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WHATEVER HAPPENED TO    
SEMI-AUTONOMY?

GRAHAM OWEN

Writing in the Yale journal Perspecta in the mid-
1980s, K. Michael Hays put forward an argument 
for “a critical architecture that claims for itself  
a place between the efficient representation of  
preexisting cultural values and the wholly detached 
autonomy of  an abstract formal system.”1 In 
setting up such a relationship between autonomy 
and criticality, Hays was elaborating his mentor 
Stanford Anderson’s efforts to promote a pragmatic 
ethical rapprochement—or compromise—between 
an autonomous practice that aspired to Kantian 
rigor and purity and the obligations of  cultural—if  
not also social—engagement. “Quasi-autonomy,” 
as Anderson had it, or “semi-autonomy” in Hays’s 
variation, offered the possibility of  an architecture 
resistant to instrumentalization in the service of  the 
dominant order.

Both Anderson and Hays were alluding to 
Louis Althusser’s notion, derived from Karl Marx, 
that superstructures in capitalist society, taken in 
this instance to include cultural activities such as 
architecture, were “relatively autonomous” from its 
infrastructure, its economic base:

Marx conceived the structure of  every society as 

constituted by ‘levels’ or ‘instances’ articulated by a 

specific determination: the infrastructure, or economic 
base (the ‘unity’ of  the productive forces and the 

relations of  production) and the superstructure, which 
itself  contains two ‘levels’ or ‘instances’: the politico-
legal (law and the State) and ideology (the different 

ideologies, religious, ethical, legal, political, etc.). […] 

semi-autonomy 
[…] offered 

the possibility 
of an 

architecture 
resistant 
to instru-

mentalization

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Their index of  effectivity (or determination), as determined by the determination 
in the last instance of  the base, is thought by the Marxist tradition in two ways: 
(1) there is a ‘relative autonomy’ of  the superstructure with respect to the base; 
(2) there is a ‘reciprocal action’ of  the superstructure on the base.2

Anderson’s formulation was originally put forward in a 1966 paper written 
in response to the positivist, even scientistic, interest of  the time in 
“problem-solving” design methods. Incorporating and elaborating upon 
that paper in his Perspecta 33 essay of  2002, titled “Quasi-Autonomy in 
Architecture: The Search for an ‘In-between’,” Anderson began by noting 
that: 

[r]ecurrently, anxieties arise around such issues as these: can architecture be 
other than a mere servant to commercial/capitalist/ideological forces? […] Is 
not autonomous production the only way to avoid submersion in the material 
conditions of  one’s time? How can a formally driven enterprise like architecture 
address social issues responsibly (or at all)?3

In the 1966 paper, Anderson had cited Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center 
as exemplary, in that it was not the “frictionless, efficient” result desired in 
problem-solving design, but rather a building where “all of  one’s senses 
and the whole of  one’s perception are engaged,” a building that is “a world, 
a context, a problem [not yet solved], and we have the happy opportunity 
to form ourselves against it.”4 In the later article, de Stijl, exemplified by 
Gerrit Rietveld’s Schröder House, and the early works of  Peter Eisenman 
such as House I (the Toy Museum in Princeton, NJ), take on this role: 

The de Stijl and early Eisenman works are of  fundamental importance to 
the discipline of  architecture. They project new ways of  conceiving material 
form, space, light, and, at least to my mind, implications for use and meaning. 
Significantly, these ‘new ways’ are deployed in such a manner as to give as much 
or more attention to their generalized potentials as to the specifics they initially 
served. It is in this that they approach autonomy and establish new references 
within the discipline.#

Anderson notes the importance of  the intimacy of  scale of  these 
examples, and the fact that “a particular use is not defined.”  He observes 
that “[o]ne is acutely aware of  one’s own body in, and in relation to, these 
environments – and with this, also the anticipation of  one’s occupation in 
various modes.”5

His concerns were thus humanist in nature, and the ethical issues as 
he implied them suggested, first, the virtue of  generous contributions to 
the discipline, and second, to the community, in effect a duty of  care to 
the built environment and to human experience within it. He concluded: 
“To seek to live only a life of  the mind at one pole, or of  materiality at the 
other, or of  coercive power from either, is to impoverish one’s self, one’s 



