5 Codes: Architecture, Paranoia and Risk in Times of Terror
Igmade (eds.), (Birkhäuser, Basel, 2006)
In examining the question of architecture’s political relevance in a post-9/11 world, 5 Codes: Architecture, Paranoia and Risk in Times of Terror thankfully pushes past the question of ‘How to rebuild?’ (a query that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey seems to have resolved in the most banal possible manner) and onto the even thornier problem of how the global ‘War on Terrorism’ has altered the political and cultural landscape in which architects and urbanists operate. This expanded scope is the book’s major virtue – as well as its principal pitfall.
The book’s title refers to the colour-coded warning system developed by the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) after 11 September to inform the public of the level of threat from a terrorist attack. In the DHS scale green stands for a ‘low’ risk, blue for ‘guarded,’ yellow for ‘elevated,’ orange for ‘high’ and red for ‘severe’. The editors of 5 Codes, members of a collective called Igmade – based at Stuttgart University’s Institute of Modern Architecture Theory and Design – suggest that the codes be read as an allegory for the pervasion of the asymmetrical war on terror into every corner of everyday life, with the state choreographing its subjects’ emotional tempo by constructing threats that never emerge: a recipe for paranoia. Meanwhile the government and businesses alike assimilate the new dangers as ‘risks’, statistics to be managed and controlled.
But what is the connection between all this and architecture? The links are more suggestive than definitive. The book, which includes essays by Victor Burgin, Beatriz Colomina, Sam Jacob and Brian Massumi, as well as interviews with Noam Chomsky and the artist Janice Kerbel, takes the reader on a wild romp from pre-modern rules of architectural ‘decorum’ to postwar suburbia to Freudian paranoia to a perfect bank robbery to Pop culture monsters. As is often the case with anthologies, the contributions vary enormously in approach and quality.
The strongest articles are those that focus on discrete historical and contemporary subjects. Beatriz Colomina astutely analyses a dystopian underground home featured at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, revealing how the Cold War nuclear threat produced fantasies of hyper-interiorized spaces (and by the way, contradicting the rather glib assertion of Stephan Trüby, one of the book’s editors, that pre-modern societies found security in interiors whereas modern cultures located security in a pacified exterior). Eyal Weizman offers a trenchant critique of the politics of Israeli settlement planning, while Gerd de Bruyn traces a fascinating history of paranoid occupants of primitive huts from Henry David Thoreau to Ludwig Wittgenstein to the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski.
Regrettably, these incisive and highly readable essays are interspersed with less compelling contributions that range from the mystifyingly jargon-ridden to the trivial. The texts are also punctuated with a series of oneiric and dystopic ‘projects’ that seem to be CGI-inflated remakes of an earlier generation of ‘paper’ architecture proposals by Archigram, Archizoom and Rem Koolhaas – only shorn of their progenitors’ clarity and hence efficacy. 5 Codes leaves the reader with the impression that, while many crucial questions have been raised, much work remains to be done in thinking through the responses – and, not least, how and whether these can take an architectural shape.
Irene Cheng
