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What mattered in the definition of real objects in space was the possibility of quantifying the distance between them. From Sohn-Rethels perspective, Marx was unable to link the abstract form of the commodity as it emerged from the apparatus of exchange and the theory of knowledge that produced all cognitive abstractions necessary for exchange to work. It was precisely his work on Barcelona that compelled Cerd to theorize the city beyond the opposition between contents (circulation, trade, and peoples vital necessities) and container (architecture and infrastructure). And it is concrete because the urban always affect and alter the physical condition of things.
Such empty space is both real, because it allows viewers to locate their position in space, but also abstract, because it is constructed according to mathematical relationships. Brunelleschis use of standardized decorative elements, made of the grey abstract color of pietra serena, deprived the builders of their artistic autonomy by rejecting their interpretation of decorative elements in favor of a total design controlled by the architect. Adolf Max Vogt, Le Corbusier, the Noble Savage: Toward an Archaeology of Modernism, trans. In the previous integration of shape exercises, we began to explore ways to create a unified composition. These divisions were anticipated by the architecture of antiquity, which established a distinction between manual and intellectual labor, and placed the former in service to the latter. In this context, advancements were triggered in calculus and mathematics. Brunelleschi made a hole in the paintings at the exact position of the perspectives vanishing point, thus allowing the viewer to see the paintings through the hole reflected in a mirror placed in front of them. Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labor,45. endobj Here, labor is no longer based on direct material interchange; it depends on capital. It is precisely for this reason that abstraction is both artificial and deeply human, since the capacity to abstract, i.e., to produce ideas and concepts out of a multitude of empirical facts, is what distinguishes the human from other animal species.2. Only by understanding the historical premises of the rise of abstraction as the prevalent form of experience in capitalist civilization and its impact on architectural and urban form will it be possible to construct an idea of architecture that is both adequate to and critical of abstraction as the historical condition in which we dwell. STEP 4: In Illustrator create the shapes you have selected, using them as outlines to develop a composition that you feel characterizes the essence of the iconic architectural building you selected. He noted that when abstract things such as money rule the world and define all social relationships, it is hard to separate the abstract from the real, the tangible from the intangible, the concrete from the conceptual. Privacy Policy <> Keeping in mind what we have learned about creating the illusion of depth through the use of atmospheric perspective (as objects recede values get lighter), try to give your design a sense of depth. That is, identify a number of characteristic and distinctive shapesperhaps five or sixassociated with the building you choose. In his seminal book Intellectual and Manual Labor, Alfred Sohn-Rethel saw the commodity form of things and persons as one of the fundamental sources of abstraction.6 While within the condition of use time and space are inseparably linked with nature and the material activities of man, within the activity of exchange time and space are emptied of their quality and becomes mere quantities that are the measure of value. In other words, the striking perspectival effect of the picture was obtained by measuring the exact dimensions of the baptistery and the surrounding buildings and then using these measurements as the basis for the perspective itself. The architecture of Brunelleschi is a paradigmatic example of how the abstraction of perspective became architecture. His profound knowledge of mathematics and his disregard for the builders decision-making capacities in the execution of his designs made him an exemplary case in the formation of architecture as a discipline clearly distinguished from the practice of building, which in its turn is henceforth relegated to the execution of the architects project.9. Yet Roman architecture was not in itself as systematic as Brunelleschi understood it to be. Form is no longer the outcome of individual craft, but the result of a socialized intellectual knowledge made of abstract conventionssuch as the use of projections and precise systems of measurement. endobj In what follows I would like to define the relationship between abstraction and architecture, avoiding the trap of identifying abstraction as a style. For example, in the Ospedale degli Innocenti the entire complex is determined by the module exhibited in the loggia facing the piazza. Before the Renaissance, empty space was considered a vacuum, a lacuna which, precisely because of its intangibility and incommensurability, could not be grasped. In his famous essay Perspective as a Symbolic Form, Erwin Panofsky argues that perspectival view is essentially a style of vision whose goal is to approximate the natural view of spaces and things. For Marx, reality could only be recomposed within thought by taking seriously the most general and simple abstractions as the real embodiments of the concrete. The expansion envisioned by Cerd consisted in a grid through which an even redistribution of social wealth would become possible. If we follow this definition of the urban as an abstraction