Statement 15

Against Program: In the past decades, ‘program’ has become a mantra for architects.  Its advantages are clear. It sets out an unsentimental list of realities that define the interaction between client and architect, and more broadly between architect and society. A program is ‘transparent.’ It is contractual. Once the building is done, the architect can ‘walk away.’ It is a foreclosure against contradiction and complexity.

Such contractualism is a direct descendent of John Locke’s ‘liberal capitalism.’ It does not ask who the people are in the building, just as long as they buy a ticket or buy coffee in the coffee shop. After all, a café is a café. In the same way, ‘people’ are just people, stripped of complicating identitarian or cultural positions. There are advantages to that especially in the neoliberal world view that has embraced such contractualism. But such arrangements limit the building to ornamented passivity. There are no accidents, minimalizations, maximalizations; no “disturbances in the field”; no hidden voices or haunts; a building is basically a ‘one thing’ thing, pretending to be everything.