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.

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

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 […]

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