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Title:
Architecture and abstraction

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In this theoretical study of abstraction in architecture—the first of its kind—Pier Vittorio Aureli argues for a reconsideration of abstraction, its meanings, and its sources. Although architects have typically interpreted abstraction in formal terms—the purposeful reduction of the complexities of design to its essentials—Aureli shows that abstraction instead arises from the material conditions of building production. In a lively study informed by Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, and other social theorists, Architecture and Abstraction presents abstraction in architecture not as an aesthetic tendency but as a movement that arises from modern divisions of labor and consequent social asymmetries. These divisions were anticipated by the architecture of antiquity, which established a distinction between manual and intellectual labor, and placed the former in service to the latter. Further abstractions arose as geometry, used for measuring territories, became the intermediary between land and money and eventually produced the logic of the grid. In our own time, architectural abstraction serves the logic of capitalism and embraces the premise that all things can be exchanged—even experience itself is a commodity. To resist this turn, Aureli seeks a critique of architecture that begins not by scaling philosophical heights, but by standing at the ground level of material practice.

Title:
Peter Eisenman : barefoot on white-hot walls

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'Peter Eisenman : barefoot on white-hot walls' - published on the occasion of the eponymous personal exhibition at the MAK Vienna - gives a profound insight into the work of Peter Eisenman. The main focus is on Eisenman's most recent projects, such as the 'City of culture of Galicia' in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, and the 'Memorial of the murdered Jews in Europe' in Berlin, Germany.

Title:
Cedric Price: Potteries thinkbelt & fun palace

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Peu avant l'éclosion du Swinging London, du flying circus des Monty Python (1969-1974) et du contrôle cybernétique de la série Le Prisonnier (1967-1968), l'architecte Cedric Price (1934-2003) va, au début des sixties, initier deux projets culturels et éducatifs restés mythiques : le Fun Palace (1961-1965, non réalisé) et la Potteries Thinkbelt (1963-1967, non réalisé). Dans leur formalisme modulaire comme dans leur esprit très évolutif, le premier est imaginé comme « un grand chantier naval installé dans n'importe quelle zone industrielle », tandis que le second entend se substituer aux fabriques de porcelaine moribondes du Staffordshire. Dans leurs essais, S. Mathews et P. V. Aureli en déconstruisent la portée programmatique et la signification sociétale.

Title:
Rewriting Alberti

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Much has been written about Renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti’s mantra of part-to-whole as one of the continuing conditions of architecture. While this underlying thesis has often been repeated in the annals of architectural history and theory, architects have rarely questioned the idea. In ''Rewriting Alberti'', architect Peter Eisenman suggests, however, that Alberti provoked a radical discourse beyond the part-to-whole dialogue featured in his Ten Books of Architecture. Eisenman’s in-depth analysis of Alberti’s five built works reveals a disjunction between the architect’s buildings and theoretical writings, suggesting a new relationship of form to meaning based on the fragmentation of homogeneous space. ''Rewriting Alberti'' includes contributions by Pier Vittorio Aureli, Mario Carpo, and Daniel Sherer. Carpo, an architectural historian and critic, theorizes that Alberti’s work initiated an idea of the discipline as a notational system akin to contemporary computational logics. By way of comparison, Sherer, an architectural historian, reconsiders critic Manfredo Tafuri’s readings of Alberti, and architect and theorist Aureli draws on Alberti to propose another idea of the architectural “project.”

Title:
Order and disorder: Selected essays and interviews by Manfredo Tafuri, 1964-1994

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Manfredo Tafuri was one of the most influential architectural historians of the twentieth century, and his work continues to shape the landscape of architectural history and theory. This anthology presents—for the first time—a carefully curated selection of essays and interviews spanning his entire career, from 1964, the year in which Tafuri decided to focus exclusively on architectural history, to 1994, the year of his untimely death. These texts—most translated into English for the first time—reveal the extraordinary range of Tafuri’s scholarship, ranging from topics as diverse as the critique of architectural ideology and capitalist development, to the contradictions of the Soviet avant-garde, urban strategies in renaissance Italy, social democratic planning policies, and the work of architects including Giulio Romano, Le Corbusier, Aldo Rossi, and Carlo Scarpa.

Title:
Dogma: Living and working

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Despite the increasing numbers of people who now work from home, in the popular imagination the home is still understood as the sanctuary of privacy and intimacy. Living is conceptually and definitively separated from work. This book argues against such a separation, countering the prevailing ideology of domesticity with a series of architectural projects that illustrate alternative approaches. Less a monograph than a treatise, richly illustrated, the book combines historical research and design proposals to reenvision home as a cooperative structure in which it is possible to live and work and in which labor is socialized beyond the family—freeing inhabitants from the sense of property and the burden of domestic labor.

Title:
Rome: The centre(s) elswhere

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An authoritative visual essay on the relationship between urban politics, large scale design, and architectural form. A plan that addresses Rome’s consular roads, infrastructure, and landscape, together with a dense reflection on the meaning of Rome as "Urban Paradigm".

Title:
The possibility of an absolute architecture

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In The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, Pier Vittorio Aureli proposes that a sharpened formal consciousness in architecture is a precondition for political, cultural, and social engagement with the city. Aureli revisits the work of four architects whose projects were advanced through the making of architectural form but whose concern was the city at large: Andrea Palladio, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Etienne-Louis Boullée, and Oswald Mathias Ungers. The work of these architects, Aureli argues, addressed the transformations of the modern city and its urban implications through the elaboration of specific and strategic architectural forms.

Title:
The project of autonomy: politics and architecture within and against capitalism

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The Project of Autonomy radically rediscusses the concept of autonomy in politics and architecture by tracing a concise and polemical argument about its history in Italy in the 1960s and early 1970s. Architect and educator Pier Vittorio Aureli analyzes the position of the Operaism movement, formed by a group of intellectuals that produced a powerful and rigorous critique of capitalism and its intersections with two of the most radical architectural-urban theories of the day: Aldo Rossi's redefinition of the architecture of the city and Archizoom's No-stop City. Readers are introduced to major figures like Mario Tronti and Raniero Panzieri, who previously have been little known in the English-speaking world, especially in an architectural context, and to the political motivations behind the theories of Rossi and Archizoom. The book draws on significant new source material, including recent interviews by the author and untranslated documents.

Title:
The city as a project

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What if the city can be seen differently than as a sort of self-organising chaos? Shaped not only by material forces, but also by cultural and didactic visions, the city may instead result from political intention in the form of architectural projects. This collection of eight essays, edited by Pier Vittorio Aureli, examines a fascinating set of urban conditions across more than two millennia of history, from the political theology of the Islamic city to the political economy of Renaissance architecture, and from the planned Mesoamerican metropolis to the Fordist factory floor, revealing the ways in which the city arises from the constant interaction between ideas and spatial conditions.