Programming

After Program:
Archizoom’s
No-Stop City
by Kazys Varnelis
One of Archizoom’s early Homogenous
Living Diagrams, a purely quantitative
representation of the city comprised solely
of a typewriter generated field of periods
punctuated by a grid of Xs. These precur-
sors to Archizoom’s later No-Stop City
project were ultimately deemed too threat-
ening to publish.
PRAXIS 8
What are the prospects for program today? In the mid-twentieth
century, program, as the loading of discrete spaces with specific
activities, allowed modern architects to aspire to the status of
social engineers. But it was precisely this idea of architecture as
social engineering that served as a target in the critiques of mod-
ernism in the 1960s and 1970s. Some fifteen years ago, program
returned to the fore as two new positions emerged: the hybrid—
which can be roughly identified with Bernard Tschumi—and the
generic—associated with Rem Koolhaas. In the former, architects
perversely complicate spaces by deploying conflicting uses—”the
skateboarder meets the suits,” for example—while in the latter
they cede the ground entirely by advocating a programmatic inde-
terminacy.1 Although these new models of program were
strongest in the academy, there too they found their undoing. Both
models produced “Photoshop architecture,” unconvincing mon-
tages of people in space, that was less visually compelling than the
experimentation with blobs and “new materials,” 2 which now virtu-
ally dominate work in the top schools.
As this debate played out, however, another challenge to archi-
tecture emerged, namely the rising preeminence of networks over
built structures. The microcomputer, telecommunications, and
pervasive computing combine with the bureaucratic landscape of
what Ulrich Beck calls “second modernity” to shape a formless and
immaterial shadow world.3 It is not architectural space that domi-
nates our lives today, as Manuel Castells points out, it is “the
Space of Flows,” organized and channeled by the invisible forces of
programming.4 Blobs and new materials can do little in response,
offering only the perverse satisfaction of giving form to the form-
less. Program, now thoroughly humbled, is in even worse shape;
activities within contemporary spaces are increasingly determined
not through program but through programming, through the algo-
rithms that run within them or by the legislative and economic
codes that determine what can transpire in them. The architect’s
traditional tactic of loading defined spaces with activities through
the plan—be it specific or hybrid—fades as contemporary spaces
are determined by programming codes instead of by architectural
programs. The programmatic indeterminacy of the generic, mean-
while, offers little more than a capitulation to this condition.
In an effort to better understand—indeed to get beyond—this
contemporary condition, I want to focus on the moment of its
instantiation, in particular, the sociocultural and technological
transformations of the mid- to late-1960s and the radical propos-
als made in response by Archizoom Associati with their No-Stop
City project of 1966-72. Of course this is not a search for retro
form—save that for the last remaining Wallpaper* magazine read-
ers—but rather for methods of practice that could inform a present
response to the challenge programming poses architecture. The
parallel of our own day to the mid-1960s has been drawn before,5
and not without reason, as Late Capitalism, Post-Fordist restruc-
turing, and a postmodernist epistemic and cultural regime remain
with us today. It was the first moment in which architects and
other thinkers could grasp the transformative potential of the com-
puter and the global telecommunications grid.6 For architecture, it
was a signal moment in which challenges to modernism and to the
idea of program were mounted.7
Much like contemporary architects, the young practitioners of the
1960s were faced with a rapidly transforming world. For this gener-
Varnelis: Programming After Program 83
ation, the battle of the heroic era of modern architecture was not
even a memory. On the contrary, in the eyes of many—such as histo-
rian Reyner Banham, Archigram, or the Metabolists—high mod-
ernism, with its fixed structures and half-century-old technology,
had failed to meet the era’s demands for more flexible spaces. But
this was by no means a wholesale rejection of modernism. If there
was a drive to the future, it consciously styled itself Neo-Futurist. In
this light, Banham recovered Sant’Elia and Mendelsohn in order to
advocate Megastructures and Archigram, while Warren Chalk, in his
“Ghosts” collage for Archigram 7, invoked Mies van der Rohe’s Fifty-
by-Fifty House project as well as Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp. Even as
the neo-avant-garde rejected the increasingly obsolete modernism,
it also sought to revive the principles, questions, and energy of the
first modernist moment. Indeed this tactic is not unique to archi-
tects; writing both about the 1960s artistic neo-avant-garde’s
return to the work of the 1920s and 1930s and about Althusser and
Lacan’s returns to Marx and Freud, respectively, Hal Foster identifies
a common impulse “to reconnect with a lost practice in order to dis-
connect from a present way felt to be outmoded, misguided, or oth-
erwise oppressive.”8 Resort to this method is a further, crucial
similarity between the 1960s and the present day. For if practition-
ers from that era pioneered the conscious recuperation of the past
as a way of distancing themselves from a problematic present, we
deploy it without so much as a second thought.
