More and More About Less and Less: Notes Toward a History of Nonfigurative

Architecture
Author(s): Pier Vittorio Aureli
Source: Log , Spring/Summer 2009, No. 16 (Spring/Summer 2009), pp. 7-18
Published by: Anyone Corporation

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 More and More
Pier Vittorio Aureli

About Less and Less

Notes Toward a History of Nonfigurative Architecture

It's just the simple thing that's hard ' so hard to do,
- Bertolt Brecht

In recent years, structural complexity, formal redundancy,

and image seem to have become the new Yitruvian triad
embraced by the majority of contemporary architects. The
result of this has been a figurai excess in architecture, of
which the city as res publica - the public and thus common
thing par excellence - is the victim. Given this figurai exces
it is possible - even necessary - to propose a nonfigurative
architectural language; that is, an architecture essentially
reduced to a public grammar for inhabitable space. This pro
posal is not advocated in the ideological terms of another sty
1. This is what is defined today as for architecture. Quite the contrary. The idea of the nonfig
"biopolitics," a constitution of political
subjectivity where what is at stake is the urative proposed here is defined through the reconsideratio
management of life and its forms of of a possible archaeology of modern architecture. With a ser
reproduction. In this sense it is possible
to say that fundamental urban categories of archetypal examples from the past, one can demonstrate
that shape the political economy of the
how the possibility of a nonfigurative architecture is not
contemporary city such as labor force,
reproduction, and sustainability are the new but is already latent within a reading of architectural
ultimate sources of the "generic" attrib-
utes of the urban condition. history - a reading in which the unfolding of such a histor
2. It is important to remember that is understood not as the change of styles or accumulation o
beyond its traditional meaning - expro-
priation of subjectivity - the term reifi-
more and more complexities and contradictions, but rather
cation comes from the Latin word res, as a series of constructive denials. These denials can be inter-
which means thing in the sense of some-
thing that is graspable as a public thing
preted within the evolution of modernity in terms of the r
( res publica). The word reification means of the "generic" condition of urban space. The term generi
the necessary dynamic that constitutes a
defines the common character associated with a number of
public sphere; that is, the movement
from the inferiority of being to external persons or things. Since modernity has always stressed, as th
relationships - the "thingness" of the
world. A fundamental réévaluation of core of its project, the possibility of an uprooted and reified
reification as ground for a new political
subjectivity, it has held up the generic attributes of life as t
form of the public sphere has been
advanced by the philosopher Paolo Yirno. common political character of society.1 It is possible to argue
See Paolo Virno, Quando il verbo si fa
that, by denying formal redundancy, the latent project of
carne: Linguaggio e natura umana (Turin:
Bollati Boringhieri, 2003), 111-42. nonfigurative architecture ran parallel to the reduction of
inhabitable space to the common forms of the generic city.
As much as the idea of a nonfigurative architecture coincid
with the process of reification2 that has permeated the city
since the beginning of modernity, nonfigurative architectur
may also point toward an understanding of what constitute
public architecture in modern civilization }
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1. This text is an attempt to rethink the The modern definition of nonfigurative architecture is
idea of the "generic" in architecture but
in different terms than those in which derived from a drawing made by Archizoom in 1968 as a
this category has been theorized in recent
scheme for a homogeneous habitat condition, which, a few
years, especially after Rem Koolhaas's
canonical text "Generic City." Seen with- years later, would become the plan of their famous theoreti-
in the perspective of the historical
cal project No- Stop City.4 Archizoom subtitled this scheme
unfolding of modernity and capitalism,
the "Generic City" that is the condition "Proposal for a Non -Figurative Architectural Language."
of the permanent cultural and social
uprooting that affects urban space is not
The drawing was executed with a typewriter and depicts an
the collateral effect of modernity, but abstract field of dots and X's. The geometry that orders the
modernity's fundamental political proj-
ect. This political project started with the
disposition of the dots and X's is provocatively simple: the
secularization of politics, the beginning orthogonal spacing of the typewriter itself. The dots and X's
of modern forms of sovereignty in the
17th century, and the rise of liberalism in represent the architecture of a city. Or better yet, they repre-
economics and politics. In this sense, the sent the basic condition required for a city to exist: the mini-
generic certainly embodies what Bertolt
Brecht would have defined as the "Bad mum infrastructure for living, according to which the city
New." Yet it is the task of a critical theory
to discern within the characters of the
reproduces itself. Read in this way, X's are columns occurring
generic the possibilities of political and every 50 meters. The remaining infrastructure fits within
cultural emancipation without a return
the grid of plug-ins occurring every five meters. According
to something like "authenticity," "origi-
nality," and "authorship," which in to this logic, Archizoom defined other elements in a nonfig-
today's extremely reified means of pro-
duction can only exist as caricatures of a
urative architectural language: a wall occurs every 10 meters,
lost aura. As such, the generic must be a bed every 20 meters, an elevator every 25 meters, etc. The
addressed without useless enthusiasm or

