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Excerpted from the March 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
Follow the building long enough and you’ll find parts of it starting to follow you back. You don’t have to work in the field – it happens to any interested layperson. In the past, it mainly happened through books, magazines, exhibitions, etc., but in the Internet age, it can happen every time you pick up your mobile phone. Certain images stay with you, appearing over and over again: walking cities, shattered structures frozen in collapse, post-coital skyscrapers, white grids devouring the landscape, vast hollow spheres containing the universe.
These fantasies and speculations, generated by architects over the centuries from Etienne-Louis Bray to Lebes Woods, resulted in a pseudo-canonical sloping architectural typology that could be built and keep out the rain. Although they exist only on paper or screen, often far removed from their original context and interpretation, they possess a monumental and enduring quality. They persisted.They draw people into buildings – and that was true for me too, after being exposed to the architecture of Robert Harbison as a teenager Built, unbuilt and unbuildable – and then they stalk them. For the working architect, they are endless possibilities and novelties. But they are also curiously frustrating: an itch that ultimately cannot be scratched, a hint that an answer will never be found.
Aaron Betsky is a professor of architecture, a veteran architectural institutional vizier, and a lively and original theorist.his book false flat (2004) provide an insightful and timely study of what makes Dutch design so distinctive and attractive.He has since forged a unique path towards impermanence, adaptability and ephemerality in architecture, among which Monster Leviathan: Anarchist Architecture is the latest and most substantial installment of an ambitious attempt to consider this parallel body of unbuilt and imagined architecture not only in architectural speculation but also in poetry, film and theory.
The “monster Leviathan” of the title, then, is very real, but also imaginary and cunning: a Bigfoot among rugged farm animals. Bezki discovered the term in a speech by Frank Lloyd Wright, in which the great American architect imagined the city of Chicago as “a living monster, made of flesh and veins and arteries, with pulse” […] The supreme beast, controlling everything”. Wright’s extension of the macabre metaphor evokes smoke, ganglia, and the roar of the beast, and proposes that it is the architect’s job to tame such creatures. Fantasy is therefore used to show the nature of the city and to suggest what must be done. Here, he briefly proposed that “the concept of architecture is not inherent in the building itself, but is evoked through language.”
From here, Bezki proposes “no structure”, suggesting more uncertain and open possibilities than a rigid and monolithic “structure”; this is a more anarchic approach that “confronts order and power.” , rather than affirming order and power”. This anarchic architecture of speculation, whimsy, theoretical waving, and pure art seems secondary to the real business of digging holes in the muck and constructing buildings within them. But Bezki presents it in a purer or more direct form as architecture as “architectural compromise,” in which architecture is affected and weakened by the various human, material, and climatic constraints within which it has to work.
It’s not that no architecture exists in plain sight – on the contrary, it “seems not quite an icon, not quite a complete structure, not quite a thing, but a mirage hovering just out of view.” […] These are almost real Leviathans.” This is a recurring theme in the book: the attempt to capture something “that is by definition uncaptured and undefinable, something that can only be felt out of the corner of the eye when distracted.”
Most chapters begin with the author’s extensive annotations on important moments in architectural theory, from Marinetti and Benjamin to Deleuze, Guattari and Lars Spurbrock, before Bezki attempts to contextualize the theory The subject that experts are grappling with is linked to the presumed “Leviathan.”I much preferred reading Bezki’s essay on Henri Lefebvre to reading about the actual Lefebvre experience, and this structure gave Monster Leviathan It’s a pretty useful role as a bluffer’s guide, helping them solve some tricky theoretical problems. But the recurring impression from readers is that it starts off on a steep slope and then winds its way through some of the more interesting sights.
Naturally, attempts to fit such a diverse and centrifugal field as architectural speculation into a coherent critical framework are doomed to fail. But Bezki exploits precisely the fragmented and elusive qualities of the subject. Projects like Constant’s New Babylon, which express psychogeography as megastructures, “do not formulate a single proposal but rather offer a snapshot of alternative worlds that might already exist, if only we wandered through them correctly”. Bezki shows that a glimpse of Leviathan is not a poor substitute for a good, stern gaze, but rather a “fragmented, torn, imperfect and mysterious veil” that inspires the imagination to speculate about itself and Reminding us of interesting qualities in the world.
Bezki ends by lamenting the “white marches” that have framed the book thus far and, as a corrective, dedicates an excellent chapter to the emancipatory potential of anarchism as a way for marginalized communities to create space for themselves — From the Meeting of Black Places in New Orleans to the Architecture of Women by Luce Irigaray enjoy, to Grindr. The book may end, for many, where it began: online, in the churn of web images. Here, theory pays off, and we learn what uses for noarchitecture might have beyond the intellectual realm. I felt a little frustrated, but I felt strongly that this would be a book that would follow the reader.
Leviathan by Aaron Bezki is published by MIT Press.
Excerpted from the March 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
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