MAB: mass absence

"Mass Absence" was first published in 1997 as the conclusion to Ladders.

MASS ABSENCE
The well-known photograph of a mass demonstration in front of Giuseppe Terragni’s Casa del Fascio is one of the most fascinating and haunting images in the history of modern architecture. All that an architecture of modernism could be was simultaneously revealed and betrayed in the second of the shutter’s collapse. It marks for an instant a road not taken in which an entirely different modernism of entirely different consequences can be momentarily glimpsed.
The photograph is only reluctantly contained within the limits of orthodox modernism. A difficulty in reading it stems from a contradiction between the building’s architectural autonomy and its apparent ability to represent a modern political state. Terragni’s building is an architectural tour de force. It manifests, perhaps more than any other modernist work, the autonomy of the architectural artifact — the ability of the building to speak about the discipline from which it springs and to reveal its in-built formal, technical, and cultural intentions. In this regard, the Casa del Fascio has few rivals in the history of modern architecture. In its rigorous proportioning systems, its reference to a traditional typology, its refined plastic syntax, and its tectonic clarity, the building is resolved, in and of itself, in all of its essential qualities.
What is then so disturbing about the photograph is how the building, so elegantly hermetic, has come to function as an icon of the Fascist state. How can a self-referencing object, timeless in its fidelity to the art of its discipline, be capable of addressing a specific place, time, and political ideology? How can a modern building simultaneously represent a thoroughly contemporary political body and sustain an argument that transcends representation, voluntarily denying or suppressing its power to represent anything but itself?
This apparent paradox, which is represented nowhere more clearly than in the image of the Fascist demonstration, represents less a contradiction than the presence of a subtle and powerful artistic force, which briefly flourished in modern architecture during the 1920s. The contradiction is, of course, not a contradiction at all. The history of architecture is written with buildings that manifest such contradictions. The ability to both reference autonomous form and support a powerful historical moment is, for many, key to the legitimacy of monumental construction. What is unique about the Casa del Fascio is that it carries out this tradition within an overtly modernist idiom. According to subsequent histories of modern architecture, this was not supposed to happen. Modernism was nothing if not a historicist reaction to the autonomous culture of architecture. It was specific to the 20th century, and the rejection of an overriding monumental culture drove its polemic. Thus, the image of the Fascist rally remains problematic because it represents the ability of modernism to sustain an ancient tradition: the uniting of autonomous form with historical contingency.
The outrageous plastic, technical, and material virtuosity of the Casa del Fascio is undeniable. What has always been more difficult to grasp is the building’s participation in its political moment. One might say that the desire to represent a thoroughly contemporary political body is one of the chief ambitions of early modern architecture, one of the primary ways in which it made itself historically specific. While the precise identity of any political constituency is difficult to parse, it is possible to argue that modernism sought to represent not a fading monarchy nor the power of the church nor even 19th-century bourgeois democracy, but the broader spectrum of an emerging, empowered majority. That majority might have been Communist or Socialist. For a short time in Italy, it was even possible to conceive of it as Fascist. The point is that this empowered majority became the collective political subject of modern architecture and urbanism.
Such claims have always presented difficulties for those who consider modernism to be only an autonomous discourse. While the technical and material brilliance of the Casa del Fascio has been thoroughly addressed by scholars, its politics have been dismissed as merely unfortunate. Such analyses conform to the idea of modernism as it was rewritten following the Second World War, i.e., modernism as an autonomous, politically untainted discipline that is limited to the expressive devices of its own plastic and material existence.
Any overt ideological aspect of the modern project, any subtle dialectic between autonomy and representation, was eliminated with the rise of totalitarian regimes in the 1930s and the momentary victory of the “New Traditionalism” and Socialist Realism. As has been observed by others, but not precisely for these reasons, this was the historic moment in which the dialectic between representation and autonomy collapsed in on itself. The subsequent haste to fashion modernism as the antithesis of totalitarian realism led to the abandonment of the idea of modern architecture as the setting for an overt ideological inscription of mass society and opened the door for the presumably apolitical, egocentric vision of the contemporary city in which we live today. In other words, it was more important for modernism to contradict the excesses of totalitarian ideology than to sustain its own collective project.
Following the war, modernism shifted toward an emphasis on its autonomous artistic and technical tendencies, abandoning, if not discrediting as a whole, its ideological involvement. The Casa del Fascio’s apparent contradiction between artistry and ideology, autonomy and representation, was “resolved” in modernism’s confrontation with totalitarian realism. From this point forward, the history of modern architecture as conceived as an autonomous discourse innocent of overt ideological intentions. With little commentary on the fate of its overt social and political goals, modernism succeeded through its opposition to the totalitarian state, but at the cost of denying its own collective ambitions. Reyner Banham once remarked that the Second World War was fought to make the world safe for modernism. The sentiment has always rung true inasmuch as it also prompted its inverse: that modern architecture was ultimately made “safe” for the postwar world.