hopeless despair, but with the awareness

overall layout illustrated an urban field governed by the
that any conception of the public sphere minimum welfare necessary to guarantee the reproduction
that wants to address what is truly com-
mon today has to be formulated from of those living and working in it. The drawing stripped the
within the reified nature of the modern
city of any architectural attribute, such as figures, and mer-
and contemporary (generic) city.
4. For a complete illustration of cilessly rendered it in all its infrastructural and biopolitical
Archizoom' s No- S top City, see Andrea
objectivity. Archizoom sarcastically defined this type of city
Branži, No-Stop City: Archizoom Associati
(Orleans: Editions HXY, 2006). For an as "a bathroom every 50 square meters."
in-depth critical study of the project, see
The drawing itself, and the way it was made, presents an
Roberto Gargiani, Archizoom: Dall'onda
Pop alla superficie neutra (Milan: Electa, interesting and provocative paradox. On the one hand, it
2007).
declares the end of architecture and the futility of making
formal and spatial figures within an infrastructural order
that is irreducible to any figure. On the other, by conveying
this message through the quintessentially architectural
organization of the grid, Archizoom exaggerates ad absurdum
the strict orthogonal logic underlying classical archetypes of
modern architecture from Filippo Brunelleschi's Santo Spirito
to Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion. In these examples,
orthogonality, defined by the logic of the grid, is the treatment
of space in terms of its physical perceptibility. This orthogo-
nality defines a sphere in which the experience of the subject
is subsumed and reproduced by means of a measurable, mod-
ular, and thus objective order of things. The extreme evolu-
tion seen in Archizoom's project can be interpreted as an act
of transferring the process of subsumption from the realm of
physical space perception to the realm of biopolitical manage-
ment in which the grid is not simply rows of columns that
define the concept of physical space but the rational and
8

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 isotropic distribution of infrastructure that defines all archi-
tectural reproduction.
This drawing therefore forces us to reconsider the idea
of the generic and its rational attributes as something differ-
ent from the stylish minimalist architecture with which it
has often been associated. The notes that follow address the

possibility of a nonfigurative architecture that extends far

beyond the Archizoom project and sets it within the evolu-
tion of "publicness," which can be understood as the pro-
gressive reification of human subjectivity in the historical
development of modernity.

Grid

The grid and its derivative formal orders are the most
important nonfigurative attributes of the city. Throughout
history, the grid has proved to be a powerful form of spatial
indexing. It evolved from a simple geometrical organization
of the visual field to the complex urban layout of ancient and
modern cities, to geographical surveys, to financial ledgers,
to visual displays, to prefabricated housing, to computational
5. For a comprehensive history of the systems, etc.5
grid, see Hanna B. Higgins, The Grid
Book (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009). In her canonical essay on the grid, art historian Rosalind
6. Rosalind E. Krauss, "Grids," October 16
Krauss emphasizes that the nonfigurative form became a cen-
(I979); reprinted in Krauss, The
Originality of the Avant-garde and Other tral theme of modern art precisely because its conventional
Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1985), 9-22.
geometric order was best suited to manifesting the nonrepre-
sentational and antinarrative ethos of modernity.6 For
Krauss, the grid constitutes a realm that can be understood
only in terms of aesthetic decisions because its coordinates
define a realm that is antithetical to the way things appear in
"real" space. She claims, for example, that the grid used by
Renaissance painters as a mathematical frame for constructing
perspectivai views cannot be considered a modern grid because
perspective was intended to reproduce the real. Yet it is pos-
sible to counter that the science of perspective was not only
intended to reproduce the real as it appeared in primary per-
ception, but also to abstract primary perception in the meas-
urable space of mathematical management. In turn, such
mathematical management generated a new type of real space.
Historically, the grid is assumed to represent the least
"complex" formal order. The grid has no directionality, no
expressivity, and supposedly no symbolic content: it is what it
does , and in that sense, it claims for itself a formal logic of
neutrality. Because of its approximation of an isotropic dis-
tributive order, the grid has often been used to convey the
ultimate essence of neutrality, yet this neutrality - as its his-
torical development in the arts, in architecture, and in
9

