What is a Monster Leviathan?
by Aaron Betsky
The Monster Leviathan: Anarchitecture collects visions of other worlds that have arisen over the last century. These might be places we imagine as proper to an unknown future, memories of the past, or territories that surrounds us every day without us knowing. Such mythic realms offer alternative ways of understanding the humanmade world we have built as a monstrous, but also more sustainable, just, and beautiful place.
The book’s title comes from a speech the architect Frank Lloyd Wright gave in 1901 at Hull House in Chicago, “The Art & Craft of the Machine.” In that short discourse, he argues for continuing the arts & crafts tradition, which imagines the emergence of communities of makers who recraft modernity bit by bit, in furniture, implements, buildings, and landscapes. This installed utopia of intentional communities remains at the core of anarchitecture, an alternative, other, anarchist version of architecture that was first name decades later by the architect-turned-artist Gordon Matta-Clark. At the end of the essay, Wright departs from his argument to imagine a “monster leviathan” that is a city, a machine, a beast, a human being, and a printing press all swirled into an organic vision of what might the Chicago in which the architect lived and worked. He proposes that the task of architecture is to breath “a soul” into this model of modernity.
Over the succeeding century, architects, artists, philosophers, and critics have imagined many other visions of what this beast might be. To some, it was an animal of creative destruction, embodied in Walter Benjamin’s “explosion of a tenth of a second,” Manfredo Tafuri’s image of all architecture reverting to pure nothing, and Arata Isozaki’s project for architecture as the “City Demolition, Inc.” For others, it was a veil, shimmering in a translucent manner over what we might imagine was our reality. In or through that veil, other possibilities could be intuited. They might not be obvious at first, and are by their very nature as ephemeral and ungraspable as “the space between the face and the mask” Henri Lefebvre posited. The monster has by its nature been a collage or assemblage: an artifice made up of the dross of daily life, transformed through the very act of hunting and gathering it into a nascent and unstable order that made sense, but only barely and in self-contradictory ways, of our reality –what Lars Lerup called a “stim” or John Hejduk drew as masques. The monster can be posited to lurk beneath every surface of our modern life, hinting at its presence through fissures in the fabric of our scenery and offering its alternative only through intimation, rumor, or fleeting glances expressed in hybrid forms.
Anarchitecture has appeared not only in the production of artists or thinkers, but also through the efforts to build community and place by groups and individuals for whom there is, because their identity is “other,” no place in the representations that dominate our global economy and culture. These bands of others continually carve out alternate realities that you can only find if you open yourself up to their existence. As each of them is either destroyed or appropriated, new ones arrive. The advent of ever more sophisticated modes of representation and storytelling made possible not only by globalization itself, but also by technology, allows such other worlds to extend their webs through both our consciousness and our lived spaces.
This book does not offer solutions, nor does it present either utopias or dystopias. Instead, it hints at possibilities. It provides other modes of architecture, some of them just waiting to be discovered, some just out of reach, while others shimmer at the edge of what we think is possible or real. Itself an assemblage of possible worlds, The Monster Leviathan: Anarchitecture is a compendium of myths of modern architecture that can be extended by the reader in both time and space.
Over the succeeding century, architects, artists, philosophers, and critics have imagined many other visions of what this beast might be. To some, it was an animal of creative destruction, embodied in Walter Benjamin’s “explosion of a tenth of a second,” Manfredo Tafuri’s image of all architecture reverting to pure nothing, and Arata Isozaki’s project for architecture as the “City Demolition, Inc.” For others, it was a veil, shimmering in a translucent manner over what we might imagine was our reality. In or through that veil, other possibilities could be intuited. They might not be obvious at first, and are by their very nature as ephemeral and ungraspable as “the space between the face and the mask” Henri Lefebvre posited. The monster has by its nature been a collage or assemblage: an artifice made up of the dross of daily life, transformed through the very act of hunting and gathering it into a nascent and unstable order that made sense, but only barely and in self-contradictory ways, of our reality –what Lars Lerup called a “stim” or John Hejduk drew as masques. The monster can be posited to lurk beneath every surface of our modern life, hinting at its presence through fissures in the fabric of our scenery and offering its alternative only through intimation, rumor, or fleeting glances expressed in hybrid forms.
Anarchitecture has appeared not only in the production of artists or thinkers, but also through the efforts to build community and place by groups and individuals for whom there is, because their identity is “other,” no place in the representations that dominate our global economy and culture. These bands of others continually carve out alternate realities that you can only find if you open yourself up to their existence. As each of them is either destroyed or appropriated, new ones arrive. The advent of ever more sophisticated modes of representation and storytelling made possible not only by globalization itself, but also by technology, allows such other worlds to extend their webs through both our consciousness and our lived spaces.
This book does not offer solutions, nor does it present either utopias or dystopias. Instead, it hints at possibilities. It provides other modes of architecture, some of them just waiting to be discovered, some just out of reach, while others shimmer at the edge of what we think is possible or real. Itself an assemblage of possible worlds, The Monster Leviathan: Anarchitecture is a compendium of myths of modern architecture that can be extended by the reader in both time and space.
