18.00-19.00 Mahagonny must vanish: Rise and Fall of the Stalinallee

Maria S. Giudici

In the 1950s, East Berlin was transformed by the construction of a monumental axis that symbolized the reconstruction of a new socialist city after the ravages of WWII. The Stalinallee remains one of the most enigmatic ruins of our immediate past as it was quickly built and just as quickly it fell into critical obscurity when the age of prefabrication hailed by Khrushchev banished the florid socialist realism of the Stalin era. The Stalinallee failed to become a paradigm and remained an architectural hapax legomenon: anachronistic, typologically ambiguous and informed by a dubious ideological purpose, it does not really fit in a linear history of XX century architecture. However, when considered in its formal characters, the Stalinallee stands out for its refusal to accept the death of the traditional city and to yield to the open-ended configurations favoured by modernist composition, in which buildings do not engage with the space of the street. In doing so, it went against a figure that had been emerging since the industrial revolution: the ‘natural’ city. The Natural City rejects the architecture of the street in favour of a looser idea of environment hailed as a solution to the pressure of metropolitan life. Indeed, the Natural City could be just another name for urbanization.

But for Hermann Henselmann, one of the main designers of the Stalinallee, the only real ‘natural’ city is the capitalist metropolis as epitomized in Bertolt Brecht’s Mahagonny: non-sanitized, based on greed and unspeakable desires, the place of executions, obscenity, disorders. Not a place for placid pacified animals, but rather the place of the animal spirits which natural metaphors hide and make acceptable. For this reason he imagined the Stalinallee as a historically placed gesture: an artificial background for human, political activity.
The Natural City is post-ideological; but if politics is what defines humankind, the post-political subject is nothing but an animal –the real subject of biopolitics as the ultimate act of oikonomia. In the Natural City streets – the very topoi of urban conflict – should be substituted by neutral circulation. Under a liberating veneer, the rhetoric of the Natural City proposes the serenity of a society of happy animals; we could say that the Natural City is indeed the place of the End of History, a condition that the Stalinallee – albeit in a rather crude and awkward manner – rejected.

The present rereading of the Stalinallee, its failure and the theoretical outputs it did succeed to inspire, tries to disprove the cliché that charges technology with the death of the street, reversing a well-established commonplace. But if it is actually the rhetoric of nature, and not of technological development, that has tarnished the believability of the street as meaningful citymaking element, perhaps reconsidering the relationship between urban morphology and architectural typology could help us propose an alternative subject to the Animal the liberal (natural) city has constructed.

19.00-20.00 Camp of Faith: On the Islamic Political Theology and Urban Form

Hamed Khosravi

Following the general premises of the research on the theological foundations of contemporary cities in Iran (The Islamic Republic), the paper takes a provocative look at the issue of Islamic conceptions of the city as such. The intention is to avoid false preconceived assumptions, which are dominating the discourse. Instead, through a political understanding of urban space, the research tends to reconstruct the Islamic idea of the city in continuity with the spaces of sovereignty, which the city has developed.

Revisiting the theological (and thus political) origins of the idea of the city in the Islamic
ideology, the research proposes the following approach; first, by referring to the literary sources – including the text of the Quran, the Prophet’s quotes and early Islamic historical manuscripts – the paper investigates the emergence of an exclusive conception of the city, which is embodied in the deep meanings of the word ‘Medina’. Consequently, this method re-evaluates the (re)formation of the paradigm of inhabitable wall based on the ideological codes formulated in reconstruction of the idea of Medina in early Islamic cities. In this way the city will be seen neither as a morphological category, defined in contrast to the Western (Greco-Roman) type, nor as a mere constellation of the Friday mosque, Bazaar, and public bath surrounded by the “organic” neighbourhoods. The deep structure of the inhabitable wall, as an explicit political apparatus, will be revisited in the formation of different typologies such as mosques, caravanserais and the entire city.

