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Roemer Van Toorn 
No More Dreams? 

The Passion for Reality in Recent Dutch Architecture . . . and Its Limitations 

It was once not considered foolish to dream great dreams. Imagining a new, better world energized thinkers and spurred their resistance to the status quo. Now Utopian dreams are rare. Instead of chasing after elusive ideals, we prefer to surf the turbulent waves of free market global capitalism. In our wildly prosperous First World-brimful of computerized pro­duction, technological and genetic applications, and commercial and cultural entertainment-reality can seem more exciting than dreams. Some even main­tain that the ideals we strove for in the past have now become reality: according to Third Way politics, the neoliberal economic engine simply needs a bit of fine-tuning; late capitalism is the only game in town: although social rights and a measure of equality are needed, globalism can only be accommodated. According to this free market fundamentalism, utopian attempts to change society lead to dictator­ships. Not only conservatives think this. Neo-Marxists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that the organization of resistance in the margins is no longer necessary now that resistance is active in the very heart of society. They believe that late capitalism is so complex and dynamic that it is capable of switch­ing automatically from an alienating equilibrium of control into a potentiality for multiple freedoms. Everything is changing much faster than we ever imagined it could. Until the 1980s, mainstream cul­tural institutions condemned the transgressive oper­ations of the avant-garde, whereas today they sup­port and favor trangressive works, because they gain publicity from scandal. Time and time again, global capitalism has shown itself capable of transforming its initial limitations into challenges that culminate in new investments. One important consequence of this is that earlier forms of social criticism and social engagement are outmoded. Thus many reflective architects believe that it no longer makes any sense to spend time constructing new ideologies or criticiz­ing "the system." Instead, they draw inspiration from the perpetual mutations of late capitalism. During a symposium on "The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century" held at Columbia University, Sylvia Lavin, chair of the UCLA graduate department of architecture, uttered the provocation that architecture ceases to be "cool" when it clings to the critical tradition. Nor is hers a lone voice; a whole cohort of American commentators is anxious to move beyond critical architecture. One form of criti­cal architecture-exemplified by the work of Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind, Diller + Scofidio, and Bernard Tschumi-offers comments within architec­tural/social discourse and avoids looking for better alternatives in reality. The Frank House by Eisenman, for example, forces the couple living in it to think about the psychology of their cohabitation by plac­ing a slot in the floor between their beds. Robert 
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Somol and Sarah Whiting have argued provocatively that we should stop burning our fingers on this kind of "hot" architecture that insists on confrontations. Whiting and Somol discourage an architecture born out of pain or the need to sabotage norms. Instead architects should initiate "projective" practices that are "cool." (Why the word projective? "Because it includes the term project-that is, it is more about an approach, a strategy, than a product; it looks forward [projects], unlike criticality, which always looks back­wards," according to Sarah Whiting in an email.) While Whiting and Somol focus foremost upon American critical architecture that has been valorized by theories of deconstruction, Critical Regionalism in Europe, Asia, and Australia-exemplified by the works of Ando, Hertzberger, Siza, and Murcutt-tries, out of disgust with contemporary society, to overcome estrangement, commodification, and the destruction of nature. Critical Regionalism does not strive to make difficult or playful comments on society but to invest in alternative spaces far from the wild city of late capitalism. It hopes to locate moments of authenticity-to calm the mind and the body-in order to survive in our runaway world. While critical architecture deconstructs the discourse of architec­ture, demystifies the status quo, and/or locates alter­native worlds in the margin, it believes that con­structing liberating realities in the center of society is impossible. 
In contrast to both deconstruction and Critical Regionalism, Whiting and Somol's proposed "projec­tive practices" aim to engage realities found in spe­cific local contexts. Instead of hanging ideological prejudices (derived from utopian dreams or from criticism) on built form, the architectural project, in their view, must be rendered capable of functioning interactively. With a projective practice the distanc­ing of critical theory is replaced by a curatorial atti­tude. This new paradigm in architecture, to para­phrase Dutch writer Harm Tilman, presupposes a continuous focus on the method (the "how") that leaves the "what" and the "why" undefined. By sys­tematically researching reality as found with the help of diagrams and other analytical measures, all kinds of latent beauties, forces, and possibilities can, pro­jective architects maintain, be brought to the sur­face. 
