‘Underneath the Pavement, the Beach’

Brasilia, Foucault and the Symbolic Importance of the Architectural

‘Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe’, so said Pascal, betraying the embodied nature of ideology; how, following Althusser, it ‘always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices.’ So if we can consider ideology to be one discursive form of the symbolic, we may extrapolate out Pascals words to disclose too the material nature of such a symbolic realm. In this sense, the symbolic is not floating above reality, impotent and insubstantial as it is in general usage, but inscribed on and acting in the material world. And this interconnection can perhaps be most effectively illustrated by its relevance to the built form that delineates and shapes our experiences; the spaces, structures and urban orders within which our lives are conducted.

Materiality, in its architectonic modality, is permeated through with symbolic significance. But this infusion does not suggest that the material is merely a ‘passive recipient of our social projections’, for it is ‘co-constitutive of the world we live in’; with its symbolic materiality producing a symbolic practice. That is, the symbolism permeated through the form comes to construct subjects in such a way whereby their world views, values and inclinations are themselves shot through with a symbolic force. As we will see with Holston’s study of Brasilia, this relation may not be entirely congruous. It is possible that the discursive intentions of the built environment may produce antithetical inclinations. Yet there still remains a nexus whereby symbolic aspirations, constituted into symbolic materiality, results in symbolic effectuality or practice.

Through various exemplars, we can apply this analytical framework of aspiration, materiality and practice in order to emphasise the very real character of a presumably ineffectual figurative realm as it relates to architectural materiality. Perhaps in service to this endeavour, we should replace Pascals theological formulation with our own, imploring one to “cross the street, move your eyes in awe, and, maybe, you too will believe.”

As France was ensnared in the bureaucratic brutality of late Keynesian capitalism, the revolutionary burst of May 1968 rushed up to meet it. The streets erupted into liberatory confrontation, as bespeckled students and belligerent trade unionists clashed with police clad in riot gear. A general strike had paralysed the nation, and at this liminal moment, it appeared as if the import of the various slogans scrawled defiantly across the cold grey walls all came true at once. ‘Underneath the pavements, the beach’, one read, as the urban environment became more than the regulator of the pious and passive citizenry. Recalling the manner in which agitators of centuries past had dislodged the cobblestones of their urban prison to barricade the narrow streets, declaring the spaces within autonomous of the states repression, the Situationists — an avant-garde linked to the slogan — recognised how their forefathers imbued the materiality of the streets with the symbolic potential to generate ‘new forms of consciousness and action’; a collective ‘mode of being that the ludic reference to the beach suggests.’ But the beach is not the only thing that lies beneath. If symbolic space could be a tool of rebellion, it too could be a tool of control.

Baron Haussmann, upon redesigning these slender walkways, transformed them into ‘broad boulevards’ neutering those ‘revolutionary attempts’ by ‘facilitating military maneuvers against the barricades.’ Against the transformation of the prosaic into the politically transformative, Haussmann recruited the streets into the negation of the ‘collective consciousness’ which before both permeated the cobblestones and was nurtured by them. Ludic potentials were replaced by the punitive, as the materiality of the Parisian streets became caught symbolically in the asymmetry of state power. So we might track the symbolic journey of such ‘bricks and mortar’, ignoring the temporal incompatibility, beginning with their position in the construction, figuratively and literally, of a proletarian consciousness, their detachment from the wall and incorporation into the barricade both symbolising and effecting emancipation, these notions entangled together in the materiality of the object. Hence the Situationists recognition of the ludicity latent in the streets themselves, a reservoir of ideological and cultural regeneration for a stagnant France. And culminating in the destruction of these potentialities through its material reformulation as a mechanism of social control, its revolutionary symbolism drained out amidst the Foucauldian ‘micro-physics’ of spatial governance.

