Collectives II: After Program

Thus the modern sociopolitics of program was, from the outset, always already a technopolitics of the thermostat...The programmatic thermostatic. To speak of program as a technical concept is to expose it as a kind of Janus concept, one side of which has always gazed outward toward a set of demands and limitations (“the brief”). Opposite this face, hiding in plain sight, are the technical conditions that allowed for the emergence of all postwar programmatic reasoning—conditions whose deployment and eventual ubiquity established a blank thermal canvas, upon which premillennial architects were (so they imagined) free to experiment without consequence...

Wandering among the ruins of a kingdom of its own making, program still declares its absolute sovereignty over so-called architectural agency, quietly searching for some release from the technical hazards of its birth. Today, in all the rooms of that kingdom, one finds nothing but hollow strategies of analysis, mixing, and hybridization, which by themselves are incapable of imagining or stimulating anything other than endless variations on the twilight characteristic of the present: our wasteful modern lives....

This view is disintegrating today. We have arrived at a situation in which programmatic thinking, reflexively coupled to thermostatic regulation, constitutes a primary political condition of contemporary architecture—partly because this coupling can now finally be seen as architecturally banal, but more consequentially because this way of thinking produces and reproduces entire populations dependent upon the now dangerous interior principle that anything can and should happen anywhere at any time.  ("The Temperamental Interior," Harvard Design Magazine No. 43) 

©Bernard Faucon

©Bernard Faucon