Life in Tehran proliferates and thrives in its interiors. When public space is policed and contro... more Life in Tehran proliferates and thrives in its interiors. When public space is policed and controlled, domestic interiors become art galleries, clubs, cultural centers, workshops, and offices. Interiors cease to be the exclusive domain for individual life and family matters; homes become the spaces in which new forms of collective life are experimented and nurtured, and the battleground for social conflicts and political constituencies. Through its extensive apparatus of drawings, Tehran- Life Within Walls presents an archaeological inquiry into the politics and the ecologies of the interior spaces of the Iranian metropolis, from its foundation as the Iranian capital until today. The book is at the same time an accessible entry point for the study of Tehran and Islamic/Iranian architecture, as well as a methodological experiment for the study of contemporary cities. An appendix of six projects provides an imaginative—yet radically pragmatic—vision for the future of Tehran.
The archaeological plan is a drawing representing the city as a continuous ground floor plan. As ... more The archaeological plan is a drawing representing the city as a continuous ground floor plan. As such, it flattens any distinction between interior and exterior, private and public, figure and ground. By reconstructing a genealogy of the archaeological plan from the Eighteenth century till 2010, this article conceives this type of drawing as something more than a representational technique. Originally meant as a tool for the description of excavation sites, in the 1950s and 1960s it became a research method for the study of urban morphology and building typology. Later, under the the influence of the neo-avantgarde, the archaeological plan is read as a principle informing the spatial properties of contemporary continuous interior landscapes, as exemplified by some designs by OMA and SANAA.
Even those, who consider themselves lucky to have escaped trauma, long-term illness and death, ha... more Even those, who consider themselves lucky to have escaped trauma, long-term illness and death, have experienced radical changes to their conception of life in its relation to public and private domains due to the COVID-19 pandemic. When public space turned into a dangerous realm, private interiors were assigned a new role, and with these shifts, also new questions about the relation of interiority to any type of exteriority emerged. The first four contributions in this Projected Interiorities issue of the journal Technoetic Arts reflect from an architectural and urban point of view on the conception of the public and private, their past, present and future. Yet, the pandemic contributed more widely to a re-evaluation of interiority, not least because the public and private realms were seemingly integrated via digital processes. While this journal issue cannot cover all these questions, it indicates the range of the pandemic turn in thought, collecting contributions from theory and practice, including architecture, art, philosophy and literary studies. With authors of a variety of disciplinary backgrounds based in China, India, Norway, France, the UK and the USA, this issue of Technoetic Arts covers not only a multiplicity of methodological approaches but also diverse regional and cultural perspectives on the idea of Projected Interiorities.
EAHN 7th International Meeting Conference Proceedings, 2023
This book has been printed on paper from responsible sources, certified by the Forest Stewardship... more This book has been printed on paper from responsible sources, certified by the Forest Stewardship Council ® .
Once known as the city of silk, Suzhou [苏州] has become the centre of wedding dress production, se... more Once known as the city of silk, Suzhou [苏州] has become the centre of wedding dress production, selling paradise on earth for one day, including copies of the last royal wedding dress, out of shops at the foot of mythic Tiger Hill. Suzhou is also the host of what is known as the Silicon Valley of the East. It has attracted millions of migrants searching for a better future; millions of tourists visit every year to experience the past, strolling through the gardens and courtyards of its Old Town. The contrasts could hardly be more apparent. Slow time, and fast time, and the time of the in-between, are woven into the city’s complex spatial fabric. This is a conversation by eight authors in eight frames on a city that connects them.
Architecture is not present among the thematic taxonomy of the European Commission's Horizon 2020... more Architecture is not present among the thematic taxonomy of the European Commission's Horizon 2020 programme, despite urban matters are key issues within the programme's priorities. With some notable exceptions, the city is addressed through the themes of innovation (the development of smart technologies for the monitoring of urban processes), sustainability or cultural heritage, but never from the point of view of its form and its physical consistency. This does not mean that architects are not actively engaged in EU-funded projects. Within the Horizon 2020 framework architects are assuming a new civic role in the coordination of urban transformations, after the crisis of architectural agency. How can the role of architectural research be defined within the framework of European projects? How is architecture research changing vis-à-vis the necessity to capture research funding? What are the possibilities for a new European urban social pact, and what could be the role of architects in this confrontation after 2020?
Bologna-Bogotà. Ricerca e azione per lo spazio pubblico, 2019
Recently, the introduction of digital technologies, new processes in the building industry, as we... more Recently, the introduction of digital technologies, new processes in the building industry, as well as the lack of explicit funding for architecture on the EU level, have led to the a crisis in architecture, at least following how it has been defined since the Renaissance. In this context, many efforts have been devoted in the attempt to define the specificities of architecture, and what is architectural research. As part of these, the concept of research by design and action-research were developed in order to link design thinking with research. One of the main tools of design action-research is the char-rette, or the design workshop. This contribution gathers some preliminary notes on the archaeology of the architectural workshop, and its meaning within architectural design, contemporary forms of education, and its role in the new participative forms through which production the city is produced today. How can the architectural workshop become a tool for regaining bits of research autonomy within the few spaces left open by the neolib-eral education and planning system? Il workshop di architettura è uno strumento didattico e di pro-gettazione che negli ultimi anni è stato oggetto di una serie di sperimentazioni nell'ambito del Dipartimento di Architettura dell'Università di Bologna. Il workshop, o charrette, prevede la collaborazione di studenti, progettisti e altre figure tecniche o meno nell'ideazione, e spesso anche nella realizzazione, di in-terventi progettuali specifici, che devono essere ideati, discussi e comunicati in pochi giorni o poche ore. La modalità del laboratorio progettuale si presta alla defini-zione di una ricerca di architettura con metodologia di ricerca-a
Until the 1990s, architectural criticism was based on the idea that architecture could be compare... more Until the 1990s, architectural criticism was based on the idea that architecture could be compared to language, and the tools for interpreting architecture were similar to those of linguistics and literary criticism. Such a view was rejected by post-critical architecture, which started looking at architecture as an asignifying, performative and affective phenomenon. However, language philosophy after the 'linguistic turn', in particular what Felice Cimatti has called the 'Italian language theory', provides new tools for rigorously addressing the parallel between language and architecture. The architectural trajectory of Peter Eisenman's Houses will be re-interpreted through the lens of these theories.