If the radicals of the 1960s sought to revive Futurism’s spirit as
they dreamed up their inflatables and plug-ins, they did so in reaction
to the rapid transformation of their contemporary world. During the
first twenty years of the postwar era, the Fordist regime of big busi-
ness, big government, mass production, limited consumer choice,
rationalized consumption patterns, and Keynesian fiscal policy had
successfully generated a long, sustained economic boom that, by
the mid-1960s, seemed inexhaustible to many. Emerging at the
boom’s end, the neo-avant-garde of the first half of the decade was
still informed by it and, hence, could serve only as a transitional
movement in architecture, its interest in specialized throw-away
plug-in units, planned obsolescence, and self-assembling mechani-
cal gadgetry the product of a faith in technology that accompanied
Fordism’s success. And yet their appeal to the young, hip consumer
was also inspired by a realization that the production-oriented
Fordist approach would be incapable of exceeding a certain level of
economic growth. So long as thrift, utility, and responsibility were
deeply engrained in the cultural mindset, consumption would be sati-
ated and the velocity of money would remain steady. By the late
1960s, in both America and abroad, the long postwar boom was
exhausted and post-Fordist restructuring began.9
The post-Fordist restructuring crisis was accompanied by a
counter-cultural youth movement that rejected mass society for
what it envisioned as the free pursuit of desire. Boomers and
’68ers alike turned their backs on traditional values and instead
followed feelings of reason, seeking lifestyles oriented around con-
sumption and self-fulfillment rather than production and familial or
corporate obligation. They were not alone for long. In his book The
Conquest of Cool, Thomas Frank convincingly demonstrated that
advertisers and corporate marketers rapidly co-opted the counter-
culture’s disgust with mass society through their promotion of a
“hip consumerism,” a new consumer culture driven by desire, a
rejection of conformity, and style as a means of rebellion.10
 Four Homogeneous Living Diagrams:
The initial grid (this page, left) is modified
by the introduction of various elements,
including both normative architectural
interventions (facing page left) and “spon-
taneous figuration” (this page, right).
Unlike the discretely planned Fordist world, the programmed
post-Fordist world exists under constant modulation. For the Post-
Fordist corporation, niche marketing and flexible production, once
the purview of the hip boutique, replace mass marketing and mass
production. Governments have given up the dream of the planned
welfare-state economy that provides for all while delivering steady
growth for an economy dominated by big, vertically-integrated cor-
porations. Instead, governments have replaced Keynesianism with
the constant fine-tuning of monetarist policy as well as the encour-
agement of more entrepreneurially-structured multinationals. So
too, the very goals of production have changed. No longer do
advanced economies pursue the production of physical objects.
On the contrary, developed countries specialize in services, infor-
mation, and media while outsourcing industrial production to the
developing world.11
Architecture, too, became subject to this epochal transformation.
By the late 1960s, the faith in technology had soured. As young peo-
ple rejected society’s traditional values and structures, both modern
architecture and the profession as a whole, overly identified with big
government and big business, came under attack. In North America,
architecture programs refigured themselves as environmental
design. Instead of enrolling in architecture school, hippies began
building ad-hoc communes and dome villages.12 The entire field was
in a crisis, concluded Robert Geddes in a 1967 special report com-
missioned by the American Institute of Architects.13
Mainstream architecture attempted to co-opt counter-culture’s
critiques by embracing early sixties neo-avant-garde ideas.
Alternative construction methods were demonstrated at the
Montreal Expo ’67, where a massive geodesic dome was con-
structed, Moshe Safdie adopted Archigram’s plug-in for his modu-
lar Habitat, and Rolf Gutbrod and Frei Otto erected a lightweight,
tent-like German pavilion. By 1969, no less an establishment
voice than Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill founder Nathaniel
Owings wrote The American Aesthetic, registering concern about
the destruction of the nation’s environment and proposing the
John Hancock Center’s megastructural density as a solution to
environmental ills produced by urban sprawl. Nevertheless, late
1960s radicals dismissed such solutions, together with the early
sixties neo-avant-garde proposals, as overly optimistic about the
powers of technology and oppressive in their reliance on the top-
down plan.14
Among the radical critics of the late 1960s, Italian Marxist
architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri stands foremost. In his
1969 essay for the journal Contropiano, “Towards a Critique of
Architectural Ideology,” he identifies architecture’s aspirations
toward the organization of society as bankrupt. Tafuri argues that
while the avant-garde set out to solve the problem of the city
through the architectural plan, that plan was now subsumed by the
Keynesian welfare state’s economic plan. The result is the exhaus-
tion of modernism itself: “architecture as the ideology of the Plan is
swept away by the reality of the Plan the moment the plan came
down from utopia and became an operant mechanism.”15 Tafuri
proposes that the architect must abandon any goals of changing
society through architecture. In his subsequent writings, Tafuri
outlines three limited choices available for architects: ideology cri-
tique wielded by the historian; the fatalistic development of a lan-
guage of formalist silence by the neo-avant-garde—as epitomized
by Aldo Rossi or Peter Eisenman; or an acceptance of architec-
ture’s complicity with capital and the establishment of a cordon
sanitaire between radical politics and architecture.16
Certainly, Tafuri’s analysis of the architectural plan within a
broader ideological context is brilliant but, for all his insight, Tafuri
PRAXIS 8
is a man of first modernity and the owl of Minerva spreads her
wings at dusk: the collapse of the welfare state was well advanced
by 1969 and the planned economy would itself soon be a thing of
the past. Even as Tafuri observed the modernist plan’s irrelevancy
at the hands of Fordist state planning, the Keynesian economic
plan was well on its way to being superseded by the programmed
modulations of post-Fordism.