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 urbanism makes clear - is far from being politically neutral.
The disarming simplicity of the grid belies the ineffable
multiplicity it attempts to frame and tame. An example of
this is the Spanish engineer Ildefonso Cerdà's plan for the
reform and extension of Barcelona, and his subsequent trea-
tise, The General Theory of Urbanization (1867). Cerda pro-
poses the organizational principle of the grid not only as a
morphological ordering but also as a means of rationally
managing the even distribution of social welfare and thus
7. Cerdà's project manifests the biopoliti- the reproduction (and control) of labor.7
cal terms of the urban project in which
the political is radically absorbed by the The nature of the grid and the forms that derive from its
governance of space in terms of its man- use as a structuring principle signal the essential consideration
agement. See Pier Vittorio Aureli,
"Toward the Archipelago: Defining the at the core of the project of modernity. Modernity's promise
Formal and the Political in Architecture,"
of a "public truth" based on universal values such as individ-
Log 11 (Winter 2008). See also Ildefonso
Cerda, The Five Bases of the General ual freedom and equality could only be conceived with the
Theory of Urbanization , ed. Arturo Soria y
reification of the subject and its space of inhabitation. At first
Puig, trans. Bernard Miller and Mary
Fons i Fleming (Madrid: Electa Espana,
this reification was the result of the formalization of universal
1999), 81. This book is a partial transla-
tion of Ildefonso Cerdà, Teoria General de
reason, which made it possible to understand the process of
la Urbanización (Barcelona, 1867). human cognition as a concrete thing. But as Cornelius
8. Cornelius Castoriadis, The World in
Fragments: Writings on Politics,
Castoriadis has pointed out, the same formalization of reason
Psychoanalysis , and the Imagination was redefined in terms of the idea of administrative logic, or
(Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1997). The Frankfurt School made a sim- the presumed rationality of capitalism itself.8 The develop-
ilar conclusion about the fate of rational-
ment of the Western city since the 15th century was a funda-
ity. See Theodor W. Adorno, with Max
Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment , mental factor in this process of subjectification. Not only
trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford:
physical objects but also treatises, drawings, representations,
Stanford University Press, 2002).
maps, and texts were deployed to produce a new, universal,
rational human subject in terms of urban space and form.
Because this process was seen as irreducible to infallible and
stable configurations, the use of simple forms such as those
derived from the parat actic logic of the grid gained relevance.
In spite of architecture's periodic immersion in the culture
of complexity (from the complex geometries of the Baroque
to the decorative patterns of Art Nouveau to the current
fetishism for parametric formalism and its resulting iconic
buildings), at crucial moments the grid always emerges as the
substratum that prevents a freefall into chaos. For this rea-
son, the grid in architecture is not merely what something
looks like. The grid should be understood as an idea of for-
mal reduction that can structure or simply help to map the
complexity of the modern city.
A history of the development of this concept can be
made by looking at five radical "architectural" interpreta-
tions of nonfigurative architecture, each of which introduces
an architectural proposition that has made neutrality and the
orthogonal not a style but a strategy for coming to terms
with the development of the modern city.
10

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 Orders

Following examples of the stacked orders in ancient Roman

architecture such as the Coliseum, Leon Battista Alberti was
the first architect in modern times to claim that the column