This contribution focuses on the possibility of isolating an Italian theory of architecture in th... more This contribution focuses on the possibility of isolating an Italian theory of architecture in the postwar period until 1969, taking the controversy over Renaissance proportions as a case study. Rather than defining a specific approach to the subject from Italian authors compared to their international colleagues, this contribution explores the specificity of Italian humanism and the significance of that experience from the point of view of the postwar reconstruction. The study of Renaissance architecture, rather than offering a historical precedent for the construction of national identities, warded off that possibility, constituting a problematic beginning for European modernity.
The status of architectural research has not yet been clearly defined. Nevertheless, architectura... more The status of architectural research has not yet been clearly defined. Nevertheless, architectural research has surely become a core element in the profession of architecture. In fact, the tendency seem for architects to be less and less involved with building design and construction services, which are more efficiently taken care of by engineering firms. On the contrary, the production and dissemination of knowledge is becoming central to the work of architects, who are more and more differentiating their activity throughout a variety of media such as exhibitions, publications, events, studios and workshops. The Dutch case is particularly instructive, since the Netherlands provided a vast network of public funding institutions for non-academic architectural research initiatives. In in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, this network acted as a true welfare institution, allowing architects to find work opportunities after the shrinkage of the traditional architecture job market. Yet, this public spending is not to be seen just as a simple welfare policy, but it acted as a new model of urban development, triggering a series of urban renewal projects based on the injection of “creative” activities in vacant buildings and problematic neighborhoods. The public funding model is probably destined to an end. In 2011, the Dutch government approved cuts for 200 million euros to cultural activities, which led to the disappearance of internationally renowned architecture research institutions, such as the Berlage Institute. Nevertheless, the effects of the economic crisis seem to have brought permanent structural and anthropological transformations in the profession of architecture. In this process, new institutions and new subjectivities are emerging. The figure of the Dutch architect is today far from that of the 1990s, which was epitomized by the figure of the Superdutch—a cynical, brutally optimist white male able to surf on top of the waves of the Dutch “Golden Age”. This article attempts to sketch the portrait of the new architect-researcher as a knowledge worker, caught between contrasting forces of precarity of employment, budget cuts, populism, co-optation and gentrification.
With the foundation of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius advocated an end to the division between arts ... more With the foundation of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius advocated an end to the division between arts and crafts. Contrary to the idea of architecture as art, the programme of the school aimed to assimilate architecture with industry in order to satisfy collective social needs. Yet, despite this programmatic declaration, such a project was realised only after Gropius’ departure from the Bauhaus, under the controversial directorship (1927–1930) of the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer. Meyer achieved unprecedented success both in terms of academic production and financial performance. Yet his realisations were paralleled by the leftist radicalisation of the school’s politics: Meyer transformed the workshops into factory production units and the students into industrial workers. Eventually, the politicisation of the school cost Meyer his office and a negative reputation in historical records that still holds today. This article posits that Meyer achieved his success at the Bauhaus not despite his radical allegiance, but precisely because of it. The realism of Meyer’s strategy is evaluated through his capacity to anticipate many developments in the organisation of architectural production. In particular, his critique of intellectual labour in architecture is confronted with the contemporary proletarisation of architects in the Western world.
Along with creativity, optimism and will, the early 1970’s London architecture scene was a momen... more Along with creativity, optimism and will, the early 1970’s London architecture scene was a moment of ideological conflict between political factions over which direction progress should be oriented. Instead of a victor being declared and a single sector followed, what resulted, at the Architectural Association at least, was an academic framework set up to preserve and even encourage such tendencies for conflict and divergence. Behemoth Press introduces here a text by Elia Zenghelis first published in 1975 that was originally written as a polemical response to a growing movement for unionization; a political form of labor that surely threatens the great productive potentials of competition and precarity.
Today we are familiar with definitions of architecture as an integrated, multidisciplinary “netwo... more Today we are familiar with definitions of architecture as an integrated, multidisciplinary “networked practice,” which takes its cognitive potential from a “diffused design intelligence.” These definitions were introduced to counter an individual, authorial approach to design which allegedly characterized modern architecture since its beginnings. This thesis aims to overcome such a distinction, showing that, on the contrary, a diffused, collective intelligence was at the core of architectural production since its invention in the 15th century. Renaissance sprezzatura, the monster in Enlightened France, Alois Riegl's Kunstwollen, Aldo Rossi's collective memory and the 1970s debate on architectural language are taken as indexes of a Western tradition of collective intelligence in design. Moreover, this genealogy shows that by embracing “collective intelligence” and “projective” practice architecture does not necessarily surrender to constituted political powers and to the forces of the market. On the contrary, this thesis shows how such a practice can be an instance of a positive and constitutive political force—in other words, able to produce the common.
Despite his unlimited commitment to the New World and its age, Hannes Meyer has always been the w... more Despite his unlimited commitment to the New World and its age, Hannes Meyer has always been the wrong man in the wrong place. As a director of the the Bauhaus, he was fired for his ill-concealed Marxist tendencies. In the USSR, free to express his political positions, he was purged as a modernist. Exiled in Mexico, he was forced to flee after Troskij’s assassination because of his Stalinist leanings. In the GDR, his legacy was still tied to the Weimar avantgardes, and he was still seen as a petty-bourgeois formalist.
Yet, perhaps because of their untimely character, Meyer’s methods and ideas have inspired generations of architects after the German master’s death, alimenting a minoritarian yet productive underground legacy of studies and recuperations.