IDEOLOGIES IN A VOID
Modernism’s denial of contemporary political space — the concrete representation of the collective metropolitan subject — returns in the photograph of the Casa del Fascio. This is why it remains, even today, so poignant and so disturbingly alien to our own possibilities. The photograph suggests that at least for one moment, the modern city was destined to be the anthropomorphically inscribed scene of contemporary political action, the manifest space of an unprecedented urban collectivity. Perhaps the image continues to disturb us not so much in recalling that particular day in Como as in forcing a critical reflection on the architecture and urbanism that grew out of it. The arresting vision of modernism in support of an overtly popular political front haunts not just the culture of architecture but, more significantly, the built reality of the contemporary city. In its overt inscription of the masses, the Casa del Fascio is so remote from the recognizable reality of contemporary urbanism that in spite of its modernity, it scarcely occurs to viewers to construct the obvious historical connection.
Perhaps, however, a connection between the revolutionary discourses of the 1920s and the contemporary urban environment is altogether beside the point. Rather than simply sustain modern historiography, it would be more interesting to focus on the historical rupture or inversion represented by Terragni’s monument and its legacy. Its ostensible modernism aside, the building stands less as a progenitor of the contemporary urban environment than its antithesis. Terragni’s built space of mass politics stands in direct opposition to contemporary urban space, the vast, unoccupied, and neglected residuum that is presumably emptied of ideological intention. The parking lots, gutted central business districts, undeveloped or abandoned lots, corporate buffer zones, and endless carscapes are all spaces hostile to physical occupation. Anthropomorphic inscription — the formally acknowledged presence of the human figure, pedestrian and demonstrator alike — is violently preempted in the voids of Megalopolis. Yet it has already been shown that these spaces are not simply empty or certainly not empty of meaning. Tied into an interurban field, they are not neutral spaces or spacings. They are instead to be understood as absences, vacancies, hiatuses, or empty centers that are as full of potential significance as the space of any urban environment.
In contrast to the space of Como, these empty centers are characterized as places where people are not, where the urban collective is profoundly marked or inscribed by its absence. The contemporary urban ellipsis seems in many ways to represent the disappearance of the urban citizen, the default of a political body, the impossibility of constructing out of the masses either an urban subject or an urban object, the index of a remarkable mass absence.
The resolution of the inherent dialectic within early modernism, the move toward a one-dimensional autonomy, the loss of the collective subject, and the subsequent rise of an atomized urban pattern, all establish a watershed that has not been adequately emphasized. Ranging far beyond the debate over appropriate style, the attempts by both the early avant-garde and the totalitarian state to inscribe the urban political masses continue to reverberate negatively in the spaces of the contemporary city. The politics of Terragni’s building clearly belong on the other side of the catastrophe that was the Second World War, in whose receding tide our contemporary cities continue to be constructed. In our postwar retreat from the city, we are in effect still “demobilizing” from that catastrophe. The voids of the contemporary city, the gaps and lacunae that have come to characterize contemporary urban space, are not without meaning: they are the residue or the detritus deposited by that catastrophe. Modernism has delivered the city that by the mid-1930s we should have already been expecting. The cost of denying its collective project can ultimately be assessed in the broad and empty sweep of contemporary urban space.

A CALCULATED WITHDRAWAL
It would be misleading to leave the impression that the early modern dialectic between autonomy and representation was simply abandoned, and that by extension it can now be reconstructed on the model provided by Terragni or others. The collapse of collective representation was never a matter of choice, whether to accept or to reject (nor subsequently to revive). The “crisis of representation” in architecture, then as now, is motivated by forces beyond the prerogatives of the discipline. It would also be misleading to affirm the move away from ideological representation and toward formal autonomy. This would preempt any and all relations between modern buildings and the spaces they construct. While neglected by almost everyone, contemporary urban space feeds back into the built environment, whether this feedback is attended by intention or not. Yet, this relation raises some difficult questions. What does it mean, for example, to suggest that exurban and inner city voids have come to signify the collapse of modern political space — a mass absence? Beyond a certain dramatic interest, what could be gained from such an understanding of contemporary urban space?
To track these consequences, it is necessary to return to the so-called contradiction between autonomy and representation with which I began. The shift of modern architecture away from representation was not simply an abdication of the discipline’s political role (or the author’s political will). It was rather a calculated ideological choice. More than a denial of representation, the move toward autonomy can be understood not as a retreat into the inner logic of the discipline, but as a specific ideological statement regarding the impossibility of contemporary political representation.
In spite of the heady utopian fervor of the early avant-garde, the potential for a mass political consensus has always been regarded with skepticism. If there was doubt about the actual existence of a mass sentiment or will, there was even greater doubt about a coherent, unequivocal representation of that will in urban space. This apparent crisis in representation was evident within modernism from the beginning and forms its implicit counter-utopian project. From this perspective, modernism’s move toward a strict autonomy and abstraction — its desire to transcend representation in favor of immanence and presence — can be understood to mask a more radical political will. Abstraction was a calculated withdrawal from an impossible political moment, an overt refusal to participate in the social and political pathologies unfolding in the early 20th-century city and ultimately a recognition of the undesirability of gratuitously constructing the masses into a collective urban subject.
At least since the polemic of Adolf Loos, the willfully muted object has represented a calculated strategy of refusal stubbornly lodged within the utopian project of mainstream modernism. Karl Kraus’s admonition to step forward and be silent perhaps steeled Loos in his refusal to represent the social and political disaster that was fin de siècle Vienna. A certain political perspective attends this refusal, a perspective that has been replayed ever since Loos invented it. Aldo van Eyck’s dilemma, “if society has no form, how can architects build the counterform?” (Alison Smithson, 1968, p.13), is echoed by Aldo Rossi’s remark, “I am proud that I have not often built for people when I did not know where they were” (1981, p.48). These are all statements of a political will, not aesthetic evasion.