These found realities are not only activated by the projective project, but also, where possible, ideal­ized. If all goes well in the realization of a projective design, the intelligent extrapolation of data, the deployment of an aesthetic sensibility, the transfor­mation of the program, and the correct technology may activate utopian moments. But the utopianism is opportunistic, not centrally motivating. Whereas projective projects are chiefly discussed in the United States, architects in the Netherlands, in other European countries and in Asian have for some time been pursued in practice. Before we look at some examples, we must pause to consider the nature and failure of it predecessor, critical architec­ture. On the one hand, projective practice is inspired by personal and strategic motives. After all, if you want to succeed in a new generation, it's a good idea prevodi 
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to contrast your own position with that of the pre­ceding generation. On the other hand, the critical tradition has itself handed projective architecture the arguments against dreaming totalizing dreams, against designing speculative systems that offer a comprehensive picture of what reality should be. 


Disenchantment 
Between the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the 1970s, many architects came to the conclusion that Modern architecture, rather than fos­tering emancipation, encouraged repression and manipulation. The depressing discovery that hope­ful dreams can end in nightmares prompted promi­nent members of the architectural community-Kenneth Frampton, Manfredo Tafuri, Aldo Rossi, and Aldo van Eyck, among others-to mount a recalcitrant opposition to the commercial and populist city. They believed that instead of being a prisoner of moderni­ty, architecture should mount continuous opposition to capitalist society. Quite apart from the fact that it operates in the margins of society and is often reserved for the elite, the creativity of critical archi­tecture depends on dealing with very things it finds repugnant. 
As Theodor Adorno remarked, "Beauty today can have no other measure except the depth to which a work resolves contradictions. A work must cut through the contradictions and overcome them, not by covering them up, but by pursuing them." The void in the Jewish Museum by Daniel Libeskind in Berlin memorializing the Holocaust is an example of the beauty Theodor Adorno is after. The horror of Fascism as a dark shadow of disaster present in this void gives the museum its symbolic meaning. Jean Nouvel avoids critique through the creation of sym­bolic meaning conveyed obliquely through form. Nouvel wants to break the enchantment of our medi­atic world with a strong and strange presence that leads to a kind of seductive contemplation. His objects are unidentifiable, inconsumable, strange. This uncanny architecture must be developed, according to social theorist Jean Baudrillard, to reach the inexplicable, a reality so ineffable that it can counteract the oversignification of everything in our culture of transient junk images. The alien language of Nouvel's architecture has the aura of nothingness, or, in the words of Paul Virilio, of a mute and silent space in radical opposition to the surfeit of our design culture. Instead of the negation of our broad cultural situation found in the work of Daniel Libeskind or Jean Nouvel, Diller + Scofidio, as ana­lyzed by Michael Hays, "produce a kind of inventory of suspicion. They capture the salient elements of a given situation 'or problem,' register them, and slow down the processes that motivate them long enough to make the working perceptible, just before the whole thing again slips back into the cultural norm, beyond our critical grasp." Critical Regionalism, another form of critique, is a reaction against the rootlessness of modern urban life. It seeks durable values in opposition to our cul­ture of mobility (it is no coincidence that Critical Regionalists see the car as a horror). Critical Regio­

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nalism locates its resistance in topography, anthro­pology, tectonics, and local light. It doesn't look for confrontation, as do Eisenman, Libeskind, Nouvel, or Diller + Scofidio, but is critical in its withdrawal from urban culture, and in its self-questioning and self-evaluating. According to Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, its place-defining elements have to create a distance, have to be difficult, and should even be dis­turbing to overcome the regional illusions of the familiar, the romantic, and the popular. Critical archi­tecture supposedly does not compromise itself since it tries to dismantle or distance itself from the logic that leads to exploitation. Yet, because of its constant need to unmask the forces to which it is opposed, it is condemned to engage at the scenes that threaten its effectiveness. As such, critical architecture is more reactive than proactive. 
Critical architecture in general rests on a self-affirm­ing system of theoretical and ideological convic­tions: "Look at me! I'm critical! Read me!" Somol and Whiting rightly remark that critical architecture pro­ceeds from a preconceived legibility. It is an archi­tecture that brooks no alternative interpretations. Unless the critical theory and vision are legible in the object, the object fails. Critical architecture is opposed to the normative and anonymous condi­tions of the production process and dedicated to the production of difference. Criticism reveals the true face of repressive forces, and this view of power is supposed to promote political awareness. Criticism is critical architects' only hope. Much of this criticism is concentrated in formalist and deconstructive the­ory and has a textual and linguistic bias. Other criti­cal positions, such as those of Aldo van Eyck and the early Herman Hertzberger, and of Critical Regio­nalism, try to create alternative worlds, "utopian islands" floating in seas of anonymity and destruc­tion. 