From our present vantage point, it is uncanny to note how some of Meyer’s prophecies, once dismissed as the delirium of a Stalinist zealot, have become part of our everyday practice as architects, students or educators. Ironically, this did not happen as a consequence of the end of the capitalist economy as Meyer wanted, but as a product of its most advanced developments.
How can Meyer’s attitude towards his times help us in constructing an ethics for architecture in the age of its demise?
"The idea of the autonomy of architecture has tantalized the imagination of architects since the ... more "The idea of the autonomy of architecture has tantalized the imagination of architects since the Sixties, as a possibility to escape architecture’s profession inability to resist the requests of the market and to actively change the life of the city. Among the vast debate on autonomy, we can isolate two tendencies. On the one hand, it is has been said that architecture is based on a set of forms and rules that are not historically determined. Thus architecture has an intrinsic resistant nature against the historical forces that produce it (Eisenman). Others, see architecture is not seen as an autonomous entity per se. Rather, its autonomy derives from the peculiarity of its own methods—the architectural Project, as the locus for the an autonomous deployment of political choices (Aureli). Against these two approaches, which posit the autonomy either in the objects or the methods proper of discipline, I would like to propose a third approach, which aims to construct the autonomy of architectural producers.
The didactic and professional engagement of Swiss architect Hannes Meyer between the years of his appointment as the director of the Bauhaus and his Soviet experience, is taken as an example of this third concept of autonomy. Meyer was conscious of the fact that architecture was at that time conditioned by industry under a capitalistic organization. Rather than resorting to an idea of original purity of an allegedly “revolutionary” architecture, Meyer saw the seeds of liberation in compromising architecture with industry even more. According to Meyer, Architecture is not enough overdetermined by industry, its tools are not yet enough standardized. Capital is the force that impedes this process, not the one that produces it, and only the destruction of capitalistic command will produce a complete assimilation of architecture with industry and life. In this process, the intellectual labour of the architect will become undistinguished from the manual labour of the construction worker: the liberated architect is a proletarized architect.
Meyer’s analysis, rather than the prophecy of a zealous communist fanatic, sounds today a lucid and bitter analysis of today’s conditions for architects, who have to face the reality of temporary contracts, low wages and unpaid internship, often with the threat of a study debt to be paid back. Architects have really become proletarians, but against their will. Besides that, architecture has lost its disciplinary foundations: fundamental design choices are today completely overdetermined by technical and financial parameters. The design process is reduced to a pure mechanism of governance, and its procedures are automatized by standardized digital tools such as BIM.
But at the same time architectural practice has never been so collectivized as it is today. The “death of the author” and the procedures of mechanical writing, once fantasized by a small group of avantgarde artists, are now the everyday reality of architectural production. Can we think of a new project of autonomy to isolate and liberate the positive tendencies which are latent in the contemporary modes of production of architecture?"
The talk traces the transformations of architectural knowledge from the “linguistic turn” of the ... more The talk traces the transformations of architectural knowledge from the “linguistic turn” of the late sixties until the “digital turn” of the late nineties as an emergence of a completely new mode of production for architecture, which marked the passage of the subjectivity of the architect from the “public intellectual” to the “precarious worker.” Against the interpretations that see architectural language as a pure textuality devoid of any relation to reality, the chapter attempts to see language as an actual means of production. In this way we will be able to give a new formulation to the old question: is architecture language?
Life in Tehran proliferates and thrives in its interiors. When public space is policed and contro... more Life in Tehran proliferates and thrives in its interiors. When public space is policed and controlled, domestic interiors become art galleries, clubs, cultural centers, workshops, and offices. Interiors cease to be the exclusive domain for individual life and family matters; homes become the spaces in which new forms of collective life are experimented and nurtured, and the battleground for social conflicts and political constituencies. Through its extensive apparatus of drawings, Tehran- Life Within Walls presents an archaeological inquiry into the politics and the ecologies of the interior spaces of the Iranian metropolis, from its foundation as the Iranian capital until today. The book is at the same time an accessible entry point for the study of Tehran and Islamic/Iranian architecture, as well as a methodological experiment for the study of contemporary cities. An appendix of six projects provides an imaginative—yet radically pragmatic—vision for the future of Tehran.
The archaeological plan is a drawing representing the city as a continuous ground floor plan. As ... more The archaeological plan is a drawing representing the city as a continuous ground floor plan. As such, it flattens any distinction between interior and exterior, private and public, figure and ground. By reconstructing a genealogy of the archaeological plan from the Eighteenth century till 2010, this article conceives this type of drawing as something more than a representational technique. Originally meant as a tool for the description of excavation sites, in the 1950s and 1960s it became a research method for the study of urban morphology and building typology. Later, under the the influence of the neo-avantgarde, the archaeological plan is read as a principle informing the spatial properties of contemporary continuous interior landscapes, as exemplified by some designs by OMA and SANAA.
Even those, who consider themselves lucky to have escaped trauma, long-term illness and death, ha... more Even those, who consider themselves lucky to have escaped trauma, long-term illness and death, have experienced radical changes to their conception of life in its relation to public and private domains due to the COVID-19 pandemic. When public space turned into a dangerous realm, private interiors were assigned a new role, and with these shifts, also new questions about the relation of interiority to any type of exteriority emerged. The first four contributions in this Projected Interiorities issue of the journal Technoetic Arts reflect from an architectural and urban point of view on the conception of the public and private, their past, present and future. Yet, the pandemic contributed more widely to a re-evaluation of interiority, not least because the public and private realms were seemingly integrated via digital processes. While this journal issue cannot cover all these questions, it indicates the range of the pandemic turn in thought, collecting contributions from theory and practice, including architecture, art, philosophy and literary studies. With authors of a variety of disciplinary backgrounds based in China, India, Norway, France, the UK and the USA, this issue of Technoetic Arts covers not only a multiplicity of methodological approaches but also diverse regional and cultural perspectives on the idea of Projected Interiorities.
