On Money

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"It is the contradictoriness of the aesthetic which only a dialectical thought can adequately encompass."‍

-Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic

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Coevolution‍

The relationship between the built environment and money is history of coevolution. As feudalism gives way to capitalism and triggers the emergence of Modernity, architecture and economics unfold, each out of the other, and produce in their wake a dazzling variety of historical tropes. Industrialization, secularization, rationalization, and the nation-state fuel Modernity, while presenting the subject with a new and difficult set of circumstances to reconcile. It is precisely the ways in which the individual conceptualizes his or her self against against the built environment and money that come to define aesthetics. Expanding on the perspective that money produces the built environment during early capitalism, and the built environment produces money during late capitalism, the subject is introduced to enrich and inform the binary, illustrating a multi-dimensional dialectical model for interrogating aesthetics. Noting that Modernity isn’t necessarily a shift from one mode of production to the next, but rather a morphological, elastic set of interrelationships that transform through time, helps us visualize Modernity as constantly evolving field within which singularities erupt and erode, inscribing themselves into historical record as events. Architectural projects, as one of the many forms of events that come to define Modernity, maintain a privileged role in history where the individual, money, and the built environment (i.e. the subject, exchange-value and use-value) all converge. Buildings then, serve as heuristic objects of historical accumulation, whose concepts, contexts, and components can be disentangled and identified as the constituent parts of a complex and contradictory history of aesthetics in Modernity.‍‍

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‍The American Artifact

In the the period directly following World War I in the United States, housing shortages caused by post-war recession were compounded by a lack of housing construction. Faced with a residential landscape characterized by “decentralized, barely regulated, and poorly coordinated” conditions,  the federal government (recently consolidated and centralized by the war) sought to reform the nation’s patchwork local mortgage lending patterns that had been established by the Laissez-Faire economics of 19th century agrarian America (Massey 23). Hoover mobilized home building capital through the Federal Reserve Banks, expanding and organizing mortgage lending on national level. Real estate groups formed across the nation and in Washington, capitalizing on the newly established market and coordinating extensive campaigns to promote home construction and ownership. Specifically, these campaigns were devoted to the proliferation of single-family detached dwellings. With the federal government facilitating mortgages to people that formerly could not afford them, and real estate groups such as the United States League of Local Building and Home Association aggressively marketing home ownership as “the safeguard of American liberties,” the American middle class is fortified as an essential feature of the United States in 20th century: the democratic political state par excellence.

The attitudes and values of the American middle class worker emerged out of the laborious domain of 19th century agricultural production and into the realm of citizenship with “a sense of dignity in belonging to the social order” (Massey 31). This idealization of home ownership as a road to self-affirmation is in fact a reification of Marxist aesthetic ideology. It is in the early 20th century American home that “the perfection of the idealism of the state [is] at the same time the perfection of the materialism of civil society.” The home, as a shared material interest between the civic individual and the state, collapses use-value and exchange-value into a total subject-affirming object. Through local citizenship, the home and its ownership resist the commodification of the built environment through supplanting the ubiquity of ground rent. Work is conceptualized not as necessary labor for earning rent money, but rather as something that leads to the ownership of the home as an immediately tangible material artifact. It is this artifact which affirms the human’s capacities and powers of production, and leads ultimately to the recovery of sensuous consciousness which is the basis of Marxist aesthetic ideology (Marxist Sublime 197). In this case, aesthetics emerges as a consequence of economics. That is, the liberalized economic impetus in post WWI America–which was initiated to reform agrarian Laissez-Faire economics–produced out of its housing policy an aesthetic ideal built upon the home as an artifact which confirms the laboring body. This phenomenon, whereby economics (money) produces the aesthetic artifact (the home, housing, the built environment), is in fact reversible, and can be illustrated in interwar Britain, where Keynes alternative treatment of the Laissez-Faire state results in a radically unique configuration of money, the built environment, the subject, and aesthetics.

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Keynesian Aesthetics

Keynes–as Britain’s foremost economist and major influencer of late capitalist economics–states in his 1925 "Essays on Persuasion":

How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and the intelligentsia who, with whatever faults, are the quality in life and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement.‍

In direct opposition to Marx’s ideology, Keynes rejects “work” and its associated materiality, arguing instead that “aesthetic refinement essentially requires a life of leisure and contemplation unburdened by the harries of toil” (Dutta 243). The ways in which this aesthetic come to bear upon his economic theory can be most explicitly identified 11 years later in his canonical book The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, in which he identifies “the propensity to consume” as an essential element to maintaining economic output, maintaining that “spontaneous optimism… and prospects of investments” ensure a diverse, healthy and organically oscillating market. This sense of excess, and emphasis on exchange-value, is a consistent cross-section through Keynes career, where he positions “the aesthetic [as] an exceptional and paradigmatic instance of the motivational forces that drive economic behavior” (Dutta 242).

