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

Author(s): Pier Vittorio Aureli

Source: Log, No. 16 (Spring/Summer 2009), pp. 7-18
Published by: Anyone Corporation
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Pier Vittorio Aureli
1. This is what is defined today as
"biopolitics," a constitution of political
subjectivity where what is at stake is the
management of life and its forms of
reproduction. In this sense it is possible
to say that fundamental urban categories
that shape the political economy of the
contemporary city such as labor force,
reproduction, and sustainability are the
ultimate sources of the "generic" attrib-
utes of the urban condition.
2. It is important to remember that
beyond its traditional meaning - expro-
priation of subjectivity - the term reifi-
cation comes from the Latin word res,
which means thing in the sense of some-
thing that is graspable as a public thing
( res publica). The word reification means
the necessary dynamic that constitutes a
public sphere; that is, the movement
from the inferiority of being to external
relationships - the "thingness" of the
world. A fundamental réévaluation of
reification as ground for a new political
form of the public sphere has been
advanced by the philosopher Paolo Yirno.
See Paolo Virno, Quando il verbo si fa
carne: Linguaggio e natura umana (Turin:
Bollati Boringhieri, 2003), 111-42.
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More and More
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 excess,
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 style
for architecture. Quite the contrary. The idea of the nonfig-
urative proposed here is defined through the reconsideration
of a possible archaeology of modern architecture. With a series
of archetypal examples from the past, one can demonstrate
how the possibility of a nonfigurative architecture is not
new but is already latent within a reading of architectural
history - a reading in which the unfolding of such a history
is understood not as the change of styles or accumulation of
more and more complexities and contradictions, but rather
as a series of constructive denials. These denials can be inter-
preted within the evolution of modernity in terms of the rise
of the "generic" condition of urban space. The term generic
defines the common character associated with a number of
persons or things. Since modernity has always stressed, as the
core of its project, the possibility of an uprooted and reified
subjectivity, it has held up the generic attributes of life as the
common political character of society.1 It is possible to argue
that, by denying formal redundancy, the latent project of
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 coincides
with the process of reification2 that has permeated the city
since the beginning of modernity, nonfigurative architecture
may also point toward an understanding of what constitutes
public architecture in modern civilization }
7
1. This text is an attempt to rethink the
idea of the "generic" in architecture but
in different terms than those in which
this category has been theorized in recent
years, especially after Rem Koolhaas's
canonical text "Generic City." Seen with-
in the perspective of the historical
unfolding of modernity and capitalism,
the "Generic City" that is the condition
of the permanent cultural and social
uprooting that affects urban space is not
the collateral effect of modernity, but
modernity's fundamental political proj-
ect. This political project started with the
secularization of politics, the beginning
of modern forms of sovereignty in the
17th century, and the rise of liberalism in
economics and politics. In this sense, the
generic certainly embodies what Bertolt
Brecht would have defined as the "Bad
New." Yet it is the task of a critical theory
to discern within the characters of the
generic the possibilities of political and
cultural emancipation without a return
to something like "authenticity," "origi-
nality," and "authorship," which in
today's extremely reified means of pro-
duction can only exist as caricatures of a
lost aura. As such, the generic must be
addressed without useless enthusiasm or
hopeless despair, but with the awareness
that any conception of the public sphere
that wants to address what is truly com-
mon today has to be formulated from
within the reified nature of the modern
and contemporary (generic) city.
4. For a complete illustration of
Archizoom' s No- S top City, see Andrea
Branži, No-Stop City: Archizoom Associati
(Orleans: Editions HXY, 2006). For an
in-depth critical study of the project, see
Roberto Gargiani, Archizoom: Dall'onda
Pop alla superficie neutra (Milan: Electa,
2007).
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The modern definition of nonfigurative architecture is
derived from a drawing made by Archizoom in 1968 as a
scheme for a homogeneous habitat condition, which, a few
years later, would become the plan of their famous theoreti-
cal project No- Stop City.4 Archizoom subtitled this scheme
"Proposal for a Non -Figurative Architectural Language."
The drawing was executed with a typewriter and depicts an
abstract field of dots and X's. The geometry that orders the
disposition of the dots and X's is provocatively simple: the
orthogonal spacing of the typewriter itself. The dots and X's
represent the architecture of a city. Or better yet, they repre-
sent the basic condition required for a city to exist: the mini-
mum infrastructure for living, according to which the city
reproduces itself. Read in this way, X's are columns occurring
every 50 meters. The remaining infrastructure fits within
the grid of plug-ins occurring every five meters. According
to this logic, Archizoom defined other elements in a nonfig-
urative architectural language: a wall occurs every 10 meters,
a bed every 20 meters, an elevator every 25 meters, etc. The
overall layout illustrated an urban field governed by the
minimum welfare necessary to guarantee the reproduction
of those living and working in it. The drawing stripped the
city of any architectural attribute, such as figures, and mer-
cilessly rendered it in all its infrastructural and biopolitical
objectivity. Archizoom sarcastically defined this type of city
as "a bathroom every 50 square meters."
The drawing itself, and the way it was made, presents an
interesting and provocative paradox. On the one hand, it
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