But if Tafuri missed the transition to post-Fordism, a growing
movement in Italy called Architettura Radicale did not. By the mid-
1960s, Italy became a hotbed of questioning and alternative
design practice. Both Tafuri and Andrea Branzi, the leader of
Archizoom, suggest that, perversely, it is the country’s industrially
backward condition that lay behind these explorations.17 The rise
of hip consumerism and the transition to the fashion oriented niche
market began to influence Italy early in the decade, and since,
unlike much of the developed world, Italian industry had never fully
adopted Fordism and instead largely employed obsolete, pre-
Fordist methods of manufacturing and construction, the country
readily absorbed these changes. In its relatively backward produc-
tion, Italy could not aspire to Scandinavian or German rationalist,
mass-produced modernism. Instead, design objects were largely
oriented toward a fashion-conscious luxury market, a market that
began as the neo-Liberty revival of Italian Art Nouveau but swiftly
moved toward hip consumerism. The result would be stylish, pop
products such as Joe Colombo’s 1962 Acrilica table lamp, Vico
Magistretti’s 1965 Eclisse table lamp, or Ettore Sottsass’s 1969
Olivetti typewriter. Crucially, this nascent post-Fordist design was
closely integrated with the country’s architectural discourse since,
at the time, Italian design was the realm not of specialists but
rather of young architects seeking opportunity when jobs in their
own field were scarce. 18
Varnelis: Programming After Program 85
Still, in the mid-1960s, Florence seemed to be the least likely
place for experimentation, stuck in its role as a historic tourist desti-
nation in a country just recovering from the War. As with Italy as a
whole, however, this very backwardness proved productive. The
touristic focus on objects as producers of affect, the impossibility of
producing realizable architectural proposals, the new design spread-
ing throughout the country, and the academy’s fascination with both
radical politics and Pop Art coupled with a paradoxical display of Le
Corbusier’s work in the Palazzo Strozzi in 1962—as well as the mas-
sive flood of the river Arno in 1966—generated an atmosphere that
inspired radical, unbuildable proposals and nurtured the groups
Archizoom Associati and Superstudio. The result was Architettura
Radicale, a movement that questioned modernism but also dis-
missed the more recent technological solutions of plug-ins, inflata-
bles, and modular architecture and drew a tense relationship to the
hip consumerism emerging in design during this period. 19
Architettura Radicale began with two joint exhibits by
Archizoom and Superstudio entitled “Superarchitecture,” the first
in Pistoia in 1966, the second in Modena in 1967, exploring the
intersection of architecture and furniture in a heady atmosphere
informed by pop culture. Superarchitecture was inspired by the
Piper Club, a mod disco that operated in Rome beginning in 1965,
and that had many imitators throughout Italy. The effect of the
Piper Club was, according to Andrea Branzi, the leader of
Archizoom, the “total estrangement of the subject, who gradually
lost control of his inhibitions in dance, moving towards a sort of
psychomotor liberation. This did not mean for us a passive surren-
der to the consumption of aural and visual stimuli, but a liberation
of the full creative potential of the individual. In this sense the
political significance of the Pipers was evident as well.” In the
show’s announcements, Superarchitecture is described as “the
 this page: A model of No-Stop City is built inside a mir-
rored box, generating an unending repetition of the
gigantic, big-box structure, and emphasizing the arbi-
trary quality of its exterior. For Archizoom the gridded,
horizontal No-Stop City was meant to replace the obso-
lete model of the traditional, bounded city.
below: Ludwig Hilberseimer’s Hochhausstadt (High-Rise
City) (1924), with its infinite grid of featureless struc-
tures, proved an important model for Archizoom’s No-
Stop City. But Hilberseimer’s city “without qualities” still
held onto notions of space, street, and building exterior,
while in No-Stop City the distinction between architec-
ture and urbanity was utterly collapsed.
