Pier Vittorio Aureli

Heavy Words
Are So Lightly Thrown
A Critical Abécédaire of Contemporary Architectural Theory

Course Introduction and Syllabus

Accademia di Architettura, Mendrisio

Spring Term, Academic Year 2020-2021

Course Summary

Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that many philosophical issues have arisen because of philosophers’
lack of precision with the words they use. The same can be said of architecture – a field in which,
often, contested issues are just the consequence of the careless way designers use words and
concepts to address architecture. Even though the kernel of architecture is building and design,
in these activities language does play a fundamental role.

Perhaps, a task of architectural theory could then be to sharpen the meaning of the words and
concepts through which we talk, discuss, teach, or learn architecture. This task is hardly new:
from Leon Battista Alberti to Claude Perrault, from Le Corbusier to Rem Koolhaas, the specific
use (or abuse) of words has been the focus of much architectural theory. This course does not
aim to talk about many words, but rather to focus on the very few whose usage is frequent, but
whose meaning has become somehow opaque. These words are project, disegno/design, form,
type, home, gender, capital, labour, territory, urban, property, common. These are the ‘heavy’
words that are often lightly thrown when we talk about architecture. Each session we will ask
ourselves, what we really mean with each of these specific words? This seemingly banal question
will be used as the starting point for inquiries that will investigate both the historical and current
use of these concepts. At stake in this discussion is not just the ‘meaning’ of the words, but the
very meaning and purpose of what we call ‘architecture’.

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Schedule and Readings

Wednesday, February 24, 2021

1st Session

Project

Readings:

- Lewis Mumford, Technics and Human Development. The Myth of the Machine, Volume One (San
Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1966-67).
- Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1988), 2-32.
- Mario Carpo, The Alphabet and the Algorithm (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2011
- Marvin Trachtenberg, Building in Time: From Giotto to Alberti and Modern Oblivion (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
- Manfredo Tafuri, ‘Ricerca dei paradigmi: progetto, verità, artificio’, in Ricerca del
Rinascimento. Principi, città, architetti (Turin: Einaudi, 1992), 3-32.
- Pier Vittorio Aureli, ‘Do you Remember Counterrevolution: Filippo Brunelleschi and the
Politics of Syntactic Architecture’ in AA Files, No. 71 (2015), 147-165.
- Alberto Perez Gomez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1985).

2nd Session

Disegno/Design

Readings:

- David MCGee, ‘The Origins of Early Modern Machine Design’, in Picturing Machines
1400-1700, edited by Wolfgang Lefèvre (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 54-84.
- Mary Henninger-Voss, ‘Measure of Success: Military Engineering and the Architectonic
Understanding of Design’, in Picturing Machines 1400-1700, edited by Wolfgang Lefèvre
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 143-174.
- Zeynep Celik Alexander, John May, Design Techniques. Archaeologies of Architectural Practice
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020).

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Wednesday, March 10, 2021

3rd Session

Form

Readings:

- Kai Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition (London: Cambridge University Press,
2002).
- I percorsi delle forme, edited by Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 1998).
- Pier Vittorio Aureli, ‘Chi ha paura della forma’ in Peter Eisenman, La base formale
dell’architettura moderna (Genova, Pendragon Edizioni, 2009).
- Luka Skansi, ‘What is Artistic Form? Munich – Moscow, 1900 – 1925’, in Russian Emigré
Culture. Conservatism or Evolution?, edited by Christoph Flam, Henry Keazor and Roland
Marti (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholar Publishing, 2018), 69-88.
- Anna Bokov, Avant-Garde as Method: Vkhutemas and the Pedagogy of Space, 1920-1930.
(Zurich: Park Books, 2020).

4th Session

Type

Readings:

- Rafael Moneo, ‘On Typology’, in Oppositions no. 13, (Summer 1978), 23-45.
- Giulio Carlo Argan, ‘Sul concetto di Tipologia Architettonica’, in Progetto e Destino (Milan:
Il Saggiatore, 1965), 75-81.
- Carlo Aymonino, ‘La Formazione di un moderno concetto di tipologia edilizia’, in
Rapporti tra la morfologia urbana e tipologia edilizia, edited by Carlo Aymonino and Aldo Rossi
(Venice: Cluva, 1966), 15-51.
- Aldo Rossi, ‘Considerazioni sulla morfologia urbana e la tipologia edilizia’, in Aldo Rossi,
Scritti Scelti sull’Architettura e la Città, edited by Rosaldo Bonicalzi (Milan: Clup, 1976), 209-
219.
- Maria Shéhérazade Giudici, ‘Counter-planning from the Kitchen: for a Feminist Critique
of Type’, in The Journal of Architecture 23: 7-8 (2018), 1203-1229.