The most pernicious form of this particular deployment of built form can be found in Foucault and Bentham’s nightmare of the Panopticon, and despite it never being actually comprehensively constructed, the techniques drawn out are instructive. The panopticons notorious potency comes from its architectural construction, whereby a central watchtower looks outward, 360 degrees, to the prisoners arranged facing the guards who can see them. The prisoners here are perennially exposed, whilst their vision of the watchers is denied. The resulting effect is the production of a ‘conscious interiority’; a ‘solitary self-reflective and self-regulating self’. No need for horrific punishments to push people in line, disciplinary measures are internalised in the blinding gaze of the ‘godlike’ eye of the watchtower. Its specific surveillance to the side, we can note how its ‘subtle, powerful reconfigurations of space’ are intertwined in a punitive ideology, and how such techniques can exist in different material and symbolic modalities. Haussmann’s boulevards was one simple case, and Fredric Jameson’s critique of the Bonaventure Hotel provides another more complex one.

His diagnosis noted how the rationalised techniques of modernism have, in many ways, been usurped by the ludic nature of contemporary ‘amusement culture’. The ‘spectacle’ of consumer capitalism, as Debord put it, is seen to course through the Los Angeles hotel. As the reflexive facade makes it appear ‘placeless’, and its segregation from mundane reality is enforced through the absence of any ‘real entry’, the ‘soaring atrium’, ‘hanging streamers’ and ‘constant busyness’ produce an inability to ‘locate [one]self, to organise [ones] immediate surroundings perceptually’ amidst the cacophony of consumerist imperatives and obnoxious imagery. But it is precisely in this tactile and overwhelming disorientation, spinning around within a ‘miniature city’ of empty hedonism, that its materiality becomes symbolic. In this ‘spatial as well as […] social confusion’, our ‘capacity to act and struggle’ as ‘individual and collective subjects’ is ‘neutralised’, reduced to stumbling from shop to shop in delirium. Thus, we can see here how in the negation of comprehension, the funhouse mirror of Bonaventure exists as a materialisation of the symbolic atomised indulgence of postmodern consumer capitalism, bludgeoning us with the fragmentation of the spectacle, numbing our resistive capabilities.

Following this introductory jaunt through the symbolic significance of various built forms, we may look to James Holstons study of Brasilia, The Modernist City, as perhaps the apogee of the techniques and themes touched upon above. More precisely though, the detail of his account allows us to examine some of the tensions that may arise between the subject and the material environment they inhabit; how the grand plans of the designers may be contorted in the construction process, thereby producing unintended and distorted modes of being. As Holston notes, the flawed utopian visions of Brasilias architects created the ‘conditions for its own subversion’. But before we can comprehend what this may look like, we must first articulate what was to be subverted.

Carrying forth the idioms of architectural modernism — a tradition that both the main architect, Oscar Niemeyer, and the master planner, Lucio Costa, were firmly rooted in (they studied under Le Corbusier, its intellectual father, on the construction of Brazil’s Ministry of Education and Culture) — Brasilia was envisioned as the ‘antidote’ to the pathologies of postcolonial Brazil. Struck both by profound class stratification and underdevelopment, the proposed creation of a glistening new capital city, to be placed in the country’s mythical Central Plateau, constituted both an emblem of Brazil’s arrival at the future and the vessel in which to travel. For the modernists did not merely believe architecture was a static reflector of a society’s political and economic processes, but an instrument of ‘social transformation’; a ‘condenser of a new way of life’. Just ‘as electrical condensers transform the nature of a current,’ Brasilia would convert ‘human nature […] turning the bourgeois individualist and the denatured labourer of capitalist society into fully developed members of the socialist collective.’ After spending years dwindling in developmental limbo, Presidential candidate Kubitschek incorporated it as the central plank of his ‘industrialisation programme’, believing it would engender ‘both national integration and regional development’. Its geographical position, decisively placed in the centre of Brazil’s interior, was hoped to generate ‘axes of economic growth from the center to farthest corners of the country.’ In short, a New World was to radiate outwards from the egalitarian oasis sitting in the heart of Brazil. As the radical forms of ‘social experience, collective associations, and personal habits’ gestated in the new capital of Brasilia, they would produce a new citizen that would carry the nation to a ‘paradise of plenty’.

