What Will the Post-Truth Era Look Like for Architecture?
This text does not aim to precisely define what post-Truth architecture will look like. Rather, it's my personal opinions formulated upon research on post-Truth art, as well as prior knowledge stemming from my experiences with art history. Sources are mentioned in the text, but also available upon request.
We are living in the “post-Truth” era; the direct consequence of post-modernity, which can be broadly defined as the “death” of modernity and “Grand narratives.” Although “post-Truth” generally applies to politics, especially in the wake of “fake news,” and “Feelings-over-facts-” rhetorics, the result of this emerging zeitgeist is starting to spill into our daily lives. Artists have already begun to experiment with what this means for art, but there is virtually no talk on what the post-Truth era will look like for architecture. Do we, as architects, design our way back to a regressed, simplified way of life, championing (the now outdated) “Truth?” Or do we embrace the absurdism of a world where the concept of “truth” is archaic, and reality is subjective for each and every one of us? I’d suggest an alternative somewhere between these two extremes.
As precedents, we can look at examples of post-Modern art – let's call these examples Para-fictional experiences, as Carrie Lambert-Beatty puts it – to try and decipher how post-Truth might echo into architecture. In a Harvard VPAL event, Lambert-Beatty brings up Para-fictional art precedents, such as Michael Blum’s house museum titled "A tribute to Safiye Behar” (2005), which was an incredibly intimate gallery of “belongings” of a fictional character that Michael Blum invented. The point of this house museum was to touch the hearts of viewers and to build a connection between them and Safiye Behar, a controversial “freedom fighter”, whom here, is presented as someone we can relate to – although Safiye Behar never existed. With this, Blum humanizes people who carry differing ideologies which many would have otherwise overlooked.
Another example brought up by Lambert-Beatty is Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena's “Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West,” (1992-93) in which they dressed as “Amerindians” undiscovered by Colombus and went on tour across Europe and the United States, making themselves a “human zoo”. This satirical performance piece directly confronted agency, voyeurism, the White gaze, White supremacy, colonialism, and orientalism, just to name a few. Here’s another: When Fred Wilson, an African American artist, was asked to do a presentation on African American art at the old Whitney Museum, he decided to do his own Para-fictional art piece. Before Wilson’s presentation, he shared lunch with the people who came to see him, left early, and instructed them to meet him at the gallery when they were done eating so that he could begin the tour. They made their way shortly afterwards, waited for him, and finally Wilson, who was dressed as a security guard the entire time, presented himself to them.
The driving force of these types of interventions can be defined as “epistemic friction.” They are incredibly powerful and pierce through problematic ways of seeing in a way which social media can never do. Jose Medina says that epistemic friction - through actual embodied encounters and specific events - can cause real disruptions that trigger the fracturing of one's “subjectivity”. Furthermore, I’ll add that these Para-fictional experiences in the real world are what is necessary to confront problematic, unilateral narratives associated with the “Grand narrative” of White supremacy. Confrontations like this are far too big to be projected onto our phone screens. Using a feelings-over-fact mantra, we can reveal the multifaceted face and nature of “Truth.” Medina also expressed his wish for society to be able to stimulate these kinds of events in our everyday lives. Is this not a casting call for architects? Imagine a world where we can explore, confront, and redefine billions of perspectives of knowledge, virtues, behavior, and the human condition through architecture.
With the death of the Grand Narrative, Post-Truth is our opportunity to implement decolonial strategies through architecture. Like post-modernism's championing of all eras, post-Truth architecture can usher ways of design otherwise seen as “primitive,” like the hundred/ thousand-year-old dwellings made by indigenous peoples across the globe, for example. I’d also add that this is our opportunity to use such “design languages” as tools for learning whilst also using them as they were intended to be used, not just pastiche spectacles for our gaze. When I say this, I think of traditional African masks used in certain areas of central, southern, and Western Africa, with peoples such as the Bobo, Bwa, and Mossi people of Burkina Faso, the Sande Society of Sierra Leone, The Dogon people of Mali, and the Nande people of Kongo, just to name a few. Each of the peoples that I mentioned have completely different uses for their masks, the only thing that they have in common is that they are not objects for our gaze. The “Truth” and supremacy of white-boxed, floor to ceiling windowed, modernist-influenced buildings will be behind us, and drown in a world clustered with a multitude of unique “Truths.” We are no longer confined to form over function and vice versa. Our technology allows us the freedom to explore feelings without compromising security, pastiche without bastardization, and homage without regression. As Jaime Hayon - an artist working to define post-Truth art - puts it, “it's about essence.”
I truly believe that post-Truth architecture has the ability to eliminate the myth of “status quo,” not through the destruction of the past, nor spangling itself in non-Western paraphernalia, but by building a rejuvenated future. We are at the apogee of post-Modernism's core values. I thank the post-Modernists for opening the door for these questions and visions to even be conceived, but it's our responsibility as post-Truth architects to walk through the door they opened for us and design new ones.