Although I have much sympathy for Critical Regio­nalism, it is too nostalgic for a lost, mainly rural land­scape, too comfortable and marginal, too much in love with architecture (rather than the life that archi­tecture can help script). Preferable, it seems to me, are works that operate with and within society at large and that set a collective and public agenda in direct communication with modernization. The victi­mology of critical theory leaves no room for plausible readings capable of completing a project in the mun­dane context of the everyday (including that of alien­ation and commodification). Estrangement must not be thought of as something to overcome, but as a position from within which new horizons can open. Although the urban, capitalist, and modern everyday is pushing towards increased homogeneity in daily life, the irreconcilable disjunctions born in a postin­dustrial city full of anachronistic interstices make it impossible to think of modernization as only nega­tive. Michel de Certeau's work confirmed the impos­sibility of a full colonization of everyday life by late capitalism and stressed that potential alternatives are always available, since individuals and institu­tions arrange resources and choose methods through particular creative arrangements. Often crit­ical experts and intellectuals prefer to think of them­selves as outside everyday life. Convinced that it is corrupt, they attempt to evade it. They use rhetorical language, meta-language, or autonomous lan­guage-to paraphrase Henri Lefebvre-as permanent substitutes for experience, allowing them to ignore the mediocrity of their own condition. Critical prac­tices reject and react unsubtly to the positive things that have been achieved in contemporary society, such as the vitality of much popular culture, includ­ing its hedonism, luxury, and laughter. 

After critique 
Instead of assailing reality with a priori positions or resistance, as critical architecture does, projective practices analyze the facts and, in the process of cre­ation, make micro-decisions capable of transforming a project in concrete and surprising ways. The archi­tect waits and sees in the process of creation where information leads him or her. As Michael Rock recent­ly remarked, "Much of the strange shapes of recent 
Dutch architecture can be attributed to the devotion to the diagram, and the authorial absolution it grants. By taking traditional Dutch pragmatism to absurd, deadpan extremes, the designer generates new, wholly unexpected forms. Some of Droog Design embodies this absurdist-hyper-rationalism. The designer simply continues to apply the system until the form appears in all its strangeness. Dutch design seems intent on erasing the sense that any designer imposed any subjectivity." The touchstone here is not subjective vision but an addiction to extreme realism, a realism that is intend­ed to show no theoretical or political mediation, a kind of degree zero of the political, without thought about the consequences of the social construction it would lead to in reality. The extreme realities the pro­jective is obliged to confront are the cyborg; the information society; the global migration of money, people, and imagination; shopping; fashion; media; leisure; and the coincidence of the enormous effec­tiveness and absolute abstraction of digitization. In other words, this practice brings to its extreme the consequences of the processes of commodification, alienation, and estrangement that constitute the contemporary motor of modernity. For projective practices, dreaming is no longer nec­essary, since even our wildest dreams are incapable of predicting how inspiring, chaotic, liberating, and dynamic reality can be. The intelligence a project is able to embody in negotiation with reality is what matters. According to the proponents of projective practices, involvement, even complicity with given conditions, rather than aloofness, is more productive than dreaming of a new world. Projective practices respect and reorganize the diverse economies, ecologies, information systems, and social groups present during the process of creation. Projective architecture also promotes a return to the discipline in a pragmatic and technical approach that takes account of the interdisciplinary influences that play a role in the realization of projects. Central to projec­tive practice is the question of what architecture is able to express as material reality. The paternalistic "we know best" attitude that has long hindered criti­cal architecture is a thing of the past. And architec­ture is allowed to be beautiful without any tortured worrying over accompanying dangers of superficiali­ty or slickness. We no longer have to say "sorry," according to Robert Somol. Often projective archi­tects, like Foreign Office Architects, have no idea what they seek except apolitical architectural knowl­edge driven only by technology and instrumentality. Others speak about beauty (the theme of the 2007 Documenta exhibition in Kassel), technical knowl­edge, and in some cases bottom-up self-organizing systems. 