EAHN 7th International Meeting Conference Proceedings, 2023
This book has been printed on paper from responsible sources, certified by the Forest Stewardship... more This book has been printed on paper from responsible sources, certified by the Forest Stewardship Council ® .
Once known as the city of silk, Suzhou [苏州] has become the centre of wedding dress production, se... more Once known as the city of silk, Suzhou [苏州] has become the centre of wedding dress production, selling paradise on earth for one day, including copies of the last royal wedding dress, out of shops at the foot of mythic Tiger Hill. Suzhou is also the host of what is known as the Silicon Valley of the East. It has attracted millions of migrants searching for a better future; millions of tourists visit every year to experience the past, strolling through the gardens and courtyards of its Old Town. The contrasts could hardly be more apparent. Slow time, and fast time, and the time of the in-between, are woven into the city’s complex spatial fabric. This is a conversation by eight authors in eight frames on a city that connects them.
Architecture is not present among the thematic taxonomy of the European Commission's Horizon 2020... more Architecture is not present among the thematic taxonomy of the European Commission's Horizon 2020 programme, despite urban matters are key issues within the programme's priorities. With some notable exceptions, the city is addressed through the themes of innovation (the development of smart technologies for the monitoring of urban processes), sustainability or cultural heritage, but never from the point of view of its form and its physical consistency. This does not mean that architects are not actively engaged in EU-funded projects. Within the Horizon 2020 framework architects are assuming a new civic role in the coordination of urban transformations, after the crisis of architectural agency. How can the role of architectural research be defined within the framework of European projects? How is architecture research changing vis-à-vis the necessity to capture research funding? What are the possibilities for a new European urban social pact, and what could be the role of architects in this confrontation after 2020?
Bologna-Bogotà. Ricerca e azione per lo spazio pubblico, 2019
Recently, the introduction of digital technologies, new processes in the building industry, as we... more Recently, the introduction of digital technologies, new processes in the building industry, as well as the lack of explicit funding for architecture on the EU level, have led to the a crisis in architecture, at least following how it has been defined since the Renaissance. In this context, many efforts have been devoted in the attempt to define the specificities of architecture, and what is architectural research. As part of these, the concept of research by design and action-research were developed in order to link design thinking with research. One of the main tools of design action-research is the char-rette, or the design workshop. This contribution gathers some preliminary notes on the archaeology of the architectural workshop, and its meaning within architectural design, contemporary forms of education, and its role in the new participative forms through which production the city is produced today. How can the architectural workshop become a tool for regaining bits of research autonomy within the few spaces left open by the neolib-eral education and planning system? Il workshop di architettura è uno strumento didattico e di pro-gettazione che negli ultimi anni è stato oggetto di una serie di sperimentazioni nell'ambito del Dipartimento di Architettura dell'Università di Bologna. Il workshop, o charrette, prevede la collaborazione di studenti, progettisti e altre figure tecniche o meno nell'ideazione, e spesso anche nella realizzazione, di in-terventi progettuali specifici, che devono essere ideati, discussi e comunicati in pochi giorni o poche ore. La modalità del laboratorio progettuale si presta alla defini-zione di una ricerca di architettura con metodologia di ricerca-a
Until the 1990s, architectural criticism was based on the idea that architecture could be compare... more Until the 1990s, architectural criticism was based on the idea that architecture could be compared to language, and the tools for interpreting architecture were similar to those of linguistics and literary criticism. Such a view was rejected by post-critical architecture, which started looking at architecture as an asignifying, performative and affective phenomenon. However, language philosophy after the 'linguistic turn', in particular what Felice Cimatti has called the 'Italian language theory', provides new tools for rigorously addressing the parallel between language and architecture. The architectural trajectory of Peter Eisenman's Houses will be re-interpreted through the lens of these theories.
This contribution focuses on the possibility of isolating an Italian theory of architecture in th... more This contribution focuses on the possibility of isolating an Italian theory of architecture in the postwar period until 1969, taking the controversy over Renaissance proportions as a case study. Rather than defining a specific approach to the subject from Italian authors compared to their international colleagues, this contribution explores the specificity of Italian humanism and the significance of that experience from the point of view of the postwar reconstruction. The study of Renaissance architecture, rather than offering a historical precedent for the construction of national identities, warded off that possibility, constituting a problematic beginning for European modernity.
The status of architectural research has not yet been clearly defined. Nevertheless, architectura... more The status of architectural research has not yet been clearly defined. Nevertheless, architectural research has surely become a core element in the profession of architecture. In fact, the tendency seem for architects to be less and less involved with building design and construction services, which are more efficiently taken care of by engineering firms. On the contrary, the production and dissemination of knowledge is becoming central to the work of architects, who are more and more differentiating their activity throughout a variety of media such as exhibitions, publications, events, studios and workshops. The Dutch case is particularly instructive, since the Netherlands provided a vast network of public funding institutions for non-academic architectural research initiatives. In in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, this network acted as a true welfare institution, allowing architects to find work opportunities after the shrinkage of the traditional architecture job market. Yet, this public spending is not to be seen just as a simple welfare policy, but it acted as a new model of urban development, triggering a series of urban renewal projects based on the injection of “creative” activities in vacant buildings and problematic neighborhoods. The public funding model is probably destined to an end. In 2011, the Dutch government approved cuts for 200 million euros to cultural activities, which led to the disappearance of internationally renowned architecture research institutions, such as the Berlage Institute. Nevertheless, the effects of the economic crisis seem to have brought permanent structural and anthropological transformations in the profession of architecture. In this process, new institutions and new subjectivities are emerging. The figure of the Dutch architect is today far from that of the 1990s, which was epitomized by the figure of the Superdutch—a cynical, brutally optimist white male able to surf on top of the waves of the Dutch “Golden Age”. This article attempts to sketch the portrait of the new architect-researcher as a knowledge worker, caught between contrasting forces of precarity of employment, budget cuts, populism, co-optation and gentrification.