Thus, infused in the concrete slabs and dizzying speedways of the city was a quasi-theological faith in its capacity to channel a utopian consciousness, which would itself spread from Brasilias concrete to encompass the entire citizenry. At the intersection of Kubitschecks developmental ‘doctrine’, and Niemeyer and Costas collectivist imaginary, the holy city ‘signified a break with the colonial past’ and the dawn of utopia. As the manifesto of the International Congress of Modernist Architects (CIAM) put it, a CIAM city is not just a city. A CIAM city is ‘a city of salvation.’

This ‘salvation’, then, was to come in the form of multiple different architectonic techniques; assorted mechanisms of ‘defamiliarization’. First, we have the ubiquity of transparent facades and the identicality of structures, transposed most effectively onto the central ‘superquadra’s’. Second is the classic modernist inversion of the conventional architectural semantics of figure-void/solid-ground as a means to create an omnipresent public sphere. Employed by various subversives, be they avant garde artists or Soviet constructivists, ‘defamiliarization’ was a powerful aesthetic tactic that sought to equip its experiencers with a critical eye; shocking them into looking upon the world as if to change it. This ‘estrangement’ induced people into recognising the mutability of social existence, bestowing upon them the truth of its eminent changeability. Hence how Brasilia’s Master Plan was wielded to ‘eliminate private property as an institutional basis’, effacing ‘the old distinctions between the public and private’, refusing to indulge in architectural inequality. As we will see, this symbolic collapse of boundaries recurs throughout the architectonics of the city, its collectivist spirit ever present. More specifically, Niemeyers all-glass facades, gracing all city zones, ‘dissolves an opposition between private and public and between inside and outside’, imposing a ‘totality of perceptions in which the targeted social distinctions would no longer be discerned.’ ‘By rendering them architecturally illegible,’ Holston writes, Niemeyers ‘sought to render them socially irrelevant,’ scrubbing away the residues of a repulsive individualism.

More dramatically, the figure-void inversion produced a substantive spatial recalibration. One of the most striking things about Brasilia, so noted its inhabitants, was the distinct ‘absence, […] of curbs, sidewalks edged with continuous facades of shops and residences, [and] squares and streets themselves.’ What at first may seen incomprehensible on the planners part to deny these ‘points of sociality’, as one of Holstons subjects assigned them, becomes less so in the context of the usual constitution of street space. A typical ‘corridor street’ is known conventionally as a ‘figural void’, in that the ‘context of its surrounding solids’ (buildings) give the void ‘a distinct and recognisable figure, one which is empty but has form.’ In architectural terminology, the solids (buildings) thus comprise the perceptual ‘ground’ of which the figural void is a negation. Traditionally, a ‘figural void’ indicates ones presence ‘in the public domain, in a street or square’ bounded by private structures. A nexus is therefore established in which solid = ground = public, and void = figure = public, which is only ever contradicted in the case of public buildings. In such cases, a museum or church or gallery and so forth are ‘designed not as continuous ground but as sculptural figures’, with the ‘void of a square or green’ becoming the ‘ground against which they are perceived,’ at which point the public sphere is materialised as a grand monument and perceptual exception. What modernism — and Brasilia — does is to take this semantic structure and inverse it, abolishing the ‘figural street’, considered to be a ‘bastion of a corrupt civic order’ of social division, its place occupied by vast streets ‘as continuous void and buildings as sculptural figures.’

