Riccardo M Villa

In his 1979 essay The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge philosopher Jean-François Lyotard noted that the advent of the computer opened up a stage of progress in which knowledge has become a commodity. Modernity and postmodernity appear as two stages of a process resulting from the conflict of science and narrative. As science attempts to distance itself from narrative, it must create its own legitimacy. This paper takes up this challenge with a focus on the question of imagery. The image is precisely what modern science seeks to free itself from in its quest for absolute transparency. This transparency is examined from the perspective of architecture, drawing on arguments from philosophy, quantum mechanics, theology and information theory.

Cosa si nasconde dietro la “facciata” dell’architettura attuale? Dietro le immagini virtuali pubblicate su riviste, giornali e siti web, così come dietro gli edifici concreti che compongono le nostre città? Quali figure e competenze, quale organizzazione del lavoro? Questo libro intende occuparsi di architettura partendo dalla sua produzione: alla luce delle trasformazioni tecnologiche verificatesi negli ultimi anni, delle mutate richieste del mercato, della metamorfosi del ruolo dell’architetto, considerato non più necessario e tuttavia in certi casi reso addirittura un feticcio.

https://www.francoangeli.it/ricerca/Scheda_libro.aspx?ID=23789&Tipo=3

In the opening pages of Architecture and Utopia, architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri famously denounced the deprivation to which the discipline of architecture was exposed under capitalist development, namely of being reduced to “sublime uselessness”. Faced to the all-encompassing and operative reality of global capitalism, the imaginative power of architecture seems to be lost once and for all. It is precisely out of this ground, from this “picture of the world” as a mere non-ideological yet operative rendering of mechanisms of financial speculation, that I would like to look at how architecture’s potentialities and power can be and have been re-thought. I will do so first by looking at financial speculation and exchange as a suspension of ends; secondly, by looking at how such a suspension could be shared by architectural production, by comparing the architectural project and the financial interest, and by looking at competition as a particular regime of their production. Examples such as Archizoom Associati’s No-Stop City (1969) and O.M.A.’s City of the Captive Globe (1972) will help to illustrate how the ‘ideology’ of capitalism can be rendered visible and, through the appropriation of its own mechanisms, how it can become a project. Finally, I will look at the notion of crisis not as a mere moment, but rather as an inherent structure of such a world-picture as much as of the architectural project in itself. Under this perspective, the crisis of architecture and its “sublime uselessness” will shift from a negative understanding to a constructive and edifying one. 

Essay written as part of an introductory issue to a box set of publications concerning the work of five different young Milan-based architects (YellowOffice, Piovenefabi, F.A.T., Forestieri Pace Pezzani and Casatibuonsante Architects).

https://divisare.com/books/368-gizmo-milano-mix

Tracciare un quadro dell'emigrazione architettonica giovanile, italiana e non, nel corso della seconda meta del XXI secolo è un compito non facile. Lo è, perlomeno, se si vuole evitare le storie individuali, i 'sentito dire', la retorica giornalistica della 'fuga dei cervelli' e qualsiasi altra evidenza del fenomeno che non costituisca una fonte oggettiva a cui ancorare il proprio discorso.

Besides their differences, Hilberseimer´s vision of the metropolis and Wright´s organic architecture seem both to respond to the loss of a clear urban figure; in their designs the project of the city shifts from a total planning to the conception of its organic `cell´. The city is re-invented as a milieu, a metabolic space of flows and transformations that goes along with a novel way of government, described by Foucault as `bio-power´

The present text is an English translation of an essay originally published in Italian for GIZMO Architectural Review on the 18th of May, 2020 (http://www.gizmoweb.org/2020/05/botanica-delle-immagini/). It is part of a set of contributions from different authors collected under the title of “#Remix – Architects in the Age of Network”.

"When it comes to uncertainty about the future, architectural competitions and the real estate market are the spaces of speculation par excellence. Departing from this idea, the following article shows how competitions – by developing and recycling architectural forms – favor the accumulation of capital within the office, since without a final destination projects are increasingly resembling money."

