语言之城：后现代主义与数字平台的建筑学

The Irving Sandler Essay Series
Edited by Alexander Nagel

This essay series, generously supported by an anonymous donor, is named in honor of the art historian and critic Irving Sandler, whose broad spirit was epitomized in the question he would ask, with searching eyes, whenever he met someone or saw someone again: what are you thinking about? A space apart from the press of current events, the Sandler Essay invites artists and writers to reflect on what matters to them now, whether it is current or not, giving a chance for an “oblique contemporary” to come in view.

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Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter made visible what the vocabulary of “social media” often conceals: the platform is not merely a medium of communication, but a political city. Built not of stone or steel but of posts, profiles, images, metrics, and algorithms, it reveals that digital space is neither immaterial nor neutral: it is an urban environment constructed through language.

Long before social media, the architectural avant-gardes of the 1960s had imagined cities whose primary material would no longer be construction but communication. The avant-garde British architectural collective Archigram’s “Walking City” (1964) dissolved the opposition between settlement and nomadism; their “City Interchange” (1963) and Computer City (1964) imagined an urban organism continuously reconfigured by information and computation. “Environment is no longer just a matter of hard buildings,” the group wrote in 1967. The Italian collective Superstudio pushed the proposition further in New York of Brains (1971), a collage mounted on black cardboard that imagined a post-apocalyptic scenario where the city’s center was occupied by millions of bodiless brains. Twitter condenses these speculative figures into a pocket-sized phone: a portable city in which connection, cognition, conflict, and public appearance have become inseparable.

Postmodernism has too often been reduced to a repertory of stylistic quotations or decorative excesses. Its deeper wager was more radical: to treat architecture and language as two names for the same symbolic operation. “There are various analogies between architecture and language, and if we use the terms loosely, we can speak of architectural ‘words,’ ‘phrases,’ ‘syntax,’ and ‘semantics,’” wrote Charles Jencks in his famous 1977 book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture.¹ In its most radical form, the truth of this analogy was demonstrated by the equally impactful 1972 book Learning From Las Vegas, written by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour.² In opposition to the dominant modernist conception of architecture as the manipulation of a space, an expression of artistic will or of the zeitgeist—and in opposition to those who, like Sigfried Giedion, seem to retroproject this vision of architecture onto the entire history of humanity—Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour pointed out that there has never been such a thing as non-symbolic space. “Architects have been brought up on Space,” the book declared: “during the last forty years, theorists of Modern architecture … have focused on space as the essential ingredient that separates architecture from painting, sculpture, and literature. … Space is sacred.”³ The modernist conception of space “abandoned a tradition of iconology” and forgot that architecture—the act of giving form to space—has always taken place through a form of symbolic writing. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour reaffirmed “the dominance of signs over space” throughout the history of architectural practice. There can be no manipulation or shaping of space without some form of symbolic writing; there can be no space that is merely an extension and not also a sign (as Peter Eisenman would later reiterate).

Theorists of postmodern architecture distinguished two main types of symbolic architecture. The first is one in which the desire to convey a message determines the entire architectural configuration: structure, space, and function are subordinated to a symbol. This is the “duck” model, where architecture coincides with its own meaning. The second is the “decorated shed”: an ordinary, functional building whose form does not seek to directly express its content, but to which meaning is conferred through signs, images, ornaments, or emblems applied separately to the building—which is conceived as a sort of enormous urban blackboard.⁴ Space is given form in order to speak, and vice versa: every time one speaks, one must in some way not only manipulate and transform, but also impose a form upon space. Writing and architecture emerge from the same root and express the same power.

While this work has made the logic of this equation extremely clear, it is more difficult to understand the precise reasons why postmodernism sought to equate building with language: what need—at once plastic and poetic, but also political, cultural, and metaphysical—did it satisfy? And how was this identity articulated? Why, in short, was it so important to recognize that the city always speaks, no matter what? Why was it so urgent to reject the modernist belief in the existence of space, understood as something like pure extension, a pure, free, infinitely malleable reality that the architect would be called upon to shape and manipulate in a sovereign and autonomous manner?

There has been a long debate about these questions, but to summarize, one can say that the absoluteness and freedom of space constituted the main dogma of modernist architecture, which—through Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier’s Dom-ino model, and the experiments associated with De Stijl—had been able to establish the plan libre: the advent of reinforced concrete, in fact, made it possible to free oneself from the wall as a static and tectonic necessity—from which the entire construction could and had to begin—and made the floor plan the embodiment of a pure, free space, no longer bound by structural or tectonic requirements nor by cultural determinants (which allowed for and presupposed absolute plastic freedom on the part of the architect). With this, modernism was able to free itself simultaneously from two major assumptions: the totality of architectural tradition was swept away, and with it the obligation to describe its own poetics as a “style” (despite Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s attempt to define it as such) or as a rhetorical (linguistic) construct. Instead, architecture could be described in terms of technical necessity.