The question now is what projective practices can affect in actuality. From my perspective, they come in three basic types in many recent realized projects in the Netherlands, types that display "projective autonomy," "projective mise-en-scene," and "projec­tive naturalization." As we shall see, projective auton­omy confines itself primary to models of geometry. Projective mise-en-scene and projective naturaliza­tion, by contrast, experiment with architecture as infrastructure. Projective autonomy tries to restore contact with the user and the contemplator through passive experience, while projective mise-en-scene and projective naturalization seek interaction. While projective autonomy is interested in form-what the aesthetic by its own means is able to communicate-the projective mise-en-scene seeks the creation of theatrical situations, and projective naturalization seeks strictly instrumental and operational systems. In the practices in the Netherlands I am about to dis­cuss, architects are not theorizing their work as "pro­jective"; rather they are practicing and making in ways that fit this American concept. 

Projective autonomy 
The architecture of Claus & Kaan, Rapp + Rapp, and Neutelings Riedijk reveals what I am calling "projec­tive autonomy." The meticulously crafted forms (a return to the discipline) characteristic of their projec­tive strategy offer comfort and reassurance. Projective autonomy revolves around the self-suffi­ciency of tasteful, subdued form, which, notwith­standing the vicissitudes of life or passing dreams, is in theory capable of enduring for centuries. In many cases it appears as a modest architecture that com­bines functional, economic, and representational requirements in an efficient, aesthetic, and sustain­able manner. The preference for tranquility and har­mony, for aloofness from change, means that in pro­jective autonomy we are dealing with a convention­al or limited projective practice. Projective autonomy is not concerned with movement, complexity, or any of the other dynamic processes that can be used to legitimize projects, but with relatively stable cultural and economic values. 
Rapp + Rapp work with received architectural lan­guage, with the internal structure of architectural typologies as the residuum of the historical and the contemporary city, very much in the spirit of the early less figurative work of Aldo Rossi, Hans Kollhoff, and Colin Rowe. Thus the foyer in Amsterdam's Bos en Lommer district is a variation of the classic atrium typology. For Claus & Kaan, the organizing principal is not historical typology but the typographic auton­omy of a building—I am referring not so much to the architects' fondness for letters and numbers as to the way they "interspace" the building-to the rhythm of thick and thin spaces by which the individual ele­ments, from the smallest detail to the entire volume, are ordered. Just as the typographer selects his type­face and searches for the most appropriate spacing, so Claus & Kaan deal in a craftsmanly and repetitive manner with windows, columns, doors, facade pan­els, and volumes. They pursue a conventional archi­tecture that inspires confidence and eschews contro­versy, that is about mass, boxy volumes, light, beau­ty, and style. Radical chic and subversion are defi­nitely not goals for them, but their buildings do pos­sess some minimalist chic. The abstract language and meticulous detailing lend their buildings a self-satisfied, stylish gloss. The floating black bar with its sleek banded pattern in the main facade of the Municipal Offices in Breda reveals a certain kinship with the elegant profiling of Bang & Olufsen design. Minimal chic glosses over vulgarities with its abstract perfection. 
While the buildings of Rapp + Rapp and of Claus & Kaan behave decorously and seriously, fun is given plenty of running room in the work of Neutelings Riedijk. No puritanical architecture for them, but instead good strong shapes that tell a story. Architecture, like television, comics, and other mani­festations of popular visual culture, must communi­cate with the public. In the case of Neutelings Riedijk it is once again possible to speak of "buildings with character." Neutelings Riedijk strive for dramatic effects that offer the viewer an "everyday architectur­al surrealism." Their buildings are dramatis personae that have stepped into our carpet metropolis, turn­ing their heads to survey their surroundings. Buildings in the landscape become part of the the­ater of life, although the leading player here is not the user but the architecture. Neutelings Riedijk are interested not in life itself, but in the autonomy of the decor against which it is played out. Their buildings may be brooding, robust, humorous, even bizarre. A critical architecture would use these powerful char­acteristics to sabotage the language of architecture or the norms and values of society. The "pop art" of Neutelings Riedijk, unlike that of Andy Warhol for example, is free of ulterior motives. Their buildings are intended to be autonomous characters, to radi­ate a unique and subversively entertaining identity that we will not easily forget. Such narrative sculp­ture is ideally suited to the branding game so loved by clients and cities. 

