Capitalism's Influence on Architecture and Urban Form

Introduction

Architecture is subconsciously affected by contemporary ideology. In the recent past, it has been shaped by capitalistic thought, as evident in "Manhattanism," where congestion and hyper-density mark Manhattan's growth in the early 1900s—precisely when people embraced capitalism and applied its ideas of supply and demand, uniformity, and scale to the built environment. This paper describes how architecture has been affected by capitalism, discusses whether that influence is good or bad, and explains how architecture has lost its agency and come to follow the direction of the contemporary political economy.

How Architecture Is Affected by Capitalism

The famous dictum of Louis Sullivan holds that form ever follows function. Tasked with creating skyscrapers that could represent the capitalist impulse at the driving heart of American life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Sullivan sought to produce buildings of scale while simultaneously elevating public consciousness by enhancing his works with aesthetic beauty. However, as time wore on and the more aggressive characteristics of capitalism prevailed, form became increasingly the slave of function. The capitalist ideology overtook architecture.

What is the capitalist ideology? Essentially, it centers on the idea of a free market in which private owners produce goods and services to compete with others in the marketplace. The goal is to obtain a profit through fair competition. One of the major flaws of capitalism is that it can lead to excessive risk-taking, rampant greed, and corruption via cronyism. Adam Smith believed that so long as people act virtuously in the marketplace, capitalism should function sufficiently well. However, the whole of human history is a story of virtue competing with vice, and in many instances vice has a devastating impact on that story. Capitalism provides no safeguards or guarantees against vice. Indeed, the vicious zero-sum game often played in global capitalism is evidence of this rather serious flaw.

In architecture, Manhattanism is linked to capitalism in terms of its excessiveness. Koolhaas refers to this excess as hyper-density or as a "culture of congestion." New York City is the best example of Manhattanism because of its dense, mixed-use buildings, which offer both vitality and chaos in the urban setting. Manhattanism was an effect of mass transportation, real estate speculation, and the rise of the dense vertical city. Richard Ingersoll states that in New York, "municipal authorities imposed the limit of the 'floor area ratio' of future buildings to 12:1 and proposed five different prescriptions for the heights of street facades according to the type of street." Laws requiring stepbacks for large commercial buildings were implemented to allow a modicum of daylight to reach street level. It was this combination of towering commercial skyscrapers in an urban jungle of block units that characterized Manhattanism—and it is the chaotic intertwining of the gargantuan and the exotic with the mundane and the insipid in a densely populated and developed urban setting that effectively captures the heart of Manhattanism.

As capitalism has spread around the world, so too has Manhattanism in architecture, with major cities on a global scale adhering to the architectural model provided by New York City. The architecture in New York City reflected the various growth stages of capitalism in the twentieth century, starting with the first skyscrapers developed at the end of the nineteenth century—often built by big business leaders in steel, finance, and consumption, but designed by the leading lights of architectural practice. Neo-Gothic, Art Deco, Modernism, and Post-Modernism all followed in turn over the decades, reflecting a changing ethos under the capitalist umbrella. All of these design movements have in turn contributed to the concept of Manhattanism. Critics view Manhattanism as the architectural representation of capitalism's inherent flaws, with Manhattan itself acting as a "nonstop consumption palace pushed to the extreme, which to its many critics can only lead to inevitable disaster or eventual decline."

According to Koolhaas, Manhattanism is an architectural laboratory wherein metropolitan living and architectural experimentation come together in a collective environment, supplanting the natural environment with a kind of factory of man-made experience. Manhattanism promotes the fantasy of a man-made world, totally divorced from nature. The density, ecstasy, and blueprint of its architecture are rooted in the idea of modern capitalist culture—in which people have the freedom to compete, to excel, to own, and to create in myriad and often chaotic forms that are nonetheless grounded in a systematized grid allowing the experience to develop.

Capitalism is directly tied to the development of technology, and it is technology that has enabled Manhattanism to thrive. The first great example of the influence of capitalist thought on the built environment is Coney Island in New York at the end of the nineteenth century. It was the development of new bridges and transportation in Manhattan that allowed Coney Island to be created. The electric lights, the fanfare, and the idea of an island offering a unique man-made experience represent Manhattanism in its embryonic stage. The Coney Island Bridge Company created the first artificial connection between the island and the mainland in 1823, and railroad tracks followed a few decades later. Coney Island attracted visitors intent on seeking pleasure, and in the final quarter of the nineteenth century a 300-foot tower was erected—the Centennial Tower—from which Manhattan could be viewed. The tower symbolized for Coney Island all the collective energy and self-consciousness that embryonic Manhattanism had to offer.

The creation of the iconic Brooklyn Bridge then made Coney Island even more accessible and more important, giving city dwellers a way to reach both the idyllic natural setting Coney Island offered and its mix of urban fanfare. But instead of suspending the urban characteristics of Manhattan, Coney Island intensified them by becoming its own mecca of technological marvel, with its gravity-defying architectural towers, railroad loops, and eventually the roller coaster. Luna Park in Coney Island became an electrified wonderland of towers and lights, with a lake at its center reminiscent of the lagoon at the center of the Chicago World's Fair. In this manner, Coney Island became an architectural amusement park. But as Koolhaas notes, it suffers from the same "self-defeating laws" of capitalism: "it can only skirt the surface of myth, only hint at the anxieties accumulated in the collective subconscious." The synthetic experience of Coney Island reflects the dream of American life and pleasure—but underlying it is the danger of the capitalist beast, capable of escaping and overtaking one at any moment; for that beast represents the perils of vice—greed, cronyism, and exploitation—which haunt the capitalist ideology just as the flaws of Dr. Frankenstein haunt him in the person of the monster he created. For the socialist writer Maxim Gorky, Coney Island represented the freak culture of capitalist America: "an absurd jungle of straight lines of wood, a cheap, hastily constructed toyhouse for the amusement of children." In other words, it was architectural distraction—nothing serious or meaningful with respect to the sublime.

