The Thrown Project: Architecture and War

Abstract

This paper examines the concept of the project through a tragic but significant example, namely Albert Speer’s project. Speer, like any architect worthy of the name, does not drop his designs from some hyperuranium of creativity, nor does he confine them to a drawing board for the benefit not of the inhabitants, but of the readers; and even more, unlike a machine, he does not merely execute the prescriptions of an algorithm. It is, on the contrary, rooted in a soil. By defending himself, by digging a hole of words, by invoking devices and programmes, by hiding behind a Diktat, Speer opens up a path that will be beaten after him, that, to express himself with Heidegger, of the “thrown project,”, of the fact that all our designing is nothing but the execution of a Message from the Emperor, the submission to the injunctions of technology. But the project, if it is a project, is lagging behind the programme, and conversely a programme that is not lagging behind (the laws of nature or trains when it goes well) is not a project. The project has a constitutive delay, it always has a delay, and that is why it is the delay, it does not have a delay.