5. For a comprehensive history of the
grid, see Hanna B. Higgins, The Grid
Book (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009).
6. Rosalind E. Krauss, "Grids," October 16
(I979); reprinted in Krauss, The
Originality of the Avant-garde and Other
Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1985), 9-22.
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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
systems, etc.5
In her canonical essay on the grid, art historian Rosalind
Krauss emphasizes that the nonfigurative form became a cen-
tral theme of modern art precisely because its conventional
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

7. Cerdà's project manifests the biopoliti-
cal terms of the urban project in which
the political is radically absorbed by the
governance of space in terms of its man-
agement. See Pier Vittorio Aureli,
"Toward the Archipelago: Defining the
Formal and the Political in Architecture,"
Log 11 (Winter 2008). See also Ildefonso
Cerda, The Five Bases of the General
Theory of Urbanization , ed. Arturo Soria y
Puig, trans. Bernard Miller and Mary
Fons i Fleming (Madrid: Electa Espana,
1999), 81. This book is a partial transla-
tion of Ildefonso Cerdà, Teoria General de
la Urbanización (Barcelona, 1867).
8. Cornelius Castoriadis, The World in
Fragments: Writings on Politics,
Psychoanalysis , and the Imagination
(Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1997). The Frankfurt School made a sim-
ilar conclusion about the fate of rational-
ity. See Theodor W. Adorno, with Max
Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment ,
trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2002).
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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
the reproduction (and control) of labor.7
The nature of the grid and the forms that derive from its
use as a structuring principle signal the essential consideration
at the core of the project of modernity. Modernity's promise
of a "public truth" based on universal values such as individ-
ual freedom and equality could only be conceived with the
reification of the subject and its space of inhabitation. At first
this reification was the result of the formalization of universal
reason, which made it possible to understand the process of
human cognition as a concrete thing. But as Cornelius
Castoriadis has pointed out, the same formalization of reason
was redefined in terms of the idea of administrative logic, or
the presumed rationality of capitalism itself.8 The develop-
ment of the Western city since the 15th century was a funda-
mental factor in this process of subjectification. Not only
physical objects but also treatises, drawings, representations,
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

Leon Battista Alberti, Palazzo
Rucellai, Florence, circa 1452-70.
Photos courtesy the author.
9. Leon Battista Alberti, De re aedificatoria ,
ed. Giovanni Orlandi and Paolo
Portoghesi (Milan: Edizioni del Polifilo,
1966), 520-21.
10. On the politics of Alberti's Palazzo
Rucellai, see Massimo Bulgarelli, Leon
Battista Alberti, 1404-1472. Architettura e
Storia (Milan: Electa, 2008), 34-72.
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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 is
the absolute element of architecture, and the system of orders
developed by the column is ornament.9 In this way, the even
geometry of a grid made of vertically stacked orders is inde-
pendent from the structure of the building itself. This is visi-
ble in Albertus most famous building, the Palazzo Rucellai
(1452-70), which he conceived in dialogue with Michelozzo's
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 and
extending their control over civic institutions. The building
of a new palazzo in the city center materialized this political
development. The heavy stone masonry of the Palazzo Medici
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 city.
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 Palazzo
Medici, Palazzo Rucellai is flat and framed by the addition of
stacked orders. The extreme flatness of the masonry overlaid
by the grid of columns creates an impression of the building
as a modular plane rather than a massive block. Alberti
transformed the archetype of the Roman Coliseum into a
wrapper with a civic orientation: rather than design an iso-
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
explicit flatness, which insists on its role as mere ornament,
is to mediate between private property and public space
through a rational, measurable order and not through the
overall figure of the building itself. For this reason, the
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 rational
basis for this negotiation is the grid, which, in the facade of
11

