Lebbeus Woods' Imaginary Architecture Abstract

By “totality” is understood a unified, homogeneous whole — one which is more or less global in concept.  A totality is unified because it is a single whole to which all of its constituent parts belong.  Phrased differently, it is the universal together with all of its particular instantiations.  Not every whole is a totality.  For example, one can imagine a whole which encompasses fundamentally disparate, heterogeneous elements.  A totality, by contrast, is internally homogeneous, in the sense that all of the parts that belong to its whole are unified according to either a common principle or common set of principles which then governs them absolutely.  As such, these parts would all share a substantial similarity.  Finally, a totality is global or international in its concept in the sense that, even if it is limited empirically at a given historical moment, it nevertheless strives to expand itself outward, to draw that which is not itself into its fold.  It is, at least logically, not localizable.

Miziakin's poster predicting the global annihilation of the contradiction between town and countryside (1923)

Despite all its metaphysical trappings, the concept of “totality” (and its enshrinement as a category of thought by figures like Kant and Fichte) is historically linked to the rise of capitalist society and the widespread rationalization that came with it.  This new form of society, unlike those that came before it, presented itself as “a general whole that is substantially homogeneous — a totality.”[1]  In Kant’s table of categories, this concept of totality belonged to the sphere of quantitative judgments.  “[A]llness (totality) is nothing other than plurality considered as a unity,” explained Kant.[2]  Fichte, who initially saw his own work as merely an extension of Kant’s, characterized totality in much the same way.  He simply substituted the notion of plurality with “the relative” and unity with “the absolute.”[3]  For both thinkers, however, the category was a cautionary one.  In general, it indicated the transgressive application of a pure concept of the understanding beyond the limitations of actual experience, the attempt to dialectically extend its use into the “absolute totality” of all possible experience (which is never given).[4]  Against both of these previous thinkers, however, Hegel upheld the legitimacy of the concept of totality and its rational application with reference to reality:

The particular has one and the same universality as the other particulars to which it is related.  The diversity of these particulars, because of their identity with the universal, is as such at the same time universal; it is totality. — The particular, therefore, does not only contain the universal but exhibits it also through its determinateness; accordingly the universal constitutes a sphere that the particular must exhaust.  This totality, inasmuch as the determinateness of the particular is taken as mere diversity, appears as completeness.[5]

Chartist meeting, Kensington commons

According to Lukács, Marx took up this thread of Hegel’s thought in a polemical fashion, again “turning it on its head,” so to speak.  In so doing, Lukács argued, Marx discovered the rational core that could be salvaged from the Hegelian system of idealism.[6]  Marx understood this novel concept of “totality” as originating not from an ingenious invention that spontaneously took place in the heaven of ideas, but as an ideological reflection of the new material processes that constituted social reality.  That is to say, the category of totality described by philosophers like Kant, Fichte, and Hegel comprehended in thought the new social formation that was emerging all around them.[7]  For this was precisely how Marx conceptualized bourgeois society toward the end of Capital, Volume 3:

[T]he capitalist process of production is a historically specific form of the social production process in general.  This…is both a production process of the material conditions of existence for human life, and a process, proceeding in specific economic and historical relations of production, that produces and reproduces these relations of production themselves, and with them the bearers of this process, their material conditions of existence, and their mutual relationships, i.e. the specific economic form of their society.  For the totality of these relationships which the bearers of this production have towards nature and one another, the relationships in which they produce, is precisely society, viewed according to its economic structure.[8]

The Integral Magnitude of the Capitalist Totality

Marx reproached the vulgar economists specifically for their failure to conceive society as such a historic and material totality.[9]  The exact implications of this totalizing aspect of capitalism have been the subject of much interpretation within the history of Western Marxism.[10]  In Lukács’ account, “[t]he category of totality [indicates] the all-pervasive supremacy of the whole over the parts.”[11]  Unlike the way it was later conceptualized by Adorno,[12] the constituent parts that make up the whole of the social totality were not all identical to one another.[13]  Importantly, for Lukács totality was the ultimate category of analysis for describing capitalist society.  To use his terms, “totality permeates the spatio-temporal character of phenomena.”[14]  With reference to the spatiotemporal dialectic of capitalism established earlier, totality might be seen as its overarching principle.

Proposed Sketch for Industrialized Magnitogorsk (1932)

Postone, while accepting Adorno’s assertion that the totality of social relations remains alienated under capitalism, likewise rejected the idea that this totality could ever successfully purged of its contradictory or nonidentical elements.[15]  However it is formulated, however, the totalizing character of capitalist society — its Weberian tendency to integrate and rationalize everything it encompasses — reappeared in the architectural ideology of the modernists.  As Tafuri noted, this mirrored attempts in modern sociology to consciously administrate and reorder social behavior.[16]  The avant-garde thus unconsciously affirmed the social totality:

Salvation lies no longer in “revolt” but in surrender without discretion.  Only a humanity that has absorbed and made its own the ideology of work, that does not persist in considering production and organization something other than itself or simply instruments, that recognizes itself to be part of a comprehensive plan and as such fully accepts that it must function as the cogwheels of a global machine: only this humanity can atone for its “original sin.”  And this sin is not in having created a system of means without knowing how to control the “revolt of the objects” against their inventor, as Löwith and the young Lukács understood Marxist alienation.  This sin consists instead in man’s “diabolical” insistence on remaining man, in taking his place as an “imperfect machine” in a social universe in which the only consistent behavior is that of pure silence.[17]