In opposition to the illusion of pure space—infinitely vast and infinitely malleable—as the primary object of practice and thought, the postmodern movement began—much to the astonishment of many contemporaries—by reaffirming the impossibility of avoiding history. Two books, likely the most influential contributions of the second half of the twentieth century to architectural and urbanistic thought—by a curious coincidence, published in the same year of 1966—affirmed the historical, contextual, and urban nature of architecture: Aldo Rossi’s The Architecture of the City and Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.

The first, Aldo Rossi’s The Architecture of the City, starts from a simple but profound insight.⁵ What characterizes architectural structures as urban realities is not their form or their occupation of space, but their persistence over time—their ability to endure beyond a single generation and thus beyond the use or function for which they were intended and built. It is this aspect, more than many others, that makes a building a specifically urban phenomenon rather than merely an architectural one.

It is time, not space, that defines the city, Rossi affirmed. It is no coincidence that its growth is measured less by its territorial extent than by the layering of times in the duplication of its reality within memory and self-awareness. Over time, the city grows upon itself: it acquires self-awareness and memory.⁶

It is persistence that makes architecture something anthropological: a space in which every era confronts something that surpasses and transcends it—the very fact of being human. For this reason—because of persistence, because it is part of a city and never an isolated element—architecture is not, and can never be, merely modern. Paradoxically, Rossi understands that the city is proof of the inadequacy of the modernist tradition—of its obsession with space—precisely because of its inability to conceive of time.

Time produces something very distinctive in architectural forms. While the city gives a form the capacity to endure (because it allows for the immediate transmission of a building to subsequent generations who no longer have any necessary connection to those who built it or used it), it also undeniably prevents a form from being defined solely by a function and a use. Once it becomes a monument, every form ceases to be a space suited to a function and instead becomes a sign, a symbol not only of a collective will (which built it), but also—and above all—of the city itself.⁷ Whether it is the Church of the Santissimo Redentore or the Doge’s Palace in Venice, the Parthenon in Athens, the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, or even the absent Twin Towers in New York, the Templo Mayor in Mexico City, or the city of Hiroshima itself after its destruction: even if in ruins, once they become monuments, certain architectural elements speak of much more than themselves.

According to Rossi, time transforms space into words and symbols and turns architecture into a symbolic technology that speaks by itself. Through time, urban forms become a city’s self-awareness: its way of speaking about itself and, by analogy, about all other cities. Or to put it another way, time dictates that in architecture, the symbolic function prevails over the purely tectonic and spatial one. The idea that time transforms space into signs and symbols also implies that the semantic power of these signs is always open-ended and indeterminate, because it is ready to accommodate the city’s changes over the centuries—and thus ready to signify elements that do not necessarily pertain to the city in which they are located. Over the years, Rossi would explore this symbolic capacity in greater depth, emphasizing that, in reality, the process by which buildings become symbols allows them to signify much more than the city of which they are an embodiment and a part. It is this insight that led him to conceive of the “analogous city”—the name given to his installation at the 1976 Venice Biennale. “Everything must signify many other things,” he would write in his scientific autobiography, because “nothing can be beautiful—neither a person, nor an object, nor a city—if it signifies only itself; indeed, if it signifies nothing other than its own utility.” Every form actually speaks of a thousand other possible functions; it opens up, it becomes indeterminate. “The tower of my Venetian theater could be a lighthouse or a clock tower; the bell tower could be a minaret or one of the Kremlin’s towers: the analogies are endless, when considered against the backdrop of this preeminently analogical city.” The very fact of being a symbol turns every form (and therefore every city) into “the realm of probability.” For this reason, drawing on another seminal postmodern work, Collage City by Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, published twelve years later, Rossi suggests that the most appropriate way to represent a city is through analogous collage.⁸

On the other hand, there is something that the city itself does to time. The persistence that the city guarantees and imposes on architectural structures does not merely alter their nature: it actually transfigures the substance and appearance, the meaning and form of existence of time itself. First and foremost, because of the city, the past ceases to be a purely psychological and immaterial memory and becomes not only a reality of stone, brick, steel, and glass, but also—and above all—a space within which we move and live: the city transforms time into space, inhabited space, and space that speaks (scenographic). On the other hand, since the stone and metal fabric of the past in the city is usually the same as that of the present and the future, time and the various times seem to be distinguished in the city only as different signs: if time becomes space, space in the city—as has been said—is merely a sign; therefore, time, too, is merely a linguistic, scenographic fact. To put it technically, one might say that the city thus compels time to become theater, and the past to exist only as a sign and a scenic setting rather than as an event. Theater should be understood here not only as a space of representation, but as that particular mechanism that allows what appears to be an entrance, like an actor taking the stage, to enact history in some way. Precisely because it is a sign and not an event, the past can act and repeat itself infinitely in the city. And conversely, precisely because it is part of the fabric of daily life, it never ceases to be composed and recomposed in different ways. It never stops rewriting itself.

