A SIMPLE HEART
11 PROJECTS (2013). P 20-33
DOGMA. PIER VITTORIO AURELI AND MARTINO TATTARA
ECOLOGIES OF THE ARTIFICIAL MEDIA archive MA-BA TRANSVERSAL WORKSHOP ETSAM-UPM
UDD 24 SORIANO SPRING TERM 2021-2022 P6-7-8 + MHAB
TEXTO
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1. The following project puts forward an idea of the city based on architecture. It is a well-known fact that, unlike the ancient city, which was primarily made with architecture, the modern city is characterised by a great divergence between the scale of architectural form and the space of urbanisation -between the singular and the finite and the extensive apparatus of governance and inhabitation. In order to make the city, architecture must be conceived as an , that is, as a potentially repeatable form. This is not to say that the repetitions must always be exactly the same. The example functions as an archetype: a singular form that defines a milieu of possible forms by virtue of the clear exhibition of its generative principle. While a type is never reducible to a singularity and can only emerge from a variety of forms, the archetype always originates from the individualisation of a precise and recognisable form. Thus, while the type indicates a model of design based on the concept of evolution, the project of an example is always based on the idea of decision. The exemplary form has the authority of a form, yet it is not based on the normative character typical of planning. Whatever it relates to -the distribution of typologies, the design of the green areas or the circulation, the different heights of buildings- the exemplary form elaborates archetypical actions that are capable of blossoming into new combinations of the artificial and the natural, the technical and the formal, the structural and the accidental. It is, in short, a form that consists of a solitary individual: the exemplary unit. For this reason, the example may be reproduced but never proliferated into an omnivorous ‘general plan’ for the entire city.’ 2. is a project for the European city. It consists of 22 inhabitable units, each located in close proximity to the railway circuit that serves the European North-Western Metropolitan Area (NWMA), linking the cities of Amsterdam, The Hague, Delft, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Brussels, Liege, Cologne, Dusseldorf, Aachen and Utrecht. Each unit is defined by enclosing an 800 x 800m portion of an existing tertiary district with an inhabitable wall. Twenty storeys high and 25m thick, the wall contains 860 hotel rooms per floor, each measuring 19.2 x 2.6m and accommodating one or two persons. Once an area has been enclosed, the space between the structures is covered by a 10m-high transparent roof supported by a 10 x 10m grid of columns. In this way the entire enclosure is transformed into a continuous interior composed of a variety of streets, squares, doorways, galleries, corridors and rooms. The interior is conceived as a vast open ‘living room’ where social exchange and production occur within the same space. Rooms inside the walls are designated as spaces of rest, solitude and seclusion. They will be used, transformed, reused and eventually destroyed by their inhabitants.
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THE RAILWAY NETWORK AND THE NORTH-WESTERN METROPOLITAN AREA
A SIMPLE HEART
Locating the units along the railway circuit facilitates their role as ‘learning centres’ focused on the productive side of knowledge and social exchange. The entire system functions as an ‘edufactory’ -a new contemporary production plant in which fordist machines are replaced by what constitutes the core of production today: immaterial work and its manifestation as the possibility of encounter and exchange. Proximity to the railway network increases mobility and enables the system to function as an enlarged university campus supporting the NWMA region as a whole. The project’s name comes from Gustave Flaubert’s short story , which extols the integrity of a humble servant in the face of the machinations of her bourgeois mistress. In the same vein, our project celebrates the power of form to frame and define the space of existence against the fragmentation brought about by contemporary urbanisation. 3. A key inspiration for our work was Cedric Price’s project from the mid·1960s, which converts the rusting railway network of industrial North Staffordshire into a learning apparatus that is flexible and mobile, with the capacity to continually adapt to technological advances. Ironically, within the post-fordist scenario of contemporary capitalism, Price’s vision is no longer a project for the future but a description of the reality of today. Price’s attempt to counter the decline of an industrial site by transforming it into an educational campus (unconsciously) anticipates the passage from a fordist to a post-fordist mode of production. Whereas fordism was based on the manufacture of material goods, post-fordism is driven by ‘immaterial’ production (of ideas, images, affects, social exchange).The importance of the production of knowledge has made the institution of the university a fundamental productive unit in the post fordist economy. If the ivory tower of ‘knowledge’ was once completely separate from the city -and especially from centres of physical industry- today the complex social and physical fabric of the university often coincides with that of the city, to the point where the city itself has become a vast campus. Cedric Price’s proposal for the can be understood as the map of this transformation. By relying on the existing rail network, he proposed to go beyond the traditional campus typology, taking the territory and its transport connections as the new scale of the learning process. Moreover, his proposal questioned the strict separation of disciplines by calling for the development of interchangeable units that would allow the learning process to be constantly reshaped in response to the demands posed by economic change. Price wanted to integrate knowledge, flexibility and territory into a single system that was not so much a new typology for learning as a new urban model. Despite this, readings of the project have focused on the ‘utopian’ aspect of Price’s progres-
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sive
AMSTERDAM
A SIMPLE HEART
sive plea for flexibility, multidisciplinarity and the dispersion of knowledge, ignoring the way this foreshadowed the subsuming of the university (and the city itself) within post-fordism’s diffuse mode of production. While Price aimed at converting an industrial site into a ‘post industrial’ space for learning, we approach the post-industrial city as a potential space for the contemporary ’expanded’ university by making explicit its role as ‘social factory’. Just as laid the groundwork for the post-fordist city on the ruins of the fordist city, we propose to build the new city on the ruins of the post-fordist city -on the stations, metro lines, chain stores, office blocks and meeting places that form the background to our ‘productive’ lives. Rather than undoing Price’s proposal, our project aims to radicalise it in a way that brings out its fundamental political potential, increasing the openness and flexibility of the spaces of learning in order to reveal the common and generic attributes of knowledge 4. In the fordist factory, workers were mostly the silent controllers of the ‘machine’ of the assembly line. In the post-fordist city, where productive industry takes the form of language and communication, machines are replaced by living labour -the workers themselves and their modes of cooperation. Within this condition architecture is completely liberated from any functionalist or programmatic duty, and serves production only by virtue of being there as framework, as . However we do not have to understand this liberation of architecture from programme as a plea for generic ‘free space’. Rather, it signals the opposite: that space has been completely subsumed by production. Thus the traditional ‘divisions’ of the city -between public and private space, between work and living, between culture and market -are no longer relevant. If they continue to exist, they simply act as ideological projections, as a mask that covers the ‘generic field’ that supports the reproduction of productive labour. This generic field is the essence of the social factory defined by the continuous mobility, the uprootedness, the precarity of life. Our project is the utmost embodiment of this condition, and at the same time the frame holding it. The aim of is not to eliminate the ethos of the social factory but to make it explicit. In political terms ours is a realist strategy: institutions have to hold the forces ranged against them, rather than attempt to eliminate them, in order to maintain their political validity. A building is therefore the best analogy for understanding the biblical and political concept of the (‘the one who holds’). Similar to the , the building has to hold the forces that might seek to transgress its order. It can achieve this through the management of the spaces to accommodate but at the same time restrain the forces. The concept of the does not imply the negation
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of the forces of mobility, genericness and precarity; it implies a form that resists these forces by adhering to them, just as the concave adheres to (and thus defines) the convex. When architectural form is reduced to its essential nature in this way, what it stages and makes visible is not itself but the life that unfolds within its limits.
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COVER IMAGE: DOGMA (2013). 11 PROJECTS.
A SIMPLE HEART