To do by washing

“I’m talking about building by demolishing, because many individuals and movements often described with adjectives like ‘progressive,’ ‘pioneering,’ ‘avant-garde,’ have put forward arguments that couldn't discard the old, even using them as a repository of wisdom to justify the contemporary. Ultimately, all of these are a kind of zombie production. This book is an effort to diagnose and discuss those zombies, those living dead. “I use the term anarchy because I want to problematize the dominant power structures, their discourses, prejudices, stereotypes, and beliefs within the field of architectural knowledge. I believe they form very weak thought constructions. And paradoxically, they owe their power to those weaknesses. They are believed, convinced, and discursive and/or design practices continue recklessly. If belief in them were abandoned, the entire intellectual construction would be undermined, and it would lose its ground. “My much more important goal is the hidden totalitarianism in architectural discourses. In most texts of architectural thought, there is talk of a totalitarian expectation that the world can be made a paradise by the architect's personal skill, and often this causes no discomfort. Such a belief, in fact, carries water to the channel extending from the imagined power of the designing subject to the uncontrolled real power of political authority. It reveals possibilities for legitimizing dictatorial claims. I can also say this: The distance between the architect's design power and the political leader's power to engage in social engineering is very short. Both long for a dictatorship to be established over sociality.” -Uğur Tanyeli-