ABSTRACT
Elaborating on the fundamental theses advanced by the French philosopher Alain Badiou in his groundbreaking book entitled The Century, this chapter argues that architecture must face the twentieth century in its various conceptualizations. As the chapter argues, it is evident that to investigate the Architectural Project from a philosophical, political, and diagnostic perspective aimed, as Badiou might say, at the common measure between architecture and its time, means rejecting the various historical narratives of ‘twentieth century architecture’ put forward by generations of liberal and conservative historians of ‘Modern Architecture’. Missing in all these accounts, as the chapter explicates, is the philosophical-political conception of the century’s totality, from which the radical emancipatory core of the Twentieth Century’s Architectural Project can be recognized and understood. It then advances a second declaration of this manifesto: that every emancipatory project is a failed project that must be repeated.