architecture of superproduction, of superconsumption, of superin-
ducement to consumption, of the supermarket, of Superman, of
super-high-test gasoline. Superarchitecture accepts the logic of
production and consumption and makes an effort to demystify
it.”20 The integration of production and consumption into a critique
of the same system, the pursuit of neither resistance nor autonomy
but exacerbation and overload is Superarchitecture’s seminal inno-
vation and a strategy subsequently deployed by Architettura
Radicale and Archizoom in particular.21
For Archizoom and other members of Architettura Radicale,
however, hip consumerism, with its quest for fashion, obsoles-
cence, and flexibility, was anathema. Rejecting “the myths peculiar
to the design of the sixties, based on flexibility, unit assembly and
mass-production,” Branzi called for “unitary objects and spaces
that were solid, immobile and aggressive in their almost physical
force of communication." In projects like Archizoom’s “Naufragio di
Rose,” “Presagio di rose” or “Rosa d’Arabia” or Ettore Sottsass’s
laminate furniture, these designers, eventually declaring them-
selves as the Antidesign movement, introduced a deliberately anti-
hip consumerism. Branzi was unequivocal in his rejection of hip
consumerism: “We want to bring into the house everything that has
been left out: contrived banality, intentional vulgarity, urban fit-
tings, biting dogs.” 22
However, Branzi’s argument also had a more Oedipal target:
modernism and architecture’s role in creating social plans. Branzi
would later reflect on the period: “mistrust of architecture and the
instruments of planning was growing; the now open crisis in the
Modern Movement came to be seen as a final day of reckoning,
symptom of mortal illness in a discipline that, born as the most
PRAXIS 8
advanced point of the system, had become its most backward sec-
tor. … the problem lay not so much in the quality of the design as in
the very presence of architecture as such, with its spaces for
observing and its metaphorical messages getting in the way of any
radical refoundation of human settlements.”23 Architettura
Radicale, Branzi explains, came to understand that “the architec-
ture of the future would not emerge from an abstract act of design
but from a different form of us…it had to work on a continuum of
the present, refraining from making strategic projections into the
future…Doing architecture became an activity of free expression,
just as making love means not just producing children but commu-
nicating through sex.” 24
For Architettura Radicale, then, the praxis of architecture was
envisioned as an expanded field, surpassing the act of simply
making buildings. Nor was this a question of merely using the
tools of architecture as a mode of critique. That would be
Superstudio’s task.25 On the contrary, for Archizoom, architec-
ture was a research project, more akin to the present-day
OMA/AMO—albeit pursuing research through architecture rather
than graphic design—than to Daniel Libeskind or Peter Eisenman
of the 1980s.
In contrast to Tafuri’s pessimistic verdict, then, Architettura
Radicale maintained a continued neo-avant-garde role for the
designer. For this Tafuri roundly condemns Architettura Radicale,
concluding that its position is nothing but a provocation for the
elite, occupying the marginal position staked out by postwar Italian
design when it turned to production of luxury objects.26 In
response, Branzi agreed that the task of the architectural plan and
the architectural avant-garde was over; however, unlike Tafuri, he
believed that the post-Fordist culture emerging around him radi-
cally changed the terms of the situation.27
Archizoom’s response to Tafuri emerged in its most significant
project, the “Critical Utopia” of No-Stop City, begun in 1969 and
published in Domus in 1971. Whereas in their projective utopias,
Archigram and the Metabolists hoped to realize their plans for a
neo-mechanical architecture and a dynamic metropolis,
Archizoom developed No-Stop City, like Superstudio’s contempo-
rary Continuous Monument, as “purely cognitive,” aiming for “a
level of clarity beyond that of reality itself.” For Archizoom, No-
Stop City performed a scientific analysis of the contemporary
urban condition, simultaneously utopian and dystopian, that is,
beyond good and evil, employing the “abstract, theoretical, and
conjectural” tools of architectural representation. The city is
treated as “a chemical datum” to understand its formation and
impact. Referring to this kind of conceptual project, Germano
Celant would later conclude, “Nowadays, the architect and
designer do not produce more ideas, they rid themselves of ideas,
producing ideal programs that are ‘less ideas,’ mental liberations
from one’s own acting and being.”28 Branzi explains: “No-Stop City
was a mental project, a sort of theoretical diagram of an amoral
city, a city ‘without qualities,’ as Hilberseimer would have
described it…The nihilistic logic of the maximum quantity was the
only logic of the system in which we were living; instead of deny-
ing this logic, we decided to make use of its inner workings to
achieve a demystification of all its ideals of quality and at the
same time to carry out scientific research into the real nature of
the metropolis…”29
Varnelis: Programming After Program 87
A comparison of No-Stop City with Hilberseimer’s Hochhaus-
stadt project of 1924 reveals not only Hilberseimer’s influence but
also the radical differences between the two moments. Both proj-
ects include a bleak, infinite grid of featureless structures extend-
ing to the vanishing point and beyond. The subject, in both cases, is
no longer autonomous and whole but exists only as integrated into
a larger system. If the Hochhausstadt, as K. Michael Hays writes,
shifts “architectural meaning from the aesthetic realm to a deeper
logic of the socioeconomic metropolis,” so does No-Stop City. But
Hays concludes that Hochhausstadt was a dead end for Hilber-
seimer; afterwards, his architecture all but ceased to develop: “we
are led to focus on the apparent fact that logically, axiomatically,
such a totalizing organization—one in which the productive, causal
source of signification is based on reproduction—can only be
repeated.” All that was left for Hilberseimer was to endlessly repro-
duce the socioeconomic conditions of capital, giving architectural
form to his moment of capitalism.30
If in Hilberseimer’s project the difference between each building
unit and the urban order was abolished, in No-Stop City the differ-
ence between architecture and urbanity itself was abolished.