Georgii Krutikov's proposal for "The Flying City" (1928)

This sentiment, which Tafuri attributes to modernist architecture, clearly carries Taylorist overtones.  It almost seems to have been presaged by the sociologist Georg Simmel in a passage from The Philosophy of Money.  This is perhaps not a coincidence.  Simmel was, after all, a major influence on the young Lukács.  The congruence of Tafuri’s description of the modernists’ position with the following lines from Simmel is uncanny, however:

The organization of the factory and the construction of machinery demonstrates daily to the industrial worker that efficient movements and effects can be accomplished with absolute accuracy and that personal and other internal disturbances must be avoided at all costs.  This attainment of ends by a transparent and controllable mechanism paves the way for a social ideal that seeks to organize the social totality with the supreme rationalism of the machine and the exclusion of all private impulses.[18]

William Craig - City Dialectics of Totality and Infinity (urbanistic project at Columbia University)

We shall accept — at least provisionally — Tafuri’s claim, and proceed to delineate the concept of a “total architecture.”  A “total architecture” here means a system of spatial organization arranged so as to constitute a totality.[19]  Space within it is organized both formally (into different shapes) and materially (through the use of various constructive materials).  It is thus uniformly constructed out of certain standardized parts and materials.  A total architecture is by necessity an artificial system; such arrangements do not arise in nature.  “Nature presents itself to us as a chaos,” recorded Le Corbusier.  “The vault of the heavens, the shapes of lakes and seas, the outlines of hills.  The actual scene which lies before our eyes, with its kaleidoscopic fragments and its vague distances, is a confusion.”[20]

The Socialist City of Moscow (1931)

Construction within the totality is determined by its overarching principles.  So while a totalizing architectural scheme would prefer to build in purely abstract space, a sort of Newtonian grid, it can remain systematic even when it is forced to deal with the messiness of empirical reality.  For example, a totally functional, utilitarian architecture may call for an inland building to be rooted at every point in an earthen foundation to ensure stability, while it might demand for a coastal structure that it be built on stilts to anticipate the rising tide.  Though two physically discrete structures would be produced, they would all the same proceed from a single organizing principle — that of utility.

Le Corbusier's aptly-titled "Cartesian towers" from his Ville Radieuse proposal (1931)

Here the totalizing impulse in modernist architecture is realigned with “the ideology of the plan,” mentioned earlier in connection with the spatial homogeneity of modernist architecture imparted to it by capitalism’s spatiotemporal dialectic.[21]  “A plan demands the most active imagination.  It also demands the most severe discipline,” wrote Le Corbusier.  “The plan is what determines everything; it is the decisive moment.”  In this formulation, the plan assumes the position of the organizing principle (or set of principles) that “determines everything,” from the smallest pieces to the greater whole.  Or as Le Corbusier continued to explain: “The plan carries within it a determined primary rhythm…with consequences extending from the simplest to the most complex on the same law.  Unity of law is the law of a good plan: a simple law that is infinitely modulable.”[22]  Thus, with the modulability of the law, it can be applied to diverse situations while maintaining a unified logic.  Again, this serves to confirm the example of the functional principle mentioned above.

Lebbeus Woods's urbanistic model

Just as a total architecture retains its integral character in spite of modifications that respond to geographical and climatic circumstances, so also does it endure modification over time.  The crucial question here becomes the way that change occurs.  For a total architectural system can possess either a rigid or fluid nature, depending on its principles.  In order to maintain its integrity, however, a fluid architectural totality must include laws that guide its development and dictate the manner in which it incorporates new elements.  Innovation would take place within the totality, but only along preordained lines.  Change within such a system thus resembles a sort of controlled plasticity, instead of a haphazard accumulation of structures from different historical epochs.  The last thing the modernists wanted was another Moscow — “the Moscow blob,” as the architect Vladimir Semenov called it in 1930, “a historically generated conglomeration of factories, buildings, streets, and green spaces.”[23]

Lebbeus Woods' "Fractures"

Viewed from above, a realized total architecture at any stage of its expansion would hence almost appear as some kind of gigantic fractal — that is, a geometric shape whose integral parts reflect the pattern of the whole.  Upon magnification, one would discover this pattern repeated at an ever smaller scale, down to its tiniest details.  Each part would thereby constitute a microcosm, in the strict sense, of the total architectural system.

Ludwig Hilberseimer's terrifying Hochhausstadt proposal (1925)

Total architecture is, finally, global in concept.  From the first it aspires to be world architecture, regardless of whether its practitioners are fully cognizant of this fact.  It is not an architecture for only this or that culture specifically; total architecture excludes no traditional configuration from its laws.  On the contrary, these laws require complete generalization.  “[T]he world of constructive forms knows no native country,” wrote Hannes Meyer in 1928, shortly after succeeding Gropius as the director of Bauhaus.  “It is the expression of an international attitude in architecture.  Internationality is the privilege of the period.”[24]  Within any individual country, a totalizing architecture can therefore never be content with its embodiment in a single building, or any number of buildings in isolation from one another.  Nor can it accept even a whole neighborhood built according to its principles.  It seeks realization at the level of the city, the region, the nation — and will not rest until it wraps the globe.