A NEGATIVE SOVEREIGNTY
Such may be the motivation for modernism’s calculated withdrawal from political activity and the subsequent implosion of the conventional channels of urban representation. “Refusal” suggests not an absence of meaning, but a potent silence, an abandoned forum, an involuted city square (Hedjuk, 1992, p.16). Accepting for a moment the plausibility of such a strategy — the emergence of a mute post-political collectivity— what are its urban implications? How exactly would this refusal and subsequent silence be received and understood?
It may be best to answer this by postulating the alternative to silence. In a 1979 interview with Michel Foucault, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze referred to Foucault’s texts as revealing the ultimate “indignity of speaking for others” (Foucault, 1977, p.209). The phrase sums up the force of Foucault’s reflections on the history of institutions and power. After the discourses of the “human sciences” have been dissected and analyzed, after their role as providing an alibi for power has been demolished and they have been revealed in all of their historical specificity, there is a question that remains: in whose name is this discourse spoken, and who, precisely, is being spoken for? For those who presume to construct public discourse, a warning is issued concerning the “indignity of speaking for others” and, implicitly, the indignity of being spoken for. When urban designers propose the revival of “public space,” for whom do they speak? What constituency has been located? What political, social, and cultural field is being brought into play, and who will be its players? Beyond any essentialist notions of urban community (for example, Clarence Perry’s “neighborhood unit”), in whose greater interests are such associations made? And exactly how and on what occasion may the politics of streets and squares be refused?
The subjects that the urban designer so eagerly seeks to construct into an “essential” community may not, or may no longer, be so amenable. Individuals may intuitively suspect the motives of a gratuitous urban representation and refuse to become its unwitting subjects. There are, in fact, signs that the recent attempts to define such a subject have been preempted. Jean Baudrillard posed the question in terms of gratuitous representations in all media, and the effects of a subsequent and deafening silence.
 [A]s for the silence of the masses in relation to the media . . . I (originally) gave this silence a pejorative and negative sense. Later on I turned this hypothesis around. . . . I proposed that this silence was a power, that it was a reply, that the silence was a massive reply through withdrawal, that the silence was a strategy. It is not just a passivity. It is precisely a means of putting an end to meaning, of putting an end to the grand systems of manipulation, political and informational. And at the moment, the masses, perhaps, instead of being manipulated by the media, actually utilize the media in order to disappear. It is a strategy of disappearance through the media. For the masses it is a way of neutralizing the fields that one would like to impose on them. One wants to impose a political field, one wants to impose a social field, a cultural field: all of that comes from above: it comes through the media, and the masses reply to it all with silence; they block the process. And in that, it seems to me, they have a kind of negative sovereignty. But it is not like an alienation. At the moment it is not at all certain that the media are a strategy of power for controlling and manipulating the masses in order to force them into silence. Rather, it is perhaps a case of the strategy inverted, that it is the masses who hide themselves behind the media. That is, they nullify meaning. And this is truly a power. On one side there is the political class, the cultural class, etc., who produce meaning. . . . And on the other side there are the masses of people who refuse this meaning which comes from above, or who block it all because there is too much meaning, too much information. (1993, p.88)
The collapse of public monuments, streets, and squares into a formless primacy of space is the fallout of this silence. And it is an arrogance equal to that of the most strident of polemicists that presumes the inhabitants of the contemporary city must now be led back to the presumed sanity of a traditional urban community — the unwitting subject of a universal inscription. This brief conclusion, in support of both modern abstraction and modern urban space, may stand as a tentative answer to the most pressing of urban questions which confront us today.