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discipline, and one’s smaller or greater community.”6

Michael Hays, in his Perspecta 21 article of  1984, 
sets up the dialectical opposition between, on the 
one hand, “architecture as instrument of  culture,” 
where it occurs as “essentially an epiphenomenon, 
dependent on socioeconomic, political, and 
technological processes for its various states and 
transformations” and “reconfirms the hegemony 
of  culture and helps to assure its continuity,” and, 
on the other hand, architecture as autonomous 
form, where both design and its criticism are 
involved with:

the comparative absence of  historical concerns in 
favor of  attention to the autonomous architectural 
object and its formal operations – how its parts have 
been put together, how it is a wholly integrated and 
equilibrated system that can be understood without 
external references, and as important, how it may be 
reused, how its constituent parts and processes may be 
recombined.7 

On one side, he remarks:
describes artifacts as instruments of  the self-justifying, 
self-perpetuating hegemony of  culture; the other side 
treats architectural objects in their most disinfected, 
pristine state, as containers of  a privileged principle 
of  internal coherence.8 

In seeking a way out of  this dichotomy, Hays 
proposes an architecture and a criticism 
characterized by “worldliness,” and in this respect 
acknowledges a debt to the thinking of  Edward 
Said. Hays’s exemplar of  such a semi-autonomous 
architecture is, perhaps surprisingly, Mies van der 
Rohe. Citing the unbuilt Alexanderplatz project 
in particular, as well as the Barcelona Pavilion and 
IIT’s campus, Hays asserts that: 

Mies’s achievement was to open up a clearing of  
implacable silence in the chaos of  the nervous 
metropolis; this clearing is a radical critique, not only 
of  the established spatial order of  the city and the 

established logic of  classical composition, but also of  
the inhabiting nervenleben. It is the extreme depth of  

Hays proposes 
the ethical 

virtue of 
architectural 

and 
interpretive 

work that 
does not 

acquiesce to 
the interests 
of hegemonic 
culture, but 
at the same 

time does not 
withdraw 

entirely from 
engagement

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silence in this clearing – silence as an architectural form all its own – that is the 
architectural meaning of  this project.9 

Implicitly, then, in semi-autonomy Hays proposes the ethical virtue of  
architectural and interpretive work that does not acquiesce to the interests 
of  hegemonic culture, but at the same time does not withdraw entirely 
from engagement. Also implicit in this opening gambit is a duty of  faith 
to the battle cries of  modernism’s avant-garde.

In his subsequent writings on this theme of  critical architecture, most 
notably in his books Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject, of  1992, and 
Architecture’s Desire: Reading the Late Avant-Garde, of  2010, Hays’s exemplars 
and his arguments undergo shifts. His exemplars move from Mies to 
Hannes Meyer and subsequently, in the third book, Aldo Rossi, Bernard 
Tschumi, John Hejduk, and Peter Eisenman. The shifts in Hays’s arguments 
have been charted in depth by Louis Martin in his essay “Frederic Jameson 
and Critical Architecture” published in 2011. Martin notes that Jameson’s 
thinking becomes increasingly important in Hays’s later writings, which 
alter the construction of  the dialectical oppositions and which address, in 
turn, the negative dialectics of  the Frankfurt School, deconstruction, the 
pessimism of  the Italian critic Manfredo Tafuri, and Lacan’s psychoanalytic 
thinking. Throughout this period, Eisenman, in parallel with Hays, 
continues to publish on the topic of  a critical architecture, convinced that 
his own work exemplifies such practice.