Hochhausstadt still acknowledged the critical importance of urban
space and the street, whereas No-Stop City rejected it. Moreover,
where Hilberseimer’s Hochhausstadt representations focused on
the exterior, Archizoom’s No-Stop City images were generally inte-
rior. When an exterior to No-Stop City was depicted, it was
included incidentally, proving that any exterior was arbitrary. This
ambivalence differentiated it from Superstudio’s Continuous
Monument, which sought to announce architecture to a world that
had abandoned it.
The question of architecture’s exterior was crucial to Archizoom,
for it was tied into the changed conditions of capital, signification,
and urbanism under what soon became known as late capitalism.
Archizoom began No-Stop City with the premise that, given the
spread of trade and commerce, the city’s historical role was dis-
placed by electronic media:
Nowadays there can be no hesitation in admitting that the urban
phenomenon is the weakest point in the whole industrial system.
The metropolis, once the traditional ‘birthplace of progress’ is
today, in fact, the most backward and confused sector of Capital
in its actual state; and this is true to such an extent, that one is led
to wonder if the modern city is nothing more than a problem which
has not been solved, or if, in reality, it is not a historical phenome-
non which has been objectively superseded.31
Archizoom’s point was that if the metropolis emerged as the physi-
cal center for trade, the universality and totality of electronic
media undid its function: “The metropolis ceases to be a ‘place,’ to
become a ‘condition’: in fact, it is just this condition which is made
to circulate uniformly, through Consumer Products, in the social
phenomenon. The future dimension of the metropolis coincides
with that of the market itself.”32 In other words, universal accessi-
bility to consumer goods obviates the market, thereby making
obsolete the metropolis’s concentrating function.
The metropolis, which concerned Hilberseimer so deeply, mani-
fested itself visually in the skyline, which, Archizoom explained,
serves as “a diagram of the natural accumulation which has taken
the place of Capital itself. So the bourgeois metropolis remains
 this page: Interior mock-ups
of No-Stop City demonstrate
it as a space waiting to be
programmed by end-users.
mainly a visual place, and its experience remains tied to that type of
communication.”33 In their own day, however, Archizoom observed a
fundamental mutation in capital: “the social organization of labour
by means of Planning eliminates the empty space in which Capital
expanded during its growth period. In fact, no reality exists any
longer outside the system itself: the whole visual relationship with
reality loses importance as the distance between the subject and
the phenomenon collapses. The city no longer ‘represents’ the sys-
tem, but becomes the system itself, programmed and isotropic, and
within it the various functions are contained homogeneously, with-
out contradictions.”34 Unlike Tafuri, then, who maintained a special
place outside capitalism for the revolutionary and the historian,
Archizoom discerned, before Ernest Mandel’s 1972 book Late
Capitalism and nearly a decade prior to Fredric Jameson’s 1983
essay, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,”
the total colonization of the world by capital and the consequent
loss of the distinction between interior and exterior.35
With the end of a qualitative distinction between the rural and
the urban, both city and architecture cease to have representa-
tional roles. The skyline is dead, as are areas of concentration and,
implicitly, structures of any architectural quality: “In a program-
mized society, the management of interests no longer needs to be
organized on the spot where trade is to take place. The complete
penetrability and accessibility of the territory does away with the
terminus city and permits the organization of a progressive net-
work of organisms of control over the area.”36 If capital no longer
needs to represent itself to a non-capitalist, rural externality
through the city, then the city, now encompassing the earth, can
be refigured: pure programming of “a social and physical reality
completely continuous and undifferentiated.”37
In place of the concentrated metropolis, Archizoom reduced the
urban realm of No-Stop City to a question of quantity. Initially, No-
Stop City took the form of Homogeneous Living Diagrams, type-
writer generated fields of periods punctuated with a point grid of
PRAXIS 8
Xs that demonstrate the quantitative origins of No-Stop City.
