Abstraction is a Privilege
Geographer Doreen Massey chose to start her book For Space (2005) by describing the encounter between Moctezuma and Cortez in 1519. Massey proposed that each leader saw a different landscape as they strolled Tenochtitlan together, because they had widely different ideas of time and space. Moctezuma was immersed in that space; an authoritarian leader, yes, but one who did not separate himself from all the people, goods, and lands under his government. Cortez, on the contrary, developed the ability to remove himself from all that history in order to see only space that could serve his goals of riches and power (Figure 1). Massey argues that modernity reduced space to a surface, removing any trace of depth that would come from understanding its multiple temporalities, its history. Such separation between geography (understood as homogeneous surface) and history (or histories), she continues, is the key paradigm shift that followed the European occupation of the Americas, commonly known as abstraction.
Figure 1. Map of Tenochtitlan and Gulf of Mexico, attributed to Fredrich Peypus, 1524. Courtesy of Newberry Library via Wikimedia Commons.
In architecture schools, we teach our students that the process of design abstraction was developed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Figure 2). Most of us, however, do not mention the European occupation of the Americas as an intrinsic component of that process. It is a disciplinary consensus that abstraction is the main component of the modern process of architectural design. The very process of slicing an object into plan, section, and elevation is a process of reduction. Design is about discarding information in order to be able to manipulate what we consider the essence. But what if the treasure lies in the information discarded? One would never know that the baby was thrown out with bath water if they never understood that there was a baby to begin with. My point here, learned from contemporary scholars who engage indigenous knowledge in an effort of epistemic decolonization, such as Robin Kimmerer and Gloria Anzaldua, is that the rise of abstraction in the sixteenth century killed relational processes that we urgently need to bring back to the table. In the case of both the built and the natural environments, the rise of abstraction as the only possible tool of analysis supported the tragic idea that white male homo sapiens rule, and everyone not-white, not-male, and worse, not-sapiens, should be at their disposal.
Figure 2. Albert Durer, Der Zeichner des liegenden Weibes, Underweysung der messung, ca. 1525, published in 1538 by Hieronymus Formschneider. Courtesy of Berlin Staatliche Musee via Wikimedia Commons.
Architectural scholarship has scores of books and articles about abstraction, almost all enthusiastically defending it as a core component of design. I learned from David Leatherbarrow, Kate Nesbitt, and Anthony Vidler that abstraction is the main pillar of modernity. I agree. What I do not agree with is that abstraction was invented in Europe and “brought” to the Americas. Five hundred years after the fall of Tenochtitlan and almost four hundred after the Cartesian synthesis of cogito, ergo sum, Massey joined Angel Rama, José Rabasa, Walter Mignolo, Camilla Townsend, and many other scholars in locating the rise of abstraction as a consequence—not a cause—of the European occupation of the Americas. Architectural scholarship has not yet adequately dealt with the impact of such encounter. The large majority of architectural scholarship until very recently completely ignored the Atlantic encounter or minimized its role in European developments, the exceptions being Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Clare Cardinal-Pett, and myself.
The abstraction that is so important for every architect after the Renaissance is manifest in the very process of descriptive geometry associated with Gaspar Monge in the eighteenth century but which in reality can be traced back to Albrecht Durer’s Underweysung der Messung mit dem Zirckel und Richtscheyt from 1525. What Cortez was doing in Tenochtitlan was simultaneously being codified by Durer in Nuremberg: mathematical formulas used to describe space were instrumental for controlling lands across the Atlantic. This is no coincidence and decolonial theory has stressed over and over that everything called modernity was deeply influenced by the European occupation of the Americas as discussed by Dussel and Mignolo. Patricia Seed reminds us that the Portuguese used points located by observing the skies as both a mapping device and an argument for possession. Ricardo Padron tells us that the new conception of abstract space “rationalized the known world according to the principles of Euclidean geometry.” This process of abstraction allowed the European powers to make the world apprehensible in ways that it had never been before.
“Abstraction had been a tool of coloniality and inequality since the world-system . . . took shape in the sixteenth century, and architecture is deeply embedded in this process.”
Abstraction is the quality of dealing with ideas rather than events, or something that exists only as ideas. The key question here is, which facts have been elevated to the realm of ideas and which facts have been discarded? Modernity was created when we abandoned any relational knowledge and adopted a superficial (what occurs on the surface) understanding of space in which the controlling white man is removed from it, and every non-man and non-white being is reduced to an object to be plotted and thereby controlled. Abstraction had been a tool of coloniality and inequality since the world-system (as defined by Quijano) took shape in the sixteenth century, and architecture is deeply embedded in this process.
Beginning design education uses abstraction to separate students from everything they knew before and immerse them with a new set of values: architectural values. Once delinked from any previous spatial relations, studio pedagogy teaches them to master abstraction, almost always discarding any site context or content in order to manipulate only geometry. Site plans do not register community life. Contours do not tell the history of the land. Plans and sections are arbitrary devices that force behaviors on people. Those are the Janus-faced powers of architecture: it could be used to envision a better world but 95% of the time it is used to reinforce the status quo. If architects can bring relational knowledge back into design, they might escape their tradition of elitism and exclusion. Abstraction is the most pervasive form of privilege.
Can we ever subvert that?
Author’s note: I borrow the expression “abstraction is privilege” from my University of Texas colleague Larry Speck who coined it during a conversation.
