Vidler, "Death Cube 'K'"

Within the excerpt titled “Death Cube ‘K,’” Vidler first calls attention to the work of fiction writers such as Franz Kafka and William Gibson in an attempt to draw parallels between their highly mechanized, pseudo-realities (as constructed in their short stories) with the recent work of Morphosis Architecture. It is significant he chose to illustrate work of Franz Kafka and the like because early twentieth century writers were part of a select few who responded to and against the rise of modernism within a bureaucratic society. He explains that the psychologically driven, situationally based environments that Kafka created were indeed under-theorized; the various scapes and scenarios he envisioned were a backlash to “the horror in the merely schematic” facilitated by modernist values. Vidler explores how the firm is re-evaluating terms sometimes used simultaneously, modernism and modernity, to explore the ramifications of a more critical study and possibly extract a new and avant-garde type of modernism.

It is significant that Vidler chooses an early twentieth century novelist to shed light on where our society is headed both sociologically and conceptually within the realm of architecture. The questions and vivid imagery present in the work of Kafka (and perhaps even more so in the work of EM Forster and Raymond Chandler) strikingly anticipate many relevant issues present in our contemporary existence. Like the term associated with architects Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi in the 1980s, their hyper-realities were a deconstruction of modernism and the infatuation with speed, technology, and identity.

Morphosis harbor the dream of “liberating space” and concern themselves with reconstituting the private realm back to the public. One of the ways in which they attempt to do this is via an investigation of typology. Vidler states that while the emergence of the model and the type (as pertaining to architecture and put forward by Foucault) were once a concern among architects practicing in the 1960s, “the word ‘type’ itself has…become an almost extinct term.” I found it particularly interesting that both the office building “type” and the apartment house “type” has remained objectively static. Presently, the architects at Morphosis are concerning themselves with typology to question fundamental spatial organization. How has it translated from the era of Foucault and is this translation valid? How has the advancement of technology from industrialism transformed both what we can create physically (or, well, digitally) and how we react to those conditions psychologically and socially? How can it inform contemporary design?

Reading a Kafka excerpt and EM Forsters’ “The Machine Stops” makes me feel simultaneously uneasy and enthralled. It completely mind-blowing to realize that a century ago, Forster (maybe the grandpa of cyberpunk?) wrote a short story about what is essentially a virtual reality “pod.” How can you anticipate such a contemporary conceptual idea? Vidler alludes to Forster’s hindsight, saying that Kafka was writing “through the lens of a traditional sense of disaster and redemption.” Certainly, he saw the negative repercussions that technology brought about while writing during the First World War.

Vidler uses Kafka as a framework for contemporary discourse about Morphosis because it was he that first articulated a dilemma that faces both theorists and architects: what is “new” and how do we invent it without the reliance on the form of the “old?” Kafka surmises that both trajectories (Vidler recounts Benjamin’s description of elliptical foci) can coexist, albeit as fragmented and broken. It is here that the connection is made between the former appraisal of modern life and the formal geometries present in the work of Morphosis.