With the foundation of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius advocated an end to the division between arts ... more With the foundation of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius advocated an end to the division between arts and crafts. Contrary to the idea of architecture as art, the programme of the school aimed to assimilate architecture with industry in order to satisfy collective social needs. Yet, despite this programmatic declaration, such a project was realised only after Gropius’ departure from the Bauhaus, under the controversial directorship (1927–1930) of the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer. Meyer achieved unprecedented success both in terms of academic production and financial performance. Yet his realisations were paralleled by the leftist radicalisation of the school’s politics: Meyer transformed the workshops into factory production units and the students into industrial workers. Eventually, the politicisation of the school cost Meyer his office and a negative reputation in historical records that still holds today. This article posits that Meyer achieved his success at the Bauhaus not despite his radical allegiance, but precisely because of it. The realism of Meyer’s strategy is evaluated through his capacity to anticipate many developments in the organisation of architectural production. In particular, his critique of intellectual labour in architecture is confronted with the contemporary proletarisation of architects in the Western world.
Along with creativity, optimism and will, the early 1970’s London architecture scene was a momen... more Along with creativity, optimism and will, the early 1970’s London architecture scene was a moment of ideological conflict between political factions over which direction progress should be oriented. Instead of a victor being declared and a single sector followed, what resulted, at the Architectural Association at least, was an academic framework set up to preserve and even encourage such tendencies for conflict and divergence. Behemoth Press introduces here a text by Elia Zenghelis first published in 1975 that was originally written as a polemical response to a growing movement for unionization; a political form of labor that surely threatens the great productive potentials of competition and precarity.
Today we are familiar with definitions of architecture as an integrated, multidisciplinary “netwo... more Today we are familiar with definitions of architecture as an integrated, multidisciplinary “networked practice,” which takes its cognitive potential from a “diffused design intelligence.” These definitions were introduced to counter an individual, authorial approach to design which allegedly characterized modern architecture since its beginnings. This thesis aims to overcome such a distinction, showing that, on the contrary, a diffused, collective intelligence was at the core of architectural production since its invention in the 15th century. Renaissance sprezzatura, the monster in Enlightened France, Alois Riegl's Kunstwollen, Aldo Rossi's collective memory and the 1970s debate on architectural language are taken as indexes of a Western tradition of collective intelligence in design. Moreover, this genealogy shows that by embracing “collective intelligence” and “projective” practice architecture does not necessarily surrender to constituted political powers and to the forces of the market. On the contrary, this thesis shows how such a practice can be an instance of a positive and constitutive political force—in other words, able to produce the common.
Despite his unlimited commitment to the New World and its age, Hannes Meyer has always been the w... more Despite his unlimited commitment to the New World and its age, Hannes Meyer has always been the wrong man in the wrong place. As a director of the the Bauhaus, he was fired for his ill-concealed Marxist tendencies. In the USSR, free to express his political positions, he was purged as a modernist. Exiled in Mexico, he was forced to flee after Troskij’s assassination because of his Stalinist leanings. In the GDR, his legacy was still tied to the Weimar avantgardes, and he was still seen as a petty-bourgeois formalist.
Yet, perhaps because of their untimely character, Meyer’s methods and ideas have inspired generations of architects after the German master’s death, alimenting a minoritarian yet productive underground legacy of studies and recuperations.
From our present vantage point, it is uncanny to note how some of Meyer’s prophecies, once dismissed as the delirium of a Stalinist zealot, have become part of our everyday practice as architects, students or educators. Ironically, this did not happen as a consequence of the end of the capitalist economy as Meyer wanted, but as a product of its most advanced developments.
How can Meyer’s attitude towards his times help us in constructing an ethics for architecture in the age of its demise?
"The idea of the autonomy of architecture has tantalized the imagination of architects since the ... more "The idea of the autonomy of architecture has tantalized the imagination of architects since the Sixties, as a possibility to escape architecture’s profession inability to resist the requests of the market and to actively change the life of the city. Among the vast debate on autonomy, we can isolate two tendencies. On the one hand, it is has been said that architecture is based on a set of forms and rules that are not historically determined. Thus architecture has an intrinsic resistant nature against the historical forces that produce it (Eisenman). Others, see architecture is not seen as an autonomous entity per se. Rather, its autonomy derives from the peculiarity of its own methods—the architectural Project, as the locus for the an autonomous deployment of political choices (Aureli). Against these two approaches, which posit the autonomy either in the objects or the methods proper of discipline, I would like to propose a third approach, which aims to construct the autonomy of architectural producers.
The didactic and professional engagement of Swiss architect Hannes Meyer between the years of his appointment as the director of the Bauhaus and his Soviet experience, is taken as an example of this third concept of autonomy. Meyer was conscious of the fact that architecture was at that time conditioned by industry under a capitalistic organization. Rather than resorting to an idea of original purity of an allegedly “revolutionary” architecture, Meyer saw the seeds of liberation in compromising architecture with industry even more. According to Meyer, Architecture is not enough overdetermined by industry, its tools are not yet enough standardized. Capital is the force that impedes this process, not the one that produces it, and only the destruction of capitalistic command will produce a complete assimilation of architecture with industry and life. In this process, the intellectual labour of the architect will become undistinguished from the manual labour of the construction worker: the liberated architect is a proletarized architect.
Meyer’s analysis, rather than the prophecy of a zealous communist fanatic, sounds today a lucid and bitter analysis of today’s conditions for architects, who have to face the reality of temporary contracts, low wages and unpaid internship, often with the threat of a study debt to be paid back. Architects have really become proletarians, but against their will. Besides that, architecture has lost its disciplinary foundations: fundamental design choices are today completely overdetermined by technical and financial parameters. The design process is reduced to a pure mechanism of governance, and its procedures are automatized by standardized digital tools such as BIM.