What had remained constant, says Louis Martin, is that “[c]ritical 
architecture … seeks change through resistance, negation, and opposition 
to the forces maintaining the status quo.”10 Mary McLeod, however, had 
summed up well the haunting skepticism of  the Italian critic:

[The Tafurian position] views architecture as pure ideology, in which ideology 
is defined as ‘false consciousness’ – that is, as reflection of  dominant class 
interests. Architecture thus plays a negative social role: it becomes an instrument 
of  the existing power structure. Even purportedly critical architecture (and 
in this category Tafuri places all utopian impulses in architecture since the 
Enlightenment) contributes in its uselessness and, more seriously, in its deception 
to the perpetuation of  bourgeois capitalism.11

Responding to Hays’s series of  texts seventeen years after their initiation, 
Sarah Whiting and Robert Somol, also writing in Perspecta 33, offered a 
“projective” alternative to “the now dominant paradigm of  criticality.” For 
both Hays and Peter Eisenman, they claimed, “disciplinarity is understood 
as autonomy (enabling critique, representation, and signification), but not 
as instrumentality (projection, performativity, and pragmatics). […] As an 
alternative to the critical project, – here linked to the indexical, the dialectical 
and hot representation – this text develops an alternative genealogy of  



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the projective – linked to the diagrammatic, the 
atmospheric and cool performance.” 12 Where 
Hays had cited Mies’s exemplary status, Somol and 
Whiting invoke Koolhaas, contrasting his response 
to the skyscraper frame in Delirious New York 
with Eisenman’s experiments with Le Corbusier’s 
Dom-ino frame: “these New York frames exist as 
instruments of  metropolitan plasticity and are not 
primarily architecture for paying attention to; they 
are not for reading but for seducing, becoming, 
instigating new events and behaviors.”13 Perhaps 
even more so than Koolhaas, for the purposes 
of  the essay the acting style of  Robert Mitchum 
(read through art critic Dave Hickey) is put forward 
as an exemplar: “‘Mitchum architecture’ is cool, 
easy, and never looks like work […]. Here, mood 
is the open-ended corollary of  the cool-producing 
effect without high definition, providing room 
for maneuver and promoting complicity with 
subject(s).” Nevertheless, Whiting and Somol felt it 
necessary, in their conclusion, to insist that “[s]etting 
out this projective program does not necessarily 
entail a capitulation to market forces […].”14

Some of  Whiting and Somol’s allies in this 
cause, however, felt less need to be equivocal.15 
In the early 2000s Michael Speaks in particular set 
out an aggressive polemic against the notion of  
critical architecture and, indeed, its entire context 
of  critical theory. Speaks’s background included 
doctoral studies at Duke University with Frederic 
Jameson, but perhaps of  greater ultimate influence 
on Speaks’s thinking were the debunking diatribes 
of  literary critic Stanley Fish. So motivated, 
Speaks took on the role of  advocate for the “New 
Economy” movement of  that time, particularly 
as promoted by Kevin Kelly in Wired magazine. 
Technology was changing everything, according 
to both Kelly and Speaks, and architecture needed 
to be not critical but innovative. In one of  a series 
of  articles published in the Japanese periodical 
A+U, Speaks wrote:  “Just as theory confronted 

Technology 
was changing 
everything [...]

and architecture
needed to be 

not critical but 
innovative.

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philosophy with its slowness and morality, so today does pragmatic 
entrepreneurial thought confront theory with its historical connection to 
the dreams and utopian aspirations of  philosophy.”16 He cites an essay by 
Alejandro Zaera-Polo, then of  Foreign Office Architects, in which the 
author constructs what he calls a “niche-seeking map” that can, according 
to Speaks, “be used to create flexible practices that are better able to 
respond to the new market reality of  globalization.”17

In an intriguing passage from the same article, Speaks invokes 
management guru Peter Drucker. Architectural practice under the avant-
garde model, informed by critical theory, Speaks claims, “is nothing more 
than what […] Drucker calls ‘problem solving’.” For Speaks, practice 
in this model simply takes direction from theory, and “adds little or no 
value along the way. Innovation, Drucker tells us, works by a different, 
more entrepreneurial logic, where, by rigorous analysis, opportunities are 
discovered that can be exploited and transformed into innovations.”18 
Speaks had, whether knowingly or not, repurposed Stanford Anderson’s 
original opposition of  1966, substituting critical architecture for Anderson’s 
target, the scientistic design methodology of  late modernist “problem-
solving.” But Speaks had also inverted that opposition: for Anderson, 1960s 
problem-solving was too much of  the world of  corporate capitalism. For 
Speaks, critical architecture’s version of  problem-solving was too little of  
it; the solution was to embrace wholeheartedly the logic of  the market.