THE PEOPLE ARE MISSING
In (early) American and Soviet cinema, the people are already there, real before being actual, ideal without being abstract. Hence the idea that the cinema, as of the masses, could be the supreme revolutionary and democratic art, which makes the masses a true subject. But many great factors were to compromise this belief: the rise of Hitler, which gave cinema as its object not the masses become subject but the masses subjected; Stalinism, which replaced the unanimism of peoples with the tyrannical unity of a party; the break-up of the American people, who could no longer believe themselves to be either the melting-pot of peoples past or the seed of a people to come. In short, the people no longer exist, or not yet. . . the people are missing. . . .
[T]his acknowledgment of a people who are missing is not a renunciation of political cinema, but on the contrary the new basis on which it is founded. . . . Art, and especially cinematographic art, must take part in this task: not that of addressing a people which is presupposed already there, but of contributing to the invention of a people. (Deleuze, 1989, p.216)
The refusal to speak or build for people when you do not know where they are, and the subsequent mass absence of the contemporary urban ellipsis, is “not a renunciation of political (architecture), but on the contrary the new basis on which it is founded.” The importance of not “addressing a people which is presupposed already there” is, at this moment, fundamental to the “invention of a people” that we are at present unable to see.
For those who disparage the contemporary city as unlivable and unworkable, and who read nihilism in the implosion of the public realm, the inversion of this realm suggests, however subtly, another possibility. Freed from the repression of an overarching or universal inscription of corporate collectivity, contemporary urban space is not simply a space of haunted absence, but may also contain the possibilities of a tabula rasa. It truly is “free space.” Thinking back to the early modernist attack on traditional urban representation, one sees that the void they savagely created in their abstractions was not politically nihilistic. The possibilities latent in Kazimir Malevich’s non-objective world were unlimited, yet these possibilities arose out of a condition similar to our own. Quoting from his Suprematist manifesto, one may note evidence of a hidden political significance in the ultimate refusal of representation:
The ascent to the heights of non-objective art is arduous and painful . . . but it is nevertheless rewarding. The familiar recedes even further and further into the background. . . . The contours of the objective world fade more and more and so it goes, step by step, until finally the world — everything we loved and by which we have lived — becomes lost to sight. . . . No more “likeness of reality,” no idealistic images — nothing but a desert! (1959, p.68)
It is better to suffer the void of abstraction than gratuitous representation, better to be lost than to languish in the “objective world” of closed urban development.
An attempt must be made to re-envision contemporary urban space and to speculate on the possibilities of habitation that exist off the corporate map. The articulation of a “subject position” outside of the world system may be read into Malevich’s manifesto, as indeed it may be read into the modern project as a whole. If modernism did foresee and urge on the world’s inevitable modernization, it can also be seen to have accounted for its consequences. Simply stated, while modernism played its part in the invention of closed urban systems, it also invented a language by which such systems could be overcome. Its greatest achievement lies not in the planning of closed urban communities, but in generating an effective legacy of space. Malevich’s words ultimately suggest a powerful longing for the treacherous, dangerous, and potent world of contemporary urban space: “No more ‘likeness of reality,’ no idealistic images — nothing but a desert!” (1997)


THE REINVENTION OF SPACE, THE SPACE OF REINVENTION
Though written as a stand-alone essay, “Mass Absence” was first published as a conclusion to Ladders. In this addendum I would like to both clarify and extend the essay’s thesis: that contemporary urban space is the index of a missing or absent political constituency. This introduction of the idea of an absent political constituency was intended to add depth to the book’s discussion of an otherwise abstract conception of urban space. While sometimes referring to the qualities of modern urban space, Ladders remained focused on how it was actually produced in the degree-zero urbanism of Ludwig Hilberseimer. As a conclusion, then, “Mass Absence” attempted to expand on Hilbersheimer’s project by speculating on the subject that his urban space characteristically produced, a space defined by the existential themes that grew in reaction to the waning credibility of mass subjectivity following the Second World War. The essay posited an alternative position in the form of a highly individualized subject inhabiting the vast and amorphous post-political space of the Megalopolis. This addendum expands on that relation of space and subject with regard to the site of its origin: the tabula rasa.

“Mass Absence” attempted to locate a contemporary subject within the unified trajectory of modern urbanism. Reacting against the prevailing tendencies of the early nineties, the essay did not see modernism as something that needed reclassifying into early modern, late modern, postmodern, or neomodern periods. It was instead based on the assumption that modernism had no more come to an end than the economic or political processes that brought it into existence. Hence, the late modern, the postmodern, and the neomodern were simply understood as “unfinished” work in an ongoing project whose overall logic was only diminished by arbitrary divisions. Completing this unfinished work was necessary because the lack of an overall logic had left gaps and omissions in the historical record. Important lines of research were terminated following the presumed conclusion and revaluation of the modern project. Most prominent among these aborted projects was that of modern urbanism itself, which had virtually come to an end with the scathing postmodern and anti-modern critiques of the early seventies. The legacy of the Radiant City or of zeilenbau typology; the legacy of the linear city or of regional planning; the legacy of obscure practitioners such as Cornelis van Eesteren, N. A. Miliutin, and Hilberseimer, or the legacy of great imaginative works such as the Hochhausstadt, Plan Voisin, Broadacre, or Magnitogorsk — all had been effectively absent from the discourses of modernism over the preceding decades. By the late eighties, an entire branch of the modern project had been so discredited that it was on the verge of being forgotten. The absence of a viable (defensible) urban position left a modern project that was chopped into pieces, unable to challenge the forces of anti-modernism that dominated (and still dominate) the discourses of contemporary urbanism. What remained of Neo-Rationalism in Europe and New Urbanism in North America was profoundly anti-modern and stood virtually uncontested by a modern urbanism that did not know what (or when) it was. In “Mass Absence” and in Ladders, I argued that that what remained absent were discourses on urban space and the subject that it characteristically produced. I am appending this postscript to “Mass Absence” because, while many advances in modern architecture have taken place over the past ten years, especially in the development of an Extra-Large Architecture or “Bigness,” the advances in modern urbanism, particularly with regard to space and subject, have yet to catch up.

