“Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier times. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned ...”
Marx & Engels, Communist Manifesto (1848)
All That is Solid Melts into Air is the title of Marshall Berman’s book on modernity for a reason. In a world in which almost all parts are ridden with capitalism, mankind cannot escape the realm of mindless production.
It is obvious that everyone in the capitalistic world can feel for Doctor Faust, subject to selling skills and brain s/he has got to deal with the devil, also known as the “system”. To reform, one must first conform.
Yet, architects with skills, intellect and ideals need to conform to the devilish society in an attempt to effect their ideologies in the world, either with selfish intent in just making a living or a moral one in bettering the world. Ironically, if one’s goal is just to make a living and one is content with just being a machine, an executor, the tug of war of morality and ethics does not exist since s/he is not equipped to evaluate his/her act because s/he simply executes commands; s/he is just another machine made out of flesh. However when one has the intellect, the ability to think, then the story can be two-fold based on the awareness of the devilish lure. When people have accustomed to capitalist way of thinking working and doing, the prevalence of such system conceals its wrong. Because of its prevalence then it is just. If one is comfortable in participating in such system there is not even a question of morality, devil or not. This is a case of willingly and, say unknowingly, selling oneself to the devil. Another case of selling oneself knowingly in hopes of overturning it is a trying one, which in fact I could see in myself, my friends and practising architects also.
Allow me to be boring and raise Rem Koolhaas as a study topic for I have just paid my pilgrimage to OMA Progress at the Barbican recently and coincidentally I read an article on the Architects’ Journal about Faust, Koolhaas and Berman all in one! (link: http://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/critics/oma/progress-at-the-barbican/8621415.article)
Rem writes in 2006 special edition of Domus, “Architects were ‘a contemporary Faustus, drowning in attention, but not taken seriously’. So away they went, ‘away from the triumphalist or miserabilist glare of media’ to record how their buildings were now being used. And to make a fat, glossy magazine, of course, occupying the role of architect and critic at once.”
and
AJ Senior Editor James Pallister writes, “Go and see it. Once there, to end with sociologist Marshall Berman’s thoughts on modernity, you can ‘make oneself somehow at home in the maelstrom, make its rhythms one’s own, [and] move within its currents in search of the forms of reality, of beauty… that its fervid and perilous flow allow’.”
After having read the AJ articles, Lefevre’s Social Space, Berman’s All That is Solid Melts into Air and having been to OMA’s progress, a feeling of helplessness arises. When in practice, all that is solid would melt into air. The manifesto, the ideal, the grand master plan and the ingenious prototype would all be the devil’s preys; and in turn, we and our works are our baits. Effortlessly, the system is perpetuated by people who buy into it but perhaps forget to effect a new order.
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