George Baird, in turn, responded in his essay of  2004, “‘Criticality’ and 
Its Discontents,” drawing into his analysis of  post-criticality the positions 
of  Whiting and Somol’s fellow-travelers Stan Allen, Sylvia Lavin, and 
Michael Speaks. Noting that for Koolhaas, “if  it turns out that ‘criticality’ 
constrains efficacy, then to that extent ‘criticality’ must give way,”19 Baird 
is nonetheless ready to allow him some remaining capacity for resistance, 
but is wary of  post-criticality’s potential consequences. To what extent, he 
wonders, will it develop models to measure “the ambition and the capacity 
for significant social transformation”? “Without such models,” he went 
on, “architecture could all too easily find itself  […] ethically adrift.”20

Were Baird’s apprehensions borne out? What were the ethical attitudes 
embodied in calls for a projective, post-critical architecture? Whiting and 
Somol’s concerns, insofar as they can be interpreted in ethical terms, 
appear predominantly pragmatic. They address architecture’s capacity 
to be effective. From their perspective, an avant-gardist position of  
principled critical distance could not be maintained if  architecture was 
to be recognized as a practice with value in the world, and in this respect 
they might also be taken as suggesting a utilitarian model. But then there is 
this business of  Robert Mitchum, of  “cool”: social autonomy of  a kind in 



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one sense, to be sure, though in another requiring a 
social setting in order to be recognized. But doesn’t 
cool imply a freedom from constraint; an unruffled 
individualism untroubled by conscience; a natural 
gift for getting what you want, by whatever means; 
even rule-breaking as an aesthetic? Is there perhaps 
a Machiavellian streak in their position?

For Michael Speaks, there is no shame in being 
an operative critic, to use Tafuri’s term; no shame in 
engaging in promotionalism and career brokerage. 
In a series of  interviews in A+U,21 Speaks extols the 
virtues of  rapid prototyping and versioning enabled 
by digital modeling and fabrication, and indeed 
technological innovation in general. Presented as 
exemplars in this respect are firms such as SHoP; 
Greg Lynn FORM; Neil Denari; Asymptote; 
Maxwan; and AMO, the research arm of  OMA.

Speaks’s use of  the business model is millennialist, 
his rhetoric neoliberal with its embrace of  
competition, technocracy and the market as arbiters 
of  all success. Does he present us with innovation 
as an implied ethical duty of  the designer? Yet he 
decries the “moralism” of  traditional philosophical 
intellectualizations of  architecture. Success in 
the marketplace is, evidently, a virtue in itself. 
For Speaks, there is no other world to be part 
of; autonomy, semi- or otherwise has become an 
effective impossibility. Instead, he presents us with 
the received ethos of  social Darwinism.

What if  we undertake a thought experiment here? 
What if  we take at face value Speaks’s cheerleading 
for the new-economy business model, for digital 
technology as the central concern for forward-
looking architectural practices, and examine what 
innovation would really mean? Clayton Christensen, 
Clark Professor of  Business Administration at 
Harvard, is a widely admired theorist of  what he 
terms “disruptive innovation,” innovation from 
below that undermines and displaces the established 
leaders in a field. Speaks is clearly seeking to be 
disruptive, to gain market share, so to speak, from 

[Speaks] 
decries the 

‘moralism’ of 
traditional 

philosophical 
intellect-

ualizations of 
architecture.

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the established authorities and positions within the field of  architectural 
intellectuals. But Christensen, in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma, notes 
that in the field of  technology, disruptive innovations “result in worse 
product performance, at least in the near term”22: early Japanese cars, for 
example, early digital cameras compared with film, or the sound quality of  
cellphones. Here we might recall a lecture that architectural critic Wilfried 
Wang gave at MIT in the early 1990s. Wang, a staunch advocate of  
European builderliness in his formal presentation, remarked in discussion 
afterwards that, by contrast, Rem Koolhaas’s buildings would fall apart in 
a few years’ time.