Rossi’s arguments found an echo at exactly the same time in Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.⁹ The work presents itself as a treatise on architectural rhetoric that, in opposition to the tabula rasa approach and the stylistic monoculture of modernism, advocates the need to embrace all forms of the past in the name of the ideal “of a complex and contradictory architecture based on the richness and ambiguity of modern experience.”¹⁰ Following T. S. Eliot, Venturi argues that one cannot truly be modern while ignoring tradition. For this reason, he does not reject modernity, but seeks to reconcile it with the past and with everything that does not fit within its strictest principles. This is not a return to nineteenth-century eclecticism: the need for this inclusion of different eras in the contemporary city does not stem from a rejection of the present or from an aesthetic stance. It is the acceptance of the richness of modern life that makes it necessary to articulate a different relationship to the past: “the complexity and contradiction that develops from the program and reflects the inherent complexities and contradictions of living.” The book is one of the most profound reflections on the idea of ambiguity, in a political, semantic, and artistic sense. Ambiguity—or, as Venturi often repeats, the logic of “both-and”—is a tool for maximalist inclusion and the universalization of the contemporary city. Only insofar as it is ambiguous—that is, capable of embracing all eras—can the city open itself to the future without losing its strength and its nature.

But as is often the case with significant books, the most critical idea remains implicit. If the work establishes and analyzes with extreme rigor what might be called the rhetoric of the contemporary city, it is because it starts from the premise that history is a purely rhetorical phenomenon. On the one hand, the various forms of the past are rhetorical figures, as are the attempts at reconciliation in our times (that is, history itself); on the other hand, the coexistence of times (that is, history) is not a matter of chronology but a matter of harmony, in other words, a matter of composition. Because it is itself a rhetorical fact, and because eras are composed in a rhetorical manner, the past can be composed, just as the present and the future are. Once again, history is not a fact; it is a style. The city makes it impossible to separate oneself materially and semantically from the past; in other words, it opens history up to a continuous material and symbolic rewriting. To put it another way, a city is a place where the archive (the past) can never be protected from the present performance.

Earlier attempts to consider the relation between digital technology and urban life were necessarily framed by a different historical situation. During the nineties, when computation, electronic communication, and the internet were still emerging as distinct and relatively unfamiliar environments, the question was generally posed in terms of an encounter between two separate bodies: the built, material, historically sedimented city on the one hand, and the new domains of information, simulation, and virtual communication on the other. The figures of the cyborg, the hybrid, the cybercity, or William J. Mitchell’s “ultrabodies”—in different ways present in the work of Antoine Picon, M. Christine Boyer, and Mitchell—registered the novelty of that encounter, but at the same time preserved its underlying dualism. The digital remained, in these accounts, an addition, invasion, deformation, or dematerialization of an otherwise autonomous urban reality.

This framework was historically understandable, and it produced important insights. Yet it now seems inadequate. The issue is no longer how a technological system intersects with the built and lived world, nor how bodies might become hybridized with machines. Platforms are themselves architectural artefacts in the proper sense of the word. They are not additions to cities; they are now a form of city in which people live—more people live in these cities than in any other. They distill the basic condition of urban life as understood by Rossi and Venturi—the constant performative interweaving of the past and the present.

In digital platforms, language does not circulate through a pre-existing space; it produces the space in which it circulates. Platforms construct a common environment by determining what appears together, what can be connected, what remains visible, and what returns from the past. We are thus confronted with a city whose streets are paths between statements, whose monuments are reactivated archives, and whose institutions are the technical procedures that govern relevance, memory, and public appearance.

This is why in social media or in AI platforms archive and performance can no longer be separated. Every performance is immediately recorded, indexed, measured, and made available for future retrieval; every archival trace can be reactivated as a present intervention, detached from its original context and inserted into a new conflict. The digital city is a permanent present made of recoverable pasts. Once language becomes infrastructure, and infrastructure becomes the condition of public speech, we must learn to recognize platforms for what they are: cities. And, like every city, they must be reclaimed as spaces of collective life—freed from the purely privatized regimes that presently govern their access, visibility, memory, and the future.

Emanuele Coccia is Associate Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris.