Nic Clear – The Architecture of Capitalist Realism

Nic Clear presents his paper &Architecture of Capitalist Realism&at the Capitalist Realism: 10 Years On symposium, February 15-16 2020. ///ABSTRACT Mark Fisher notes that the phrase ‘It is easier to imagine the end of the world than imagine the end of capitalism’ is attributed to both Slavoj Zizeck and Frederic Jameson. Jameson uses the phrase most notably in an essay ‘Future City’ that discusses the ‘Project on the City’, two books published by Dutch Architect Rem Koolhaas, the founder of the architectural firm the ‘Office for Metropolitan Architecture’ (OMA). Jameson’s commentary focuses on Koolhaas’s main theoretical contribution to Vol 2 of The Project on the City’, The Harvard Guide to Shopping’, the essay ‘Junkspace’. Junkspace is a remarkable and dizzying piece of writing that excoriates many of the characteristics of contemporary culture that epitomise Fisher’s description of Capitalist Realism. It is further implicated into a Fisheresque nexus by the fact that it is written by one the leading practitioners of the type of corporate commercial architecture that the essay condemns. OMA under the leadership Koolhaas is one of the world’s leading architectural commercial practices. In response it would be tempting to suggest that architecture should resist the large-scale architectural transformations typical of OMA and look at more bottom-up local interventions, but rather than suggesting a type of ‘folk-architecture’ it might be worth pursuing the more radical...