must only support the architrave and that the arch is an open
ing in a wall. For Alberti, the planar condition of the wall
the absolute element of architecture, and the system of orde
developed by the column is ornament.9 In this way, the eve
geometry of a grid made of vertically stacked orders is inde
pendent from the structure of the building itself. This is vi
ble in Albertus most famous building, the Palazzo Rucellai
(1452-70), which he conceived in dialogue with Michelozzo
design for the Palazzo Medici in Via Larga (1445-60).10 At
that time, the Medicis were consolidating their power over
Florence, destabilizing the republican politics of the city an
extending their control over civic institutions. The building
of a new palazzo in the city center materialized this politica
development. The heavy stone masonry of the Palazzo Medic
facade consciously mirrored that of the medieval Palazzo
Vecchio, the seat of Florentine communal power. Moreover,
the imposing geometry of the square palazzo block with its
internal courtyard required the demolition of an entire
neighborhood, which emphasized the confrontational stance
of the new building toward the intricate structure of the cit
Opposing such a naked display of power politics, Albertus
Palazzo Rucellai offered a simple facade that unites several
preexisting houses, all belonging to a single family. Alberti
used stone masonry in a polemical fashion: unlike the Palazz
Medici, Palazzo Rucellai is flat and framed by the addition o
stacked orders. The extreme flatness of the masonry overla
by the grid of columns creates an impression of the building
as a modular plane rather than a massive block. Alberti
Leon Battista Alberti, Palazzo transformed the archetype of the Roman Coliseum into a
Rucellai, Florence, circa 1452-70. wrapper with a civic orientation: rather than design an iso-
Photos courtesy the author.
lated block, he rationalized the interface between street and
building, wrapping the latter in a repetitive and simple sur
face that seems infinitely extendable despite the uneven
geometry of the block itself. The function of the facade's
9. Leon Battista Alberti, De re aedificatoria ,
ed. Giovanni Orlandi and Paolo
explicit flatness, which insists on its role as mere ornament,
Portoghesi (Milan: Edizioni del Polifilo, is to mediate between private property and public space
1966), 520-21.
through a rational, measurable order and not through the
10. On the politics of Alberti's Palazzo
Rucellai, see Massimo Bulgarelli, Leon overall figure of the building itself. For this reason, the
Battista Alberti, 1404-1472. Architettura e
Storia (Milan: Electa, 2008), 34-72.
Palazzo Rucellai is the archetype of a new, modern, bour-
geois-mercantilist way of dealing with public space: not
through confrontation but through negotiation. The ration
basis for this negotiation is the grid, which, in the facade of
11

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 Palazzo Rucellai, extends the even order of the private
palazzo toward the city space.

Composition

A radical evolution of Albertus approach was elaborated by

Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand in his Precis des leçons d'archite
ture (1802), 11 where the French architect introduced for t
first time the theme of composition. The Precis is divided
into three parts. The first is devoted to "architectural ele-
ments," the second to "composition in general," and the thi
to "architectural genres." In the first part, Durand isolates
and presents each element of a building - walls, atria, stair
vestibules, and so on - subdividing these architectural ele-
ments into formally independent units. The isolation of ea
element leads to the second operation: composition. Durand
proposed the idea of composition in order to overcome the
methodological straightjacket of spatial distribution. For
Durand, distribution was the art of creating order accordi
to predefined habits of dwelling. As such, it had a limited
capacity to deal with the huge variety of possible architectu
genres - what today we would call "programs." Compositio
on the other hand, proposes a combinatory principle wher
the positions of architectural elements can be changed accor
ing to the kind of program addressed, and can occur in bo
plan and section. In order to allow this formal flexibility,
Durand proposed to subject the composition of all architec
Top: Michelozzo, Palazzo
Medici in Via Larga, Florence, tural elements to a radical, simple, and unequivocal method
circa 1445-60. Above: Palazzo the ordering of architectural elements through the use of t
Vecchio, Florence, i4th century.
Photos courtesy the author.
grid. Walls would be placed on the parallel axes of the grid
columns on the intersections of the axes, and openings suc
as doors or windows between the axes. Thousands of differ
ent combinations could be made, each ad hoc, to accommo-
date any program. For this reason, Durands method of des
was not only a radical attack on the strict hierarchical distr
bution of Baroque architecture, in which formal complexi
prevented programmatic and spatial flexibility, but also a
11. Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, Precis des radical secularization of architectural form: composition
leçons d'architecture données a l'Ecole rojale
polytechnique, 2 volumes (Paris: 1802-05).
accommodated the increasing diversification of programma
12. See Sergio Villari, J.N.L. Durand concerns that characterized the rise of the bourgeois city, a
( 1760-1814-y. • Art and Science of
Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1990). city whose subsequent evolution Durand anticipated with
the intrinsic flexibility of his method.12 Composition allow
each element to have a potentially different position in eac
application; the only fixed law of architecture was the com
binatory logic of the grid.
Whereas in Albertus Palazzo Rucellai the grid made by
stacking the orders was still a two-dimensional surface med
12