Top: Michelozzo, Palazzo
Medici in Via Larga, Florence,
circa 1445-60. Above: Palazzo
Vecchio, Florence, i4th century.
Photos courtesy the author.
11. Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, Precis des
leçons d'architecture données a l'Ecole rojale
polytechnique, 2 volumes (Paris: 1802-05).
12. See Sergio Villari, J.N.L. Durand
( 1760-1814-y. • Art and Science of
Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1990).
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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'architec-
ture (1802), 11 where the French architect introduced for the
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 third
to "architectural genres." In the first part, Durand isolates
and presents each element of a building - walls, atria, stairs,
vestibules, and so on - subdividing these architectural ele-
ments into formally independent units. The isolation of each
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 according
to predefined habits of dwelling. As such, it had a limited
capacity to deal with the huge variety of possible architectural
genres - what today we would call "programs." Composition,
on the other hand, proposes a combinatory principle whereby
the positions of architectural elements can be changed accord-
ing to the kind of program addressed, and can occur in both
plan and section. In order to allow this formal flexibility,
Durand proposed to subject the composition of all architec-
tural elements to a radical, simple, and unequivocal method:
the ordering of architectural elements through the use of the
grid. Walls would be placed on the parallel axes of the grid,
columns on the intersections of the axes, and openings such
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 design
was not only a radical attack on the strict hierarchical distri-
bution of Baroque architecture, in which formal complexity
prevented programmatic and spatial flexibility, but also a
radical secularization of architectural form: composition
accommodated the increasing diversification of programmatic
concerns that characterized the rise of the bourgeois city, a
city whose subsequent evolution Durand anticipated with
the intrinsic flexibility of his method.12 Composition allowed
each element to have a potentially different position in each
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 medi-
12

13. See Ludwig Hilberseimer, Grosstadt
Architektur (Stuttgart: Hoffmann, 1927),
13-14. A fundamental reading of this
project and on the German period of
Hilberseimer has been advanced by K.
Michael Hays in his book Modernism and
the Posthumanist Subject: The Architecture
of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 187-277.
Hays correctly emphasizes the influence
of "enlightened" capitalists such as Walter
Rathenau on the social-democratic urban
vision of Hilberseimer. Hays writes: "For
Hilberseimer, as for Rathenau, advanced
capitalism harbors contradictory forces.
It is, on the one hand, the structural pre-
condition of modernity, whose forces
blast subject from object and recolonize
the fragments of each in terms of purely
instrumental functional categories (thus
promoting what Hilberseimer saw as the
overdevelopment of science, know-how,
and technique)." Ibid., 250. It is precisely
the emphasis on the overdevelopment of
science, know-how, and technique over
industrial material production sic et sim-
pliciter as the basis of the capitalist
metropolis that Hilberseimer's vision of
the generic city can be seen as the préfig-
uration of a post-Fordist productive
landscape ante litteram. This hypothesis
can be confirmed by the fact that in the
views of the Hochhausstadt there is no
trace of heavy industry plants, and the
fact that living space is superimposed on
working space implies that working
space is intended to be mostly production
of services.
14. Le Corbusier, "Une Ville
Contemporaine," in Œuvre Complète,
1910-1929 (Zurich: Les Editions
d'Architecture, 1964), 34-43. Gabriele
Mastrigli has proposed a close reading of
the "classical" figures that it is possible to
identify in Le Corbusier's Contemporary
City for Three Million Inhabitants. See
Gabriele Mastrigli, "In Praise of
Discontinuity, or La Leçon de Rome," in
Visionary Power: Producing the
Contemporary City , ed. Saskia Sassen
(Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2007),
113-24.
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
combinations. The nonfigurative character of Durand' s grid
revealed the combinatory logic of composition: no element
was fixed but rather each was made relative to a specific use
and thus accommodated a myriad of "architectural genres."
Durand's idea of composition suggests that the reduc-
tion of form to a grammar of simple elements addresses the
increasing proliferation of urban institutions such as markets,
hospitals, museums, etc. - the increasing unpredictability of
the city's programmatic situations. Far from being just the
outcome of aesthetic concerns, the "abstraction" produced
by a building's combinatory performance, made efficient by
eliminating the figurai infill of the poché , is the result of the
reification of the city due to the "liberalization" of its func-
tions and activities. The grid as a compositional template not
only frames and thus tames the liberalization of city space, it
is also the only element that could orchestrate the design of
everything from a single room to an entire city without
requiring the predefinition of all the stages between those
two poles.
Plan
The integration of the room and the entire city into the same
compositional logic is further radicalized by Ludwig
Hilberseimer in his famous theoretical project for the mod-
ern metropolis, the Hochhausstadt (1924).1* In this project
for a vertical city, Hilberseimer takes a polemical stand against
not only the Utopian images proposed by Expressionist archi-
tecture but also Le Corbusier's Contemporary City for Three
Million Inhabitants (1922). In his well-known proposal, Le
Corbusier seems to arrange different building types accord-
ing to the figures of classical architecture: the spatiality of the
typical Parisian classicist square evoked by the space between
the Cartesian skyscrapers; the layout of the Palace of Versailles
evoked by the Redents; the communitarian form of the abbey
cloister reinterpreted in the Immeuble -Villas; and, finally, the
outline of Michelangelo's plan for St. Peter's in the form of
the main train and air terminal at the city center.14 Moreover,
Le Corbusier clearly uses diverse building typologies, from
the most monumental at the center to the more suburban at
the periphery, and separates residential space from work
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 seems
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 regard
for their further formal articulation. But where Hilberseimer

