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Making the City: The Immeuble Cit

Unit Teaching Team: Pier Vittorio Aureli, Barbara Campbell-Lange, FenellaCollingridge

1. Introduction2. Organization of the Unit3. Few Notes about the Background of the Project4. Unit Readings

1. Introduction

In recent years complex form, parametric systems of design and diagrams havebecome the norm in architecture. If these devices promise endless differentiation andadaptability to multiple situations, identities and performances, the results in factcontribute to a monotonous landscape of (value-free) diversity. Against thislandscape, Diploma 14 proposes a return to simple forms notas retreat into the vacuum of self-referentiality (as in the glossy minimalism of contemporary architecture), but as a polemical way to confront (and understand) theinsurmountable complexity of the city. Instead of naively mimicking urbancomplexity with architectural complexity, the unit proposes to critically understandurbanity as something that provides architecture with its veryraison dtre, while being itself irreducible to architectural form. For this reason theunit encourages a rigorous (but not cause-and-effect) relationship between enquirieson the nature of the contemporary city and the development of architectural formsbased on the composition and estrangement of physical spaces most literal attributes,such as walls, rooms, openings, connections and obstructions. The aim of the unit isto define an intelligible vocabulary of forms as a basis for rethinking the form of thecontemporary city. Consequently, the use of diagrams, gratuitous iconic gestures andparametric complexity is strongly discouraged. The theme for this year will be thedesign of a building the Immeuble Cit (city building) with a critical masscomparable to that of the city. The simple premise for such a building will be toreduce the footprint to a minimum impact on the ground, thus countering the sprawlof urbanity. The Immeuble Cit must go beyond the commercial form of towers orany facile iconic or utopian gesture: instead, it is to be conceived as a radical(architectural) test for a number of spatial and political issues such as the relationship

between living and work space, new forms of welfare and systems of bio-politicalgovernment, the will to community or segregation, urban government and thepossibility of conflict. The impulse behind this design problem is twofold: on the onehand it aims at a critique and revision of architecture and its specific history, on theother it challenges the present state of architectural form vis--vis the politics of thecity. The context for this exercise will be the North- Western Metropolitan Area(NWMA), a region of 137 million inhabitants encompassing the old core of the EU(France, Belgium, UK, Germany and the Netherlands). The unit will consider thisregion as one city and, as such, the framework for the Immeuble Cit.

2. Organization of the Unit


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The Year project is divided into three main and consecutive parts. Instead of thetraditional formula design follow resarch, the Unit propose the following sequence:design, research, design.

2. 1

In the first term the students will be asked to develop a siteless model for theimmeuble cit. This exercise should be executed as radical demonstratio perabsurdum : these models should develop concepts of collective living to their extremeconclusion while being extremely realistic in their design form.

The Immeuble cit should be able to host a community of 1.600 inhabitants. TheImmeuble cit should provide space for living and working, and host all the necessaryequipment to make the community self-sufficient.

The immeuble cite is intended as opportunity to put forward innovative and extremeliving standards in light of the increasing merging of living and working activities.Issue that must be considered in the design of this building are: the economy of construction means, accessibility, relationship between individual and collectivespaces, materials and structural framework, the dialectic between flexibility andpermanence (e.g. no value-free flexibility), the critical relationship between repetitionand exception. Two fundamental issues that the project should confront are the criticalrelationship between pauperism and hedonism. In architecture, pauperism concernsthe austerity of form for the sake of affordability. Hedonism concerns the pursuit of pleasure as fundamental aspect of life. Within our contemporary form of life wherethe entirety of our existence is dominated by work, hedonism has to be thought not asconsumption or spectacle (which are the main modalities through which themanagement of work operates today), but as truly political state of being, as what thephilosopher Gorgio Agamben defined as inoperosit (state of unproductivity). Forthis reason the Immeuble cite must be thought as the contradictory place of extremeefficiency in management and organization of collective space, and as the possibilityof escaping such management.

Students are asked to investigate these issues at first by means of design. At this stageany argument, proposal, or reflection must be advanced by the architectural project of the immeuble cite. The project must be drawn at scale 1:200, and should representedthrough plan, section, elevation, and axonometry. Representation must be direct andsimple, made of line drawings. Parallel to this set of drawings, the students are asked

to develop only one view of the interior. In contrast with the dryness of the otherdrawings, the view should be subtly narrative and evocative. A special workshop willbe held about representation and its narrative effects. The project should beaccompanied by an explanatory text.