This new spatial ‘inscription’ of figural solid and ground-void amounts to a highly symbolic ‘semantic erasure’, in which the bourgois distinction of private and public vanishes along with the bustling street corners of Brazil’s traditional metropolis. Defamiliarization operates here through taking an internalised ‘architectural code’ and warping it through a radical ‘logic’ so as to negate its ‘established values’. In the utopian city, there is no perceptual divisions between that which is collective and that which is individual. Subsumed into a ‘monolithic spatial order’, all buildings are shrines to sociality. There are no forms nor spaces that escape Costa and Niemeyers discursive intentions. And, at least in the realm of their intentions, no people, either. But reality did not conform as neatly to their aspirations as the cities materials did.

It is Holston’s contention that the design of Brasilia was abounding in contradictions, ‘the delirium and power in master planning itself [creating] conditions over which the planners [were to] stumble.’ From the discontent around the relentless exposure of glass, to the denial of homely social space, residents did not find themselves spontaneously remade in the image of the ideology that drove its construction. The interplay between subject and environment instead ended up thwarting hopes for collective harmony, as an approximation of the old Brasil, altered and frustrated, reasserted itself.

Class divisions obstinately returned, as ‘upper-echelon bureaucrats’ escaped the enforced proximity of the superquadra for opulent and ostentatious homes constructed ‘on the other side of the lake.’ Now, this isn’t altogether that surprising. Whilst residential hierarchies were flattened, their economic counterpart (or perhaps more accurately, progenitor) was left intact. If the cramped co-living of the ‘residential scheme’ was to ‘operate successfully’, it relied on ‘the bureaucrat who commands at work to forego’ his authority upon entering the superquadra; a block comprised of ‘neighbours who may well be distant subordinates.’ The semantic inversion which denied residents the bustle of street life too was soon rejected by inhabitants. Brasilia was said to have been “cold” in its denial of street-corner sociality, so the residents took it upon themselves to warm the place up. Shops were once again established along facades, the flow of individuals partly threaded through the momentary vibrance of an ersatz marketplace. Moreover, the prevalence of figural solids, wherein ‘every building now vies to be recognized as a monument’ had the opposite effect in reducing them to a sort of ‘sculptural anonymity.’ As Holston observes, ‘as sculptural objects in a vast field of sculptural objects, they are indistinguishable’, material paeans to the public obscured by their own banal exceptionality.

These subversions, coupled with the failure of architectural standardization to produce ‘equality’ but ‘monotonous’ sameness and ‘anonymity’, suggest that the defamiliarization strategies produced a paradox. They evidently did not ‘alienate the individual from his alienations’, as Niemeyer had grandly stated they would. But nor did they fail ‘to produce something new.’ Instead, ‘what they produced contradicted what they intended.’ By eschewing organic sociality and individual aggregation under a formalised process of (ir)rational governance, the subjectivities of the inhabitants pushed back; attempting to reconstitute the space quicker than the planners could stop them. A bizarre game of containment occured, in which the deities of the city attempted to preempt and rollback the subversion of the inhabitants. Neither succeeded in their aims. And so the symbolic effectuality of Brasilia ended up formulating a subject that rejected its symbolic aspirations: one that was interior, individualised; restrained rather than liberated. Perhaps utopia could be built elsewhere. But it certainly did not arise here, in the dusty concrete plains of Brazil’s Central Plateau.

Whether in the revolutionary (or counter-revolutionary) cobblestones of a beleaguered France, the punitive circularity of the panopticon, or the spatial hallucinations of Bonaventure Hotel, built form can be considered an interface for symbolic and material processes, of which both are intertwined and co-constitutive of social reality. That is, the architectonics of Brasilia, say, are not symbolic in that they affect people; not symbolic because of its function alone. But because of the relationality between the ideology that, first, became contained within the specific formations of its urban environment, and that — if it had been successful — would have acted through it to manifest itself in people’s physical movements and psychological inclinations. Hence, built form, as a particular materiality, does more than just embody the intentions of its designers, or those that lay claim to it. It provides a tool in which those symbolic frameworks become transmitted. It becomes part of an apparatus, in which discourse and physicality is melded into one. Circling back to the words of Althusser, the ideologicals ‘existence is material’. And in this broader context, so too is the symbolics.