Une réflexion sur l'ascétisme en architecture.
« Less is more », dit le dicton moderniste. Mais est-ce bien le cas ? À une époque où l'on nous exhorte sans cesse à faire « plus avec moins », pouvons-nous encore romantiser les prétentions du minimalisme ? Le propos d'Aureli s'exprime dans toute son actualité, alors que presque dix ans se sont écoulés depuis sa première publication : il offre un regard critique sur la pratique architecturale et sur les questions fondamentales de la discipline, que ce soit dans le passé ou pour notre avenir, en démasquant habilement l'hypocrisie du capitalisme latent qui esthétise l'ascétisme, tout en continuant de regarder avec espoir la possibilité de conserver l'idée du « less » comme point de départ. Il se veut donc le témoin d'une époque où le cadre théorique et critique de l'architecture nécessitent une profonde reconfiguration.
A landmark study of abstraction in architectural history, theory, and practice that challenges our assumptions about the meaning of abstract forms.
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, this book 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.
B>An argument against the ideology of domesticity that separates work from home; lavishly illustrated, with architectural proposals for alternate approaches to working and living.br>;/b>br>br>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.;br>;br>The projects aim to move the house beyond the dichotomous logic of male/female, husband/wife, breadwinner/housewife, and private/public. They include the reinvention of single-room occupancy as a new model for affordable housing; the reimagining of the simple tower-and-plinth prototype as host to a multiplicity of work activities and enlivening street life; and a plan for a modular, adaptable structure meant to house a temporary dweller. All of these design projects conceive of the house not as a commodity, the form of which is determined by its exchange value, but as an infrastructure defined by its use value.br>;br>br>br>;
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.