2.2In the second term, students are asked to substantiate their design with a criticalenquiry into the projects references and background. Each student will develop amonographic research into critical aspects of collective living, and their historicalbackground.This research will help the students to become aware of their design decision, and willled them to understand that any idea in architecture is simultaneously a projection for


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the future and a retrospective analysis/judgment of the city of the past. This enquirywill be develop in the form of a text.Parallel to this monographic inquiry, the students will collaborate on a collectiveanalysis of the site of the project, the North Western Metropolitan Area which will bethe site of the project. The analysis will be executed by drawing a synthetic and

conceptual map of the area. The task is to render this region in the form of city.A special workshop will be held on imaginative cartography as a means of urbanvision.

2.3In the third term the students will further develop the Immeuble cit. The previousmodel will be apply to a critical site within the North Western Metropolitan Area, andthus revised and changed if necessary. The project will be developed in all its details.Effort will be invested in representation and argumentation of the project.

3. Few notes about the background of the project

A fundamental question held in the studio is what sort of political subjectivity thisproject addresses. In other words, for whom we will envision the immeuble cit. Anyanswer to this questions has to fist carefully consider that architecture has alwaysbeen subservient to the ruling authorities in human society. Indeed there is not anarchitecture of opposition. To realize built architecture, architects have to explicitlyor implicitly, consciously or unconsciously comply with the priorities of the powersystem in force. Architects whose principles oppose these priorities find themselvesunable to realize their architecture and can only postulate, by means of projects,conjectures anticipating an alternative regime. Those architects are often theharbingers of a new political subject.

The main argument behind the idea of the Immeuble cit stems from the observationthat today the relationship between those who live and work in the city and the cityitself recalls the relationship that workers use to have with the factory during the eraof industrial expansion 1. If the factory was dominated by the spatially and temporallychoreographed rhythm of the assembly line, todays cities are dominated by thepervasive informality of social relationships in which any aspect of humancommunication and cognition is expected to become a factor of production. In otherwords, the contemporary city in spite of its increasing complexities, contradictions,

and informalities has become reduced to simply being a site for production, and itsinhabitants are (potentially) the new working class. This is evident if we consider thefact that capitalistic production has historically and radically evolved by expanding itsdomain from the manufacture of goods to production of services such ascommunication, education and cultural exchange. Production occurs not only in termsof what we traditionally understood as working activities, but tends to coincide withthe whole spectrum of social activities as the ones related to culture, media, andeducation, and all the bio-political means of life (re)production.Thus, work is not political, but bio-political: its domain has finally extended into ourentire life. This condition of unlimited extension of work into any sphere of humanlife has created a new political subject that although we can still address it as working

1 See: Antonio Negri, Dalla Fabbrica alla Metropoli (Roma: Datanews, 2008).


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class has nothing to do with the traditional features of the proletariat. This newworking class is made of workers in the material and service industry, but also of people like us: students, professors, free-lance designers, programmers, translators,educators, artists, poets, intellectuals, etc. Beside the fancy and dangerouslymisleading way in which these workers are label as Creative Class a term used to

uncritically celebrate this new wave of immaterial labour as a the eden of work - liesthe absolute economic instability in which these workers find themselves. Economicinstability is here the condition in which the so much celebrated value of flexibilitythat is implied in social, cultural, and economic behaviours is appropriated andinterpreted by work as the condition of precariousness of life of the workersthemselves. This precariousness is the very core of contemporary production. It is likeif someone is telling us the following: the more you learn to cope with the instabilityand unpredictability of working conditions, the more you are productive under the aregime that in order to maintains its power and being productive has to adapt itself toany condition. This precariousness of life is further exacerbated in Europe by thebackfiring of Globalization in which work has become the ultimate means marketcompetition. Global competition of work a phenomena that some economist hascalled a global civil war - has forced the labour market of Europe to compete withother (cheaper) labour markets by dramatically decreasing the wage power of theaverage European worker, producing a new poor middle-class citizen. This newpoor middle-class citizen is called The Precarious worker, and unlike the traditionalproletariat has still neither political, nor cultural form.

