Alejandro Zaera - Well Into the 21st Century The Architectures of Post-Capitalism?

It was 1998 when the editors of El Croquis invited me to produce a text that would explain contemporary trends in global architecture at the beginning of the 21st Century, which resulted in 'A World Full of Holes',1 an analysis of the state of the art in (global) architectural practice. These notes emerge from my response to the same question almost 18 years later, well into the 21st century. Much has changed since then: In 1998, El Croquis was perhaps the prevailing vehicle of expression for the model of global architectural practice that the star system had established. It is worth remembering what had been happening simultaneously on a larger scale: the USSR had been in decay for almost a decade; the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal had just begun, after President Clinton’s successful stint at market fundamentalism; the Eurozone was in the making; China had effectively submitted to capitalism; and the dot-com bubble was about to explode.

Fast-forward to 2015: Dezeen (with an average of 287,000 daily visits), ArchDaily (with an average of 132,000 daily visits), and other online publishers have dwarfed conventional 'circulation' for all of the various design print journals, whose best-selling issues might sell around 30,000 copies at best. The European Union is cracking up, Putin has turned Russia into a dictatorship, the Islamic State controls wide stretches of Syria and Iraq, and China has overtaken the US as the world’s leading economic driver. Some believe that the end of capitalism has begun and we are entering post-capitalism.2 The tunnel vision that supported neoliberal market fundamentalism, globalization, etc. has risen to a flat horizon without orientation: we have been thrown back into history just when we thought it was over, although some believe that we are now in the age of the 'extreme present', where 'de-narration' becomes our new collective form-of-life. While it somehow survives today, the star system in architecture is consistently blasted, and has not been able to reproduce itself. The predominance of the global, techno-corporate machine is over.

Neither the editors of El Croquis nor myself are particularly impressed by the turn of events, probably for different reasons: they mourn the death of the canon and human self-consciousness; I mourn the death of the markets and the interruption of our seamless ride into the post-human. But that is the state of affairs, and this is an attempt to analyze the new situation and try to find the positive side of what otherwise feels like a much less exciting world.