On Architecture and Power
by Mike Pyatok

Designer/Builder Magazine
July 2000

To the Editor of Architecture magazine:
On Your Issue of ‘Power’
I was very disturbed by your recent issue titled "Power" (May, 2000). It made me realize how little the genre of slick architectural magazines has changed in content, style and delivery over the past 35 years of my career as a practitioner and educator---except, of course, to become even more fused with the fashion industry. You very consistently focus on self-aggrandizement and use the media to worship those in our profession who are uncritically steeped in the culture of conspicuous consumption. As such, they are on an insatiable quest for superfluous novelty, the cornerstone of a consumption-based society, or in the pursuit of some recent more sophisticated ways of packaging and camouflaging the same social and economic outcome. It is no wonder that it becomes more and more difficult to even visually distinguish in your magazine the difference between the articles with supposed content and the advertisements. All fuse into one raging sea of frenetically screaming graphics or pretentiously posed obtuse symbols as they compete to attract our attention for even the briefest of moments--which is all they, or you, ever expect or hope us to do.

In the age of instant digital communication and a global economy, we can no longer judge the cultural products of the so-called ‘developed’ nations isolated from their relationship to all six billion of us. The criteria for assessing our contributions as architects to all humankind requires us to put aside narrowly defined measures of value closely aligned with the economic and cultural interests of the ruling elites of the ‘developed’ nations, which is where the work of the architects you highlighted is focussed. They have spent their careers, intentionally or not, as apologists providing the cultural legitimization for continued unchecked exploitation of our planet and its peoples. Even when seeking the opposite, their attachments to the accoutrements of power as you define it have led them to achieve the opposite of their intentions. Their works are unashamedly unconcerned either about their real impacts on nature or how their corporate or institutional clients assist the massive shift of wealth from those who must sell their labor to produce that wealth to those who own that labor as investors---and yes, even including this recent spate of ‘spectacle’ museums.

The architects and their promoters whom you worshipped provide either the seductive envelopes to mesmerize us into accepting as omnipotent the cultural, economic and political institutions they house, or worse yet, to distract us with a deceptive pretense of rebellion against those institutions merely because the form of their envelopes shocks while there is no substantive change of their institutional contents. You pretend in your style of writing that you are simply reporting on the power these individuals have achieved through their own efforts, whether we like it or not. But the very reporting and postured images that you staged not only in this issue but in many prior issues, have made you accomplices in this system that unjustly distributes wealth and uses us culture-makers to either justify or disguise it.

While corporate and governmental architectural extravaganzas are understandable in the light of their goals of self-promotion (they have long since been expected to be wasteful of material and labor), the recent pursuit of similar goals by museums is at first surprising until seen in this light of global domination by the ‘developed’ countries. Regions and cities stripped of their real productive economic base by fleeing corporations then seek to create spectacles to compete for limited tourist dollars from that handful of First World citizens rewarded sufficiently to have the discretionary income and leisure time to be so lured. They may be a few hundred million, but on a planet of 6 billion, that is a mere handful. The local jobs created by these entertainment spectacles are low-paying and servile compared to the former productive industries which once occupied ‘First World’ cities and those jobs transplanted to the ‘developing’ nations wreak another form of even more exploitative havoc. The added bonus of these museum spectacles is that the investor class gets its art possessions automatically increased in value while the added threat to those who staff the new service jobs is that, being dependent on the discretionary income of tourists, they will be the first to evaporate with a downturn in the global marketplace.

In the face of all this distracting fiddle-playing by the architects you highlight, the United States, with 5% of the world’s population, merrily continues to consume 75% of the material resources extracted from the planet each year while we have the highest rates of poverty and illiteracy among the so-called ‘developed’ countries. Where are your priorities and responsibilities as journalists? Are these architects you idolize helping to reverse those trends by the examples of their works or their lives? What kind of messages do you send to the young of our design professions with this recent issue about what you believe are the pinnacles of ‘power’ we should all be seeking to achieve?

I think you now owe it to all of the design professions, and to the general public, to produce an issue entitled "Empower" which will highlight the contributions of the many grass-roots organizations in our country and elsewhere in the world who, assisted by members of the design professions, are fighting to bring a moral foundation to the ruthless self-interests of market-driven economies and their destructive impact on working class communities, or who are working to display more genuine forms of non-commodified cultural expression, or who are struggling to save our planet’s resources from yet another round of titanium museums designed to hold sacred the artistic investments of the wealthier classes, or from yet another rush of arrogant corporate headquarters and government centers. That will require some thoughtful research on your part as journalists, a very different type of photography from your photographers, an unpretentious graphic format, and it will send you into regions and neighborhoods and households where you probably have not spent much time. Are you up to that challenge? Will your commercial advertisers let you?

Sincerely,


Michael Pyatok, FAIA


PS. The design professions are fortunate that we have such magazines as Designer/Builder, New Village or Places to fill the very big void left by your fashion magazine.