ABSTRACT

In this manifesto, the author takes a leap of faith. It is a faith in Lost Causes. He asserts that today, architectonic reason has fallen into ruins. As soon as architecture leaves the limits set to it by architectonic reason, no other path is open to it but the path to aestheticism. This is the wrong path contemporary architecture has taken. In its reduction to a pure aesthetic object, architecture negatively affects the human sensorium. Capitalist consumer society creates desires by generating ‘surplus-enjoyment’ for capitalist profit and contemporary architecture has become an instrument in generating this ‘surplus-enjoyment’, with fatal consequences.

This manifesto is thus both a critique and a work of theory. It is a siren, alarm, klaxon to the current status quo within architectural discourse and a timely response to the conditions of architecture today.

chapter 2|17 pages

Facing the twentieth century

chapter 3|23 pages

In praise of the failed project

chapter 4|17 pages

Nihilism

chapter 5|17 pages

Nietzsche and the architect

chapter 6|13 pages

Architectonics

chapter 7|16 pages

Universality of reason

chapter 8|14 pages

Building and Aufhebung

chapter 9|17 pages

One divides into Two

chapter 10|15 pages

End of utopias

chapter 11|16 pages

The emancipatory hypothesis