Browsing by Author "Wharton, Annabel"

In this dissertation, I present the ways in which architecture was used to perform citizenship in post-colonial Singapore from 1965-2015. During the first fifty years of independence, architects, alongside other artists and activists, contested the restrictions and exclusions of de facto and de iure citizenship through alternative proposals for the urban built environment. I make the case for an alternative architectural history based on those buildings which are excluded from the canon by virtue of their being unbuilt and rejected projects. Through archival research and interviews, I provide an historical narrative and visual analysis of these alternative proposals for architecture and politics. I argue for an understanding of both citizenship and architecture’s agency as performative. I begin with the Singapore Planning and Urban Research (SPUR) Group’s proposals and continue with examples its co-leaders’—Tay Kheng Soon and William Lim—alternative unbuilt projects. The rejection of these architectural projects by the state reveals the rejection of the postcolonial social democratic politics on which they were based. This evidence demonstrates the continuity between British colonial control and one-party planning. I conclude that these architects were the forefront of envisioning and advocating for an alternative democratic ideal. Their contributions paved the way for visual and performing artists as well as civil society organizations to continue contesting the state’s oppressive politics.

“Political Postmodernisms” argues that postmodern architecture can be radically rethought by examining its manifestations in Chile and Poland in the 1970s and 1980s. Postmodern architecture tends to be understood as politically indifferent and devoid of the progressive agenda embedded in modernist architecture – a view typically rooted in the analyses of North America and Western Europe. By investigating the cases of Chile during the neoliberal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and Poland during the late socialist Polish People’s Republic, my project unfolds a less acknowledged narrative—one in which postmodernism is profoundly entangled with the political. Drawing from interviews I conducted with a range of Chilean and Polish architects, as well as analyses of physical buildings, urban development plans, and architectural journals from Santiago and Warsaw, I show how these South American and Eastern European sites reveal an altogether different dynamic between capitalism, democracy, and architecture.

The dissertation is composed of an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion. The Introduction discusses the current revivalism of postmodernism and its critique, tracing the roots of this criticism in foundational scholarship on postmodern architecture, and analyzing how postmodernism is defined in architectural scholarship. It also discusses why Chile and Poland are chosen as case studies. The first chapter, “Postmodernism and the State: Chile,” discusses propagandistic uses of postmodern architecture by Pinochet’s regime in Chile, using two case studies – the Plaza de la Constitución in Santiago de Chile (1980) and the Congreso de Chile in Valparaíso (1987). The second chapter, “Postmodernism Against the State: Chile,” examines the practices of architects who were members of CEDLA, an independent collective of Chilean architects established in 1977 in Santiago, who promoted a version of politically and socially engaged postmodernism that could counter Pinochet’s neoliberal agenda. Chapter Three, “Postmodernism and the State: Poland,” analyzes how the Polish Socialist Party first appropriated postmodernism as a Soviet invention and then used it as a means to appease social tensions in times of increasing unrest. It focuses specifically on state-sanctioned architectural discourse and the Na Skarpie housing estate in Kraków (1985). The final chapter, “Postmodernism Against the State: Poland,” discusses Polish architects organized under the Dom i Miasto group (1980–1984), which united postmodern inspirations with agendas that opposed the vision of society imposed by the Polish People’s Republic. It also discusses the work of Marek Budzyński, for whom postmodernism created a “third way” beyond socialism and capitalism.

Across these chapters, I argue that Chilean and Polish architecture between 1970 and 1990 complicate the generally accepted view of postmodern architecture as politically disengaged and as an exclusively neoliberal phenomenon, disinterested in any progressive social agenda. In both countries, postmodern currents were appropriated by the regimes for propagandistic purposes and used to oppose the agendas of the State.

In 1278, the Franciscan Order of Piacenza acquired a large piece of land in the center of the city. The land had been confiscated by the commune when the property's former owner had been exiled several years earlier. However, that land was occupied by at least eleven other private and commercial tenants, including the jurisdictions of five different parishes. The friars immediately set to work demolishing the houses, and sealing off the site with a high enclosure wall. They then began construction on a large church and convent. The impact on the economy of the parish churches in loss of charitable revenue was immediate. One month into their project, a representative of the Bishop and Chapter of the Cathedral arrived at the site and denounced the friars in the name of the harm it was inflicting on the surrounding parishes. The friars ignored the warning and the result was their excommunication. Four years later Pope Martin IV sent three delegates to investigate the Franciscans' actions. The inquest that followed was recorded in a detailed manuscript that is preserved in Parma's Archivio di Stato. The document records the testimony of eighteen witnesses, including parish priests, neighboring lay people and workers on the building. Their testimony and the accompanying documentary material allows us to reconstruct the alteration to the economic and urban fabric of the parish community caused by the Franciscans.