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 ating between public and private space, in Durand^ Précis,
the grid became a spatial system that involved the three-
dimensional totality of architectural composition. Durands
plans are devoid of poché', they are made only by simple walls
and columns. Flexibility requires the extreme simplicity not
only of the architectural elements themselves but also of their
13. See Ludwig Hilberseimer, Grosstadt
Architektur (Stuttgart: Hoffmann, 1927), combinations. The nonfigurative character of Durand' s grid
13-14. A fundamental reading of this
project and on the German period of
revealed the combinatory logic of composition: no element
Hilberseimer has been advanced by K. was fixed but rather each was made relative to a specific use
Michael Hays in his book Modernism and
the Posthumanist Subject: The Architecture and thus accommodated a myriad of "architectural genres."
of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer Durand's idea of composition suggests that the reduc-
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 187-277.
Hays correctly emphasizes the influence tion of form to a grammar of simple elements addresses the
of "enlightened" capitalists such as Walter
Rathenau on the social-democratic urban
increasing proliferation of urban institutions such as markets,
vision of Hilberseimer. Hays writes: "For hospitals, museums, etc. - the increasing unpredictability of
Hilberseimer, as for Rathenau, advanced
capitalism harbors contradictory forces.
the city's programmatic situations. Far from being just the
It is, on the one hand, the structural pre- outcome of aesthetic concerns, the "abstraction" produced
condition of modernity, whose forces
blast subject from object and recolonize by a building's combinatory performance, made efficient by
the fragments of each in terms of purely eliminating the figurai infill of the poché , is the result of the
instrumental functional categories (thus
promoting what Hilberseimer saw as the reification of the city due to the "liberalization" of its func-
overdevelopment of science, know-how, tions and activities. The grid as a compositional template not
and technique)." Ibid., 250. It is precisely
the emphasis on the overdevelopment of only frames and thus tames the liberalization of city space, it
science, know-how, and technique over
is also the only element that could orchestrate the design of
industrial material production sic et sim-
pliciter as the basis of the capitalist everything from a single room to an entire city without
metropolis that Hilberseimer's vision of
requiring the predefinition of all the stages between those
the generic city can be seen as the préfig-
uration of a post-Fordist productive two poles.
landscape ante litteram. This hypothesis
can be confirmed by the fact that in the
views of the Hochhausstadt there is no Plan
trace of heavy industry plants, and the
fact that living space is superimposed on
The integration of the room and the entire city into the
working space implies that working compositional logic is further radicalized by Ludwig
space is intended to be mostly production
of services. Hilberseimer in his famous theoretical project for the m
14. Le Corbusier, "Une Ville
ern metropolis, the Hochhausstadt (1924).1* In this proj
Contemporaine," in Œuvre Complète,
1910-1929 (Zurich: Les Editions for a vertical city, Hilberseimer takes a polemical stand ag
d'Architecture, 1964), 34-43. Gabriele
not only the Utopian images proposed by Expressionist ar
Mastrigli has proposed a close reading of
the "classical" figures that it is possible to tecture but also Le Corbusier's Contemporary City for T
identify in Le Corbusier's Contemporary
City for Three Million Inhabitants. See
Million Inhabitants (1922). In his well-known proposa
Gabriele Mastrigli, "In Praise of Corbusier seems to arrange different building types acc
Discontinuity, or La Leçon de Rome," in
Visionary Power: Producing the
ing to the figures of classical architecture: the spatiality
Contemporary City , ed. Saskia Sassen typical Parisian classicist square evoked by the space bet
(Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2007),
113-24. the Cartesian skyscrapers; the layout of the Palace of Ver
evoked by the Redents; the communitarian form of the
cloister reinterpreted in the Immeuble -Villas; and, finally
outline of Michelangelo's plan for St. Peter's in the form
the main train and air terminal at the city center.14 Mor
Le Corbusier clearly uses diverse building typologies, fr
the most monumental at the center to the more suburb
the periphery, and separates residential space from wor
13