MODERNISM AND MEGALOPOLIS
 In addition to the conspicuous gaps and omissions in the discourse of contemporary urbanism, a second consequence of modern “periodization” into early, late, post, and neo must be addressed. This consequence concerns the actual realization of the modern project. How much of the modern urban project remains as unfinished work is inversely related to how much the modern urban project has already been realized in cities across the globe. As late, post or neomodernism was imagined to be either winding down or completely over, we stopped paying attention to modernism’s actual impact on the urban environment. If one is prepared to look past particular forms and focus on the idea of contemporary urbanism, it is apparent that a great deal of what was proposed in the first half of the 20th century had been successfully realized in the second. This aspect of modernism is not just related to questions of architectural styles or technologies, nor is it limited to the exploration of new architectural typologies, such as the high-profile social condenser. In fact, the greatest successes were not related to architecture at all but were instead related to the structuring form of the city itself. A large-scale reorganization of urban infrastructure that had been specified in the 1920s was put into widespread production in the immediate postwar period. This altogether successful strain of the modern project was ultimately achieved across the globe in the second half of the twentieth century. This achievement was marked, first and foremost, by the invention of new type of urbanism that is dominated by space.
In retrospect, it is not surprising that space would become the focal point of a modern urban discourse. At the end of “Mass Absence,” I referred to the non-objective world of Suprematism as a reminder that, in all of the modern arts, spatial innovation was (as it continues to be) a great common denominator. This is nowhere more apparent than in the field of modern urbanism, where space is not defined by a canvas, a pedestal, or a wall, but is instead coterminous with the world. While modern urbanism always meant different things to different practitioners, the single characteristic that each version shared was that a new type of urban space would achieve predominance over traditional types of urban form. This characteristic space was described by such unlikely bed-fellows as Le Corbusier, van Eesteren, Hilberseimer, Ivan Leonidov, Richard Neutra, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Each of these designers proposed large-scale plans that opened up the traditional urban fabric with an infusion of a new and highly idealized conception of urban space.  What distinguishes each of these projects from several millennia of urban history was that space, not form, became the dominant phenomenal effect of the built environment.
While first specified in urban theory, many larger economic, political, and cultural forces were already driving toward a spatially dominant urbanism. The requirements of new and faster transportation technologies, for example, required more space in order to meet their potential. The escalating scale of industry required large staging areas, accelerating an outward expansion to ever-larger parcels of land. On a completely different level, the nuclear threat required decentralization in the name of civil defense. The list could go on but beneath these outward effects more consequential causes lingered such as the idea that the speed and freedom of movement was an index of individual agency or that a direct engagement with nature was indispensible to a dignified urban existence, or more generally, that open, unencumbered space is analogous to personal liberty. I would argue that, whatever the motive force, the city of space was effectively set into motion in the fifties by all of these forces and more. Starting with postwar reconstruction, the “spatial dominant” of modern urbanism began to systematically emerge on a global scale, bringing about an inversion of the “formal dominant” which had heretofore driven urban history. To dramatize this inversion, and supply it with a working legacy, Ladders was not the first to suggest that modernist abstraction — for example, Malevich’s non-objective world — had been faithfully realized both in the slab cities of Europe and Asia and in the North American housing tract. The book suggested that a productive relationship existed between these utopian spaces of the past and the dystopian realities that they spawned in the all too familiar world of Megalopolis. The embrace of this relationship was, however, more than an attempt to write a revisionist history of modern urbanism. The attempt was rather to mine the enduring potential of modernist ideals not only to shed a new and positive light on a banal and futureless environment, but also to exploit the still relevant urban strategies that drove their realization.
The last paragraph of “Mass Absence” evoked the modernist conceit of the tabula rasa in order to isolate these positive, still relevant spatial qualities. It suggested that the tabula rasa was invested with some kind of spatial ideal and that this ideal had survived its realization in the space of Megalopolis. I would like to pick up on this understanding of the tabula rasa and expand its relation to both space and subject. In order to do this, Hilberseimer’s mechanics of spatial production must be briefly recalled.

THE INVENTION OF UNBOUNDED SPACE
Modern urban space is distinct from traditional urban space in one significant way: it is unbounded. In traditional cities, urban space comes into existence through the erection of urban walls that create a bounded condition. This bounded condition last emerged in the urban parks and squares that were carved out of the gridiron city’s streets and were shaped by the walls of the structures built around their edges.  These bounded spaces were complemented by open streets that theoretically extended to the horizon. Like Central Park in New York City, Marquette Park in Chicago is typical of such a bounded spatial condition formed within a matrix of open, extensible streets. As described in chapter three above, Hilberseimer used this district of Chicago as a practical demonstration of the difference between the bounded urban spaces of traditional gridiron cities and the unbounded urban spaces of the modern city. At the very heart of Hilberseimer’s project was the emblematic distinction that he made between the space created in a gridiron Metropolis, and the space created in a cul-de-sac Megalopolis. Where the gridiron has open and extensible streets with a closed and delimited urban urban space, the modern cul-de-sac has closed and delimited streets that are set in an open and extensible continuum of urban space. This inversion of space and form is the key to the production of modern urban space.
Back in the twenties, Hilberseimer already realized that designating a certain number of city blocks as “no-build” zones in order to create urban parks does not produce sufficient quantities or qualities of urban space to satisfy the needs of a modern city.  Strictly speaking, boundaries create a very weak or passive type of space that are always framed by dominant forms. To become itself a dominant urban force, Hilberseimer believed that modern urban space must be actively produced, not passively bounded. Accordingly, his formal strategy for the production of space does not employ bounding lines but spatial points in the form of terminal cul-de-sac streets. This abstract devolution from line to point produces space without recourse to boundary conditions.
Urban space bounded by form — for example, the walls of the residential buildings surrounding Marquette Park — is replaced in the modern city by s series of terminal points that produce an unbounded spatial field. Instead of containing space with walls, Hilberseimer’s closed cul-de-sac urbanism generates space through the organization of terminal points. Each terminal point creates a closed configuration that not only terminates form but also marks the emergence of space. When these points are arranged in concert, a larger spatial field comes into existence. These fields are not framed by boundaries or edges, but generated by points of emission.

