architecture and the subversion of space

Dreaming Architecture

Architecture: Sexual identity and Phantasm

1. Architecture as a dream.

Throughout the extension of the empire and years on the battlefield, Marcus Aurelius had seen many cities being destroyed, reduced to ashes. In his “Meditations”, Marco Aurelius mentions the construction of the city of Rome as a temporal exercise built for posterity, so his designs for Rome were tainted by his visions of Rome as a magnificent open ruin. What always fascinates me about this caption is the manner in which he projects his vision towards a future past. Time and erosion will complete his work and Rome will build itself. What is left will be completed by the interpretation of future generations, an exercise of architecture as an open signifier, an exercise in anamnesis and remembrance?
What it was is no more becomes a trace to be dreamt upon, idealized in its grandiose presence in absence.
Is Architecture dreaming about itself? And to which category this being aware of its dreams belong? Does it belong to the sphere of the phenomenon of the trace? As a bringing about of the convergence of a pure phenomenological notion with historiographical procedures, all of which can be referred to the act of retracing a trace, a following. This retracing of the trace, which for Emmanuel Levinas (1982), “escapes the dialectic of revealing and hiding, and the alternation of unveiling and concealment”, reconfigures itself as an indicative sign of the mobility and the secular quality of architecture as a dream. Or perhaps it is just a justification of reason as an act of freedom and the belief of an ideology as Voluntas.

2. Traces

Notions of the body and of the ideal body are linked to an economy of sexuality and territoriality within the fabric of an architectural public sphere that, in my opinion, belong to a nostalgic utopian-ism of an eclipsed society under the tension between modernity, antiquity and its ever-declining spiritual and intellectual orders. Take for instance philosophies of history which hypostatize society as an absolute and eclipse personal existence and its meaning - in which the selection of a specific representation of a non-specific other has been historically interpreted as a “resisted identification”. The same may be said of any authoritarian cultural politics driven by a willingness to co-opt a spectrum of aesthetic movements, or representational fragmented histories constantly recycled, that acquire an erotic charge that may prefigure the sexualization and the homosexualization of architecture during the first half of the Twentieth Century.

There is something disturbing about dealing with regimes of political oppression, within the sanitized confines of a "system of representation", or using Benjamin's definition, “the aestheticization of politics”. Rather than legislate an "art of the state," modernist political systems continually experiment with and revise their art’s policy as they “pursue” the support of artists and audiences.
For Lyotard (1964), postwar invocations of Fascism have tended to undertake a reduction making sense of fascism, if only as the maker of historical senselessness.

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Since I can remember I have always dreamt about Architecture. I inherited it from my father and he from his father/fatherland. Growing up in Argentina under fascist military governments, my dreams became living Piranessi’s prints - symbolic constructions generating reconstituted realities in which architecture and fascistic symbolisms of heroism, sexuality and identity are dreamt as intertwined. According to Voegelin’s (1990) interpretation of the symbolic,“ symbols have a peculiar relation to the truth experienced and when the experience disappears from the man, the reality to which the symbols refer also vanishes. Because of this, symbols often become detached from reality; with the decoding of these symbols the engendering reality can be reconstituted”. Is architecture dreaming me as the magician is being dreamed by the temple in Borges’s Circular Ruins (1956)? Am I being reconstructed by Architecture?
I recognize my need to understand the processes of identification and to analyze the tracings by which architecture conforms my identity as it writes itself in my body, while historians delve increasingly into the issues of political propaganda and visual art as the mapping of social space.

3. He sees this move as the fallout of the historical structure of the dialectic into the realm of the rhetorical. The very ambiguity of fascism as “ideologeme” results from its reification at the hands of a melancholic historical sensibility.
As a theoretical construct, this aesthetification of politics and melancholic sensibility derives from a cultural and political tradition homosexually coded. The shift towards a libidinal understanding of fascist aesthetics involves a form of structural reading, by which economies and structures of political desire are considered fascist rather than their specific embodiments. With the establishment of Fascism as a dominant ideology, the need to rekindle the spirit of heroism has to exist reflected in the reconstruction of the Polis. State architecture appropriates Roman models of order, discipline and sociopolitical hierarchies. Nazi architecture was both in appearance and symbolically intimidating, an instrument of conquest, total architecture as an extension of total war. Speer wrote in 1978: “My architecture represented an intimidating display of power”.
The potentially fascist moment of "ordering" the gaze occurs in the gaze itself through a per Halifax, 2001