Project Vicissitudes. Private ironism and critique of ideologies

Abstract

The virtual discredit of the modern notion of “project” as a rational achievement of an emancipatory political telos emerges as a
counterface of the persistent reduction of the project exercise to the significant plan of representation resources, an aspect that
is possible to recognize, symmetrically, in the particular way of exercising the typical postmodern theoretical reflexion. Thus, the
emptying of the ends of the project after the preoccupation for the means seems to coincide with the apparent critical radicality
of deconstructivist ironism that, having become today the common sense of the self-promotional writing of the “architect-
entrepreneur”, has not done anything but exercise a strong discursive depolitization of the discipline. Precisely, postmodern ironism
as an “ideology” needs to be thought of and fought against from a field that recognizes itself as resistant to its influence, at the time
of demanding, urgently, the repolitization of the project notion by means of a critique of ideologies. Only the public vocation of the
university would seem to have the necessary conditions for a new meaning of this nature, reclaiming the modernist inspiration of the
architectural project.