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Wednesday, March 24, 2021

5th Session

Home

Readings:

- Jerry D. Moore, The Prehistory of Home (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012),
1-69.
- Peter J. Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species (New Haven, London: Yale
University Press, 1989), 23-78.
- Pier Vittorio Aureli, Maria Shéhérazade Giudici, ‘Familiar Horror: Towards a Critique of
Domestic Space’, in Log 38 (Autumn/Winter) 2016, 105-129.
- Robin Evans, ‘Rookeries and Model Dwellings: English Housing Reform and the
Moralities of Private Space’, in Translations from Drawings to Building and Other Essays
(London: AA Publications, 2004), pp. 93-117.
- Stuart Hodkinson, ‘The Return of the Housing Question’, in Ephemera. Theory and Politics
in organization vol. 12(4), 423-444.

6th session

Gender

Readings:

- Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, Women in the international Division of
Labour (London: Zed Books), 44-111.
- Dolores Hayden, Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Design for American Homes,
Neighborhoods and Cities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981).
- Norbert Schoenauer, ‘Early European Collective Habitation’, in New Households, New
Housing, edited by Karen A. Franck, Sherry Ahrentzen (New York: Van Nostrand, 1991),
47-70.
- Alison Woodward, ‘Communal Housing in Sweden’, in New Households, New Housing,
edited by Karen A. Franck, Sherry Ahrentzen (New York: Van Nostrand, 1991), 71-94.

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Wednesday, April 21, 2021

7th Session

Capital

Readings:

- Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia. Design and Capitalist Development (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1975).
- E. W. Cooney, ‘The Organization of Building in England in the 19th century’, in
Architectural Research and Teaching no. 2 (November 1970), 46-52.
- Deborah Gans, ‘Big Works: Le Corbusier and Capitalism’, in Architecture and Capitalism,
1845 to the Present, edited by Peggy Deamer (London: Routledge, 2013), 98-112.
- Elizabeth Yarina, ‘How Architecture Became Capitalism’s Handmaiden: Architecture as
Alibi for the Highline’s Neoliberal Space of Accumulation’, in Architecture and Culture vol.
5, Issue 2 (2017), 241-263.
- Jesse LeCavalier, The Rule of Logistics: Walmart and the Architecture of Fulfillment.
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

8th Session

Labour

Readings:

- Moishe Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination. A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical
Theory (London: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
- Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 79-
135.
- Lindy Biggs, The Rational Factory: Architecture, Technology and Work in America’s Age of Mass
Production (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
- Pier Vittorio Aureli, ‘Labor and Architecture: Revisiting Cedric Price’s Potteries
Thinkbelt’, in Log 23 (Fall 2011), 97-118.

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Wednesday, May 5, 2021

9th Session

Territory

Readings:

- Robert Delaney, Territory: A Short Introduction (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005).

- Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum
(London: Telos Publishing, 2006).
- Stuart Elden, The Birth of Territory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
- Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-1978
(New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 1-28.
- Pier Vittorio Aureli, Territory, in AA Files 76 (2019), 152-155.

10th Session

Urban

Readings:

- Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991).

- Ross Exo Adams, Circulation and Urbanisation (London: Sage, 2019).
- Neil Brenner, New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Space Question (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2019).

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Wednesday, May 19, 2021

11th Session

Property

Readings:

- Yan Thomas, Il valore delle cose (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2015).

- Gary Fields, Enclosure. Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror (Oakland: University of
California Press, 2017), 1-170.
- Karl Marx, ‘Part Eight: Primitive Accumulation’, in Capital: Volume I, translated by
Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Champaign, IL: Modern Barbarian Press, 2018),
506-548.
- Nicholas Blomley, ‘Law, Property, and the Geography of Violence: The Frontier, the
Survey, and the Grid’, in Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93, no. 1 (March
2003), 121.
- Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law. A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated
America (New York: Liveright, 2018).
- Pier Vittorio Aureli, ‘Appropriation, Subdivision, Abstraction: A Political History of the
Urban Grid’, in Log 44, Autumn/Winter 2018, 139-167.

12th Session

Common(s)

Readings:

- Stavros Stavridis, Common Space. The City as Commons (New York: Zed Books, 2016).
- Massimo De Angelis ‘Grounding Social Revolution: Elements for a System Theory of
commoning’, in Perspectives on Commoning. Autonomist Principles and Practices, edited by
Guido Ruivenkamp and Andy Hilton (New York: Zed Books, 2017), 213-255.
- An Atlas of Commoning: Places of Collective Production, edited by Ahn-Linh Ngo, Mirko Gatti,
Stefan Gruber, Christian Hiller, Max Kaldenhoff; Special issue of Arch+ (Summer
2018).

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Exam Guidelines

The examination mode of course will be an oral exam, that will take place during the summer
exam session. The dates will be communicated by the Accademia.
The exam will test the student's knowledge of and ability to critically evaluate the topics of the
course. The student is asked to select one topic and prepare by studying the bibliography, in
addition to following the lectures. Students of the MSTAA programme are asked to select two
topics and will receive the double amount of time during the exam. The exam can be taken in
Italian or English.