TABULA RASA AND THE REINVENTION OF SPACE
While Hilberseimer was clear about the production of modern urban space, he rarely speculated on its potential qualities. As we know, a spatial field can take on a great many diverging qualities. It can be animated or inert, homogeneous or heterogeneous, grey or green, monotonous or varied, fallow or active. More generally, space can be qualified by both utopian and dystopian terms. I will argue that each of these qualities not only produce a number of spatial effects, but also a variety of subject positions. While the advocates of modern urbanism invented a limited number of spatial qualities and new subjectivities, these qualities were more often left implicit. This neglect of the basic “programming” of modern urban space figured large in the postmodern rejection of modern urban space. A sound bite, popular in the 1970s, held that this programmatic ambiguity inevitably led from “the tower in the park to the tower in the parking lot.”  At issue was precisely the ambiguity of use, as if modern architects had not gone far enough in their specifications. For the postmodernist, space like form must be programmed — activated, populated, cultivated, connected — in order to become to be a legitimate urban entity. Putting words into the mouths of the founders of modern urban space, I would suggest that the specific programming (masterplanning) of space is not only undesirable, it is politically retrograde. I would like to make this suggestion with regards to one of the 20th century’s most controversial urban ideas.
Long consigned to spatial oblivion by postmodernism, the tabula rasa is an important analytical construct for a city that is dominated by space. Translated from Latin, tabula rasa literally means “scraped tablet.” The modern usage of the term does not come from urbanism, but from political theory, where in 1690 John Locke used it to fire the opening salvo of the nature vs. nurture wars. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke described the tabula rasa as the innocent state of the human mind freed from any and all innate constraints. The mind was a blank slate, ready to found new worlds without the impediments that largely defined societies in the past. The tabula rasa defined a site, both metaphorically and physically, for the achievement of a destiny that was entirely of our own design.
Over the ensuing centuries, the wish of humanity to remake itself in its own image has lost none of its appeal. It is not surprising, then, that at the beginning of the 20th century, a tabula rasa would be imagined not only as a frame of mind, but as the ideal place setting for modernism’s utopian imagination. As it was employed in modern urbanism, tabula rasa planning came to be defined as a literal procedure where all construction would start from scratch. The “scraped tablet” of the mind functioned as a metaphor for a cleared piece of property — a literal building site. I would like to take this definition one step further and suggest that the tabula rasa not only served as a metaphor for a building site, but also described the actual, phenomenal effect of modern urban space. In other words, the characteristic absence or emptiness of the tabula rasa was not entirely obliterated by new construction, but that emptiness remained as space remained, dominant in the modern city. Seen as a utopian substrate, the tabula rasa was not merely a preliminary stage that would eventually disappear once construction was completed, it was instead an enduring feature whose open-ended qualities would permeate the modern city at every stage of its existence. If the new city was to be dominated by space, the unrealized potential of the tabula rasa gave this space meaning; as a staging ground without limit, it brought content to the neutral, abstract qualities of modern urban space.
Freed from physical resistance, the tabula rasa suggested not just a blank tablet or an empty mind or even an actual construction site, but a new quality of urban space. It was arguably the basis upon which space was idealized and subsequently traded as that most cherished commodity of modern urbanism. While it may have been conceived under a utopian star, it is important to recognize that the space of the tabula rasa is broad “space of reinvention” that cannot anticipate an ultimate or final construction.