Projective mise-en-scene 

In the projective mise-en-scene approach favored by MVRDV and NL Architects, the user becomes an actor invited to take an active part in the theater choreo­graphed by the architects. In these projective prac­tices, projects are not to be contemplated; rather they throw reality forward through the help of sce­narios inspired by the theatrical programs the archi­tects write based upon the data they find within con­temporary "extreme reality." Because nobody really 
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knows what the "appropriate" response is to the unprecedented degree of innovation and uncertain­ty in this reality, observing its many mutations "neu­trally" is seen as essential. In the projective mise-en-scene, the city is one huge datascape. The architects use a method based on systematic idealization, an overestimation of avail­able clues in which it is possible to integrate even mediocre elements. The program of requirements, which sometimes seems impossible to comply with, is followed to the letter, as are the complex and strin­gent Dutch building regulations. But an experiment with the real world remains the basic aim: in the mar­gins and gaps of late capitalism these architects hope to foreground unclassified realities easily seen as parts of the ordinary world, while turning them upside down by means of theatrical performances. Usually theatrical performances allow us to dream of other worlds. Not so the theatre of MVRDV and NL Architects: after observing and charting our dynamic society, they go in search of new shapes which, with the help of an inventive program and a fresh aesthet­ic, cater to actual and everyday demands of use. They turn life into an optimistic and cheerful play that gen­erates new solutions while making jokes about our constantly mutating reality. Giving the flat roof of the bar in Utrecht an added function is not just a clever use of space; by putting a basketball court on the roof of this student bar, NL Architects also achieve a delightfully absurd juxtaposition of two quite differ­ent milieus. MVRDV makes "endless" interiors in which diverse programs are compactly interwoven. The architects call them "hungry boxes," boxes hun­gry to combine different programs in a continuous landscape. Whereas Neutelings Riedijk create repre­sentational forms that tell a story at one remove from the user/observer, MVRDV translate the program into a carefully choreographed spatial experience that incorporates the user into science fictions hidden in the everyday. When you stack all the village libraries from the province of Brabant in one huge skyscraper with the looks of an updated tower of Pisa and make individual study rooms into elevators zipping up and down the facade of books, the user suddenly takes part in a futuristic mise-en-scene. With NL and MVRDV, we can justifiably speak of spec­tacular effects, of "scripted spaces" that steer experi­ence (especially via the eye) in a particular direction. While NL makes jokes and develops a trendy lifestyle typology without bothering too much about provid­ing the design with a data-based, pseudo-scientific alibi, MVRDV looks for new spatial concepts capable of giving our deregulated society the best imagina­ble spectacular shape. 
In projective mise-en-scene, it is not the autonomous force of the type, of chic minimalism, or of expressive decor that is given free rein-as in projective autono­my-but the daydreams alive in society. Objects are not important as things in a projective mise-en­scene; they are there to be used as a screen onto which fragments of our extreme reality can be pro­jected. (On the Dutch pavilion at the Hannover world expo, MVRDV projected all kinds of Dutch data cliches-the artificial landscape, the dunes, tulip prevodi 
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fields, a forest, and windmills.) As in the social sci­ences, objects are seen as the carriers of everyday culture and lifestyle. The architecture is a co-produc­er in the embodiment of cultural and social meaning. In projective mises-en-scene, everyday life is magni­fied by the spectacular decor that the architect assembles from data that reproduce the hidden logic of contemporary society. Instead of continuing to hide the more than sixteen million pigs in thousands of pitch-roofed bioindustry barns spread over the picturesque countryside of the Netherlands, MVRDV proposes that it is more efficient and animal-friendly to house pigs in high-rise flats in the harbor of Rotterdam. Suddenly-without any value judgment-the facts that there are more pigs than people in the Netherlands and that pigs can be happy in high-rises with a view-looks plausible. The shock effect of such a surreal and pragmatic mise-en­scene-like the Benetton billboards by Olivier Toscani with an AIDS patient dying in a living room-will immediately grab our attention. But if this bewilder­ing realistic mode of representation is interested in either a better world or in exposing our Brave New World remains uncertain. The fables that lie hidden in the everyday are made visible by MVRDV's oppor­tunistic imagination and make users into leading actors, as in the "Medical Center Pajama Garden" in Veldhoven. Instead of hanging around the sterile corridors and other introverted spaces typical of a hospital, patients can relax in their pajamas day­dreaming of the Mediterranean among olive trees and other surreal "Mediterranean" set pieces. Dreaming about utopias has lost its appeal. The everyday is so rich in fantasies that dreaming of a dif­ferent world outside the existing one is no longer necessary. Like Steven Spielberg, architects must provide new representations that everyone can enjoy. Entertainment first confronts you with dystopias (e.g., sixteen million stacked pigs), then guarantees a happy ending by glossing them over with "pragmatic solutions" ensuring conformity. The attitude is the putatively cool "Whatever." 