But might we also understand this lower performance as applying 
to ethics as well? Christensen’s second major point is that disruptive 
innovation creates new markets where consumption in that field had not 
been occurring before. His colleagues cite the example of  the ChotuKool, 
a small-battery powered refrigerator produced by a company advised by 
Christensen’s consulting firm Innosight. David Duncan, a senior partner 
there, confirms that “[b]y the standards we are used to, it doesn’t perform 
well. It would never sell [in North America]! But in rural India they have 
sold 100,000 units in the last year or two.”23 The analogy is once again 
rough, but could we understand the connection in this instance as being 
to the proliferation of  iconic architecture in places it had not hitherto 
appeared: Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, the Emirates, and China, and its ethical 
performance in those contexts?

If  there is some insight to be gained for architecture from this thought 
experiment, how might we understand the motivation of  Somol, Whiting, 
and Speaks’s allegiances? The Oedipal nature of  their assaults has been 
noted by Baird and others. One aspect, however, has not received so 
much attention: the fact that the promoters of  post-critical architecture—
Whiting, Somol, Speaks, Stan Allen, and Sylvia Lavin—were all at that 
time pursuing or already in administrative positions in architectural 
academe. Now I do not wish to impute ethically questionable activity to 
all academic administrators, nor indeed necessarily to all members of  this 
group. But it is nonetheless worth noting that the business model was 
also widespread in the university by this time, with all the consequences 
for tenure, academic freedom, and collegial values which we experience 
today. The antagonists of  semi-autonomy and critical architecture, Speaks 
and company, would need to have become entangled, if  not embedded, 
in fundraising, marketing and the academic equivalent of  flexible 
accumulation. In short, a necessary and perhaps ingratiating closeness to 
capital would have become part of  their daily modus operandi. For some, 
advocating at least a partial autonomy, and a critical distance, from the 



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hegemonic social order might well have appeared, in 
these circumstances, to be a liability. Some reflexive 
institutional critique appears to be necessary here, 
although this is a subject for another essay.24

What of  the ethics of  the actual projects of  
the projective camp? Reinhold Martin tackled 
this question in an essay of  2005, taking to 
task some of  that movement’s exemplars for 
their involvement in the 2002 exhibition and 
competition for the rebuilding of  Ground Zero. 
Foreign Office, Martin noted, accompanied their 
entry with the exhortation: “Let’s not even consider 
remembering…. What for? We have a great site in 
a great city and the opportunity to have the world’s 
tallest building back in New York.”25 Greg Lynn, 
for his part, asserted that “the transfer of  military 
thinking into daily life is inevitable.”26 The projects, 
says Martin, “monumentalize, in exemplary ‘post-
critical’ fashion, the neoliberal consensus regarding 
new ‘opportunities’ opened up by techno-corporate 
globalization. Accordingly, the responsibility of  
professionals in the new world order is confined 
to facilitating the ‘new’ while washing their hands 
of  the overdetermined historical narratives […] 
through which this new is named.”27

Things came to a head at the Projective Landscape 
Conference, held at the Technical University of  
Delft in 2006 and including Hays, Somol, Whiting, 
Speaks, Stan Allen, Roemer van Toorn, and 
Reinhold Martin, among others. As reported by 
the web site Archined, Willem Jan Neutelings asked 
“what should he do if  he were asked to build a new 
head office for the fascist Vlaams Belang party? 
While the assembled panellists (twenty in total) 
fiddled uneasily with their glasses, a high-spirited 
Robert Somol bellowed ‘take the job’. Somol then 
turned on Michael Hays: ‘I don’t care what you 
think. You do your thing and I’ll do mine, and 
let’s both have fun.’” Reinhold Martin observed 
that the “idea […] that the arrival of  capitalism 
opens an immense field of  possibility in which the 

Speaks 
and company, 

would need to 
have become 
entangled, if 

not embedded, 
in fundraising, 

marketing and 
the academic 

equivalent 
of flexible 

accumulation

“

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designer can experiment freely is an outstanding example of  ideology.” 
This criticism Michael Speaks “heartily laughed away saying, ‘The market 
is something that happens, and what happens is reality, not ideology’.”28