AN AGNOSTIC OUTLOOK
The fact that modern urban space was conceived under a utopian star made it a prominent target for a postmodern critique of the early to mid 1970s. While Sigfried Giedion, Bruno Zevi, and Colin Rowe supplied the postwar period with a nominal theory of architectural space, urban space was largely overlooked. Starting with the notorious case of Pruitt-Igoe, however, urban space became the centerpiece of a postmodern critique of modern architecture and urbanism. I have already mentioned the postmodern critique of modernisms indeterminate programming — the city in the park becoming the city in the parking lot.  Added to this would be a devastating critique of modern spatial formation, or lack of formation, carried out by a much-changed Colin Rowe. Gone were the riveting spatial analyses of Le Corbusier’s cubist compositions — specifically his discussion of the dialectical planning of the League of Nations Competition. In their place Rowe and his co-author Fred Koetter delivered a new version of Corbusian space that was based on a comparison between Le Corbusier’s Unité d'Habitation and its jelly mold inverse, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Compared to one of the greatest urban spaces on the planet, Le Corbusier was rendered as a bombastic contrarian, polemically turning history on its head whilst delivering little more than a conception of space as purely unformed and residual to his great plastic bodies. Rowe and Koetter defined modern urbanism as a “figure/ground reversal” where the void of the Uffizi became the solid of the Unité. It was a brilliant analysis that contained both a history lesson and a graphic demonstration. From this point forward, the figure/ground reversal would render modern space as residual, unformed, unprogrammed, and virtually non-existent as a medium of modern expression. It is not an overstatement to say that the critique was antimodernism and it effectively doomed any and all productive thinking about modernist space up until the late eighties. As devastating as the figure/ground reversal was within the discipline and the profession, there was, however, a critique that was even worse.
At the same time as the critique of modern space came from within the discipline, a revival of urban spatial theory also under the rubric of postmodernism was set off by the 1974 publication of Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space. Despite being an ardent modernist and a Marxist, Lefebvre delivered an explicit and unsparing critique the modernist tabula rasa. Without actually confronting the design disciplines, Lefebvre argued that modern urbanism’s spatial abstractions turned from benign to malignant the moment that they were translated into actual urban spaces. Even more striking, The Production of Space redefined the tabula rasa not as a site of the utopian imagination, but as the malign instrument that leveled difference in favor of a crushing uniformity. Lefebvre wrote:
We already know several things about abstract space. As a product of violence and war, it is political; instituted by a state, it is institutional. On first inspection it appears homogenous; and indeed it serves those forces which make a tabula rasa of whatever stands in their way, of whatever threatens them — in short, of differences. These forces seem to grind down and crush everything before them, with space performing the function of a plane, a bulldozer or a tank. The notion of the instrumental homogeneity of space, however, is illusory — though empirical descriptions of space reinforce the illusion — because it uncritically takes the instrumental as a given.” (1991, p.285)
Here, the modernist scraping of the tablet (by tank or by bulldozer) was viewed as a manifestation of raw power that was both violent and preemptive. For Lefebvre, the “production of space” was seen as a disciplinary mechanism exclusively benefiting the interests of capital and of the state. Completely inverting the utopian reading of the tabula rasa, postmodern urban space was redefined as regressive, if not fully dystopian. This conception of modern urban space stuck in the minds of a generation of postmodern designers and geographers who would regard the tabula rasa as nothing more than a platform for tyranny. Yet crediting Lefebvre’s righteous indictment of abstract space is no more useful than crediting the naive utopians that preceded him. The conceptual stalemate of urban theory that we have endured over the past quarter-century is owed precisely to such ideological wars. It is thus necessary to finally acknowledge that the qualities of modern urban space transcend ideological classification. It is necessary to look beyond the tabula rasa’s role in both utopian modernism and dystopian postmodernism in order to measure its significance in a fully realized city of space.
I will return to Lefebvre’s commitment to, and critique of, modern urban space and attempt to reconcile this commitment with space that exists on the ground. In the end, the postmodern critiques of modern urban space do not call for a complete reassessment or rejection of the modern urban project. They instead reveal that such judgment is completely beside the point. In this regard it is necessary to define space as a quality that is neither inherently good nor bad. The prospect of a more neutral evaluation makes it possible to dispense with the hard and often debilitating judgments that come with assessments of modern urbanism — to make it possible to define space, not as a panacea or a problem, but as the symptom of larger urban trends whose logic is revealed only when judgment is suspended. For all that ideological interpretations create urban crises, space does not. This is because space is not a symptom of anything. Space is a quality that is both beneficent and malign, and its analysis requires agnostic detachment.
The simultaneous existence of utopian and dystopian impulses marks the reevaluation of Hilberseimer’s project just as it marks the reevaluation of the decisive aspect of modern urbanism: urban space. The conclusion of “Mass Absence” implied that the alienation of the atomized city was the flip side of the modernist utopia. It used an existential play on “free” space to suggest that the very best of 20th-century urbanism was implicated in the very worst.  The validity of both extremes suggests that any conception of urban space, historic or modern, must steer clear from arbitrary judgments. Once judgment is suspended, the discourse of a modern city of space can be seen to move through the second half of the 20th century up to the present day. “Early, late, post, and neo” all vanish. It remains to be asked, however, if the suspension of judgment with regard to contemporary urban space be extended to the contemporary urban subject.

The tabula rasa is useful in defining the qualities of contemporary urban space because its very definition establishes reciprocity between space and subject. In other words, the “blank slate” is at once an empty site and a state of mind; it is a metaphor that conjoins a building site with a subject that is unencumbered by innate historical (or natural) constraints. It can thus be said that the space of the tabula rasa always implies the subject of modern urbanism. The will to create the world in our own image necessarily entails the creation of ourselves in our own image. This sentiment gives way to a truism: as we reinvent our cities, we reinvent ourselves.
This reciprocity of space and subject demands the unity of the modern urban project, if only to present an urbanism to which we may attach its evolving subject. It fills in the gaps and omissions created by gratuitous periodization and makes it possible to put some much needed words into Hilberseimer’s mouth.