Projective naturalization 
The limitation of projective mise-en-scene is that, while it is busily projecting meaning onto things, it forgets that things can themselves convey meaning, can be sensitive and active, and can activate process­es in both the eye and the body. That performative capacity is at the heart of practices that follow the route of what could be called "projective naturaliza­tion." In the Netherlands, projective naturalizations have been developed by, among others, Oosterhuis.nl, UN Studio, Maurice Nio, and NOX Architekten. They featured largely in the recent "Non-Standard Architectures" exhibition in Paris. Projective naturalization is not about signs, mes­sages, codes, programs, or collages of ideas project­ed onto an object, but about technologies that allow matter to be performative. 
Architect Lars Spuybroek of NOX is not interested in technology as a way of regulating functions and comfort. He sees it as a destabilizing force whose function is to fulfill our craving for the accidental by 

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providing a variety of potentialities and events. "With the fluid merging of skin and environment, body and space, object and speed, we will also merge plan and volume, floor and screen, surface and interface, and leave the mechanistic view of the body for a more plastic, liquid, and haptic version where action and vision are synthesized," he writes. What geology, biology, and even history have taught the architects of projective naturalization is that mutable processes generate far more intelligent, refined, and complex systems than ready-made ideas ever can. This non-conventional architecture comprehends many shapes and schools. What these manifestations have in common with nature is that the shapes they pro­duce exhibit similarities with the structures, process­es, and shapes of biology. The properties of these buildings change in response to changing condi­tions, just as nature does. A facade is not simply a shell, but a skin with depth that changes in response to activity, light, temperature, and sometimes even emotions. 
A blobbish interactive "D-tower" designed by NOX is connected to a website at which the city's inhabi­tants can record responses to a questionnaire, designed and written by artist Q.S. Serafijn, about their everyday emotions: hate, love, happiness, and fear. The answers are graphed in different "land­scapes" on the website that show the valleys and peaks of emotions for each of the city's postal codes. The four emotions are represented by green, red, blue, and yellow, and determine the colors of the lamps illuminating the tower. Each night, driving through the city of Doetinchem, one can see which emotion is most deeply felt that day. A host of meas­urable data and technologies gives rise to a sophisti­cated metabolism that, as in Foreign Office Architects' Yokohama Terminal, channels the flows of people, cars, ships, and information like blood cells through and near the organism of the building. The project tries to function without obstacles or other complications and avoids communicating cul­tural meaning through shock, as does the work of MVRDV. 
Projective naturalization projects are not rough or unfinished like many projective mise-en-scenes, but smooth and fluid. It is not ideology but the (wished for) instinct of artificial organisms that ensures that complex processes are operating appropriately. Buildings are intended to function like bodies with­out heads following complex biomechanical logic. When Foreign Office Architects exhibited their Yokohama terminal at the Venice Biennale, they showed sections of a body scan parallel to the one of the terminals, suggesting that the logic of a building should resemble the body's. The foreign presence of forms generated by the "genetic manipulation" of data and technology in projective naturalizations helps prevent instant categorization of these proj­ects as good or bad, beautiful or ugly. Judgment is deferred. The building rebuffs immediate consump­tion as symbol or myth; instead it invites people to use it, to interpret, to enter into relations, to step into a stream of stimuli organized by matter. More than ever a building is able-by means of the new digital design methods and computer-controlled produc­tion of complex 3D elements ("advanced prototyp­ing")-to behave like an organism. In contrast to projective mises-en-scene, projective naturalizations are not interested in projecting sce­narios onto objects related to society, religion, power, politics, globalization, or individuals. Projective naturalizations possess a super-functional­ity that revolves around movement, self-organiza­tion, and interactivity. The intelligence of the project does not reside in a capacity for reflection, in offering a representation for or against something, but in activating open processes that can supposedly func­tion automatically in accord with the flows of the sta­tus quo. Projective naturalizations are about modu­lating precise and local decisions from a mechanistic perspective interested in open, self-organizing sys­tems that allow flows of consensus to follow their dif­ferent trajectories with the aid of an advanced con­struction processes. Grand dreams and other para­digms-except those of advanced technology and design expertise-are of little relevance. While con­centrating on organic abstractions, projective natu­ralizations totally neglect the fact that every appro­priation of a project depends on narratives of use-is about the interaction between social behavior and a given objective condition. What projective natural­izations tend to forget is that our social actions and behavior, not our biological bodies, constitute our identities. 