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 space. Hilberseimer, on the other hand, uses only one build-
ing type: a hybrid of blocks and slabs in which all civic activ-
ities, such as production, living, and commerce, are super-
imposed rather than zoned in different locations. Thus the
form of the city emerges from the repetition of a single ele-
15. Archizoom's No-Stop City was devel- ment or type and reflects the logic of the most conventional
oped as a class-critique of the existing
urban condition. Following Operaismi geometry possible - that of the grid. The circulation system
thesis that the working class was strongest of the Hochhausstadt is then uniformly extended in all
only at the level of the most advanced
forms of capitalism, Archizoom strategi- directions by the superimposition of train lines, metro lines,
cally adopted the radical reformism of
trams, roads, and pedestrian streets in a tartan pattern. For
Ludwig Hilberseimer not as an ameliora-
tion of the urban condition, but as a Hilberseimer, typological diversification no longer seems to
working-class appropriation of the exist-
be an issue. Due to the extreme social mobility brought about
ing urban condition. This "appropriation"
consisted of rendering the capitalist by changing labor conditions in the modern metropolis, living
metropolis through its utmost objective
standards are reduced to the hotel room, which is contained
forms, such as those of labor power
reproduction. Branži has recently in an absolutely uniform slab superimposed atop a plinth
described the nonfigurative architecture
of No-Stop City in these terms: "The
comprising workshops and office space. Distributive zoning
idea of an inexpressive, catatonic archi- and diverse typologies disappear because the inhabitants of
tecture, the outcome of the expansive
forms of logic of the system and its class
Hochhausstadt live, work, and move everywhere.
antagonisms, was the only modern In Le Corbusier's hierarchical City for Three Million,
architecture of interest to us: a liberating
architecture, corresponding to mass programmatic diversity is attained by means of formal alter-
democracy, devoid of demos and of cratos natives. In Hilberseimer^ Hochhausstadt, programmatic
(of people and of power), and both cen-
terless and imageless. A society freed from diversity is addressed by assembling all of the elements of the
the rhetorical forms of humanitarian
city - domestic space, office space, roads, railway lines, etc. -
socialism and rhetorical progressivism:
an architecture that gazed fearlessly at into one gridded composition that can be repeated ad infini-
the logic of gray, unaesthetic, and de-
dramatized industrialism. . . . The color- tum. Form is no longer seen as representation but as process.
ful visions of Pop architecture were In the Hochhausstadt, form is devoid of any figurative or
replaced by Ludwig Hilberseimer's piti-
less urban images, those of a city without
individualistic feature, guaranteeing it will perform in the
qualities designed for people without most rational, uniform way. The city is reduced to its repro-
preordained qualities - free, therefore, to
express in an autonomous way their own ductive conditions. Its image may seem frighteningly mono-
creative, political, and behavioral ener- lithic, but it also appears to be serene, because it has eliminated
gies. The greatest possible freedom
occurred where integration was any formal anxiety through the radical deployment of a
strongest. . . . Alienation was a new artis-
tic condition." Andrea Branži, Preface, in
generic type.
No-Stop City: Archizoom Associati , 148-49.
I have analyzed the relationship between Surface
Archizoom and Operaism in the book
The Project of Autonomy: Politics and The continuous surface of Archizoom's No- Stop City seem
Architecture Within and Against Capitalism
(New York: Princeton Architectural
to have been developed as an exaggeration ad absurdum of
Press, 2008), 69-79. Hilberseimer's Hochhausstadt.15 In both plans, the city is
envisioned as a stacking of technical elements without reg
for their further formal articulation. But where Hilberseim

uses building blocks, Archizoom dissolves the built structu

of the city into its constitutive infrastructural elements -
column, elevator, wall, etc. - by envisioning the city as a va
artificially lit, air-conditioned interior. Differences such a
inside and outside, landscape and city, production and con-
sumption, living and working, are collapsed into one equip
surface that is extendable in all directions along the grid, t
14

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 most generic order possible. Here the grid is neither a visual
element nor a functional one, nor even a circulation system.
It is simply the most conventional ratio possible in order to
distribute the necessary elements of the city without resorting
to any architectural gesture. The city is what it does : it is a con-
tinuous ambiance made by repetitive conditions of light,
communication, air-conditioning, mechanized transporta-
tion, and all of the social connections - material and imma-
terial - that are needed in order to make a city work and
reproduce itself. Thus No- Stop City formalizes the conditions
that make the city. Neither a proposal for a new city nor a
Utopian transformation of the existing city, No- Stop City is a
conceptual X-ray of the existing capitalist metropolis, in
which the conditions for reproduction are no longer localized
in specific sectors, such as the factory, housing, and recreation
spaces, but proliferate everywhere. With this scenario, the
iconoclastic form of No-Stop City can be understood as a
merciless memento mori for architecture as a shape-maker and
producer of difference.
Within the objective conditions of the metropolis, formal
complexity becomes ideological, becomes a false consciousness
that pretends to explain the functioning of the city with futile
formal gestures. The form of No-Stop City does not pretend
to erase these formal gestures; on the contrary, it cynically
maintains them, integrating them into the system, albeit as
helpless arbitrary elements. Any formal difference is sub-
16. An example of this subsumption of sumed within the sameness of the city.16 With No- Stop City,
difference is Rem Koolhaas's theoretical
project, City of the Captive Globe, 1972. the history of nonfigurative architecture appears to have
Conceived as a parody of Manhattan, the
arrived at its logical conclusion. But it is precisely the Hegelian
project is an allegory of the lobotomy
that the city's infrastructural order - the act of coming to the awareness of this unavoidable conclusion
grid - imposes on iconic architectural
expression. See Rem Koolhaas, Delirious
that offers the possibility of a new beginning. In the aftermath
New York (New York: Monacelli Press, of the history of nonfigurative architecture, a nonfigurative
1995), 294-95.
form is no longer the demiurgical design of everything but
the limit that attempts to release everything from its design. A
possible postscript to the history of nonfigurative architecture
is to think of nonfigural form no longer as a vehicle for its
own extension but as a frame, as a limit of itself: form as limit.