Ultimately, the concept of the city as a camp of faith will be used as the key to interpret the very manifestation of Islamic ideology represented in the built environment. It will shape a theoretical/conceptual framework that can transcend itself as a historical archetype to the ideological spatial planning and development of contemporary cities in Iran (Islamic Republic). In fact, a paradoxical meaning is inherent in the idea of camp of faith; it insists on the concept of the camp as an absolute and pure paradigm of political space that defines borders between insiders and outsiders. On the other hand, it denotes faith as the decisive factor that goes beyond the limits of geography, race, and nationality. Indeed the term camp is used to enclose the territory of believers while their faith becomes a (geo)political apparatus, constantly marking the state of exception.

20.00-21.00 The Resistance of Architectural Form: the Emergence of Abstraction, Modern Architecture, and Autonomous Architecture

Dubravka Vranic

The Paper will unravel our idea of resistance of architectural form, tracing the origins of modern form as a logical outcom of the historical development of architecture. In this way, we will posit that modern architectural form is not only a naked form which came into being as the result of a radical break with history, but that it is deeply embedded within history and has evolved from the tradition of formalist thinking.

Just as for Plato the material world was the reflection of the world of ideas, we suppose that the development of architecture is intrinsically connected with the development of ideas and world views. This, we will trace the historical development of the concept of form from antiquity to modernity in relation to architecture. While in the ancient concept form was considered as a mere representation of nature, the modern concept of form cannot be separated by the subject that perceives and produces it. In this way the subject and all its artistic activities become autonomous: in this process, architecture started exploring its own specificity and its own language.

Le Corbusier’s sketch from Vers une architecture will be used as a heuristic device to illustrate the emergence of modern form. Inspired by the Map of Rome by Pirro Ligorio, Le Corbusier redraws the segment of this imaginative reconstruction of the ancient city and juxtaposes it with five primary geometrical bodies, abstracted from the buildings and monuments represented in it. Through this sketch we will narrate the story about the emergence of phenomenon of abstraction and mutually interdependent and concurrent emergence of modern forms of thought, architectural and urban form.

In the first part, the emergence of autonomous form will be traced in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and in the post-Kantian 19th-century reflections developed by Herbart, Fiedler, Hildebrand, Schmarsow, Riegl and Wöllflin. Secondly, the work of the Viennese architects Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos will be illustrated through the metaphor of Stilhülse and Kern Secondly, we will trace the emergence of modern architectural form in the work of Viennese architects Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos using the metaphor of the liberation of the kernel from the stylistic hull. Thirdly, the relationship between subject and object, man and nature, will be read through the breakdown of baroque organicism and composition of autonomous entities in the work of Ledoux, Schinkel and Wagner. Finally, through Peter Eisenman’s Ph.D. dissertation on The Formal Basis of Modern Architecture we will explore the possibility of architectural formal autonomy as a form of resistance.

Remaking the Public: CCTV, the Hyperbuilding and the Image of Labour

OMA’s CCTV headquarters in Beijing is considered here as emblematic of a reversal of the tenets of Bigness towards a new (proto)typology of the ‘hyperbuilding’. In this reversal the objective of a ‘metropolitan architecture’ is replaced with that of an infrastructural urbanism. This turn, I argue, has significant implications in regard to the production of new urban subjectivities, whilst also bringing Koolhaas remarkably close to what I have termed, elsewhere, ‘architectural Deleuzism’ in both his architectural and his discursive strategies. In order to challenge Koolhaas’s claims to be revisiting in the CCTV project his early interests in communism and communist architecture, I turn to elucidate a number of accounts of the relationship between post-reform China, neoliberalism, and neoliberal governmentality. From this analysis emerges the significance of imperatives within the People’s Republic of China for social ‘stabilisation’, the ‘reengineering’ of the worker, and the ‘remaking’ of the public, as well as the place of the media, and CCTV specifically, within these processes. These imperatives are then used as the optics through which to understand the organisational and semantic operation of the CCTV headquarters, focusing particularly upon its zoned departmental organisation, its use of stacked ‘generic’ floor plates, and the function of the ‘Visitors Loop’ as an instrument of social induction.

Douglas Spencer has studied design and architectural history, and cultural studies, and currently teaches on the Historical and Critical Thinking, and Landscape Urbanism programmes of the Architectural Association’s Graduate School, as well co-directing the school’s research programme on Urban Prototypes. His research and writing on urbanism, architecture, film and critical theory has been published in journals including Radical Philosophy, The Journal of Architecture, and AA Files. He is a co-editor of the book Critical Territories: From Academia to Praxis (forthcoming), and is now completing his study of ‘Architectural Deleuzism’ for his Doctoral thesis at the University of Westminster.

Suggested reading

Lemke, Thomas, “Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique,” in Rethinking Marxism, Volume 14, Issue 3, September (2002)

Ong, Aihwa, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006): 219-239

Spencer, Douglas, “Architectural Deleuzism: Neoliberal Space, Control and the ‘Univer-City’,” Radical Philosophy 168, July/August (2011)

Virno, Paolo, A Grammar of the Multitude (Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e), 2004): 47-71

Platon Issaias shows the collapse of the petty bourgeois domestic space in the 2000s Greece. On the ashes of the old subjectivity, is it possible to think the architect as a collective design agent? Bernardina Borra tries to answer this question analyzing the architecture of Hannes Meyer.

18.00-19.00
On Co-operation: from a Political Category to a Design Tool

Bernardina Borra

Within cognitive capitalism architects have a chance to help overcome contemporary capitalist limits to economic and (re)productive life. The paper will attempt to critically retrieve from Hannes Meyer’s legacy on Co-op design the professionality and tools needed in today’s society to overarch this impasse.­

Within modernist culture Hannes Meyer can be seen as a paradigmatic example in the attempt to establish co-operation no longer as a political category, but as a design tool. In particular, his work can be regarded as a harbinger to put into crisis the cognitive status of the autonomous vision and the centered self. This is a key concept to outline the potential of our profession today, as well as to understand the multitude in its actual status and possible future developments.

Meyer deconstructs the work of architecture into its material determinants and the social conditions of its making. For him, architecture tries to disappear. This entails acknowledging that design is collaborative and our profession is based on the re-appropriation and re-signification of existing built matter in the city. The professional task is designing the use and the meaning of the city rather than exclusively focusing on form tout court: in particular, reorganizing an organized form of existence by co-operating among individuals.

Individuals could then redeem a subject-object relationship to the city, and regain on the one hand the agency to affect and on the other the capacity to be affected by their space and environment. Such process casts a new light for a possibility to shape an active agency that has a reciprocal relationship to spatial issues. Hereby the result would not be a transposal into built matter of an already constituted meaning that exist outside and before architecture and planning. But rather, an organization of process, a set of operations, a co-production of certain effects not available without design performance.

19.00-20.00
War within Four Walls: A City in Crisis and the Collapse of the Domestic Archetypes

Platon Issaias

The paper analyzes two significant feature films of the last decade, “Matchbox” (2003) and “Dogtooth” (2009), which were both presented by two young Greek directors, Yannis Economides and Yorgos Lanthimos.

Dealing with different subjectivities–the first with the urban petit bourgeoisie and the second with the suburban middle class–the films proceeded with a brutal critique of the cultural and ideological prejudices and stereotypes of the native society. These were exposed as pathogeneses of an illusionary and disorienting social consensus, an institutional prerequisite during the decades of economic development. However ordinary, paradigmatic and exemplarily familiar, characters, situations, everyday life, language articulation and content, spaces and objects are depicted to their extremes.
What makes these two projects significant in the discipline of architecture is the way the artists relate all of the above with the collapse of the domestic archetypes of the city: the typical apartment of the generic Athenian block, and the self-built suburban villa of rural Attica. In both cases, space is of fundamental importance, primarily because the plot is developing only within interior and introverted settings, with barely any reference to the surrounding city and landscape. By being ordinary and typical, they manage to further estrange the reality of the protagonists.

The aim of the paper is to explore the relation of these two significant films with the city’s contemporary condition. This will allow elaborating on and arguing the hypothesis of the research, which is the bond of the profound economic and political collapse of Greece with a particular spatial crisis that preceded it.

18.00-19.00
Prehistories of Typical Plan: War Machines and Isometric Architecture

Francesco Marullo

The extension of production at all levels of society, and the parallel expansion of conflict into new forms of warfare, progressively forced architecture to abstract its technical representation into a set of calculable points and to reduce its own mass to a naked frame. In order to strenuously commensurate its apparatus of capture upon the progressively immaterial sources of value, the architecture of production turned in an isometric defensive system, infinitely reproducible like a mise en abîme of Typical Plans.

The rise of such isometrical language could be traced back to the very first treatise of architecture by Vitruvius, in which the analytical disposition of objects through plans, elevations and sections was explicitly related to the military procedures of surveying the battlefield, layouting the camp and ordering the legions. For a soldier-architect as Vitruvius there was a sharp distinction between reason and ingeniousness. While ratio mostly referred to a static knowledge based on a superordinate set of rules and proportions, sollertia alluded to the deepest human ingenious faculty, synthesis of cunning intuition and pragmatic thought, which could be attained only at war: conflict constituted both a source of technical innovation and a trigger for a scientific investigation of reality.

In its Renaissance reception, the Vitruvian machinatio was productively transformed into operative diagrams of organization. The evolution of artillery required a prompt measurement of the fire- trajectories and an accurate survey of the opponent forces, to strategically modulate the line of bastions and to rearrange the urban fabric accordingly. The symbolical and subjective vanishing- point of the costruzione legittima was thus gradually replaced by the neutral objectivity of the axonometric view, constructed by dissecting reality into orthogonal projections, and by posing the view-point at an infinite distance.

Typical Plan, in its tautological reiteration as nth plan, is intrinsically axonometric. Conceived as an abstract device which constantly develops by absorbing and framing the inner and outer struggling pressures of its own ‘content’ without restraining its productive potential, it definitely embodied the diagram of the late capitalist exploitation. Therefore this essay would be an attempt to retrace a prehistory of the Typical Plan from the Vitruvian machinatio and its Renaissance reception, between the two paradigmatic ‘projects’ of Francesco Di Giorgio Martini and Archizoom Associati.

19.00-20.00
Uniqueness Without Aura, or: Monsters of Architecture Against the Typological Order

Amir Djalali

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.

For more than four decades, Los Angeles-based visual artist, Mike Kelley has engaged both materially and thematically with musical production, first in the Detroit, Michigan art and music collective, Destroy All Monsters (DAM), and then in a series of groups and performances. While DAM has recently received a good deal of art-world attention–with ongoing musical releases, exhibitions in 2011 in Boston and Los Angeles, and a reprint of the group’s “fanzine” publication–the critical and historical stakes of their production (and the larger question of art/music interactions) has hardly been broached. Concentrating on three art/music groups with which Kelley was involved (DAM, the Poetics, and the almost completely unknown Idiot Bliss), “Live Dead” will discuss the relation between Kelley’s musical production and his art into the 1980s to expand and investigate the artist’s larger relations to popular culture, postmodernism, and the historical avant-garde.

Reading

Branden W. Joseph, “John Cage and the Architecture of Silence,” October 81 (Summer 1997), pp. 80-104.
Branden W. Joseph, “My Mind Split Open: Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” Grey Room 8 (Summer 2001), pp. 80-107.
Branden W. Joseph, “No More Apologies: Pop Art and Pop Music ca. 1963,” in Warhol Live, ed., Stephane Aquin and Emma Lavigne (Montreal: Montreal Fine Arts Museum, 2008), pp. 122-129.

The presentation forms part of a larger study that tracks the emergence of what remains a highly influential account of the politics of contemporary culture. The argument considers on how accounts of culture and art, which influenced by and sympathetic to the New Left, responded to and deployed the categories of Marx’s Capital. In particular, the paper engages with Fredric Jameson’s essays, which associate recent so-called ‘isometric’ architecture with finance capital, to challenge the notion of ‘abstraction’ he advances.

Gail Day is Senior Lecturer at the School of Fine Art, History and Cultural Studies at University of Leeds. She is author of Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010)

Friday 25th November

The Politics of Urban Form
PhD in Progress Presentations

Respondents:
Tahl Kaminer, TU Delft
Marina Lathouri, Architectural Association, London
Lara Schrijver TU Delft
Thomas Weaver, Architectural Association, London

10.00 Introduction and Welcome by Vedran Mimica
10.15 Introduction by Pier Vittorio Aureli

10.30
Amir Djalali
Becoming Metropolis: Aloïs Riegl’s Kunstwollen and the Politics of the Groszstadt
Response: Lara Schirver, Tahl Kaminer, Marina Lathouri

11.30
Francesco Marullo
Homeostatic Bureaucracy: A Genealogy of the Bürolandschaft
Response: Tahl Kaminer, Thomas Weaver, Lara Schrijver

12.30 Break

13.30
Platon Issaias
The Absence of Plan as a Project
Response: Tahl Kaminer, Marina Lathouri

14.30
Maria S. Giudici
Spectacle vs. Pedagogy: From Hausmann’s Boulevard to Cerda’s Urbe
Response: Thomas Weaver, Tahl Kaminer

15.30
Hamed Khosravi
Spaces of Sovereignty: The Exceptional Geography of the State and the Dissolution of Paradise
Response: Thomas Weaver, Marina Lathouri

16.30
Bernardina Borra
On Co-Operation: Towards a Collectively Based Subjectivity
Response: Tahl Kaminer, Marina Lathouri

18.00 Concluding remarks and Drinks

19.00 Dinner

Intellectual History and Architectural Culture

The profile of architectural history has changed in recent decades to increasingly accommodate research into the intellectual history of architectural culture. What some have called architectural theory’s historiographical turn emerged from the debates of the 1980s and 90s, granting writers of the last decade or so a (contestable) legitimacy to conduct historical research on architecture in this mode. Where the case for architectural history as architecture by other means has been relatively persuasive in many quarters, the more recent tendency to privilege historiographical and historiological matters has a less direct recourse to an idea of architecture made of books rather than buildings. If one task of architectural history in the twentieth century has been to construct and foster architecture’s historical consciousness, what is the work done by historians of historians and theoreticians in the present moment? The lecture will reflect on this problem through current and recent research projects.

Andrew Leach has over a decade’s experience teaching the history, theory and criticism of art, design, architecture and urbanism; and conducting research in universities, technical institutes and research academies in Australia, New Zealand, Italy and Belgium. He studied art history, architecture and urban planning at Victoria University of Wellington (BA,MArch), and earned his PhD from Ghent University under the supervision of cultural philosopher Bart Verschaffel.

At present a senior lecturer in Architecture at the Griffith School of Environment and an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow, Andrew held a UQ Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from 2006-8 and was appointed a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Queensland in 2010.

Andrew’s work on the Italian architectural historian and theoretician Manfredo Tafuri has secured him an international reputation as a writer and commentator on the intellectual history of post-second-world war architectural, urban and political culture in Europe

Published in San Rocco, 2, “The Even Covering of the Field” (2011) [link]
1. There are several articles and essays on this competition, which was a true landmark event in the history of corporate branding through architecture. See Manfredo Tafuri, “La Montagna Disincantata”, in Giorgio Ciucci, Mario Manieri Elia and Manfredo Tafuri, eds., La città americana dalla Guerra civile al New Deal (Bari: Laterza, 1973), trans. as “The Disenchanted Mountain: The Skyscraper and the City”, in The American City: From the Civil War to the New Deal (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984). See also Luca Garofalo, Concorso per il Chicago Tribune (Turin: Testo & Immagine, 1997).
2. Hilberseimer did not submit his proposal to the competition. The project was published for the first time in the second issue of the journal G as an illustration for his short piece on the high-rise typology. Here Hilberseimer discussed his proposal for the Chicago Tribune building and his proposal for a residential high-rise in order to criticize the divide between construction and form that characterized most high-rise buildings in US at the time. It is interesting to note that Hilberseimer’s publication of his Chicago Tribune project followed on Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s proposal for the Burohaus, a model for the office building designed as a vast open space. The reality of industrial architecture and its adaptability to other uses was a topic that both Mies van der Rohe and Hilberseimer addressed in two of their contributions to G. See Ludwig Hilberseimer, “Hochhaus”, G: Materialen für elementaren Gestaltung, n. 2 (September 1923): 3; and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, “Burohaus”, G: Materialen für elementaren Gestaltung, n. 1 (July 1923): 3.
3. Hilberseimer’s knowledge of American architecture is demonstrated by several articles he wrote on the subject during the 1920s, especially the important publications Beton als Gestalter, written with Julius Vischer, and Groszstadt Architektur. In both texts examples of American industrial architecture are commented on and illustrated. See Ludwig Hilberseimer and Julius Vischer, Beton als Gestalter (Stuttgart: Julius Hoffmann Verlag, 1928); Ludwig Hilberseimer, Groszstadt Architektur (Stuttgart: Julius Hoffmann Verlag, 1927).
4. See Carl Schmitt, Römischer Katholizismus und Politische Form (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1923)
5. This argument is also addressed in Schmitt’s famous critique of the neutralizing ethos of economic management. See Carl Schmitt, “Das Zeitalter der Neutralisierung und Entpolitisierung”, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 58 (1927): 66–81.

In 1922 Chicago’s famous daily newspaper The Chicago Tribune launched an international competition for its new headquarters, which were to be built on Michigan Avenue. Carefully strategized as a media event, the call for proposals attracted both interest from the general public and a massive participation of 263 architects from the US and abroad.[1] As the winning proposal, the jury selected the Gothic-inspired high-rise designed by John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood. Howells and Hood’s proposal met the organizers’ ultimate goal: to redeem the brutal product of economic speculation – the high-rise – in the form of a spectacular landmark for the city. Before the Chicago Tribune competition, high-rise buildings in Chicago and New York were usually conceived and perceived as raw histograms of land value erected to serve the sole purpose of facilitating and generating business. The Chicago Tribune competition, in contrast, went beyond the possibility of economic value being derived from land speculation to the possibility of that derived from representation. Architectural representation – the power of a building’s image – was here rediscovered not as a tool for political representation, but rather as one of economic interest, as branding. The remarkably heterogeneous responses to the competition, which presented designs inspired by wide-ranging Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque or Art Deco styles as well as some modernist ones, showed the abstract and non-representable nature of economic interests when it comes to giving it a definitive form. In its pervasive and fluctuating nature, economic interest can assume any kind of stylistic or formal expression. In terms of form, economic interest can be whatever one wants precisely because it is whatever – the potential to be anything – that is at stake in an economic process. It is possible to argue that in a regime like capitalism, in which the appropriation and exploitation of the potential of things rather than what already exists becomes the fundamental object of economic interest, the only definitive architectural form possible is one that is reduced to the barest essentials of existence: a space in which any foreseen and unforeseen activity can take place. The stark simplicity and literalness of Ludwig Hilberseimer’s proposal for the Chicago Tribune can be understood as the most radical response to the problem architectural form when erected on the unstable ground of economic interest.[2] The project consists of the simple extrusion of the required square metres of space enveloped within a façade defined by a uniform distribution of openings. The design represents a radical application of the principles of the “free plan” already implicit in the development of industrial architecture: a field of columns supporting unobstructed floors ready to be arranged according to any kind of use. Hilberseimer knew the reality of commercial and industrial architecture in US very well.[3] Moreover the language of his proposal seems to have been developed directly from the industrial architecture of the Plant, the Chicago Tribune’s old workshop, which the newspaper’s competition brief explained was to be extended or replaced with a more representative structure. Therefore the radicality of Hilberseimer’s proposal lies not in the originality of the architectural solution, but in its transferring of the abstraction of the free plan from the material production of the factory to the immaterial production of white-collar office space, where economic processes are even more abstract and elusive in terms of the organization and management of space. And yet it is precisely the radicality – or better, the literalness – with which Hilberseimer adhered to the abstract conditions of economic management, just as the concave adheres to the convex, that makes his proposal a critical clinamen within the totalizing space of economic processes.

II

In his article Römischer Katholizismus und Politische Form, Carl Schmitt affirmed that the reality of an economic process cannot be represented. According to Schmitt, economy is what it does.[4] Unlike categories such as “God”, “The People”, “The State”, “The Public”, “Freedom” or “The Principle of Equality”, the economy is unrepresentable; it cannot be real if it does not exist – it is matter of fact. As a political and juridical sphere, the act of representing a value, a believe, a principle gives a special dignity and authority to the agent of representation because who or what represents a high value – i.e. something that must be persuasive, or that has to feed a pathos of conviction – cannot be itself devoid of moral value. Moreover moral value is not only a prerogative of who represents and what is represented. It is also conferred upon the subject at whom a representation of something is addressed. The crude reality of the economy deals with data that are in themselves devoid of any moral value and, thus, of any representational authority. According to Schmitt, there is no possibility to establish any condition of value or charisma in a world reified by the managerial apparatus of the economy.[5] Unlike traditions of representation like those of the church, the monarchy, and the state, whose masteries are based on metaphysical and transcendental values, the abstraction of the modern factory is incapable of representation to the point that, as Schmitt reminds us, the Soviet Republic had to use obsolete emblems of work such as the hammer and the sickle (whose symbolism did not corresponded to the technically advance way Lenin defined Communism as “Soviets plus Electrification”) in order to find a “representative” symbol for Communism. It is possible to argue that it is precisely the impossibility of any convincing representation of a world reified by the management of economic processes that created fertile ground for value-free aesthetic expressions. For this reason it is not surprising that with the rise of industrialization and its expanding universe made of increasingly advanced forms of production, art and architecture were no longer considered as an embodiment of values beyond themselves, but rather as realities within themselves.
The rise of abstract art and the rise of modern architecture had already been anticipated in the 19th century by theories that considered both visual art and architecture as self-referential phenomena whose critical assessment was based only on their immanent physical and corporeal properties. These properties were form, space, volume, mass and movement – in other words, the generic properties of any artefact. If there is a true artistic and architectural manifestation of a civilization driven by its economy, then this must be the reduction of the content of a work of art to its purely generic attributes, for any attempt to represent reality in a convincing way is made impossible by the fact that reality is so complex, infinitesimal and ultimately elusive.
And yet the condition of the generic is not simply a result of industrial modes of production. The generic is an anthropological dimension of subjectivity that is of fundamental importance in capitalism. In order to extract surplus value from workers, Capital has to conquer and appropriate worker’s labour power. Labour power is not a specialized sphere but it represents the totality of the human condition. Labour Power is generic, undetermined potential “where one particular type of labour or another has not been designated, but any kind of labour is taking place, be it the manufacturing of a car door, or the harvesting of pears, the babble of someone calling in to a phone “party-line,” or the work of a proofreader.”[6]6. Paolo Virno, The Grammar of the Multitude (Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2004), p. 81 Labour power coincides with the generic ability to act, to speak, or to do things both with our hands and with words. Labour power relies on a fundamental characteristic of the human animal: its ability to adapt to and to cope with any unforeseen situation.

