T O W A R D T H E A R C H I P E L A G OPier Vittorio Aureli

A G L O S S A R Y

“What sort of significant and critical relationship can architecture aspire to in a world that is no longer constituted by the idea and the motivations of the city, but is instead dominated by urbanization? (Aureli 91)

”“If one were to summarize life in a city and life in a building in one gesture, it would have to be that of passing through borders or walls...the only program that can reliably be attributed to architecture is its specific inertia in the face of urbanization’s mutability, its manifestation of a clearly singular place. (Aureli 119)

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OMA: Ville Nouvelle Melun-Sénart, 1987

“ W H Y A R C H I T E C T U R E ? ”Pier Vittorio Aureli

C O N T E N T I O N

“Aureli is concerned with the possibility of constituting other criteria of interpretation of

the idea of the city and its architecture based on the concepts of the political and the formal.

(Aureli 114)

”“Any general idea of constructing the city is conceived by starting from the limits of architectural form itself. (Aureli 119)

”A city without landmakrs. Proposal for the New Administrative City in the Republic of South Korea. Dogma.

U R B S v s . C I V I T A S

“The CIVITAS is the gathering of free individuals who come together by recognizing a public sphere...[URBS] lies in the space infra, or in between them; it is infrastructure...the infra of the urbs is the space of connection and integration. (Aureli 95)

”Emperor Trajan: Timgad, 100

In contrast to the Greek polis, which presupposed a defined community and had defined limits, the urbs represented a network of assimilation.

U R B A N I Z A T I O N

“The task of URBANIZATION was to expand infrastructure as much as possible in order to settle human habitat beyond the symbolic frame of the city. (Aureli 957)

” Ildefonso Cerdà: Project for the Extension of Barcelona and its Port, 1859

The framework of the suburban expansion is the quality of the capitalist bourgeous city.

E N C L A V E a n d I N F I N I T Y

“The ENCLAVE is a restricted place that makes the urban territory uneven . (Aureli 108)

No-Stop City proposed a radicalization per absurdam of the industrial, consumer, and expansionist forces of the capitalist metropolis in the form of an infinite city with attribute other than its infinite quantity. (Aureli 101)

”Archizoom: No-Stop CIty, 1970

Hegelian “bad inifinity” appears as the infinite repetition of a system. The enclave, or the exception, is absent to preserve the totalizing system.

E N C L A V E a n d L A N D M A R K

Rem Koolhaas: The City of the Captive Globe, 1972

“The space of the building in the City of the Captive Globe is not really that of an island...but is more an ENCLAVE, where the strict dependency of the enclave on the regime of accessibility an circulation is compensated for by the overdose of ideology and iconography provided by the LANDMARK . (Aureli 107)

”The City of the Captive Globe uses the grid as a means to see the city where the exception is the rule; where the relationship between eccentricity and framework is mediated through isolation - the archipelago.

T H E P O L I T I C A L

“POLITICS is based on the fact of human plu-rality... (it) arises in what lies between men and it is established as a relationship... In other words, there is no way to claim autonomy without first asking what we are affirming ourselves against as political subjects - as parts. To be political is inevitably to judge. (Aureli 109)

” Students protest at a sit-in. Towards Edufactory: Architecture and the Production of Subjectivity. Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria S Giudici

In a basic way, the political is a composition of otherwise unrelated parts – creating a possibility for the relationship between political action and the form of an object.

T H E F O R M A L

“The FORMAL is the experience of limits, as the relationship between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside.’ (Aureli 111)

”Stop City, by Dogma. 2008

The formal is political – it is the act of spatial determination, or the space of confrontation between parts. They are each the composition of parts in relation to their whole.

It is also a paradox, indicating unity and spatial differentiation simultaneously.

T H E A R C H I P E L A G O ( B E R L I N )Ungers, Ovaska, Riemann, Kollhoff, Koolhaus

“A reinterpretation of Berlin as a potential ‘city made by islands.’ Berlin’s reality was reinforced through form by making sharp and legible the limits of each ‘island.’ Each island was defined by the COMPOSITION of architectural artifacts – making a formally defined micro-city. (Aureli 114)

”The City Within The City: Berlin As Green Archipelago, 1977

“Ungers thought that this approach (singular architectrual interventions instead of cohesive spatial designs) would be able to overcome the crisis of the city by turning the crisis itself (the impossibility of planning the city) into the very project of the architecture of the city. (Aureli 114)

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T H E A R C H I P E L A G O ( t h e c i t y )

“ A POLIS is a city evoked not through its totality but through the confrontation of its parts. (Aureli 118)

1. The individuality of the islands 2. Each is bound as a whole precisely by the way they react dialectically to each other.

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Abraham Bosse, frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, And Power of A Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil. 1651

“ Establshing the city as “Coincidentia 0ppositorum” is not universal synthesis. Rather, each part of the whole coincides without dissolving into the other parts, thus making even more evident the differences among the parts that share the same whole/place. (Aureli 117)

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A R C H I T E C T U R E

“ The ARCHITECTURE of the archipelago must be an absolute architecture, an architecture that is defined by and makes clear the presence of borders that cross the city. It must recognize the political separateness that potentially, within the sea of urbanization, can be manifest through the borders that define the possibility of the city. It must refuse any impetus to novelty and accept the possibility of being an instrument of separation, and thus of political action. (119)

”Stop city. Vertical Plan, typical plan and eleva-tion of the unit for 60,000 inhabitants. Dogma.

“ARCHITECTURE cannot have any goal apart from that of relentless inquiry into the singularity of finite parts. (Aureli 119)

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