And finally, what of  the arch-exemplar of  the post-critical, Rem 
Koolhaas? At least from his earliest days in America, Koolhaas had 
exhibited a consciously transgressive enthusiasm for the commercial. 
Delirious New York, of  course, assigns the power of  a subconscious 
manifesto to the commercial production of  Manhattan architecture, and 
while at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, Koolhaas had 
produced an exhibition on the work of  Wallace Harrison. The exhibition, 
even then, had the Nietzschean title “Beyond Good and Bad.”

Two decades later, writing on the effects of  globalization on the city, 
Koolhaas remarks that:

[w]e realize . . . that we are now moving into uncharted territory, a territory 
characterized by fluid conditions – flows of  traffic, flows of  human beings, flows 
of  money, flows of  work. […] Confronted with this mutation, this new urban 
condition, we refuse to recognize that we are powerless to forestall it. […] I would 
like […] to help make us […] a profession able to formulate perfectly rational 
answers to perfectly insane questions. For it seems clear that we are increasingly 
confronted with utterly irrational problems, problems that we no longer have the 
luxury of  refusing.29

As Louis Martin observes, “the iron cage of  an oppressive status 
quo becomes through Koolhaas’s sublime descriptions the terrifying 
splendours of  the real, a real in which there is no situation rotten enough 
for not containing a new positivity. To negativity and resistance, Koolhaas 
opposes an exhilarating acceleration of  the real as the only strategy for 
achieving change.”30

In a 2004 interview with Mark Leonard, Koolhaas attempted to 
rationalize his acceptance of  the CCTV commission, then estimated to be 
worth $740 million, elaborating on the nature of  the opportunity: 

In the CCTV building there is a utopian nostalgia that is the foundation of  
architecture and in my work in the past there have been very few triggers for that. 
[…] What attracts me about China is [that] there is still a state. There is something 
that can take initiative of  a scale and of  a nature that almost no other body that we 
know of  today could ever afford or even contemplate.31

Apologists for the Koolhaasian position have often invoked the image 
of  the surfer as a redemption or transcendence of  that position’s 
affiliation with globalized capital, and as an attempt to redirect narratives 
of  architecture’s powerlessness. A “new pragmatism,” in the face of  the 
overwhelming complexity of  undecidable outcomes, informs the choice 
of  ride.32 The surfer, far from being overwhelmed by the inexorable 



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force of  events, instead is skillful enough to ride 
the wave, to use its massive energy and power to 
enable his or her own (spectacular) performance. 
Of  this image, several observations need to be 
made. First, the surfer presents the (Deleuzian) 
trope of  the intuitive calculator, able to judge speed 
and position with an uncanny ability. Second, the 
flow that the wave exemplifies is indeed inexorable, 
a force of  nature, its direction unchangeable (and, 
ultimately, determining of  the surfer’s own). Third, 
in capitalizing upon this force for his performance, 
the surfer not only valorizes but also aestheticizes the 
wave: through his work, he gives it legitimacy.33

The image of  the surfer, in its positive valence, 
is another metaphor of  innovation in the face of  
massive change. But how does Koolhaas feel about 
innovation of  the kind that motivated Michael 
Speaks: iPhones, wireless fridges that remind you 
what to buy, the Internet of  Things? Could it be 
that, with the passage of  time, he has finally fallen 
off  his board? As Jay Merrick wrote in a review of  
the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, directed by 
Rem: 

despite his craving for data, Koolhaas has become 
increasingly concerned about what he referred to at 

the Biennale launch event as ‘digital regimes’. And 
he added: ‘I seriously question if  it’s safe and sane 
to surrender more and more of  our information … 
if  our current involvement with digital technology 
continues, our houses will betray us.’34

For those who feel they have witnessed a different 
kind of  betrayal—by the members of  the post-
critical international star system who seem willing 
to build anything for anybody anywhere—a turn 
to architecture as activism appears to offer an 
ethical alternative.35 Amid present-day efforts 
to instrumentalize architecture once again—but 
this time as agent of  environmental and social 
redemption—has the argument for semi-autonomy 
come full circle?