The XIII Triennale, inaugurated in Milan in 1964 and dedicated to the theme of “free time”, staged a pitiless criticism of the human condition in the capitalist system. The exhibition focuses on «the discussion on the quality of our “leisure”, in its historical formation and stratification».
The attempt is to show its visitors the deception of leisure and denounce the bad habits which tie free time to the cultural industry, and it centers specifically on the imposition, through the creation of myths, of a mode of production based on standardization, with the ensuing transformation of each user into a consumer and of leisure into merchandise.
Although the issue is primarily sociological, it is a subject of deep relevance and already a field of experimentation in architecture. Time freed from work needs structures and specific spaces, and it acquires from the start the same socially standardizing nature as the two main categories of modern anthropological discourse: work life and home life.
Since Cedric Price's Fun Palace (1960-65), a proper «mechanized homo ludens sanctuary», architects begin to explore - often critically - the potential of the leisure machine at a time when leisure is becoming one of the most powerful market drivers in developed capitalist societies.
1966 is the year in which the rising radical thinking starts focusing primarily on this issue: Andrea Branzi graduates with a project for an amusement park in Prato; after the success of the Piper club in Rome, in the same year Pietro Derossi takes on the design of its Turin and Rimini counterparts; 1966 is also the year in which Massimo Morozzi designs the cultural center inside the Emperor's Castle in Prato. One year later Superstudio, with Toraldo di Francia, imagines a «machine for holidays» in Tropea, an "artificial paradise" where a regulated microclimate is kept by controlling the natural elements.
The radical research on the topic of leisure time continues for several years, showing the central importance of the issue even within the Marxist readings that articulate their criticism around free time as time of consumption, and comes to maturity in the early Seventies in Ettore Sottsass’ The Planet as Festival.
Though in such speculations, leisure was again conceived as another kind of productive activity, its times and places still kept their specificity, as being clearly separated from times and places of actual production - the so-called “working hours” and “work places”.
Can we still talk today about «free time» as clearly separated from labour? Can these two functions still be associated to specific spatial configurations? As the time devoted to production seems to acquire more flexibility, its new “liquid” state is harder to contain in defined hours and in specific places. Work begins to surface in places of leisure, and vice-versa. Places like the Rolex Learning Center or the Google Campus seem to promote a new kind of “free space”, and a new conception of free time, that are worth being investigated. The debate opened by the XIII Triennale echoes to the present day, asking for its actualisation.

According to Hans Blumenberg, Weltbildverlust is the distinctive trait of the Modern Age. World-images are lost and forgotten due to the rise of scientific and operative world-models. This understanding of science reconnects with the ancient project of philosophy: to emancipate knowledge from images—something that the philosophical tradition, from Plato onwards, has always looked with deference and as potentially treacherous. Digital technology seems to fulfil this dream: it turns knowledge into a numeric matter, computable and non-figurative. This is the character of what Jean-François Lyotard named as the postmodern condition. And yet, today we find ourselves drowning in pictures, as portable devices push to an even more capillary diffusion—in space and in time—of the “spectacle” of society. The emancipation of images turns into its opposite: with the digital everything is image. In a computerised society knowledge becomes a matter of production and consumption, handing it into the “treacherous” hands of sophistry which philosophy was trying to preserve it from. At the same time, contemporary physics is confronted with a principal indeterminacy: picturing something can no longer be considered an impartial act and observation (the picturing itself) must be considered as a constitutive part of the equation: if truth, as Walter Benjamin once said, must be intentionslos, intellection cannot. On these bases, the paper will argue for an urgency to reconsider pictures and images and of their constitutive role for an architectonic understanding of science, media, and technology in the so-called Digital Age. In this context, images are not representations of something as much as representatives: they are endowed with a political autonomy—a non-predicative kind of figuration—that makes them an expression of an ontological difference, a ‘writing’ of legibility itself. In this light, knowledge is not anymore the object of epistemology but of architectonics, and intellection is not just a ‘reading’ but Entwurf: an articulation (via images) of a contingent ‘pact’ with the negligible—i.e. with what such reading cannot accommodate.

If modernity was supposed to be the age in which world-images were abrogated or discredited as world-views, or as ideologies to be critiqued and deconstructed, our contemporary condition seems to be faced with an unexpected reappearance of images and of their importance for orienting our values. Instead of coming from mythology, theology or philosophy, these "world-pictures" are rather 'renderings' and 'accounts' of scientific models; by conceiving and studying their subject as a closed environment-as an oikos, a 'house'-disciplines like economy and ecology are able to project their own picture of the world. Yet, such pictures become normative (they acquire the power to legitimate policies) only when they are pushed to their own limit; in other words, these pictures become images whenever they stage the crisis of their own model. But is this phenomena limited to the contemporary condition and to its presumedly singular 'criticality', or is it rather pertaining to 'human' orders and to 'artificial' techniques at large? Looking at the interplay between images and crisis might open up a field of perspectives able, if not to escape, at least to rethink any apocalyptic prophecy, for how 'scientific' its base might be.

The present manuscript was put together as an introductory address to the panel “Europe” of the 2nd Sophistication Conference, that took place at the Technical University of Vienna on the 8th of November 2018. It followed Georg Fassl’s presentation “Mobile yet Immobile”, and introduced two contributions by Prof. Rodolphe Gasché and Prof. Gregg Lambert.

