Contemporary architecture is a functional architecture; indeed, any aesthetic questions concerning it have long since been eradicated by the formula: ‘What is functional is necessarily beautiful.’ This is a surprising bias, which the spectacle of nature constantly contradicts, as the latter incites us to see beauty as a way of taking revenge on reason. If the forms of nature appeal to the eye, this is often because they are useless, and do not meet any perceptible criterion of efficiency. They reproduce themselves in a rich, luxuriant way, apparently moved by an internal force that can be described as the pure desire to be, the simple desire to reproduce – a force that is not really understandable (just think of the burlesque and somewhat repulsive inventiveness of the animal world), a force that is nonetheless suffocatingly obvious. Admittedly, certain forms of inanimate nature (crystals, clouds, hydrographic networks) seem to obey a criterion of thermodynamic optimality; but these are precisely the most complex, the most ramified. They do not make one think of the functioning of a rational machine, but rather of the chaotic turmoil of a process.
Reaching its own optimum by creating places so functional that they become invisible, contemporary architecture is a transparent architecture. Since it has to allow for rapid movement of people and goods, it tends to reduce space to its purely geometric dimension. As it’s meant to be crossed by an uninterrupted succession of textual, visual and iconic messages, it must ensure maximum readability for them (only a perfectly transparent place is likely to ensure a total conductivity of information). Subject to the harsh law of consensus, the only permanent messages this architecture can allow itself will be confined to objective information. Thus, the content of those huge signs that line motorway routes has been the subject of thorough preliminary studies. Numerous surveys have been carried out in order to avoid offending one or other category of users; social psychologists have been consulted, as well as road safety specialists; all of this just to end up with indications of the kind: ‘Auxerre’, or: ‘The lakes’.
The Gare Montparnasse deploys a transparent and non-mysterious architecture, establishing a necessary and sufficient distance between video screens showing timetable information and electronic reservation terminals, organizing with adequate redundancy the signage of the departure and arrival platforms; this allows Western individuals of average or higher intelligence to achieve their goal of travel by minimizing friction, uncertainty, and wasted time. More generally, all contemporary architecture must be considered as an immense apparatus for the acceleration and rationalization of human movements; its ideal point, in this regard, would be the motorway interchange system that can be observed in the vicinity of Fontainebleau-Melun Sud.
This is also how the architectural ensemble known as ‘La Défense’1 can be read as a pure productivist arrangement, a device for increasing individual productivity. This paranoid vision may be locally accurate, but it fails to account for the uniformity of the architectural responses offered to cater for the diversity of social needs (hypermarkets, nightclubs, office buildings, cultural and sports centres). On the other hand, we will get a bit closer to the truth if we consider that we live not only in a market economy, but more generally in a market society, that is to say a space of civilization where all human relations, and similarly all human relationships with the world, are mediated through a simple numerical calculation involving attractiveness, novelty and value for money. In this logic, which covers erotic, romantic and professional relationships as well as purchasing behaviour as such, the point is to facilitate the establishment of many rapidly renewed relationships (between consumers and products, between employees and companies, between lovers), and thus to promote a consumerist fluidity based on an ethic of responsibility, transparency and free choice.
Building the shelves
Contemporary architecture implicitly adopts a simple program, which can be summed up as follows: building the shelves of the social hypermarket. It achieves this on the one hand by showing total fidelity to the aesthetics of the pigeonhole, and on the other hand by favouring the use of materials that show low granular resistance (metal, glass, plastics). The use of reflective or transparent surfaces will also make it possible to increase the number of displays. In all cases, the aim is to create polymorphic, uniform, modular spaces. The same process, incidentally, is also at work in interior decoration: furnishing an apartment these days is essentially a matter of knocking down walls so to replace them with movable partitions – which will actually hardly be moved at all, as there is no reason to move them; but the main thing is that the possibility of movement exists, that an additional degree of freedom has been created – and the fixed decorations can be eliminated: the walls will be white, the furniture translucent. Contemporary architecture is all about creating neutral spaces where the information and advertising messages generated by social functioning can be freely deployed, messages that in fact constitute that very functioning. After all, what is produced by the employees and executives gathered at La Défense? Strictly speaking, nothing; indeed, the process of material production has become completely opaque to them. Digital information about objects in the world is transmitted to them. This information is the raw material for statistics and calculations; models are developed, decision graphs are produced; at the end of the chain, decisions are made, new information is reinjected into the social body. Thus, the flesh of the world is replaced by its digitized image; the being of things is supplanted by the graph of its variations. Versatile, neutral and modular, modern places are adapted to the infinite number of messages they are to transmit. They cannot allow themselves to deliver an autonomous meaning, to evoke a particular atmosphere; they can thus have neither beauty, nor poetry, nor more generally any character of their own. Stripped of all individual and permanent character, and on this condition, they will be ready to welcome the indefinite pulsation of the transient.
Mobile, open to transformation, always available, modern employees are undergoing a similar process of depersonalization. The techniques that teach adaptability, popularized by ‘New Age’ workshops, aim to create indefinitely mutable individuals, free from any intellectual or emotional rigidity. Freed from the shackles of belonging, loyalty, and rigid codes of behaviour, the modern individual is thus ready to take his place in a system of generalized transactions within which he or she can univocally and unambiguously be given an exchange value.
Simplifying the calculations
The gradual digitization of microsociological functioning, already well advanced in the United States, had lagged significantly behind in Western Europe, as the novels of Marcel Proust testify. It took several decades to completely filter out the symbolic meanings added onto the different professions, whether these meanings were laudatory (church, education) or deprecatory (advertising, prostitution). At the end of this decanting, it became possible to establish a precise hierarchy between different social statuses on the basis of two simple numerical criteria: annual income and number of hours worked.
In people’s love lives, too, the parameters of sexual exchange had long been dependent on a lyrical, impressionistic, unreliable system of description. Once again, the first serious attempt to define standards came from the United States of America. Based on simple and objectively verifiable criteria (age – height – weight – hip-waist-chest sizes for women; age – height – weight – size of the erect penis for men), it was first popularized by the porn industry, soon followed by women’s magazines. While the simplified economic hierarchy was sporadically the object of protest over a long period (with movements in favour of ‘social justice’), it should be noted that the erotic hierarchy, perceived as more natural, was quickly internalized and immediately met with a broad consensus.
Now able to define themselves by a brief collection of numerical parameters, freed from the thoughts of Being that had long hampered the fluidity of their mental movements, Western human beings – at least the youngest – were thus able to adapt to the technological changes affecting their societies,