Another example is the Art Deco Chrysler Building in eastern Manhattan. Completed in 1930, it stood as the tallest building in the world at the time of its completion and remains the tallest brick-and-steel-framework building in the world. It was itself a product of competition—emblematic of the capitalist ideology—conceived by Walter Chrysler, head of Chrysler Corp., to rival the Empire State Building. With New York having become the most populated metropolis in the world by the 1920s, it stood to reason that a figure of Chrysler's wealth should represent this massive concentration of capital and population in architectural terms with a building symbolizing the economic boom of the early 1900s. The race to create the world's tallest building was no different from any other race in a capitalist economy to create the biggest and best product for consumption. The winner obtains bragging rights and brand equity. When the developers of the Empire State Building learned of the Chrysler plans, they added more stories and an observation deck to their tower, ultimately claiming bragging rights over Chrysler upon completion.

A third example is the Twin Towers, completed in 1973. These towers represented the glories of capitalism in the latter half of the twentieth century. Until the completion of the Sears Tower in Chicago, the Twin Towers at 110 stories were the tallest buildings in the world. As the World Trade Center, they were the heart of financial capitalism in New York—iconic emblems featured in hundreds of films. Yet rectangular, oblong, and monotonous, they also represented the soul-deadening, monolithic enterprise of capitalist thought: a nondescript beast towering over everything, intent on dominating and consuming whatever it could in order to be the winner in the world's zero-sum game of monopoly.

Is Capitalism's Influence on Architecture Good?

The argument can be made that capitalism's influence on architecture is good because it creates an atmosphere of competition in which designers, developers, builders, and visionaries come together to produce grand works of architecture. As Owen Hopkins notes, "architects have traditionally been the mediators of this process, working to ensure that the public effect of a building is a positive one." It was Sullivan who, seeing the problems that modern architecture presented in terms of aesthetic value, recognized the great challenge of producing a form that served the building's function—capitalism—while still providing aesthetic value for the good of the public. To some extent capitalism has enabled this to happen. Works such as the Chrysler Building possess their own aesthetic value, typify the Art Deco style of the early twentieth century, and stand tall as icons of modern architecture. Were it not for capitalism's influence, such a building never would have been produced.

Yet the Chrysler Building is unique because what makes it appealing is the fact that it was created at a time when focus was still given to form. Although the capitalist spirit motivated its creation, the art and style of architecture still existed and had not yet succumbed to the materialistic insistence of capitalist enterprise. In a few decades, the art of architecture would be hammered out by capitalism, as residential and commercial buildings gave up all pretense of aesthetic value and saw their contribution to the public good in wholly utilitarian terms. But at the outset, capitalism allowed architects to flourish in new ways with grand designs.

This happened because there was plenty of money to invest in large projects like the Empire State Building or the Chrysler Building. But even by the 1970s one can see that tall towers such as the World Trade Center had moved far from the style and aesthetic of the 1920s. The Twin Towers were monolithic and interesting only because two of them stood side by side, like twins. Outside of that singularity, there were no embellishments, nothing of any artistic significance—only steel and glass concealing the financial dealings of the operators within.

Thus, for a short time, capitalism allowed the art of architecture to flourish. But as with Coney Island, the art was often garish and superficial. Sullivan attempted to enhance the concept of the skyscraper by giving it some semblance of aesthetic value. Without capitalism, the opportunity for such an initiative would never have been presented. Capitalism was the driving economic force of the times, and it is how the money was made. That money sought expression in architecture in big ways—to show off—and enough principle and insistence upon style still carried over from preceding eras to prevent a soulless form of architecture from developing all at once. In time, however, architecture became crippled by the cost-focused building decisions of developers.

Conclusion

Architecture over the years has subconsciously lost itself to capitalism, and this is due to the fact that the culture bred by capitalism is materialistic and dominating. The art and style found in the architecture of the early twentieth century still possessed some of the old-world culture, which emphasized grace, harmony, and beauty. Yet the political economy that developed—culminating in the symbolic architecture of the Twin Towers—eliminated that emphasis. The germ of this destructive path can be found in Coney Island, which represents Manhattanism in its embryonic stage: a chaotic mass of man-made experience, replacing nature with inelegant behemoths of design and technology.

Today, developers and real estate industrialists dictate architectural discourse. Rem Koolhaas's Manhattanism is an example of how this phenomenon transpired: it began with speculation and development, was supported by advertising, travel, technological advancements, and the deployment of capital for the purpose of creating a man-made experience. Now, that experience is less and less human because it is less and less attached to the natural order and beauty of the created world. It is a distortion of the form of architecture, which now follows only a purely material function.

Architecture today serves no purpose but to profit those who pay for it. Yet the architecture of the past served to profit the public through its aesthetic beauty, its cultural significance, its societal support, and myriad other ways. Today, architects must work for the developers and tycoons, industrialists and magnates who have the capital to support building projects. Their interest is not in serving the public good through architecture but primarily in serving themselves; thus, architecture is killed through suffocation, and the vitalizing spirit of architecture is lost because there is no way for form to follow this kind of function.