacle. It is a criticism of despair. The critic seeks the authentic, the spiritual, the bodily, the craftsmanlike or the unsullied. He believes in a better world that is unaffected by the technological revolution. This is the criticism of negation. It disqualifies and reacts rather unsubtly against the achievements of the contemporary condition. Escape is seen as the only hope – minute though this hope may be …
I do not think it is appropriate to develop an alternative to the contemporary condition by negating it – thereby, in effect, losing one’s way in the past or the future. The point is not to pursue a fixed ideal but to accept the necessity of movement. In various modern films, in city culture and in recent works of architecture, there can exist a type of space that has the properties of a neural net: one little bit can become linked to another in an infinity of different ways, rather than the links being predefined. This dynamism inspires a form of critical production that is interested not so much in the things in themselves as in the events that take place between and through things …
This is a form of criticism of the regime that does not seek its alternative outside the regime, but implies rather an immanent criticism that aims to radicalize the modern existing situation from within. It is a constant re-identification that allows room for conflicts. Hence it is ambivalent and even schizophrenic in character. Every interpretation is constantly in motion. It is conscious of change because it is open to other points of view.”