Until the End of the Word

Thinkers of the Architecture world, and of the arts in general, love to play with the notion of the “end,” often associated with death, which in turn is easily reflected in the modernist concept of tabula rasa, fueling the avant-garde spirit of twentieth-century architecture. From Duchamp to postmodernism, art—and architecture—seems to sustain itself and its social function by playing with the progressive disruption (an “end”) of every representational code, continuously questioning the very possibility of existing and having agency in the world. In the middle decades of the second half of the century such permanent condition of de-construction was embodied by a leading architecture tendency, gaining most of its allure and authority by the close dialogue/collaboration with philosophers. This essay discusses how such design attitude has also come to an end. The reasons for this shift are to be found in two main areas. The first is today’s Weltaanschuuung—the cultural and anthropological condition we live in, compared to the final decades of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first. This can be examined by looking at how philosophy and its sister disciplines are reacting to these new conditions, gradually distancing themselves from architecture. The second is the loss of a set of protocols that once governed the relationships between theory, practice, and representation, as well as the loss of philosophy as the main partner in defining these protocols—an arrangement that had existed since Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790).