Dear Mr. Schumacher:i
Pursuant to your recent essay, THESIS on the auto-destruction of architecture, also published in: KHOREIN – Journal for Architecture and Philosophy, Vol 2, No 2 (2024), it must be asked if architectural educational dogma was so different in your day.
While your claim that architectural practise in the post-2008-financial-crash world “has self-dissolved, eroding its intellectual and professional autonomy under the pressures of anti-capitalist politicisation and woke virtue signalling” is readily supported by even the most cursory and superficial examination of the field today, you might also take some individual credit for this lamentable (if perhaps not preventable) state of affairs, or at least for prefiguring the presently decayed sociopolitical environment during these briefly unipolar decades in the West.
Certainly if we look back at one of your public lectures in 1997ii as indication, during which you loudly, proudly, and no doubt controversially at the time brandished your fiery Marxist-Communist leanings, we can see the didactic framework that shaped your beliefs in the 1980s / 1990s – as well as it might be said the naive, immature, inherently feminine, unseriously franchised misperceptions of undifferentiated youth broadly understood – did nothing to instil the type of personal responsibility, pragmatic resolution, and theoretical creativity you seem to have independently developed these past 30-odd years in your role as semiological seminarian and architectural avant-gardist.
So perhaps, Mr. Schumacher, your personal philosophical evolution is a sort of directionally elevated template – an aspirational roadmap – of inherited good fortune, quixotic determination, dashing ambition, and time? By extension for the next generation, we may only hope to see this replicated in at least its most successful members.iii And until then, it seems we wait… shining little flashes of future’s light wherever and whenever we can.
But so too may your own personal evolution continue to find new illuminations, and in your next developmental chapter may you surpass your current libertarian leanings to arrive logically next at neo-monarchism, that ultimate resting place of ancestral wisdom and noble history. Certainly your firm’s most ambitious and successful projects to-date have been in what we might call neo-monarchical states (eg. China, Saudi Arabia), and no doubt this trend will continue, as it deontologically must, and this can be no mere coincidence.
But all in all, I very much enjoyed and appreciated “THESIS on the auto-destruction of architecture” including its addendum on sustainability. It deserves to be widely read, no matter how narrowly understood, and it can only be said that the agentic, art-lovingiv world looks forward to your continued evolutions of theoretical and architectural practises.
- You can take the boy out of East Berlin, but you can’t take the East Berlin out of the boy:
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Video link from 1997 lecture:
↩ - Of course Peter Pans never grow up, and we’ve had no shortage of those for the last few decadent decades.↩
- You may not love Parametricism or Tectonism anymore than you love Fidenzas or Cryptopunks. But you need them all the same, per McLuhan:
