Pier Vittorio Aureli

Pier Vittorio Aureli was born in Rome in 1973. He graduated in Architecture at the IUAV in Venice. He earned his PhD at the TU Delft in 2005. Aureli’s main research focus is the relationship between architectural form, political theory and urban history. He teaches at the Architectural Association in London where is both Diploma Unit Master and Director of the PhD Program ‘City-Architecture’. Currently he is Louis I. Kahn Visiting Professor at Yale School of Architecture. He has taught at Columbia University and Berlage Institute in Rotterdam.

Aureli has written many essays on architecture and the city, he is the author of several books such as The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (2011), The Project of Autonomy: Politics and Architecture within and against capitalism (2008), and he is the editor of the recently published collection of essays The City as a Project (2014). Together with Martino Tattara he is the co-founder of Dogma. Since its foundation Dogma has worked on the relationship between architecture and the city by focusing mostly on urban design and large-scale projects. Parallel to the design projects, the members of Dogma have intensely engaged with teaching, writing, and research, activities that have been an integral part of the office’s engagement with architecture. In 2006, Dogma has won the 1st Iakov Chernikhov Prize for the best emerging architectural practice and in 2013, on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Dogma. 11 Projects’ the Architectural Association in London has published a monograph on the work of the office.


Posts by Pier Vittorio Aureli

How We Became Architects

First published in The Real Review 1, Spring 2016. Notes on Ann C. Huppert, Becoming an Architect in Renaissance Italy: Art, Science, and the Career of Baldassarre Peruzzi. Between the 14th and 16th century the European city developed from being civitas to what the architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri defined as machine for the extraction of […]

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.

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 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.

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 […]