Branzi would later ask, “What is a city? You could say that a city is a
bath every 100 metres, or a computer every 40 metres, etc. These
are quantifiable data making up a city.” Archizoom deemed these
drawings too threatening to architects to publish.38
As No-Stop City developed, it acquired structure as an endlessly
repeated field of gigantic structures, themselves nearly limitless,
modeled on the supermarket and the factory. For Archizoom, these
were the structures of programming, the natural consequence of
emerging social organizations:
Production and Consumption possess one and the same ideology,
which is that of Programming. Both hypothesize a social and phys-
ical reality completely continuous and undifferentiated. No other
realities exist. The factory and the supermarket become the spec-
imen models of the future city: optimal urban structures, poten-
tially limitless, where human functions are arranged
spontaneously in a free field, made uniform by a system of micro-
acclimatization and optimal circulation of information. The ‘natural
and spontaneous’ balance of light and air is superseded: the house
becomes a well equipped parking lot. Inside it there exist no hier-
archies nor spatial figurations of a conditioning nature.”39
In Archizoom’s big box, interior climates were perfected through
artificial light and ventilation while limitless communication was
made possible through information networks. These structures’
exterior boundaries are merely arbitrary, not privileged in any way
in plan. Branzi would later reflect on the project:
By introducing the principle of artificial lighting and ventilation on
an urban scale, the No-Stop City avoided the continual fragmenta-
tion of real property typical of traditional urban morphology: the
city became a continuous residential structure, devoid of gaps,
and therefore of architectural images. By the installation of a regu-
lar grid of lifts, the great levels, theoretically infinite, whose
boundaries were of no interest whatsoever, could be laid out freely
in accordance with differences in function or new forms of social
aggregation.40
When Archizoom did represent the exterior of No-Stop City, they
often merely placed models in a mirror box, creating an endless,
banal repetition of one giant structure after another. Inside, No-
Stop City serves as a kind of residential Büro Landschaft, allowing
the individual’s full realization within utterly neutral spaces. The
freestanding structures and landscape deployed within No-Stop
City at random intervals ensure that one’s scope of vision is local-
ized to a discrete area of the gargantuan floorplate. Having elimi-
nated architecture’s representational role, Archizoom proposes,
“the problem becomes that of freeing mankind from architecture
insomuch as it is a formal structure.”41
If Tafuri had earlier declared the death of architecture,
Archizoom did no less in this statement. However a crucial differ-
ence emerges. Tafuri believed the death would be punctual and
final whereas Archizoom saw death as a means of the discipline’s
growth. In a later interview, Branzi recalled:
All the most vital aspects of modern culture run directly toward
that void, to regenerate themselves in another dimension, to free
themselves of their disciplinary chains. When I look at a canvas by
Varnelis: Programming After Program 89
Mark Rothko, I see a picture dissolving into a single color. When I
read Joyce’s Ulysses, I see writing disappearing into thought.
When I listen to John Cage, I hear music dissipating into noise. All
that is part of me. But architecture has never confronted the
theme of managing its own death while still remaining alive, as all
the other twentieth-century disciplines have. This is why it has
lagged behind…42
Unlike Hilberseimer’s fatal compulsion to repeat the Hochhausstadt
project, Archizoom, which dissolved in 1974, never replicated No-
Stop City, nor did they or Branzi nostalgically return to traditional
ideas of architecture and planning. Branzi later reflected on the plan:
The idea that the architect is a person who expresses himself only
through his plans is stupidity. Today, industry and the metropolis
require different contributions than the simple plan, which always
presupposes the quest for a formal, figurative solution to prob-
lems. At the same time, it may also be that the problems do not
need to be resolved or represented; it may be more important to
invent them…43
Instead, architecture is free to pursue a new project—that Tafuri
could not or would not envision—in the postindustrial society, that
of creating new relationships. This new, expanded architect “takes
some logical mechanisms and analytical processes from modern
architecture but disdains the tools of the discipline.”44 For Branzi,
the architect becomes invaluable as a technocratic “co-ordinator
of human and technical resources,” abandoning the old role of “a
constructor of artifacts” once and for all.45
Much like Freudian therapy, No-Stop City served as both diagno-
sis and cure. Archizoom named the problem—that late capitalism
has no use for the traditional bounded city and substitutes instead
a blank, limitless field, be it the physical terrain vague or the global
telecommunications network—and allowed architects to under-
stand how to go beyond the world of physical objects and enter into
a collision of codes that marks the new transurban condition. This
issue is of even greater consequence today. No-Stop City is now a
fact: globalization has spread the market’s reach to the furthest
ends of the Earth, telecommunications has radically reconfigured
our notions of space, and the device of the Big Box—so well antici-
pated in No-Stop City’s limitless structures—is now ubiquitous, in
exurbia, suburbia, and city alike.46 Embracing programming over
program means that architects need to be willing to let unpre-
dictable effects take over while finding ways of hacking codes, both
digital and physical. We can see this emerging in works such as
Foreign Office Architect’s Yokohama Terminal, Rem Koolhaas’s
urban plan for Melun-Senart, and NL Architects’ WOS 8 heat trans-
fer station; in works at the boundaries of architecture such as Mark
Shepard’s Tactical Sound Garden Toolkit, Meejin Yoon’s White
Noise/White Light, or AUDC’s Windows on the World; as well as in
the kind of interior design, often ephemeral, deployed by firms such
as Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis, Neil M. Denari Architects, and servo.