But at the same time architectural practice has never been so collectivized as it is today. The “death of the author” and the procedures of mechanical writing, once fantasized by a small group of avantgarde artists, are now the everyday reality of architectural production. Can we think of a new project of autonomy to isolate and liberate the positive tendencies which are latent in the contemporary modes of production of architecture?"
The talk traces the transformations of architectural knowledge from the “linguistic turn” of the ... more The talk traces the transformations of architectural knowledge from the “linguistic turn” of the late sixties until the “digital turn” of the late nineties as an emergence of a completely new mode of production for architecture, which marked the passage of the subjectivity of the architect from the “public intellectual” to the “precarious worker.” Against the interpretations that see architectural language as a pure textuality devoid of any relation to reality, the chapter attempts to see language as an actual means of production. In this way we will be able to give a new formulation to the old question: is architecture language?
Through the reading of the Bergsonian urbanism of Marcel Poète and Maurice Halbwachs, Aldo Rossi ... more Through the reading of the Bergsonian urbanism of Marcel Poète and Maurice Halbwachs, Aldo Rossi attempted a rigorous definition of the role of collective memory in the production of the city. Retracing his unfinished project La Città Analoga, the talk deals with the collective temporal
dimension of the city, attempting a definition of historical time in architectural design, beyond historicism and its political instrumentality.
Traditionally, Renaissance architecture has been seen either as a totalitarian apparatus to “make... more Traditionally, Renaissance architecture has been seen either as a totalitarian apparatus to “make slaves its workmen and plagiarists its architects,” or as the embodiment of a universal system of true harmonic proportions. In the first case, the lower classes are reduced to a mere passive role; in the second, the historicity of the class confrontations that characterized the period are completely removed, and architecture is reduced to an abstraction of the worst kind.
In the dedicatory letter of The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli employs the tool of linear perspective: to know himself, the prince has to look at himself from the point of view of the common man. But this method is not only a heuristic device for the knowledge of power, but also the key for its conquest and management. The Prince has to ally with the multitude, because the multitude, not yet tamed as a well-ordered people, preserves the right to enforce the common good of the state through violence.
Architecture is always a product of the ruling classes, and its emergence as an autonomous, abstract knowledge parallels the necessity to order the rise of the modern state, to give form to what will become its public space. But in the Renaissance this space is far to be realized, and architecture is caught between an unresolved tension between a power in constant redefinition and the tumultuous multitude in the process of organizing itself as a political force. The emergence of Brunelleschi's, Alberti's and Palladio's architectural systems will be seen as informed by this confrontation, in the necessity to strengthen an alliance with the innovative forces of the common, but also as an attempt to tame its revolutionary impulses.
This presentation assumes that every theory of architecture is an attempt to define the common in... more This presentation assumes that every theory of architecture is an attempt to define the common in architecture–the irreducible elements common to all architecture–and to provide an account on the genesis of individual architectural objects. This does not mean that every theory is able to grasp the common adequately: while it is very difficult to define what is common in architecture itself, it is easier to apply a set of universal rules upon architecture.
Typology, in its first and third historical occurrences, will be seen in its contradictory relation towards the common.
In the eighteenth century typology provides the solution to the anxiety caused by the discovery of the arbitrariness of our understanding of formal beauty. Typology substitutes the authority of the ancients as a veritable basis for the choice of architectural forms. Typology, as a catalogue of forms agreed upon and the rules of their composition, is the architectural social contract providing the necessary institutional framework for the production of architecture.
Parallel to typology–the catalogue of regular, admissible forms–the eighteenth century seems obsessed by monsters. Monsters are those forms which exceed the table, that cannot be comprehended and explained by it. Monsters destroy and invalidate typology. Yet, monsters can be (temporarily) tamed, and provide the basis for the construction of new institutions on the ashes of the old ones.
Introducing typology as an antidote against the Italian bureaucratic town planning of the post-war years, Rossi cautioned architects against reducing typology to another set of rules and procedures. On the contrary, Aldo Rossi is interested in showing how the mechanical reproduction of found architectural forms can produce monuments, ie. emergent properties that escape the codified order of power and produce difference as the main constituent of the city. In this sense, his unfinished project The Analogous City can be seen as an attempt to elaborate a science of the unpredictable genesis of urban individuality out of determined architectural materials.
The talk attempts to give a rigorous definition of art and aesthetics as one of the forms of thes... more The talk attempts to give a rigorous definition of art and aesthetics as one of the forms of these collective habits, through an analysis of the aesthetic theories of Alois Riegl, in particular his concept of Kunstwollen (literally, will to art). Against the simple materialism of the followers of Semper, which put material necessities as the origin of style, and against the idealists, who saw art stemming from symbolic meanings, Riegl saw art as the product of an aesthetic will. This will is not to be seen in a subjective sense, but as an impersonal drive, a collective organ of sense capable of selecting and organising aesthetic experience. Riegl never referred to the art of his own time. Yet, Riegl’s contemporaries appropriated his concepts and employed them in the debate over the political significance of art production in the modern capitalistic metropolis. Tracing an alternative genealogy for the rise of modern architecture, the chapter attempts to delineate a political economy of perception and metropolitan art. Riegl’s Kunstwollen is a collective capacity to produce and shape reality, which is at the same time the source of the production of value in capital, and the possibility to overcome it.
"This presentation is an exploration on the possibility of a common architectural language. How c... more "This presentation is an exploration on the possibility of a common architectural language. How can we define architectural language beyond the systems of signification and rules that are imposed on it by power institutions? In some cases, sometimes in periods of political crisis, architecture expresses itself beyond those codes, undermining its possibility to convey meaning, or to manifest invariant structures. The cases of Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Peter Eisenman will be seen as creative destruction of the meanings and the structures of architecture.
