ABSTRACT
In 1992, Francis Fukuyama published The End of History and the Last Man, one of the most discussed books of our time. In the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the former Soviet Union, Fukuyama argued that humanity had reached a certain climax in its evolution, which would lead to the triumph of Capitalism as a global political-economic system. Although his theses are debatable, Fukuyama’s book can be related to two crucial moments in the history of architecture in contemporary times. The first, in the aftermath of World War II, was marked by the utopias proposed by a new generation of architects, and the second was characterized by the new post-critical and post-theoretical reality that emerged in the last years of the 20th century. This period, which extends to the present day, had one of its most relevant moments in the early works of Rem Koolhaas. This article analyzes the historical moment in contemporary architecture, in which theoretical projects such as Exodus, the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, or The City of the Captive Globe, are already a foretaste of the idea of the End of History, the apparent triumph of neoliberalism in the disciplinary field of architecture, and that came to translate into the capitulation of theory and criticism as they were thought of in the 1960s and 1970s.
