ABSTRACT
Under the two headings of historicity and totality, this essay outlines a different take on periodization and revisits the contemporary state of center-periphery architecture. Drawing on the diachronic nature of architecture’s relation to the past, it posits the concept of contemporaneity and the aesthetic turn to the spectacle as a third tier to the well-known two-tiered historical periodization, the Classical and the Modern. This classificatory mode positions modern architecture’s universality in the concept of frame, contrary to the classical discourse on Orders. The tectonics implied in the proposed three states of objectivity will be taken to demonstrate the ahistorical dimension of architecture’s contemporaneity. In addition, given the capitalistic urbanization prevailing on a global scale, the frame’s tectonic order introduces a collective common mediating between the long history of modern movement architecture and the immediacy of the present temporality, which has attained global attraction. These claims have geopolitical connotations: whereas the Orders’ presumed universality had currency within western civilization, modernization has deployed the frame to promote modernism in geographies peripheral to Euro-American centers. It thus inflicts the local experience of temporality. These observations reaffirm the necessity to discuss the state of architecture in non-western nations anew and critique the totality structured by global capitalistic modernization. The argument foregrounds the geographic variable expanding the historiography of architecture beyond the modernist notion of the zeitgeist. Another contribution relates to the short-sightedness of essentialist interpretations of the Heideggerian concept of dwelling. The following pages highlight the work’s capacity to exhibit the interplay between locality and totality and the idea that contemporaneity is to be measured in its dialogical rapport with formative themes of modern architecture. What this does mean is that criticism of the contemporaneity of architecture is not comprehensive if it does not reverse the telescopic regime of temporality disseminating from the old center. I am proposing an analogical deconstruction of the structure of the panopticon wherein the gaze of the center is also locked into the look of the other, double hunting in which each side of the equation deterritorializes the other’s temporality.