Piranesi's refusal of the Vitruvian’s grammar of orders on the one hand, and his aversion toward the ‘rationalistic’ approach of the French architectes philosophes on the other hand, allows him to define architecture in a original way in respect to his contemporaries. Far from being driven by mere imagination or sentiment, Piranesi appropriates the most advanced technical and scientific knowledge of his time in order to push it to its extreme consequences of revealing the absence of meaning and structures for architecture. This conclusion doesn’t end up in a nihilistic paralysis: on the contrary, the plan of Campo Marzio is a non-utopian manifesto of a radically different program for the city.
In his series of houses, Peter Eisenman’s, through a hyper-analytic, at times pedantic method, progressively dissolves all the pillars of architecture: function, the meaning of architectural signs, the socially accepted conventions of use, the architect as author, and eventually, contradicting his own first hypothesis, the possibility of a transcendent ‘deep structure’ of architecture itself, and the innate capacity of humans to read it.
For bot Piranesi and Eisenman, the removal of rules, signification and subjectivity have a constituent purpose: the construction of architecture as a choral narration, a free indirect discourse."
*New Call for Papers* Curating the city: artistic practices and urban transformations
CPCL Vol 3... more *New Call for Papers* Curating the city: artistic practices and urban transformations
CPCL Vol 3 no 1, edited by Annalisa Trentin, Anna Rosellini and Amir Djalali, invites contribution exploring the "curatorial turn" in architecture and urbanism. How are artistic and curatorial practices changing the way in which the city is made today?
Deadline for full paper submission: 15 December 2019
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The Dutch case is particularly instructive, since the Netherlands provided a vast network of public funding institutions for non-academic architectural research initiatives. In in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, this network acted as a true welfare institution, allowing architects to find work opportunities after the shrinkage of the traditional architecture job market. Yet, this public spending is not to be seen just as a simple welfare policy, but it acted as a new model of urban development, triggering a series of urban renewal projects based on the injection of “creative” activities in vacant buildings and problematic neighborhoods.
The public funding model is probably destined to an end. In 2011, the Dutch government approved cuts for 200 million euros to cultural activities, which led to the disappearance of internationally renowned architecture research institutions, such as the Berlage Institute. Nevertheless, the effects of the economic crisis seem to have brought permanent structural and anthropological transformations in the profession of architecture. In this process, new institutions and new subjectivities are emerging. The figure of the Dutch architect is today far from that of the 1990s, which was epitomized by the figure of the Superdutch—a cynical, brutally optimist white male able to surf on top of the waves of the Dutch “Golden Age”. This article attempts to sketch the portrait of the new architect-researcher as a knowledge worker, caught between contrasting forces of precarity of employment, budget cuts, populism, co-optation and gentrification.
Thesis by Amir Djalali
Talks by Amir Djalali
Yet, perhaps because of their untimely character, Meyer’s methods and ideas have inspired generations of architects after the German master’s death, alimenting a minoritarian yet productive underground legacy of studies and recuperations.
From our present vantage point, it is uncanny to note how some of Meyer’s prophecies, once dismissed as the delirium of a Stalinist zealot, have become part of our everyday practice as architects, students or educators. Ironically, this did not happen as a consequence of the end of the capitalist economy as Meyer wanted, but as a product of its most advanced developments.
How can Meyer’s attitude towards his times help us in constructing an ethics for architecture in the age of its demise?
The didactic and professional engagement of Swiss architect Hannes Meyer between the years of his appointment as the director of the Bauhaus and his Soviet experience, is taken as an example of this third concept of autonomy. Meyer was conscious of the fact that architecture was at that time conditioned by industry under a capitalistic organization. Rather than resorting to an idea of original purity of an allegedly “revolutionary” architecture, Meyer saw the seeds of liberation in compromising architecture with industry even more. According to Meyer, Architecture is not enough overdetermined by industry, its tools are not yet enough standardized. Capital is the force that impedes this process, not the one that produces it, and only the destruction of capitalistic command will produce a complete assimilation of architecture with industry and life. In this process, the intellectual labour of the architect will become undistinguished from the manual labour of the construction worker: the liberated architect is a proletarized architect.
Meyer’s analysis, rather than the prophecy of a zealous communist fanatic, sounds today a lucid and bitter analysis of today’s conditions for architects, who have to face the reality of temporary contracts, low wages and unpaid internship, often with the threat of a study debt to be paid back. Architects have really become proletarians, but against their will. Besides that, architecture has lost its disciplinary foundations: fundamental design choices are today completely overdetermined by technical and financial parameters. The design process is reduced to a pure mechanism of governance, and its procedures are automatized by standardized digital tools such as BIM.
But at the same time architectural practice has never been so collectivized as it is today. The “death of the author” and the procedures of mechanical writing, once fantasized by a small group of avantgarde artists, are now the everyday reality of architectural production. Can we think of a new project of autonomy to isolate and liberate the positive tendencies which are latent in the contemporary modes of production of architecture?"
The Dutch case is particularly instructive, since the Netherlands provided a vast network of public funding institutions for non-academic architectural research initiatives. In in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, this network acted as a true welfare institution, allowing architects to find work opportunities after the shrinkage of the traditional architecture job market. Yet, this public spending is not to be seen just as a simple welfare policy, but it acted as a new model of urban development, triggering a series of urban renewal projects based on the injection of “creative” activities in vacant buildings and problematic neighborhoods.
The public funding model is probably destined to an end. In 2011, the Dutch government approved cuts for 200 million euros to cultural activities, which led to the disappearance of internationally renowned architecture research institutions, such as the Berlage Institute. Nevertheless, the effects of the economic crisis seem to have brought permanent structural and anthropological transformations in the profession of architecture. In this process, new institutions and new subjectivities are emerging. The figure of the Dutch architect is today far from that of the 1990s, which was epitomized by the figure of the Superdutch—a cynical, brutally optimist white male able to surf on top of the waves of the Dutch “Golden Age”. This article attempts to sketch the portrait of the new architect-researcher as a knowledge worker, caught between contrasting forces of precarity of employment, budget cuts, populism, co-optation and gentrification.