Limit

If the idea of form as limit means the diachronic sequence

followed so far must be slightly altered, it would be useful to
conclude this brief history of the nonfigurative by consider-
ing the work of Mies van der Rohe, who made "silence" his
dogma. Unlike many architects of his generation, Mies had
little to do with political activism. Apart from some experi-
mental design at the beginning of his career and some sporadic
15

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 and strategic social proclamations, Mies focused on architec-
ture as a "distanced" accomplishment of its purpose: to frame
space. Yet, as several critics have pointed out, the silent forms
through which Mies pursued this goal are far from idealistic.
Especially in his American corporate projects, Mies allowed
the attributes of industrial technology - the famous I beams
used in the Seagram Building facade, for example - to enter
and envelop his architecture. The reificai ion that emerges in
Hilberseimer's method of allowing the objective forces of
capital to redefine the modern city and the cynical detach-
ment with which Archizoom addresses the generic form of
the late-modern postindustrial city are both apparent in
Mies's work. Again, the neutrality of the grid seems to be the
most effective ordering system for resisting the semantic
cacophony of the city while analogically and literally reflect-
ing in the glass facade the constitutive elements of that urban
context. Neither an architecture of hope nor of celebration,
Mies' s buildings remain stubborn yet docile and simple
orthogonal forms within the complex space of the modern
metropolis. As has been noted, their apparent indifference to
17. See Manfredo Tafuri, Progetto e Utopia
(Bari: Laterza, 1973), 64. context is paradoxically their true contextual quality, which
18. See Sven-Olov Wallenstein, The reflects, in the most literal and objective terms, precisely what
Silences of Mies (Stockholm: AXL Books,
2008). one cannot see: the generic space of exchange and reproduc-
19. See Tafuri, Progetto e Utopia ; Manfredo tion behind the appearance of figurai diversity.17 The
Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co, Modem
Architecture , trans. Erich Robert Wolf "silence" of Mies' s architecture has often been interpreted by
(New York: Rizzoli, 1980); Massimo
historians and critics as reflecting and incorporating the
Cacciari, Architecture and Nihilism'. On the
Philosophy of Modern Architecture (New uprooting nature of modernity while defining a critical dis-
Haven: Yale University Press, 1990»
tance from it.18 These interpretations range from the aesthet-
Michael Hays, "Critical Architecture:
Between Culture and Norm," Perspecta 21 ic of renunciation proposed by Manfredo Tafuri, who saw in
(1984); and Detlef Mertins, "Mies's
Mies's American projects the explicit interiorization of the
Skyscraper 'Project': Towards the
Redemption of Technical Structure," in abstraction of social life itself in the form of a paradoxical
The Presence of Mies, ed. Detlef Mertins
(New York: Princeton Architectural formal autonomy per via negativa , to Massimo Cacciari's
Press, 1994), 49-67. reading of Mies's abstraction (and of modern architecture)
20. Fritz Neumeyer, "Space for
Reflection: Block versus Pavilion," in as a conscious image of fulfilled nihilism, to Michael Hays's
Franze Schulze, Mies van der Rohe : use of Mies as an act of critical architecture posited as both a
Critical Essays (New York: The Museum
radical detachment from all that is outside architecture and
of Modern Art, 1989), 148-71.
21. Oswald Mathias Ungers, "Mies van reflecting the conditions that permit such distance, to Detlef
der Rohe and Toronto," in Lotus 112
(March 2002), 108-31. Ungers has read Mertins' rendering of Mies's redeeming use of technology.19
Mies's use of the plinth in his North
Yet, with the notable exceptions of the German critic Fritz
American complexes, such as the
Toronto Dominion Center, as an attempt Neumeyer20 and Oswald Mathias Ungers,21 these canonical
to design a city form from within the
limited boundaries of the architectural readings seem mostly to have focused on the Miesian motif
artifact. Addressed in this way, the plinth of the building envelope, while giving less importance to the
becomes the element that transforms the
limits of the architectural artifact into its element that defined all of Mies's projects: the careful place-
fundamental contribution to the city's ment of buildings through the use of the plinth. From his
form.
early suburban houses in Germany to his corporate office
complexes in the US, the simple, bounded form of the plinth
16