Much like the recent publishing boom, the current building boom is
an end condition as we cross the threshold toward a world domi-
nated by virtuality and immaterial culture. How architects embrace
this new territory and the new techniques for engaging it deter-
mines whether architecture dissipates in this immaterial century or
becomes one of its a central fields of research.
Notes
1. These twin poles are exemplified by two essays: Bernard Tschumi, “Architecture
and Transgression,” Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT
Press, 1996), 65-80 and Rem Koolhaas, “Typical Plan,” S, M, L, XL (New York:
Monacelli Press, 1998), 334-350.
2. Two recent dissertations treat the emergence of these discourses in the acad-
emy. Jorge Otero-Pailos’s excellent Theorizing the Anti-Avant-Garde: Invocations
of Phenomenology in Architectural Discourse, 1945-1989. (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Dissertation, Department of Architecture, 2002) examines the development
of phenomenology, while my own The Spectacle of the Innocent Eye (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell Dissertation, History of Architecture and Urbanism, 1994) investigates
the emergence of formalism. The “death of theory” is played out principally in
Assemblage; early hints can be found in Assemblage 27: The Tulane Papers
(August 1995) and the topic is much discussed in the final issue, Assemblage 41
(April 2000).
3. Ulrich Beck, “The Transition from the First to the Second Modernity,” in The
Brave New World of Work (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2000), 17-35. On the
challenge posed by this new regime to architecture see my pair of articles in Log:
“One Thing After Another,” Log 3, September, 2004, and “Prada and the Pleasure
Principle,” Log 6, forthcoming.
4. Manuel Castells, “The Space of Flows,” in The Rise of the Network Society, sec-
ond edition, (New York: Blackwell, 2001), 406-459.
5. See Felicity D. Scott, “Involuntary Prisoners of Architecture,” October 106, Fall
2003, 75-101. In itself a return, exploring the work of Superstudio, Scott’s essay
thoughtfully critiques the more problematic returns to the 1960s in contempo-
rary architectural discourse.
6. Mark Wigley, “Network Fever,” Grey Room 4, Summer 2001, 82-122.
7. See, for example, Charles Jencks, Architecture 2000. Predictions and
Methods. (New York: Praeger, 1971).
8. Hal Foster, “What’s Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?” October 70 (Autumn
1994), 7.
9. A succinct explanation of this transition and its consequences for culture can
be found in David Harvey, “From Fordism to Flexible Accumulation,” David Harvey,
The Condition of Postmodernity. An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change,
(Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 141-172.
10. See Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool. Business Culture, Counterculture,
and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
11. This correspondence of planned/Fordist and programmed/post-Fordist can
best be explained by the distinction that Gilles Deleuze makes in his brief essay
“Postscript on Societies of Control.” Deleuze begins by recounting Foucault’s theo-
ry of a disciplinary modernity functioning through enclosures, planned environ-
ments whose purpose is “to concentrate; to distribute in space; to order in time.”
Deleuze observes that increasingly control is produced not through the “molds”
formed by enclosures, but rather through an ever-present series of programmed
modulations taking the form of a “self-deforming cast that will continuously change
from one moment to another.” In the society of control, power is not fixed but rather
is the product of “ultrarapid free-floating forms of control.” Thus, instead of asking
employees to conform to a pre-established hierarchy, the corporation now expects
them to identify with, and enter, an ever-changing flow. If Fordist disciplinary socie-
ty perfected the mechanical regime of discipline, aiming to regulate workers in the
factory like cogs in a machine, the specialized product of plans, drawn once, the
Post-Fordist society of control operates in the regime of the computer, with its infi-
nite flexibility, run by programs composed of easily modifiable code. And if, in the
hierarchical disciplinary society, the possession of the plan determines who has
power, as Deleuze observes, in the society of control, power disseminates insidi-
ously throughout so that everyone is both master and slave.
12. One aspect of the anti-architectural movement of the late 1960s is charted
by Simon Sadler in “Drop City Revisited,” an essay in a special issue
edited by George Dodds and myself, 1966: Forty Years After, Journal of
Architectural Education (February 2006), volume 59, number 3, 5-14.
13. Robert L. Geddes and Bernard P. Spring, Final Report. A Study of Education
Sponsored by the American Institute of Architects, (Princeton University:
December 1967).
