160. Modernism’s Magic Hat with Ijlal Muzzafar
Original Drawing by Tori Haynes
Today, we are joined by Ijlal Muzzafar who is a professor at RISD and author of Modernism’s Magic Hat: Architecture and the Illusion of Development without Capital. The book is M’s thesis on how modernists in the post-war era invoked and worked with the concept of development to produce a re-imaging of development as a process of self-actualization without real sizeable investment of capital.
Timestamp Outline
4:22 Modernism’s Magic Hat: Architecture and the Illusion of Development without Capital by Ijlal Muzzafar. What is the illusion that you are talking about?
4:53 IM’s thesis of this book, “Soft Bricks, Hard Mortar of Immanence: Thinking through Other Figurations of Architecture and Development”. How to account for decolonization without accounting for centuries of loot and quoting the Marxist economist Utsa Patnaik.
6:26 Colonization drained material wealth and modernism was an impossible project? How do you make a nation-state seem plausible? This is where modernism acquired a different function, and the argument is that this is purposeful fiction.
8:52 The different scenario in Europe of what modernism had to encounter and the Marshall Plan as a counter point. “Development is defined—in both cases in Europe and the colony—as a problem of design. Design can do it better, and modernism is a way of designing. ” IM
9:25 Designing means to put things in sequence based on efficiency to create certain relationships to allow change to happen. Money in relation to the post-Marshall Plan Europe, and why is the question of “where is the money?” brought up in the colonizing world. Modernism in this scenario would play a new role in how to generate the welfare state itself.
11:05 Why was the question of money not asked in the case of the post-colonies/decolonization where it was asked in the case of Europe? The epistemology, what concepts came in at the time which made it seem plausible that there was no need for money and a system of forgetting.
12:18 “Perhaps what was operational was a modernist hubris that we delivered industrialization in the West, some sort of modernism, that we could deliver to the rest of the world.” VP
The institution of self-generation and self-reliance, the first decade of development, and the move on to the next stage.
13:41 “United Nation itself calls the first decade as the ‘lost decade’. In the end, there is a magic hat in the development of Europe and America: they had colonies that funded.” IM
Forget about the big, let’s start capturing the small and making it big. This is where modernism gets somewhat of a “second life”, and this is how to capture the decolonized body and defining the decolonized laborer.
15:57 Small is Beautiful E.F Schumacher was like a bible to Aditya Prakash, who worked with Le Corbusier and the making of Chandigarh. Produced urban proposals and essentially did what IM is talking about, producing new legitimation of the modernist project via a valorization of the colonial body. The center piece of the new urban proposals was manual labor and glorify the person rather than think of them as the problem. VP
17:15 “Small is beautiful, but you have to account for all the years when big was beautiful” IM quoting Schumacher. A certain way of same language and belief in modernism can be used to surface complexities (big modernism produces this waste, but what do we do with it?). Also mention Rickshawala and the life of the complexities, the “Jane Jacobs” post-modernism in the West, and the post-colonies.
19:59 Are you reading liberation theology, Schumacher, and this whole idea of the decolonial body as a magic trick? The subaltern never knows. “Not yet modern, no longer traditional.” IM
The motivation of the bodily: Houses are something they are looking for (to shelter the body). It’s pointless to convince people to save, but they will save for the house because it’s for the body.
23:26 The agency of the architect/the modernist architecture thinks, Charles Abrams book Man’s Struggle for Shelter in an Urbanizing World, a need for shelter, the model state, modernism 2.0 and the question of a savior?
26:07 “The theology is that what the theology maintains the periphery; both in and out. That is the biggest trick, as it promises liberation, but it doesn’t. Give them depth because your body needs it but never make them question the terms of the debt.” IM
27:02 How does this play into Pakistan’s development and Pakistan’s history? How did everything play out in Pakistan in specific? Self-help project of refugee settlements, and conversation about IM and his experience with the refugee settlement projects.
32:53 “De-centralization and open-endedness and open growth becomes incomplete modernism and becomes a technology to sustain power and continue this unending growth and self-generating growth” IM
Modernism 2.0 means keeping the population in limbo using the fiction of their own self-generative power to imagine and control the future at any point they want. A master plan that is open-ended.
37:28 Does the modernist project die here, or is there a modernist 3.0? Between 2.0 and 3.0, it seems that new generation architects who valued the poor in the Third World, and it’s taking a new aesthetic simplifying complexities and attempts to use untapped resources. The present of architecture is to make the complexities of the present apparent.
43:37 “On one hand, it seems like just an aesthetic conceived. On the other, it seems like an obfuscation of reality” VP
A system of knowledge not just made of concepts but also materials (example: brick = opaque). The gap between these two opens multiple ideas, such as the tropical architecture artifice (tropical modernism). The ontology of the brick as a blind spot or vanishing point, and “architecture allows it to come in a certain way that it can explain and become almost transparent in connecting economics around it” IM
46:11 The real architects in the world are economic systems? IM argues that the architects need to resist; “not only will it help you with this but can also do other things” IM
Architects as truth-sayers, and that we offer friction
Modernism is a design project, it must have an idea of how things can be done beyond critique. If you aren’t doing that, you are doing something else besides modernism. VP
48:13 The work of architecture as doing these critiques in IM’s book, and the book is an example of doing that critique.
49:11 Are there any architects anywhere working in way that you would call “truth-saying”?
52:16 How do you bring all this into your teaching pedagogy? What are the general architectural pedagogies of this critique? Students find examples in the real world and use the complexities in their designs and their theses.
“The whole idea of the modernist traditional symbolism is one of unifying. We have not developed a language speaking of absences.” IM
57:46 What is IM working on now? Ijlal Muzzafar 2.0 thinking about short stories and scenarios