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 is the precondition for nearly all of Mies's designs. If, as
Neumeyer has argued, the pavilion-like quality of Mies' s
buildings seems to have followed Schinkels attempt to ele-
vate the freestanding architectural object as an analogous
form encompassing the bourgeois occupation of space (as
opposed to the imperial claims of Baroque architecture) then
the plinth seems to give to this appropriation a self-defined
limit. This is evident in projects such as the Riehl House
(1907), the Barcelona Pavilion (1929), the Seagram Building
(1954-58), and the New National Gallery in Berlin
(1962-68). By putting emphasis on the building site, the
plinth inevitably makes the site a limit for what it contains.
The isotropic order of industrialization evoked by the build-
ing envelopes is contrasted by their siting, which is framed
by the plinth. Moreover, the way the plinth reorganizes the
connection between a building and its site not only affects
one's experience of what is placed on the plinth, but also - and
especially - one's experience of the city that is left outside the
plinth. One of the most remarkable things felt by anyone
climbing a Mies plinth, whether in New York or in Berlin, is
the experience of turning one's back to the building in order
to look at the city. Suddenly, and for a brief moment, one is
estranged from the flows and organizational patterns that
animate the city, although one still confronts them. In this
way, Mies's plinths reinvent urban space as an archipelago of
limited artifacts. While the materiality and composition of
Mies's envelopes reproduce the attributes of the generic city,
their placement on the plinth presents these attributes no
longer as ubiquitous but as sensual and finite objects. While
Mies's buildings assume the generic attributes of production,
his insistence on framing and limiting proposes these attrib-
utes not as norms but as architectural states of exception that
force the generic to conform to the finite form of location.
In the age of "biopolitics" and "geopolitics," where
political subjectivity is constantly reformulated in ever more
complex and impalpable terms, one can ask whether the
bodily experience of form and location can make sense at all.
But this is precisely the point. Today, a possible and radical
counteraction to the ubiquity of the management of space in
all its forms can only be proposed by reaffirming in the most
radical terms the most graspable junctures through which
space must be made. The nonfigurative gesture of the plinth
seems to open an analogical crack in urban space even as it
has been totalized by the managerial forces of the modern
city. The plinth introduces a stoppage into the smoothness of
urban space, thus evoking the possibility of understanding
17

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 urban space not as ubiquitous, pervasive, and tyrannical, but
as something that can be framed, limited, and thus situated
as a thing among other things. While buildings assume the
ineffable attributes of production, the plinth limits these
attributes to a finite location. Moreover, unlike the wall, a
form like the plinth is a frame that does not simply separate
or isolate; it recuperates in subtle ways the difference that
the modern city has subsumed within its generic space: the
symbolic possibility of confrontation.
Unlike Alberti, Durand, Hilberseimer, and Archizoom,
Mies is concerned not only with the universality and repeata-
bility of this form but also with its limit, with the finitude of
its location. The possibility of a nonfigurative architecture is
thus reinvented by absorbing the compulsion to repeat, which
is the essential trait of capitalist civilization, while increasing
architecture's function as a frame, as a limit both to itself and
to the forces and interests it represents. Mies not only devel-
oped a particular model of architecture, he also introduced a
particular attitude toward the city.
Today, against the ubiquity of design, this attitude toward
framing and limiting needs to be developed both as a literal
and material form of architecture, and as a political principle
of design. Not open-ended growth but limiting should be
conceived as the fundamental meta-project that gives form
to architecture's responsibility toward the city. There is no
question that the idea of limit implies issues that go far
beyond the scope of architecture and its project, and involves
the complex ecology of political and economic space. Yet like
the archetypes we have seen before, the task of architecture
is to reify; that is, to transform into public, generic, and thus
graspable common things the political organization of space,
of which architectural form is not simply a consequence but
one of the most powerful and influential political examples.
In this way, the absoluteness of architecture - its being a
finite form - is not simply the tautological claim of its liter-
ality as object; it is also the example for a city no longer driv-
en by the ethos of expansion and inclusion but by the posi-
tive idea of limits.

Pier Vittorio Aureli is an archi-

tect. He is co-founder of the
collective Dogma and teaches
at the Berlage Institute in
Rotterdam.

18

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