Here the video of the introduction: https://youtu.be/NQGgzHRTLB8

Seminar held for the Department of Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics, TU Wien, Summer Semester 2019.

From the early Greek myth of Atlantis and Plato’s theory of the Republic, to the Christian image of the ‘Heavenly Jerusalem’, until the properly ‘utopian’ projects of the Renaissance, European thought has never really been contempt with (and within) the limits of an immanent ground, but always projected itself beyond any here-and-now.
Yet, with the arise of nihilism and after the “death of God” (Nietzsche), not only the place, but also the time in which such a transcendent projection might find its realisation seemed to disappear from the horizon of thought, casting it to the domain of the ‘untimely’, or ‘u-chronic’—something which can never possibly be realised.
What implications does such a history have for Europe today? How can architecture—as the techne more than any other able to ‘project’, to ‘cast a form in advance’—help in the understanding of the problem (by nevertheless going beyond mere planning)? In other words: can we conceive of Europe as  project?
In order to avoid reducing Europe to a mere geo-political issue, and therefore trying to go beyond any ‘positive’ affirmation of it , the course will address the complex ‘nature’ of such continent through the eye of contemporary philosophy and architecture theory, with a particular regard to the work of Massimo Cacciari.
Such a perspective will be enriched by outlooks on a kaleidoscope of different concerns: the quest over the ‘origin’ of Europe in mythography (Calasso); the understanding of politics as the ‘in-between’ (Arendt); the relationship between economy (as money) and truth (Hénaff), or money and ‘good’ (Coccia); the ‘exodic’ perspective of transcendence (Corbin); and of course the role of architecture, both in the historical importance of utopia for European urban planning (Klein), as well as in the understanding of the City as a ‘project’ (Aureli).

An anthology of essays that revolve around a cloud of topics concerning the architectural profession – from the notions of immaterial production and creative work at large to the ethics of the profession and the labour conditions in architectural practice – The Architect as a Worker includes contributions from practitioners, scholars, theorists and sociologists outside of the architectural milieu, critics and activists. The wide spectrum of themes raised and the many ways they are approached ..

According to Hans Blumenberg, Weltbildverlust is the distinctive trait of the Modern Age. World-images are lost and forgotten due to the rise of scientific and operative world-models. This understanding of science reconnects with the ancient project of philosophy: to emancipate knowledge from images—something that the philosophical tradition, from Plato onwards, has always looked with deference and as potentially treacherous. Digital technology seems to fulfil this dream: it turns knowledge into a numeric matter, computable and non-figurative. This is the character of what Jean-François Lyotard named as the postmodern condition. And yet, today we find ourselves drowning in pictures, as portable devices push to an even more capillary diffusion—in space and in time—of the "spectacle" of society. The emancipation of images turns into its opposite: with the digital everything is image. In a computerised society knowledge becomes a matter of production and consumption, handing ...

Besides their differences, Hilberseimer´s vision of the metropolis and Wright´s organic architecture seem both to respond to the loss of a clear urban figure; in their designs the project of the city shifts from a total planning to the conception of its organic `cell´. The city is re-invented as a milieu, a metabolic space of flows and transformations that goes along with a novel way of government, described by Foucault as `bio-power´

Since the Renaissance, perspective drawing has been established as the most ‘objective’ way to represent a ‘subjective’ point of view; it is precisely through the reflective surface of a mirror, as the space in which the self can be objectified, that such invention takes place. The apparent contradiction of an ‘objective subjectivity’—which most of modern science builds upon—can be properly investigated only if such space of ‘speculation’ is addressed as an excluded, invisible element of a triadic setting. The paper will then try to look at modern ‘rationality’ as a ‘projection’ arising from such exclusion and externalisation—to inspect the space of the mirror as an architectonics of information. It will do so by looking at a range of examples—from architecture to philosophy, art and literature—in which this third is consciously questioned, or where it is instead ‘invisibly’ at work. The outline of such a “transcendental topology” will then perhaps provide the tools to address in a ...

If modernity was supposed to be the age in which world-images were abrogated or discredited as world-views, or as ideologies to be critiqued and deconstructed, our contemporary condition seems to be faced with an unexpected reappearance of images and of their importance for orienting our values. Instead of coming from mythology, theology or philosophy, these "world-pictures" are rather 'renderings' and 'accounts' of scientific models; by conceiving and studying their subject as a closed environment-as an oikos, a 'house'-disciplines like economy and ecology are able to project their own picture of the world. Yet, such pictures become normative (they acquire the power to legitimate policies) only when they are pushed to their own limit; in other words, these pictures become images whenever they stage the crisis of their own model. But is this phenomena limited to the contemporary condition and to its presumedly singular 'criticality', or is i...