III

The spatial indeterminacy of the free plan is a radical manifestation of how labour power has been put at work by capital. If labour power is characterized by man’s ability to adapt to any situation, and therefore by the total unpredictability of man’s actions and reactions, then the only corresponding spatial form in such unstable conditions is free space: space emptied of any obstruction and ready to accommodate any situation. The history of capitalistic spatial governance can be understood as that of the possibility of accommodating the condition of permanent unpredictability and instability that is inherent to human nature. If labour power – the very object of any economic process – can be understood as the even covering of the field of human potentialities (from body to mind), then the spatial apparatuses that correspond to this reality have to reach the same degree of openness and potentiality of use and occupation. This condition becomes even more radical when “production” is no longer understood as the production of goods, but as the production of immaterial facts such as services and information. When language, cooperation and exchange become the main instruments of production, as occurred in the so-called post-Fordist economy – the diagram of spatial relationships becomes so complex and ever-changing that it becomes impossible to translate it into a fixed spatial arrangement. The increasing importance of tertiary and intellectual work within the development of industrial cities was already becoming evident in the 1920s, particularly in Germany and the US.[7]7.On the rise of white-collar and intellectual work as mass work phenomena, see Sergio Bologna, “I lavoratori della conoscenza fuori e dentro l’impresa”, in Ceti medi senza Futuro? Scritti, appunti sul lavoro e altro (Rome: Derive e Approdi, 2008), 108–36. Also relevant is Sergio Bologna “Nazismo e classe operaia”, paper presented to the Camera del Lavoro in Milan, 3 June 1993. [An English translation is available here] While industrial work was dominated by the rigid pattern of the assembly line, in which workers were the silent controllers of machines, tertiary work was already seen as being carried out by a multiplicity of human relationships and associations whose unpredictable pattern overcame any rigid organization of space. Hilberseimer’s proposal for the Chicago Tribune building takes this reality into account by reducing architecture to its barest formal state: generic floors supported by a homogeneous field of columns, reached by elevators and enveloped by uniform façades. While Mies van der Rohe’s office buildings, such as the high-rise building in Friedrichstrasse and the Burohaus, were attempts to redeem the generic form of productive space by subtly manipulating the envelope, Hilberseimer’s is simply the most literal representation of the open-ended logic of capital when it comes to the question of form. At the same time, Hilberseimer’s design shows how architecture, once it is emptied by the destructive character of economic management, returns to being what it used to be at the very beginning: an enclosed space, an absolute form. In this respect a crucial element in Hilberseimer’s project is the façade’s uniform pattern of openings. The pattern is the vertical projection of the logic of the interior’s structural grid. However, Hilberseimer explained how this formal solution eliminates the opening as an individual piercing element on the wall of the façade and makes the building appear to be a composition of pure volumes.[8]8. See Ludwig Hilberseimer, “Hochhaus”, Das Kunstblatt (1922): 531 Hilberseimer’s interpretation of the principle of “the even covering of the field” within the plan, the section and the elevation of the building through a reliance on the simplest spatial and formal organization – the isotropic grid of columns and openings – has an ambivalent meaning. On the one hand, such organization of the building form derives from an attitude that has accepted the abstraction of economy; on the other, Hilberseimer develops a legible limit out of this condition by turning the spatial logic of the free plan against itself in the form of the absoluteness of the volume. 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.

EZCT Architecture & Design Research. Universal House and Assembly Element, 2009-2011

October 20th – 16.00-19.00 – Berlage Institute, Rotterdam

Philippe Morel
A Discussion about the Computational Logic of Late Capitalism

After a general presentation of the main theoretical hypotheses that I exposed in my recent essay Sense and Sensibilia (in Architectural Design, July 2011), in which I evoke a search for an understanding of the “computational logic of late capitalism”, I will describe more precisely with the help of examples such an important aspect of my work. As it can be noticed, the expression “computational logic of late capitalism” refers to the “Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”, a theoretical analysis of Postmodernism that Fredric Jameson exposed in a famous book first released in 1992. While the logic described by F. Jameson is mainly related to our visual culture (the images of our world), the logic of capitalism I am calling computational is related to the intrinsic mechanism of the production of economical value in all aspects of the everyday life, as long as it is mediated by the use of a computer. It is therefore deeply related to the advent of a kind of capitalism that I first called in 2000 “Integral Capitalism”, capitalism which not only refers to the fact that it now controls the entire life from birth to death (and before and after), but that also refers to its own “technical logic”: its intrinsic mechanism. Such a mechanism is based on the capacities of integration that computation offers us through integrative computer simulations, simulations that are now strictly necessary in a general economy.