(BQ) Part 2 book "Architecture and capitalism" has contents: Manfredo Tafuri, Archizoom, Superstudio, and the critique of architectural ideology; the varieties of capitalist experience; spectacular failure - The architecture of late capitalism at the Millennium Dome,.and other contents. | Chapter 6 The varieties of capitalist experience Simon Sadler During the formative years of today’s senior architects and educators in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the architectural discipline faced seismic developments in political economy and culture. The global west’s post-war boom—that Golden Era of Capitalism, as it is sometimes called in the United States or, as it is has since been recalled in France, the Trente Glorieuses1—was met by its rejoinder from the New Left and the counterculture. Architectural education was drawn to the way that the New Left and counterculture habitually located political consciousness close to architecture’s disciplinary heart in design, aesthetics, and everyday life. The situationists, based in Paris, and the hippies, congregating in the West/Southwest of the US, advanced analyses of the political economy of space and suggested tactics for its transformation. Their theses intrigued the architectural discipline to the same extent as they threatened the discipline’s extinction. After 1968, partly in response to counterculture, the architectural discipline did indeed de-emphasize rote technical training and service to the booming post-war military industrial complex. Architecture schools reconsidered the making of the architect and architectural culture. But the discipline also prevented design from becoming the instrument of total revolution that the counterculture demanded. Rather, the cleft between capitalism and counterculture, in which architecture was wedged by the late 1960s, prompted the discipline to reassert its relative autonomy from political economy. It was a sort of non-alignment that allowed architecture to pose as a “third way” out of the impasse between capitalism and counterculture, much as counterculture earlier suggested a way out of the Cold War impasse between capitalism and communism. This shared historical calling—as a sort of Hegelian play of contradictions— points to architecture and counterculture’s .