uses building blocks, Archizoom dissolves the built structure

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

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16. An example of this subsumption of
difference is Rem Koolhaas's theoretical
project, City of the Captive Globe, 1972.
Conceived as a parody of Manhattan, the
project is an allegory of the lobotomy
that the city's infrastructural order - the
grid - imposes on iconic architectural
expression. See Rem Koolhaas, Delirious
New York (New York: Monacelli Press,
1995), 294-95.
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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-
sumed within the sameness of the city.16 With No- Stop City,
the history of nonfigurative architecture appears to have
arrived at its logical conclusion. But it is precisely the Hegelian
act of coming to the awareness of this unavoidable conclusion
that offers the possibility of a new beginning. In the aftermath
of the history of nonfigurative architecture, a nonfigurative
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

17. See Manfredo Tafuri, Progetto e Utopia
(Bari: Laterza, 1973), 64.
18. See Sven-Olov Wallenstein, The
Silences of Mies (Stockholm: AXL Books,
2008).
19. See Tafuri, Progetto e Utopia ; Manfredo
Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co, Modem
Architecture , trans. Erich Robert Wolf
(New York: Rizzoli, 1980); Massimo
Cacciari, Architecture and Nihilism'. On the
Philosophy of Modern Architecture (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1990»
Michael Hays, "Critical Architecture:
Between Culture and Norm," Perspecta 21
(1984); and Detlef Mertins, "Mies's
Skyscraper 'Project': Towards the
Redemption of Technical Structure," in
The Presence of Mies, ed. Detlef Mertins
(New York: Princeton Architectural
Press, 1994), 49-67.
20. Fritz Neumeyer, "Space for
Reflection: Block versus Pavilion," in
Franze Schulze, Mies van der Rohe :
Critical Essays (New York: The Museum
of Modern Art, 1989), 148-71.
21. Oswald Mathias Ungers, "Mies van
der Rohe and Toronto," in Lotus 112
(March 2002), 108-31. Ungers has read
Mies's use of the plinth in his North
American complexes, such as the
Toronto Dominion Center, as an attempt
to design a city form from within the
limited boundaries of the architectural
artifact. Addressed in this way, the plinth
becomes the element that transforms the
limits of the architectural artifact into its
fundamental contribution to the city's
form.
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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
context is paradoxically their true contextual quality, which
reflects, in the most literal and objective terms, precisely what
one cannot see: the generic space of exchange and reproduc-
tion behind the appearance of figurai diversity.17 The
"silence" of Mies' s architecture has often been interpreted by
historians and critics as reflecting and incorporating the
uprooting nature of modernity while defining a critical dis-
tance from it.18 These interpretations range from the aesthet-
ic of renunciation proposed by Manfredo Tafuri, who saw in
Mies's American projects the explicit interiorization of the
abstraction of social life itself in the form of a paradoxical
formal autonomy per via negativa , to Massimo Cacciari's
reading of Mies's abstraction (and of modern architecture)
as a conscious image of fulfilled nihilism, to Michael Hays's
use of Mies as an act of critical architecture posited as both a
radical detachment from all that is outside architecture and
reflecting the conditions that permit such distance, to Detlef
Mertins' rendering of Mies's redeeming use of technology.19
Yet, with the notable exceptions of the German critic Fritz
Neumeyer20 and Oswald Mathias Ungers,21 these canonical
readings seem mostly to have focused on the Miesian motif
of the building envelope, while giving less importance to the
element that defined all of Mies's projects: the careful place-
ment of buildings through the use of the plinth. From his
early suburban houses in Germany to his corporate office
complexes in the US, the simple, bounded form of the plinth
16
 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
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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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