Hannes Meyer’s goal was to transform the collective potential of co-operation in architectural production from a political concept into a functional tool 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 the product itself – architecture – and its producer – mass society.

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.

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.

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

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

Communique on the Dutch govenment’s “sanctions” against Iranian students

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.

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 – for their authors, scientific analysis was the key tool to rethink the living conditions of their time

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 [...]

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 [...]

An overview on the first year series of seminars and discussions within “The City as a Project” PhD Program The series of seminars and discussions, entitled ‘Whatever Happened to the Twentieth Century: Modernity and Its Discontents,’ were proposed in order to reconsider the character and the content of the modern urban project. The main goal [...]

In the Obus plan the syndicalist vision became a capitalist world made palatable by an organic metaphor, both social and aesthetic in implication. Anguish was warded off by absorbing its causes; crass materialism masked by beauty. – Manfredo Tafuri A PhD Seminar held in Rotterdam on March 18, 2010. The lecture is mostly referring to [...]

A PhD seminar held in Rotterdam, April 8th 2010 From the standpoint of writing the history of the avant-garde in architecture, there is no book more rigorous, challenging, and poetic than Manfredo Tafuri’s The Sphere and the Labyrinth, where the fragments of the history of neo-Avant-garde, like the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle, have been [...]

Ludwig Hilberseimer’s contribution to the debate about the modern metropolis remains one of the most extreme if not one of the most original. Architect, theorist and urban planner, Hilberseimer addressed the city, whose project he reduced to minimal structuring principles, with what could be described as a non-figurative approach, that is, an architecture without attributes which, for this reason, was able to overcome its formal crisis and re-claim itself an instrument of urban and political invention.

A Seminar held in Rotterdam, January 28, 2010. See also Helena Mattsson, Sven-Olov Wallenstein, 1939/1931. Swedish Modernism at Crossroads. (Stockolm: Axl Books, 2009). A modernist manifesto that leans on national identity and historical continuity. A pedagogical project that addresses (bio)politics through aesthetics. A compromise between capital and labor, crafted by avant-garde designers. 1. Uno Åhrén, [...]

Can a single building symbolize the crisis of an era? The seminar will analyze the crisis of modernism by an excursus on one of its most emblematic failures: the Unesco Building in Paris.

The capital is spectacle to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes a skyline of cement