a+t architecture publishers

"Organization: what an inexhaustible concept, both challenging and charismatic! If the notion of design, critically downgraded to a shortsighted mode of architectural practice, has come to imply the understanding of architecture as an act of embellishment and competence, characterized by immediacy and effectiveness, and driven to make the–human–environment agreeable, visually pleasant, and mild, to make it perform predictably under allegedly good intentions, domesticating what we see or sense around us–and no farther–for the purpose of softening out its sharp edges, and therefore making our supposedly unsatisfactory lives livable, I would say, to start with, that good intentions are generally as perverse as they appear to be amenable, and that the clear-cut notion of organization, as harsh and cruel as it sounds, confronts the rawness of the conditions of our practice, to say the least, straightforwardly, taking a vehement stance to radically change them from within, through the sheer force of passion, determination, and fearless intensity. Core and backbone of architecture, organization constitutes the inner exteriority of our discipline, and it is only through the will for organization that architecture accomplishes a genuine form of autonomy at the same time as it engages and potentially rules over its performance..."

Extract from the essay "Models. The Self-alienation of Organizations" by Chuck Hoberman, published in a+t 46 Organization or Design?