The temples and other monumental structures that were built in Archaic and Classical Greece, for example, are inseparable from the competition of cities for economic and political hegemony in maritime trade. In numerous instances, the professional role of the architect emerged or became empowered in times of intense commercial activity. It is for this reason that we have positioned the figure of the architect as the ideological pinnacle. It reflects the way society is organized, its power relationships, and its social division of labor. The goal of this diagram is to suggest how architecture’s disciplinary tradition is not (only) born from the imagination of builders, architects, and patrons. Similarly, we can speculate how the geometric mastery that emerges from the subdivision of land into perfectly orthogonal parcels resonates with geometric virtuosity of ancient monuments. For example, after the end of the neolithic age, many manifestations of large-scale monumental structures such as temples or pyramids can be interpreted as consequence of societies where agricultural surplus was appropriated by elites whose extractive capacity was organized through centralization and administration of religious and political power. It is up to the viewer to trace direct or indirect connections and resonances. The diagram does not draw direct connections between specific modes of production and specific architectures or architect’s roles, but rather makes visible the historical proximities between them. The upper, the superstructure, condenses a complicated apparatus made of material and immaterial factors into three sub-registers: architectural plans of representative artifacts, a skyline of iconic buildings, and the incarnations of architects. The bottom, the base, sets terms referring to different modes of production against a background of land use patters from different epochs. The diagram is organized through two registers. 4 The diagram expands Tafuri’s critique of ideology to trace base and superstructure before capitalism and up to its contemporary stage. As noted by Felice Mometti, in Tafuri’s critique, architectural ideology does not merely legitimize the status quo by mystifying reality or false consciousness, but also is a political force that produces its own materiality in the form of symbolic codes, techniques of representation, constructions processes, divisions of labor, etc. 3 For Tafuri, architecture is a never-ending “intellectual work” whose aim is to constantly innovate in order to cope with the technical and social innovations provoked by social and economic development. This reading of architecture as ideology is based on Manfredo Tafuri’s seminal article “For a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” (1969) in which the Italian historian proposed to read architectural culture as the ideological sublimation of the conflicts and contradictions brought by the historical evolution of capitalism. Yet reading history-especially architectural history-as a dialectic between base and superstructure offers a direct and frank explanation of when certain architectures have been designed and built, and why. From a liberal point of view (which is dominant within the historiography of architecture), the reading of cultural artifacts through the lens of base and superstructure is viewed with skepticism because their allegedly deterministic relationship seems to frustrate any form of autonomy and agency at the level of cultural production. Such reading implies that architecture is ideology. The goal of the diagram presented here is to offer a crude and concise history of Western architecture as a dialectic of base and superstructure. However, as noted by Raymond Williams, Marx always located the origin point of worldviews or cultural imaginations in people’s productive activities, rather than in external forces or a general abstract consciousness. While in The German Ideology, Marx and Engels polemically emphasized how the base determined the superstructure, 1 in his mature writings, Marx understood the relationship as dialectical, so that base shapes superstructure and vice-versa. The relationship between base and superstructure is neither static nor neutral, but evolves over time and is used by the ruling class to exploit its subalterns. Base is the mode of production, while superstructure is the ideology that legitimizes it. It is well known that within Marxism the term “base” addresses the way in which human beings produce and reproduce themselves, while “superstructure” includes norms, cultural identities, professional roles, and politics that emerge as a consequence.
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