The Lower Depths

Utilitas, rather than firmitas and venustas, is the real basis of architecture’s social status within capitalist society. But what exactly is utility? In a lecture at e-flux’s Brooklyn campus, the historian Reinhold Martin attempted to furnish the beginnings of an answer. After a dense summary of competing systems of value and price—specifically, those of Marx and marginal utility theorists—Martin narrowed his focus to industrial capitalism’s prime mover: oil.

The pivot made sense in the context of the presentation. Like architecture, oil is both a commodity and needed for commodity production. But as Martin argued, oil more readily exemplifies the problem of utility. Neoclassical (and later, neoliberal) economists ascribed the boom in petroleum production at the turn of the century purely to the will of sovereign consumers but failed to account for the sluggish pace with which oil actually overtook coal. The half-century that was required for oil’s conquest can’t be chalked up to managerial optimization, either. Instead, interrelated social processes involving “bloo…