Activist architecture does, as in Stanford 

Apologists 
for the 

Koolhaasian 
position have 

often invoked 
the image of 

the surfer as a 
redemption [...] 

as an attempt 
to redirect 

narratives of 
architecture’s 

powerlessness

“

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Anderson’s model, seek to detach itself  from the dominant culture—or at 
least distance itself  from it. What is its economic model, after all? Some 
activist work is funded by grants, which is to say potentially by surplus 
accumulation of  capital channeled—or some might say laundered—
through philanthropic entities. Other activist work is enabled through pro 
bono professional services and volunteer labor, which is to say again by 
surplus accumulation that enables members of  one class to donate their 
time to assist another. Could we say that these kinds of  activist work follow 
a traditional development aid model, in which there is a charitable transfer 
of  wealth without necessarily being accompanied by capacity building? If  
so, would research work in international development ethics come into 
play on these issues?

Anderson’s criteria for quasi-autonomy include the capacity for 
fundamental and generalizable contributions to the discipline. Activist 
work, however, can be characterized as having exhibited an abundance of  
goodwill and, initially at least, a shortage of  theory. Have such contributions 
to the discipline occurred—can they occur—if  the existing discourse, the 
existence of  a discipline per se are brought into question by activist praxis? 
Do activist practices, then, mirror the predicament of  Michael Speaks, in 
that from their perspective there is no disciplinary world in which to place 
the other foot?

What theory and discourse as do exist seem to have emerged from 
areas such as critical urban studies, but these fields, with their emphasis 
on bottom-up spatial production, are by nature suspicious of  elite 
professional interests.36 The next ethical frontier, I suggest, is to determine 
how the design disciplines and professions can get on board, in an 
intellectually productive way, without leaving some of  their most valuable 
baggage behind, and without hijacking the bus. This baggage includes the 
fundamental and generalizable contributions that Anderson still valued 
so highly: those “new ways of  conceiving material form, space, light, and 
[…] implications for use and meaning” that can establish “new references 
within the discipline,” but pursued without the exclusive “life of  the 
mind […] or of  coercive power” leading to that impoverishment of  self, 
discipline and community he feared so much.37

ENDNOTES
1. K. Michael Hays, “Critical Architecture: Between Culture and Form,” 
Perspecta 21 (1984): 15.
2. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes 
towards an Investigation),” trans. Ben Brewster, in Lenin and Philosophy 
and Other Essays (Monthly Review Press, 1971). Originally published in 



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La Pensée, 1970. Accessed June 30, 2014, https://www.marxists.org/
reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm.
3. Stanford Anderson, “Quasi-Autonomy in Architecture: The Search for 
an ‘In-Between’,” Perspecta 33 (2002): 30.
4. Ibid., 33.
5. Ibid., 35.
6. Ibid., 37.
7. Hays, “Critical Architecture,” 16.
8. Ibid., 17.
9. Ibid., 22.
10. Louis Martin, “Frederic Jameson and Critical Architecture,” in The 

