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.