SPACE FOLLOWS SUBJECT
When contemporary urban space is considered at all, it is usually considered to be empty, uninhabitable and meaningless.  In other words, contemporary urban space is not thought to have a subject position at all. “Mass Absence” argued that the post-political void is the index of an absent political constituency. This emptiness is typically attributed to the closure of urban form that is characteristic of Megalopolis. When urban forms turn inward, creating an enclave, an empty and alienating vacuum ensues, which raises a question: if contemporary urban space is unoccupied and un-occupiable, how can it produce a characteristic subjectivity? As there is no definitive answer to this question, the idea of establishing a subject position in megalopolitan space seems without foundation from the start.
Imagine, however, that the subject is not derived from the disposition of space, but that space is derived from the disposition of the subject. This leads to an immediate question: was urban space abandoned because its surrounding forms were closed to it (as urban designers have long assumed), or did an absence of credible subject positions result in the closure of contemporary urban forms? If the great, unified constituencies that historically occupied urban space were to suddenly disappear, what would logically happen to the space that had sustained them? This returns us to the conflict posed by the Casa del Fascio.  Did the mass subject of Fascism produce the Casa del Fascio or did the Casa del Fascio produce the mass subject? What is at stake in these questions is the ability of urban space itself to create new social potential.
I would flatly answer that the invention of space necessarily follows an invention of the subject, and that any absence of public space is owed to the non-existence of a coherent political constituency. We cannot simply create a constituency through the design of urban space. It is necessary therefore to challenge the spurious assumption that the revival of public life begins with the revival of public space. Only a transformation in the political constituency can lead to a transformation of urban space. It is on this point that the conceit of so many recent urban theories is revealed. New Urbanism and Neo-Rationalism, which project a collective subject based on vague essentialist notions of “community,” avoid asking if such a community has a historical existence. What does it mean for an architect to refuse to build for a subjectivity that does not exist? First and foremost it is a refusal to construct a gratuitous political identity. Political subjectivities are no more invented by architects than they are by politicians. In progressive societies, political identity emerges from below; it is not orchestrated from above. An architect may anticipate the emergence of a subjectivity, and assist that emergence with a sympathetic environment, but this modest role is far removed from invention.

As noted in “Mass Absence,” it was in the 1950s that van Eyck questioned not only his fellow members of Team X but the entire legacy of modern urbanism when he asked, “if society has no form how can architects build the counterform?” (Alison Smithson, 1968, p.13). The absence of a viable subject position profoundly affected the first postwar generation of modernists and I believe their struggle with the question of subjectivity is directly related to the revival of interest in their work today. It would otherwise be safe to say that Aldo van Eyck’s question concerning the construction of a “counterform” in response to a formless constituency has not been sufficiently answered to this day. As it turns out, van Eyck was asking exactly the right question, but the fact that his understanding of the city was still dominated by form precluded an adequate response. This question remains decisive, but it is possible for a student of the contemporary city to give Van Eyck a tentative answer. In the absence of a social form, architects do not build a counterform; they build a counterspace.
The spaces that political constituencies traditionally occupied were dominated by form; that form bore the stamp of the given constituency. In Megalopolis form is dominated by space; the stamping of a constituency onto form is not possible for the simple reason that form no longer dominates space.  As it turns out, it is not actually desirable for a political constituency to stamp itself on form. Political constituencies are formed every Monday and reformed the next, dependent more on a news cycle than a construction cycle. To say the obvious, no political constituency is stable enough to be celebrated in stone. In other words, space is a more appropriate response to the fluid constituencies and unstable identities of today.

A SUSPENDED REVOLUTION
“Mass Absence” noted that the last credible collective subject we admitted into our urban discourses was that of “universal man” and its incorporated counterpart, “mass society.” Having definitively vanished with the Megastructure, few architect have the foolish hubris needed to operate out of such subject positions today. The comprehensive economic, political, and cultural transformations that were set off by the Second World War overturned this mass constituency, and its eclipse was marked by the radical transformation of urban space. But this urban “revolution” — that took us from massification to individuation in the few short years of a postwar recovery — was largely unattended by anything like a political, economic and cultural revolution.
While he damned the effects of abstract space, it is clear that Lefebvre continued to hold out hope for a utopian reorganization of urban space. This was made apparent in perhaps the most famous passage from The Production of Space: “A revolution that does not produce a new space has not realized its full potential; indeed it has failed in that it has not changed life itself, but has merely changed ideological superstructures, institutions or political apparatuses” (1991, p.54, my emphasis). For Lefebvre, modern space has the power to consolidate a revolution — to change life itself. Despite his dystopian characterization of the modern tabula rasa, his faith in the utopian outcome of a revolutionary space abides. With regard to his assessment of the potential of space, however, his swings between the utopian and the dystopian are disconcerting, if not actually sensational, and it has precluded foresight to another possible outcome that is closer to what we actually face today. Lefebvre was concerned that a revolution would fail to produce a new type of space and thus fail to transform everyday life. Today we confront the opposite situation: instead of a revolution that failed to produce a new space, we have a new space that failed to produce a revolution.
Or not yet... This absence of a revolution and a revolutionary subjectivity leads back to the quotation from Gilles Deleuze in “Mass Absence”: “the people no longer exist, or not yet. . . the people are missing” (1989, p.216). How does a city respond to an absent constituency? The answer lies in Deleuze’s qualifier: “not yet.” This anticipation of an absent constituency supplies the program of modern urban space, the space of the tabula rasa. And while the future is too uncertain to commit our identity to form, our intention to project such an identity thrives in urban space. Armed with a greater specificity, it is possible to turn back to the closing paragraphs of “Mass Absence” that evoke the potential of the tabula rasa.  “For those who disparage the contemporary city as unlivable and unworkable, and who read nihilism in the implosion of the public realm, the inversion of this realm suggests, however subtly, another possibility. Freed from the repression of an overarching or universal inscription of corporate collectivity, contemporary urban space is not simply a space of haunted absence, but may also contain the possibilities of a tabula rasa. It is ‘free space.’”