Political Unconscious of  Architecture: Re-opening Jameson’s Narrative, ed. Nadir 
Lahiji (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 198.
11. Mary McLeod, quoted in Louis Martin, “Frederic Jameson and Critical 
Architecture,” in The Political Unconscious of  Architecture: Re-opening Jameson’s 
Narrative, ed. Nadir Lahiji (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 173.
12. Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting, “Notes around the Doppler Effect 
and Other Moods of  Modernism,” Perspecta 33 (2002): 74.
13. Ibid., 75.
14. Ibid., 77. 
15. Indeed, as Ole Fischer has pointed out, in “post-critical” work, 
“[d]iagrams, slogans, logos, and new media are deployed as a kind of  
‘mental PowerPoint’ to reduce the complexity of  architectural projects 
to recognizable icons, core messages, or brands, and thus to promote a 
fast, approximative perception and an intensive experience or atmospheric 
‘feeling’ – particularly with regard to a broad audience of  occupants, 
consumers and clients,” in contrast to the difficulty and resistance of  
“critical” work. I thank Dr. Fischer for drawing my attention, after the first 
presentation of  this paper, to his excellent essay which tackles similar issues 
at greater length. The reader is directed to that paper for a finely nuanced 
and more extensive discussion of  the theoretical ramifications of  “the 
critical.” See Ole W. Fischer, “Architecture, Capitalism and Criticality,” in 
The SAGE Handbook of  Architectural Theory, eds. C. Greig Crysler, Stephen 
Cairns, and Hilde Heynen (London: SAGE, 2012), 59.
16. Michael Speaks, “Architectural Theory and Education at the 
Millennium, Part 3: Theory Practice and Pragmatism,” A+U 372, no. 9 
(2001): 24.
17. Ibid., 22.
18. Ibid.
19. George Baird, “‘Criticality’ and Its Discontents,” Harvard Design 
Magazine 21 (2004): 18.



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20. Ibid., 21.
21. Michael Speaks, “Design Intelligence [Parts 1-12],” A+U 387-399 
(2002-2003).
22. Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma (New York: HarperBusiness, 
2011), quoted in Craig Lambert, “Disruptive Genius,” Harvard Magazine, 
July-August 2014, 39.
23. Ibid., 41.
24. See, for example, my “After the Flood: Disaster Capitalism and the 
Symbolic Restructuring of  Intellectual Space,” Culture and Organization 17, 
no. 2 (2011): 123–137.
25. Reinhold Martin, “Critical of  What? Toward a Utopian Realism,” 
Harvard Design Magazine 22 (2005): 107.
26. Greg Lynn, “A New World Trade Center,” Max Protetch, www.
maxprotetch.com/SITE/PREVIOUS/ANEWWTC/FORM/index.
html, quoted in Reinhold Martin, “Critical of  What? Toward a Utopian 
Realism,” Harvard Design Magazine 22 (2005): 107.
27. Martin, “Critical of  What?,” 107.
28. “Design Intelligence – Speaks & Co in Delft,” Archined, published 
March 27, 2006, accessed June 24, 2014, http://www.archined.nl/
archined/5303.0.html. Spirited and subtly argued defenses of  criticality in 
architectural practice and theory were also mounted by the contributors to 
the “Critical Architecture” conference of  2004 and publication of  2007. 
On the relationship to autonomy, see particularly the editors’ introductory 
essays in that volume and those of  Leach, Cunningham, Benjamin, Heynen, 
Barber, Dovey, and Rice. Eds. Jane Rendell, Jonathan Hill, Murray Fraser, 
and Mark Dorrian, Critical Architecture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007).
29. Rem Koolhaas, “Understanding the New Urban Condition: The 
Project on the City,” GSD News (1996): 13.
30. Louis Martin, “Frederic Jameson and Critical Architecture,” 198.
31. Mark Leonard, “Power housing”, Financial Times, March 6/7 2004, 
W6-7.
32. See Cynthia Davidson, “Introduction,” Anyhow (Cambridge, MA/New 
York: MIT Press/Anyone Corporation, 1998), 10, and John Rajchman’s 
essay in the same collection.
33. Passages in this section appeared in my introduction to Architecture, 
Ethics and Globalization (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009).
34. Jay Merrick, “Rem loves the smell of  information in the morning,” 
Architects’ Journal, June 6, 2014, 53.
35. See, for example, “Architecture and Ethics,” Architectural Record, June 
2014, 167-206.
36. As discussion with colleagues, after the first presentation of  this paper 



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in Delft in 2014, suggested, a further productive conjunction might be 
made with the arguments of  Erik Swyngedouw regarding the post-political 
in environmental debates. Although the proponents of  the post-critical in 
architecture celebrated the expanded ability of  designers to embrace the 
complexity of  issues embodied in any contemporary project, it is through 
professional and technological expertise that this expansion is achieved. 
Swyngedouw too is skeptical about expertise so mobilized and its ability 
to neutralize sociopolitical debate.
37. Anderson, 5.


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