TEL AVIV.- The modernist architecture produced and marketed from the 1930s to the 1970s was received from the very outstart with ambivalence, which continues to shape its current perception. It was conceived as a form of Esperanto, a standard designed to promote equality and solidarity while addressing functional needs within the framework of modernist ideology’s “laboratory” for the construction of societies and nations. Modernist urban planning and its utopian, universal models, which imposed city planning “from above,” are retroactively viewed by historians and cultural critics as presenting a superficial “flattening” of cultural memory and as effacing singular identities. Rem Koolhaas’ colossal study “Elements of Architecture,” which was exhibited at the International Architecture Biennale in Venice (2014), presented a typological array of basic architectural elements including doors, windows, stairs, corridors, ceilings, and toilets. This exhibition may be viewed as a counter-response to modernism’s flatness and its blurring of unique and distinct features, which have increased over time. The study of these “elements” may also be viewed as a counter-reaction to corporate-style planning and to the blurring of boundaries between architectural projects devoid of an ideological agenda.

The exhibition “Production Routes” seeks to point to the richness embodied in “generic” architecture by closely examining 28 modernist methods of prefabricated construction. These unique methods were gradually formed as part of the processes of abstraction characteristic of modernist architecture, and were subsequently dispatched worldwide. Their study reveals how architecture and urbanism were charged with historical, social, and political narratives, and how the modernist vision promoted the fusion of aesthetics and politics. The peregrinations of these concrete 
panels serve as a litmus test indicative of how ideologies and mechanisms of power reached across continents and oceans. Some 170 million prefabricated residential units were constructed worldwide between 1945 and 1981 – a period when the export of industrialized building methods to developing countries was perceived as a gesture of good will in support of allies and protectorates, another tool in the arsenal of the Cold War.

During the 1980s, as dominant ideologies and political blocks began losing their power, their global impact was replaced by that of market powers and international corporations operating in accordance with financial models. Private real-estate entrepreneurs backed by investment banks came to promote large-scale projects centered on the development of generic housing, generic offices, and generic cities, resulting in an accelerated process of global homogenization. As a result, contemporary architecture appears more uniform than during the modernist age. Is there an optimistic perspective from which one can examine these generic developments? Is there a chance for oppositional forces working against hegemonic powers?

This historical “scaffolding” is represented in the exhibition by the typological study undertaken by Pedro Alonso and Hugo Palmarola, which expands the limits of the term “prefabricated building” and exemplifies its particularity by means of models produced using 3D printers. This study is juxtaposed with three additional perspectives: the artist Amie Siegel’s seemingly disinterested gaze, which presents a sampling of the generic New York architecture firms in which today’s global, 
generic architecture is produced. In this film, the sites where means of production and export are used to preserve hierarchies that shape the use of resources and the operation of markets and political regimes are revealed to reflect the structure of a factory or industrial assembly line. Stephan Trüby presents an interview with Friedrich Mielke, who developed the esoteric field of scalalogy, or the “science of stairs.” This rare historical document explores the social history of stairs and the 
relations between people and stairs. Teri Wehn Damisch and Jean-Louis Cohen present a fascinating, dialectic archival document about the hopes tied to architectural modernism in France, the illusions to which it gave rise, and their subsequent rupturing. The relations between architecture, urbanism, and planning ideologies, as well as between present and past, are examined from various perspectives. This exhibition does not aim to illuminate the past from the viewpoint of the present or vice versa. Rather, it constitutes a modest attempt to draw closer together seemingly distant phenomena, so that we may attend to their shared resonances.