Yet, perhaps because of their untimely character, Meyer’s methods and ideas have inspired generations of architects after the German master’s death, alimenting a minoritarian yet productive underground legacy of studies and recuperations.
From our present vantage point, it is uncanny to note how some of Meyer’s prophecies, once dismissed as the delirium of a Stalinist zealot, have become part of our everyday practice as architects, students or educators. Ironically, this did not happen as a consequence of the end of the capitalist economy as Meyer wanted, but as a product of its most advanced developments.
How can Meyer’s attitude towards his times help us in constructing an ethics for architecture in the age of its demise?
The didactic and professional engagement of Swiss architect Hannes Meyer between the years of his appointment as the director of the Bauhaus and his Soviet experience, is taken as an example of this third concept of autonomy. Meyer was conscious of the fact that architecture was at that time conditioned by industry under a capitalistic organization. Rather than resorting to an idea of original purity of an allegedly “revolutionary” architecture, Meyer saw the seeds of liberation in compromising architecture with industry even more. According to Meyer, Architecture is not enough overdetermined by industry, its tools are not yet enough standardized. Capital is the force that impedes this process, not the one that produces it, and only the destruction of capitalistic command will produce a complete assimilation of architecture with industry and life. In this process, the intellectual labour of the architect will become undistinguished from the manual labour of the construction worker: the liberated architect is a proletarized architect.
Meyer’s analysis, rather than the prophecy of a zealous communist fanatic, sounds today a lucid and bitter analysis of today’s conditions for architects, who have to face the reality of temporary contracts, low wages and unpaid internship, often with the threat of a study debt to be paid back. Architects have really become proletarians, but against their will. Besides that, architecture has lost its disciplinary foundations: fundamental design choices are today completely overdetermined by technical and financial parameters. The design process is reduced to a pure mechanism of governance, and its procedures are automatized by standardized digital tools such as BIM.
But at the same time architectural practice has never been so collectivized as it is today. The “death of the author” and the procedures of mechanical writing, once fantasized by a small group of avantgarde artists, are now the everyday reality of architectural production. Can we think of a new project of autonomy to isolate and liberate the positive tendencies which are latent in the contemporary modes of production of architecture?"
dimension of the city, attempting a definition of historical time in architectural design, beyond historicism and its political instrumentality.
In the dedicatory letter of The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli employs the tool of linear perspective: to know himself, the prince has to look at himself from the point of view of the common man. But this method is not only a heuristic device for the knowledge of power, but also the key for its conquest and management. The Prince has to ally with the multitude, because the multitude, not yet tamed as a well-ordered people, preserves the right to enforce the common good of the state through violence.
Architecture is always a product of the ruling classes, and its emergence as an autonomous, abstract knowledge parallels the necessity to order the rise of the modern state, to give form to what will become its public space. But in the Renaissance this space is far to be realized, and architecture is caught between an unresolved tension between a power in constant redefinition and the tumultuous multitude in the process of organizing itself as a political force. The emergence of Brunelleschi's, Alberti's and Palladio's architectural systems will be seen as informed by this confrontation, in the necessity to strengthen an alliance with the innovative forces of the common, but also as an attempt to tame its revolutionary impulses.
Typology, in its first and third historical occurrences, will be seen in its contradictory relation towards the common.
In the eighteenth century typology provides the solution to the anxiety caused by the discovery of the arbitrariness of our understanding of formal beauty. Typology substitutes the authority of the ancients as a veritable basis for the choice of architectural forms. Typology, as a catalogue of forms agreed upon and the rules of their composition, is the architectural social contract providing the necessary institutional framework for the production of architecture.
Parallel to typology–the catalogue of regular, admissible forms–the eighteenth century seems obsessed by monsters. Monsters are those forms which exceed the table, that cannot be comprehended and explained by it. Monsters destroy and invalidate typology. Yet, monsters can be (temporarily) tamed, and provide the basis for the construction of new institutions on the ashes of the old ones.
Introducing typology as an antidote against the Italian bureaucratic town planning of the post-war years, Rossi cautioned architects against reducing typology to another set of rules and procedures. On the contrary, Aldo Rossi is interested in showing how the mechanical reproduction of found architectural forms can produce monuments, ie. emergent properties that escape the codified order of power and produce difference as the main constituent of the city. In this sense, his unfinished project The Analogous City can be seen as an attempt to elaborate a science of the unpredictable genesis of urban individuality out of determined architectural materials.
Piranesi's refusal of the Vitruvian’s grammar of orders on the one hand, and his aversion toward the ‘rationalistic’ approach of the French architectes philosophes on the other hand, allows him to define architecture in a original way in respect to his contemporaries. Far from being driven by mere imagination or sentiment, Piranesi appropriates the most advanced technical and scientific knowledge of his time in order to push it to its extreme consequences of revealing the absence of meaning and structures for architecture. This conclusion doesn’t end up in a nihilistic paralysis: on the contrary, the plan of Campo Marzio is a non-utopian manifesto of a radically different program for the city.
In his series of houses, Peter Eisenman’s, through a hyper-analytic, at times pedantic method, progressively dissolves all the pillars of architecture: function, the meaning of architectural signs, the socially accepted conventions of use, the architect as author, and eventually, contradicting his own first hypothesis, the possibility of a transcendent ‘deep structure’ of architecture itself, and the innate capacity of humans to read it.
For bot Piranesi and Eisenman, the removal of rules, signification and subjectivity have a constituent purpose: the construction of architecture as a choral narration, a free indirect discourse."
CPCL Vol 3 no 1, edited by Annalisa Trentin, Anna Rosellini and Amir Djalali, invites contribution exploring the "curatorial turn" in architecture and urbanism. How are artistic and curatorial practices changing the way in which the city is made today?
Deadline for full paper submission: 15 December 2019
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