Architecture and Design/Planning

“It is a stark prospect . . . that not everyone in the design professions is equally free to make . . . the choice between going with the flow of the market or cultivating a self-conscious resistance. . . . Certainly living needs, as opposed to desires, demand to be met but surely not in such a way as to ruin the world for generations yet unborn.” -Kenneth Frampton, from the Introduction

More than ever, architectural design is seen as a means to promote commercial goals rather than as an end in itself. Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, for example, simply cannot be considered apart from its role as a catalyst for economic revitalization. But how harmful, if at all, is this unprecedented commercialization of architecture?

The contributions to Commodification and Spectacle in Architecture stake out positions in the debate over the extent to which it is possible-or desirable-to escape from the culture of consumer capitalism. Rejecting nostalgia for an idealized time in which design is completely divorced from commerce-and, in some cases, celebrating the pleasures of spectacle-the individual essays range from indictments of particular architects and critiques of the profession to broader concerns about what commodification means for the practice of democracy and the health of society.

Contributors: Michael Benedikt, Luis Fernández-Galiano, Thomas Frank, Kevin Ervin Kelley, Daniel Naegele, Rick Poynor, Michael Sorkin, Wouter Vanstiphout.

William S. Saunders is editor of Harvard Design Magazine and assistant dean for external relations at the Harvard Design School. He is the author of Modern Architecture: Photographs by Ezra Stoller.

Kenneth Frampton is Ware Professor of Architecture at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation and author of many books, including Labour, Work, and Architecture.

Harvard Design Magazine Readers Series
University of Minnesota Press
Printed in U.S.A.
Cover design by Percolator