Within this inverse milieu of aesthetics producing economics, the built environment seeks to recover the solidarity of the subject through the public arts, but more specifically the architecture that facilitates art as a sort of social savior. He sharpens this position in his 1936 article Art and the State: “Architecture is the most public of the arts, the least private in its manifestations and the best suited to give form and body to civic pride and the sense of social unity.” He later expands on the benefits of foregrounding aesthetics in economic theory:

The life in [England] in the realm of the arts flows more strongly than for many a year. Our most significant discovery is the volume of popular demand. . . . But the lack of buildings is disastrous. The theatres, concert galleries, and galleries well suited to our purpose, taking the country as a whole, can be counted in a few minutes. That is where money will be wanted when in due time we turn to construct instead of to destroy. Nor will that expenditure be unproductive in financial terms. But we do have to equip, almost from the beginning, the material frame for the arts of civilization and delight. (Dutta 246)‍

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Elastic Aesthetics‍

Architecture’s form, its relationship to the body, and the citizenship it promotes are therefore central to the aesthetic ideology of interwar economic policy in both the United States and Britain. However in the former, aesthetics emerge as the consequence of economics, whereas in the latter aesthetics in fact produce economics. This dualism of the aesthetic illustrates the degree to which its value, location, motivation, and consequence will shift in sync with reconfigurations in monetary and environmental parameters. This fickle tendency of the aesthetic–its ability to expand and contract with the ebbs and flow of money and the built environment–is in any case linked to the effort of the subject to recover the self through a conceptual restructuring of his or her positioning to spatio-economic circumstances. That is to say, with relationship to architecture, the amount of elasticity required by aesthetics to salvage the sensuous body is directly proportional to the magnitude of divergence between the use-value and exchange-value in any one building.

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Marx, Kant, and Late Capitalism

Following the globalization of finance in 70s, the signifier (a building’s use-value) is finally disassociated completely from the signified (its exchange value). As this realm of exchange value becoming increasingly abstract, so too does the role of aesthetics in architecture. Consider, for example, Philip Johnson’s and John Burgee’s Penzoil Place (1976). In terms of Marxist aesthetics, the object which confirms the subject must carry within it the record of the subject’s capacities and power of production (Martin 95). Johnson’s Penzoil Place denies this object-subject affirmation through a process of threefold dematerialization. First, the ground upon is not conceptualized along the material properties of its soil, or any other sensuous quality, but rather as a plot containing an amount of “fictitious capital” within the milieu of speculation and revenue through ground rent. Furthermore, the plot as a unit of fictitious capital is replicated vertically, thereby multiplying its degree of “fictitious-ness” with every floor, as the process of replication marches opportunistically into the sky. Thirdly, this extrusion of floor slabs as commodity is wrapped in the curtain-wall, which with its reflectivity and lightness denies itself recognition as a singular commodity, eroding its own materiality and opting instead to become a symbol of the commodity that it contains: rentable office space. The cleavage between the building’s form and its content is a gross insult to Marx’s sense of aesthetics, but falls into a coincidentally and strangely parallel rhetoric with Kant’s aesthetics, which demand that the judgement of a form’s beauty be separated from its social or political “interests.” It could argued that Kant would in fact find Penzoil Place to be a fulfilling aesthetic experience, given that it acquired a universal acknowledgement of its beauty. However, where this full and valid Kantian aesthetic experience slips, is in the question of whether or not the the building contains any sort of teleological sense of “purposiveness.” This unique and peculiar qualifier put forth by Kant for what can be considered beautiful is polemic in that it asks us to identify something that is by its own nature nondescript (Eagleton 205). It effectively calls into question any statement of beauty, such that it vibrates with uncertainty within the supremely judicial realm of intuition.  What is useful about the contradictions and questions contained between Kantian and Marxist aesthetics, is that they precisely outline the different faculties that we as architects use to judge, interpret, and ultimately produce buildings. It boils down to an ethical issue: does the social and political context within which a building sits come to bear upon its beauty? Architects and designers can–and do–oscillate endlessly between these value judgments, however simply being aware of them allows us to operate with greater dexterity and awareness, and understand our contemporary disciplinary landscape and phenomena.

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Works Cited:

Arindam Dutta, “Marginality and Metaengineering: Keynes and Arup” in Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century, by Aggregate (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012): 237-267.

Chapter 8 (“The Marxist Sublime”) in Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Blackwell Publishing, 1990): 196-233.

Reinhart Koselleck and Michaela W. Richter, “Crisis,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 67/2 (April 2006): 357-400.

Reinhold Martin, “Materiality: Mirrors” in Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (University of Minnesota Press: 2010): 93-122.

Jonathan Massey, “Risk and Regulation in the Financial Architecture of American Houses,” in Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century, by Aggregate (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012): 21-46