An Architecture Manifesto Critical Reason and Theories of a Failed Practice

In this manifesto, the author takes a leap of faith. It is a faith in Lost Causes. He asserts that today, architectonic reason has fallen into ruins. As soon as architecture leaves the limits set to it by architectonic reason, no other path is open to it but the path to aestheticism. This is the wrong path contemporary architecture has taken. In its reduction to a pure aesthetic object, architecture negatively affects the human sensorium. Capitalist consumer society creates desires by generating ‘surplus-enjoyment’ for capitalist profit and contemporary architecture has become an instrument in generating this ‘surplus-enjoyment’, with fatal consequences. This manifesto is thus both a critique and a work of theory. It is a siren, alarm, klaxon to the current status quo within architectural discourse and a timely response to the conditions of architecture today.

1. Architecture, The ‘Restoration’, and This Manifesto. 2. Facing the Twentieth Century. 3. In Praise of the Failed Project. 4. Nihilism. 5. Nietzsche and the Architect. 6. Architectonics. 7. Universality of Reason. 8. Building and Aufhebung. 9. One Divides into Two. 10. End of Utopias. 11. The Emancipatory Hypothesis. 12. Universality and the Ethical Life of Building.

Nadir Lahiji is an architect and critical theorist. His recent books include Adventures with the Theory of the Baroque and French Philosophy (2016); the co-authored The Architecture of Phantasmagoria: Specters of the City (Routledge, 2017); the edited volume Can Architecture Be An Emancipatory Project? Dialogues on Architecture and the Left (2016); and the edited collection The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture (2014).