This essay is the first installment of a two-part investigation on the history of the Greek city and its distinct domestic architecture. The two essays aims to a critique of the popular category of ‘informal urbanism’ by interrogating the underlining relation between urban management and architectural form Read more

The garden not only creates a minimum condition for a life, but it is the spatial device through which the power of the sovereign dominates the territory. In the harsh landscape of Iran gardens were micro-cosmos; camps that protected life and let it flourish within the tabula rasa. Read more

The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred. Read more

Meyer's goal was to transform the collective potential of co-operation in architectural production, as a means of rescuing the working class from capitalism. Meyer perceived architects as workers, and for him, co-operation was both a collective mode of production and the link between architecture and the masses. Read more

A graduation project for the second-year program of The Berlage, led by Amir Djalali, Francesco Marullo, Hamed Khosravi, and hosted by Technische Universiteit Delft, November 2012 - June 2013. Read more

A critical stance towards the role of images is not to refuse them, but to open a gap—a critical distance—between images and their experience. Read more

The more the “office” fulfilled its own effectuality, the more its plan became empty Read more

What we should ask ourselves is not “What does this monument mean?”, but “What is this monument capable of doing?” Read more

Communique on the Dutch govenment's "sanctions" against Iranian students Read more

The term medina renders a political power associated with a territorial dimension. In fact, medina can be understood as a "space of sovereignty", while it affirms a form of settlement, which is fundamentally shaped, defined and controlled by a theological political power. Read more

The year 1867 marks the publication of two seminal works: Marx’s Das Kapital, and Ildefonso Cerdà’s Teoría General de la urbanización. Both books shared the same belief in the emancipatory potential of science Read more

The barest condition in which architecture can exist is presented here not as a stylistic exercise, but as a paradoxical act of representation, as a will to give to the conditions of the city its adequate form, whose meaning is the definitive renunciation of any will to representation. Read more

When Sébastien Marot introduced his lecture Palimpsestuous Ithaca: A Relative Manifesto for Sub-Urbanism projecting a closed box on the screen he established one main thesis of his project, a precise methodological operation. Read more

Regardless of the emergence of rotundity in architectural form the introduction of digital technologies implied deeper transformations in the modes of production of architecture, to an extent to break the consolidated categories that ruled architecture for the past five centuries. Read more

What is a city? How is it constituted? What are its functions? How is it to be governed? Who are its citizens? How should it look like? In the 18th century French intellectuals proposed novel formulations of such questions, radically changing the practice of urban planning and ultimately redefining the very idea of the city. Read more

Christopher C.M. Lee defines the concept of type. Read more

The original description of paradise in the Avesta explicitly illustrates an image of an earthly place. “It signifies and has the sense of a dwelling place, earthen enclosure, of those intimately associated with death:” the place where you should eat and wear clothes, the place that you should live in: the city. Read more

In his Economical and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx merges the twofold roots, γενος and γιγνομαι, defining man as social individual, a twofold entity made both of singular determinations and generic faculties. In this sense, the individual seems to be the arrival point of a process of individuation [...] Read more

In 1970, Manfredo Tafuri published a long article titled “Lavoro Intellettuale e Sviluppo Capitalistico” (“Intellectual Work and Capitalist Development”) in the journal Contropiano. Remarkably, “Intellectual Work and Capitalist Development” contains no reference to architecture proper [...] Read more

An overview on the first year series of seminars and discussions within “The City as a Project” PhD Program Read more