ABSTRACT
Throughout the twentieth century, Architecture came in varying degrees under the influence of radical egalitarian theories resulting from emancipatory struggles. It attempted to translate political manifestos into architectural manifestos, and in the case of the Weimar Republic and Red Vienna, it stepped directly into party politics to advance a progressive agenda. What I call the century’s ‘Architectural Project’ was based on an egalitarian idea grounded in politics of emancipation. In examining the failure of Architecture Project within the great revolutionary sequences in the twentieth century, this chapter follows Slavoj Žižek’s thesis that one has to confront the problem of fidelity: ‘how to redeem the emancipatory potential of these failures through avoiding the twin trap of nostalgic attachment to the past and all-too-slick accommodation to “new circumstance”’. This thesis underlies the methodological-philosophical method of this Manifesto. Accordingly, I argue that the Architecture in the twentieth century, dialectically entangled with its Project, was bound to fail.
