ABANDONED BUILDINGS

Through the course of the long twentieth century, an expansive and robust philosophical debate developed on the relationship between art and radical politics, ranging from the work of the Frankfurt School to post-war French theory and contemporary discussions in the anglophone world. Although there are a few important exceptions, this debate has evinced a decidedly disproportionate interest in the literary and visual arts at the expense of architecture and public art. The theorists who have participated in it – including such prominent figures as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Georg Lukács, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Rancière and many others – have primarily been concerned with the relationship between literature and the fine arts (occasionally music), on the one hand, and more or less radical forms of politics on the other. There are, of course, a few intermittent and partial reflections by these theorists and their major interlocutors on various types of architecture and design, many of which have been meticulously collected by Neil Leach in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory. However, these authors’ voluminous writings on the literary and visual arts far outweigh the handful of texts that have been collected in this anthology or elsewhere.

We must not confound this tendency with a general law or fall into simplistic schematisations that lose sight of the fine-grained nuances of historical dynamics. Let us insist at the outset, therefore, on the exceptions to this trend by briefly spotlighting some of the thinkers to have significantly engaged with the politics of architecture: Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre and Paul Virilio in continental Europe, as well as David Harvey and Frederic Jameson in the anglophone world. As we will see with some specific examples below, architecture has clearly not been completely ignored.