Architecture at the Edge of Political Time. 1980s Context

This paper aims to evaluate architecture in relation to its position within the political time of the 1980s, through an analysis grounded in the social context of the period. This decade can be understood, on the one hand, as a moment of peak theoretical and practical development of postmodernity in the West, and, on the other hand, as a time of intensified constraints and restrictions on freedom in countries under the influence of the Soviet bloc. Consequently, in both contexts, filtered through their specific ideological frameworks, architecture may be interpreted as a direct expression of a political time, structured around two major registers: progressive politics and reactionary politics. The former will analyse the social moment within the Western context of neoliberal administrations that push architecture towards progress and competitiveness and in which quintessence becomes fragmentation and pluralism, while the latter will position the social moment in countries under socialist regimes in relation to technological development and a romanticized nationalism, both used as instruments of propaganda and mystification of the official regime. This dynamic gives rise to a causal binomial — official versus alternative — the latter emerging as a form of cultural liberation in the face of the regime’s oppression, lacking an autonomous language, unfolding within the limits of reactionary politics. In both situations, political time and ideological time become a matrix of socio-economic elements that dictate architecture as presence, memory, and perception, which in turn act as an active tool for formulating metanarratives that intrinsically influence the political-ideological time.