In the studio we maintains that to propose project at the scale of the entire city todayis to address the emergence of this political subject. We will also maintains thatpolitical subjects are not the by-product of some sociological identity: lifestyles,groups, communities, social targets, etc., but that political subjects are made of thebalance of powers at stake. In the studio we will assume that the powers at stake are:work the fact that anything that exists in society has to be productive and thusmust be putted at work, and the workers those who find themselves shaped by thiscondition of work, but that can potentially express a subjectivity that exceeds itssocial, cultural, and political boundaries. In this light, notions such as architecturalform and monumentality acquire a radically different motivation that they use to havein the past. No longer direct manifestation of an imposed order, monumentality willbe seen as the tangible incarnation of what exceeds urbanization and its market of values made of flexibility, smoothness, consensus, sustainability, commercialrevenue, and mediatic success. This new monumentality is an act of ideological

detournamont : is appropriated from its original function to celebrate constitutedpowers, and addressed to the dignity of those who work in the city. Furthermore, inthe studio we will assume that monumentality has to take the form of collectivegathering points where the combination of work and living in the same place makesevident the positive side effect of work: cooperation, coexistence - the collective. If work is (always) a form of exploitation is also true that work gathers people togetherand thus makes real (and tangible) their togetherness. Architectural types of thisparadoxical social monumentality are: Benedictine Monasteries, Charles Fourierstransformation of the Mall into a Phalanx , Victor Hortas conversion of bourgeoisesteel architecture into the Palace of the People, the Bruxelless Maison de Peuple,Peter Berhens Vinarsky-hof, Le Corbusiers Unite DHabitation, OMAs WelfarePalace. In all the examples each of them seen in its time monumentality and formwere interpreted not as celebration, but as a socialized collective consciousness.


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Trough these artifacts collective consciousness, which is the very form of anypolitical subject, exceeds the boundaries sets by their economic purpose, and becomespolitical, that is collective per se .

In the studio we will assume that today one of the most crucial epicentre of work and

production is learning and research, and thus what we use to call University. Morethan just the place of the academia, today Universities are veritable social factoriesthat embodied, in the most radical terms, the attributes of post-fordist production,such as over-abundance of social relationships and opportunities, social mobility,communication, and extreme flexibility and instability o cultural programs. As suchthe university cannot be thought any longer through the model of the campus, but hasto be imagined as something that has reached the critical mass of the city itself. Apoint of departure of our re-conceptualization of this model of work will be CedricPrices project for Pottery Thinkbelt.In the 1960s Cedric Price proposed to convert the rusting railways network thatserved the industrial area of North Staffordshire into an educational campus. Price

proposed the educational apparatus of learning as mobile, flexible, and constantlysubjected to be adapted to the demands of technological development and itsoffspring of labour skills. The project proposed mobility and flexibility as the core of the education process. Ironically within post-fordist Capitalism, Cedrics Price projectfor Pottery Thinkbelt is no longer a vision of social emancipation, but it has becomethe evocative description of the present condition of the way capitalism and its andreproductive apparatus seizes the city by managing the latter perpetual state of fluxand instability. In the third term the Unit propose to critically exacerbate the scale andthe concept of Prices Pottery Thinkbelt and to apply this model within theinfrastructural network of the North Western Metropolitan Area of Europe. This newframework is meant to figure forth the latent welfare capital of this area, which is oneof the densest in the world in terms o inhabitants and infrastructure. In such aFramework the Immeuble Cit will constitute the hubs of this new city. TheImmeuble Cit will be the urban form that simultaneously accommodate the forces of capital, and render them explicit and thus critical.

4. Readings

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (The University of Chicago Press: Chicago,1958).

Hannah Arendt, Introduction into Politics, in Jerome Kohn (edited by) The Promise of Politics (Schocken Books: New York, 2005).

Paolo Virno, The Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life (The Mit Press: Cambridge Ma., 2004).

Paolo Virno, Three Remarks Regarding the Multitudes Subjectivity and its AestheticComponent , in Daniel Birnbaum, Isabelle Graw, Under Pressure: Pictures, Subjects,and the New Spirit of Capitalism (Sternberg Press: New York, 2008), pp. 30-45.

Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, Precarity as Political Concept: New Forms of Connection, Subjectivation and Organization in: Open Issue 17 (2009), A


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Precarious existence: Vulnerability in the Pubic Domain (Nai Publisher: Rotterdam2009), pp. 48-64.

Rem Koolhaas, Bigness: or the Problem of Dimension, in OMA, Rem Koolhaas,Bruce Mau, SMXL (Monacelli Press: New York, 2009), pp. 495-516.

Kenneth Frampton, Megaform as Urban Landscape (University of Michigan Press:Chicago, 1999).

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