CRAIG ELLWOOD
WEEKEND HOUSE PROJECT, 1964
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Abstraction means a process of taking out (Ab-traho)
Abstraction is a process through which man seeks to define generic frameworks rather than specific solutions.
Marx in the Grundrisse, Via Pier Vittorio Aureli’s lecture @ the AA on Abstraction in Architecture
Casalino 23 Masterplan - Initial Concept Models - Ludovico Quaroni with Roberto Maestro
…Rossi’s elaboration of an autonomous architecture coincided with his proposal of a theory of the city capable of challenging what he saw in the early 1960s as capitalism’s new form of urban project: its totalistic planning of the city, with its concomitant celebration of technology.
Pier Vittorio Aureli, from The Project of Autonomy
Out of an abundance of concern that the voices of old white men are failing to be heard, Domus has announced that it will create a ‘college of maestri’ to ensure that this marginalized demographic in the architectural profession regains a representative voice at the table.
Exactly because the description of confusion differs from a confused description, only maximum precision makes it possible to speak about ambiguity, suspensions, voids, stratifications of meaning.
Vittorio Gregotti, from Inside Architecture
“Architecture is a history of borders. It materializes existing power relations through a clear delimitation of space. The surrounding structures impose onto us in an intrusive way in order to reassure, control, contain, seduce.
They reflect our lifestyle, conditioning it directly.The city is both territory and population, physical environment and gravity of social relations.
It is the interaction between the delimiting built environment and the conditioned social flow that should be studied to approach its reality. Open the envelope to look inside.”(Translation from French by Socks)
Against the presumed open-ended form of city-territory planning, then, Rossi’s group opposed an urban space of finite, juxtaposed parts. The limitation implied by the circumscribed form of the urban artifact was seen as the foundation of the architecture of the city. […] This mode of thinking was counterposed by Rossi and his colleagues to the so-called organic tradition of planning, represented by the work and theories of figures like Patrick Geddes, Gaston Bardet, Lewis Muford, and Victor Gruen.
Pier Vittorio Aureli, from The Project of Autonomy
Post-Traumatic Urbanism
Excerpts from Adrian Lahoud’s Lecture ‘Post-Traumatic Urbanism’ at the Bartlett, 5 October 2011:
[26:08]
So if the city is the object of architecture, it is an object that is now synonymous with complexity. More importantly the problem is posed such that its complexity is excessive. It is too much. So the discipline, then, is always caught in a position of informational deficit with regards to its object; it is trying to catch it, but it can’t. This city appears through a form of knowledge that continually recalibrates around its object, always trying to provide increasingly high resolution and live representations of it in order to control and close this deficit.
In one sense the issue is that complexity is neutralized as a concept and becomes recast as a mere excess of variables. now the concept of the city that emerges from these practices is highly interconnected and it is contingent, but it is a contingency that is presented to us primarily as a problem of environmental management and not of politics.
So thinking back to the work I showed you in both Beirut and Venice, you have a typical case of complex emergent behaviors. What I have described as the anonymous materiality of the city.
…
In each case the city emerges out of an action that is coordinated within a strictly local horizon. To my mind the mistake made in most homilies to bottom-up, emergent thinking is to somehow naturalize this tendency. To depoliticize it. And the central figure within this ethos is not Manuel De Landa, it is Jane Jacobs. And I think my disagreement with this lineage in urban thinking is that - while I think these tendencies are absolutely important to understand, it is why we study them, I don’t think that our relationship with them needs to be one of fidelity: they condition our domain of action, but they do not exhaust it.
Architecture and urbanism are still matters of decision-making, that is to say, politics. And a decision must reserve the right to refuse this reflexive inheritance of what already exists. I locate this momant of refusal in the cut, or in separation
…
- Adrian Lahoud
via Michael Keller
room-of-flint
