City Makers and Culture Industry. Supply and Demand for contemporary architects

During the last decades city makers (investors, industries, politicians, decision makers, activists) and cultural innovators (thinkers, academics, designers, economists) have not corresponded necessarily to architects and architecture intended as professional tasks or appointments. Innovation is today more the business of scientist, thinkers than the commitment of artists, technicians, professionals (as it happened in the past during the age of princes and artists, dictators and architects). Artists/Architects’ works today seems to be prevalently floating in a state-of the art curatorial-based practice grounded in the “cultural industry” persuasion. In the global contemporary society, tackling “the rise and the grinding decline of the neoliberal moment”, through a series of policies, investments, cultural initiatives – open society, creative cities– have acted as a sounding board or as the opposing references for entrepreneurial groups as Vanke (a leading urban and rural development and living services provider in China) and investors whose names are much less known, as the one of Handel Lee a Chinese-American Lawyer and entrepreneur, but that have initiated very important and tangible urban transformation processes around the globe merging investment from US/Western world to Asia and vice versa, involving the Asian diasporas, transforming decaying monuments, urban areas and architectural heritage for the luxury and entertainment market. Of course, architects are still needed to implement the above-mentioned processes but how can they still contribute and address innovative outcomes at a leading cultural level beyond being talented craftsmen appointed by private clients? The paper will take advantage from the analysis expressed in two significant observations already published, related to two cases of “radical pedagogies” in the history of architecture: the Seminario di Arezzo in 1963 promoted by Fondazione Olivetti and The Harlem School, a non-finalized project elaborated by the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) in 1968, a nonprofit independent agency New York funded also by the Rockefeller Foundation. In both cases the dialectic relation between “independence and influence, private and public, the real and the theoretical” demonstrated the historical-social supervene of “breaking points” in which the return of architecture as autonomous art, the intellectualization of the discipline as a “cultural industry” could have been interpreted as “a gesture of political neutralization” or as the utilitarian adhesion to the winner of the moment. Is there today an upcoming or ongoing “braking point” or the need for a shift from the cities of architectural objects to a different model of surviving, living and settling, which a growing number of individuals on the Earth expects to share?