14. By the late 1960s, Archigram was quite unpopular. Elia Zenghelis states
“Archigram were our enemies; well, they were our friends as people, but intellectu-
ally we opposed them.” In Lieven De Cuter and Hilde Heynen, “The Exodus
Machine,” Martin van Schaik and Otaker Mác̆el, Exit Utopia: Architectural
Provocations 1956-76 (Munich: Prestel, 2005), 269. See also Martin Pawley’s
melancholy lament for Archigram, “‘We Shall Not Bulldoze Westminster Abbey’:
Archigram and the Retreat from Technology,” in Oppositions 7 (Winter, 1976), 25-
35, and Peter Eisenman’s biting condemnation of Archigram in his introduction to
Pawley’s piece: “As the Modern Movement died in 1939, so too did this neo-func-
tionalism of Archigram die in 1968. What remains is the joyless demiurge and the
dark side of the English wit—snarkiness.”
15. Manfredo Tafuri, “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” Contropiano 1
(January-April 1969), reprinted in K. Michael Hays, ed., Architecture
Theory Since 1968 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 28.
16. See Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist
Development, (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1976).
17. See Manfredo Tafuri, “Design and Technological Utopia,” in Emilio Ambasz, ed.,
Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1972),
388. Also, Andrea Branzi in François Burkhardt and Cristina Morozzi, Andrea
Branzi, (Paris: Éditions dis Voiir, 1997), 59. On the Italian scene in the early
1960s see the essay by Mary-Lou Lobsinger also in 1966: Forty Years After, JAE,
(February 2006), volume 59, number 3, 28-39.
18. See also Lesley Jackson. The Sixties. Decade of Design Revolution (London:
Phaidon, 1998), 157-161.
19. On the scene in Florence in the mid-1960s and the genesis of Architettura
Radicale see Germano Celant in Ambasz, Italy: The New Domestic Landscape and
Peter Lang, “Suicidal Desires” in Peter Lang and William Menking, Superstudio.
Life Without Objects. (Milan: Skira, 2003), 31-52 as well as a number of the
essays produced for van Schaik and Mác̆el, Exit Utopia: Sander Woertman, “The
Distant Winking of a Star, or the Horror of the Real,” 146-155; Andrea Branzi,
“Notes on No-Stop City: Archizoom Associates 1969-72”, 177-182; Adolfo
Natalini, “How Great Architecture Still Was in 1966…Superstudio and Radical
Architecture, Ten Years On,” 185-190. Branzi takes pains to note that
Architettura Radicale was not monolithic but rather “composed of diverse individ-
uals who in time produced completely different results,” Branzi, “Notes on No-
Stop City,” 177. Branzi cites the influence of two projects in the show on
Corbusier: “Chandigarh—whose plans replicated the caste system that regiment-
ed Indian society, without showing how to overcome it—as well as a master plan
for Algiers that juxtaposed the historic Arab Kasbah and recent European plan-
ning without offering any form of mediation,” “Notes on No-Stop City,” 179.
20. Andrea Branzi, The Hot House: Italian New Wave Design, (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1984), 54.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., 55.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 58-60.
25. On the differences between Archizoom and Superstudio, see Peter Lang,
“Suicidal Desires,” in Lang and Menking, Superstudio. Life Without Objects,
44-48.
26. Tafuri “Design and Technological Utopia,” in Ambasz, ed., Italy: The New
Domestic Landscape, 394-395.
27. Branzi does mention Tafuri’s death of architecture in The Hot House, 73.
28. Celant, “Radical Architecture, “in Ambasz, ed., Italy: The New Domestic
Landscape, 386.
29. Branzi, The Hot House, 76.
30. K. Michael Hays, Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject. The Architecture
of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992),
178-183.
31. Archizoom Associates, “No-Stop City. Residential Parkings. Climatic Universal
Sistem” Domus 496, March 1971, 53.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., 54.
34. Ibid., 55.
35. Here, against all my impulses as a historian, I nevertheless am compelled to
suggest that Branzi and Archizoom are able to see the limitations of Tafuri’s posi-
tion because they understand themselves to be within the system, not at a privi-
leged point outside the system.
36. Ibid., 53.
37. Archizoom Associates, “No-Stop City,” 55.
38. Woertman, “The Distant Winking of a Star, or the Horror of the Real,” 153.
39. Archizoom Associates, “No-Stop City,” 55.
40. Branzi, The Hot House, 70
41. Archizoom Associates, “No-Stop City,” 55.
42. Branzi interviewed in Burkhardt and Morozzi, 49-50.
43. Branzis in Burkhaqrdte and Morozzi, Andrea Branzi, 51.
44. Branzi, The Hot House, 76.
45. Ibid., 75-76.
46. On the ubiquity of the big box, see Paul Goldberger, “The Malling of
Manhattan,” Metropolis, March, 2001, 136-139, 179.
PRAXIS 8 Varnelis: Programming After Program 91

this page: In No-Stop City the house becomes

a furnished parking lot, the city modeled on
the factory and supermarket.