Larger ambitions 
Breaking with criticism, a passion for reality and a return to what architecture as a discipline is capable of projecting are essential to make the most of the many possibilities inherent in the "second moderni­ty." Instead of predicting the future, we have to be attentive to the unknown knocking at the door. Projective practices also demonstrate that the ques­tion is not whether architecture should participate in late capitalism. That is a given. But what form this relationship with the market should take is an ethical and political question that cannot be curated only in pragmatic, technical, or aesthetic terms. The projective practices described here create spaces cut from the same cloth as the garments of the ruling systems. As such they confine themselves to forms of comfort enjoyed in particular by the global middle class. Apart from fear of confrontation with the unknown, the chief concerns of this middle class are the smooth processes that guarantee its rights to power, individualism, career, identity, luxury, amuse­ment, consuming, and the infrastructure that makes all this possible. 
This totalitarianism of difference, of individual rights-celebrated as the "multitude" of neoliberal­ism-overlooks the fact that it is essential to pay attention to the collective interests of the world pop­ulation (including that of the transnational middle class). Instead of the paradigm of difference, we should vivify a paradigm of sameness and supra-indi­vidual responsibility. Culture is now all about diversi­ty, flexibility, and the search for permanent novelty and effect that a project initiates, about how an object can relate to the market as an open supposed­ly neutral platform. This is a strategy without political ideals, without political or socio-historical awareness, that is in danger of becoming the victim of a dictator­ship of aesthetics, technology, and the pragmatism of the blindly onrushing global economy. Instead of taking responsibility for the design, instead of having the courage to steer flows in a certain direction, the ethical and political consequences arising from the design decisions are left to the market, and the archi­tect retreats into the givens of his discipline. In that way, all three projective practices described here are formalistic. 
The positive thing about projective practices is that in the making of a project, under the influence of the material, the economy, the construction, the form, the program, the specific context, and with the help of architectural knowledge and instruments, projec­tions can be tested and developed. In the very act of walking, projective practices create their paths. In the making of work, reality projects itself. What these projective practices fail to see, however, is that utopian dreams are necessary in order to develop in a project a perspective that reaches beyond the status quo. I am not suggesting that utopian dreams can be realized, but that such dreams provide frames of reference for political action. Utopian dreams also enable us to make a detached diagnoses of the present. This moment of exile from the addiction to reality could make us aware of our own inevitable and implicit value judg­ments, of the fact that excluding political and social direction itself sets a political and social direction. It is the interaction between the dream of utopia with reality that could help a projective practice develop a new social perspective. What should fascinate pro­jective practice is how it might inflect capitalism towards democracy. 
The only problem is that so far almost nobody has been prepared to rethink the now-eroded concept of democracy or to carry out research into what democ­racy could mean today in spatial terms. Talking about democracy is simultaneously a taboo and a fetish. We treat the word democracy as a palliative that relieves us from having to think hard about its realization. 
If we were to dream about new forms of democracy, we would develop visions that shake off the current political ennui, the blind pursuit of the market, and our incessant navel-gazing. But instead it looks as if we have nodded off. Do we really derive so much enjoyment from the addictive consumption of com­fort, design trends, technology, and countless mutu­ally indifferent differences? Isn't it time to wake from our deep sleep and again dream of utopias? 
Roemer van Toorn, head of the Projective Theory program and Ph.D. researcher Delft University of Technology (Berlage Chair), is author of the In Search of Freedom in Contemporary Architecture: From Fresh Conservatism to Radical Democracy and the photo book Society of The And (December 2005).