that becomes real in its multifarious way of working, we come very close to the very nature of industrial labor. STEP 6: Using the grey value scale in the Illustrator color swatch, complete your first design by filling in the shapes. Activate the edges of your composition by extending some of the elements off the page. Starting in the fourteenth century, the practice of exchange imposed a radically different way of experiencing the world through the lens of abstract knowledge. % Coming to terms with abstraction was one of the most methodologically pressing issues for Marx.3 Following Hegel, he was convinced that the correct methodology for grasping concrete reality was to go from the abstract to the concrete. Thus, in Pelacanis mathematical space, once the measurement of an object was known it was possible to measure other nearby objects and the space between them. These were the questions that Marx asked himself when facing the task of describing the reality of capitalistic modes of production. Once the mirror was removed, the viewer was able to appreciate the correspondence between the painted version of the building and the building itself. 58, no. Select all of the objects with the Selection Tool. Further abstractions arose as geometry, used for measuring territories, became the intermediary between land and money and eventually produced the logic of the grid. Cerds theory is a de facto definition of urbanization as a totalizing governmental machine within which the city as a discernable political form is subsumed by an ever-expanding logistical, normative, and juridical apparatus whose ultimate materialization is the infinite grid of circulation.21. x=koGr ?GnM?u1H: %ZL.i~Ut3zW7O7Oiy}uzW~#6ih?vso6oo~07?n0jl8af_`M 7OMu>^m~;}&6 ]Y#O[);u7\Of;'hOo `7r t Introduction to Formal Analysis and Composition, 10 Photoshop Secrets for Better Composites, 8 Artists Who Harness the Power of Words in Art, Teaching Josef Albers Interaction of Color: Anoka Faruqee, The Basic Elements Shape Value Color Edge, Basic Oil Pastel Techniques: Rule of 3's Example, Oil Pastel Color Blending the Color Wheel, I See Arts Abstract art techniques with pastels. Drers effort was focused on keeping the unity of head and hand by encouraging artisans to benefit from mathematical knowledge without becoming mathematical brainworkers themselves. Not only the category, labour, but labour in reality has here become the means of creating wealth in general, and has ceased to be organically linked with particular individuals in any specific form. If you would like to expand your color scheme to include shades or tints, use the Blend tool with the specified steps set to 4. To abstract comes from the Latin verb trahere, which means to pull something essential out from the totality of which it is a part. Abstraction is a process through which man seeks to reach generic frameworks rather than specific solutions. Although Zaha Hadid began her remarkable architectural career in the late 1970s, it would not be until the 1990s that her work would lift out her drawings and paintings to be realized in physical form. Cerd wanted to give to urbanization its true face as a form with no form, deprived of all the symbols and meanings of the traditional city. In this theoretical study of abstraction in architecturethe first of its kindPier Vittorio Aureli argues for a reconsideration of abstraction, its meanings, and its sources. In contemporary urbanization, a plethora of symbols and meanings has become the generic curtain behind which the abstraction of capital operates. Today we publish over 30 titles in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and science and technology. See Arnaldo Bruschi, Considerazioni sulla maniera matura del Brunelleschi in Arnaldo Bruschi, Lantico, la tradizione, il moderno da Arnolfo a Peruzzi, saggi sullarchitettura del Rinascimento (Firenze: Electa, 2004), 87122. All rights reserved. In the next project we will derive the shapes for our composition from architectural forms. As such, a fundamental result of the advent of abstract labor is the transition from artisanal to industrial labor. Within the history of capitalism the rise of abstraction was triggered precisely by the necessity to make everything that exists measurable according to a system of universal equivalence. Filippo Brunelleschi, arguably the first architect to practice as a freelance professional outside the guild of carpenters and builders, was a goldsmith, and his approach to architecture was deeply rooted in his artisan know-how.
Dont forget to draw a square the same size as you artboard. While artisanal workers mastered their production by practical know-how and the expertise of their hands, the industrial worker relies instead on the means of production as technology and calculus become crucial. <>>> However, these paintings were not meant to hang on a wall, but to be seen in the same place from which the buildings had been painted. Apart from crucial buildings such as the Coliseum, which shows a coherent stacking of different orders, the ruins of ancient Roman architecture demonstrate a much greater variety, irreducible to the grammar of the classical orders. But, as Sohn-Rethel notes, this project failed. This abstraction does not remain virtual but becomes concrete in what the painter Peter Halley has described as the modern city: an omnipresent unfolding of geometric structures, such as houses and transportation, in which human life is channeled, measured, and reproduced.18, In 1867the same year Marx published the first volume of CapitalSpanish engineer Ildefonso Cerd published the seminal, although overlooked, General Theory of Urbanization, in which he attempted to define a new conceptual framework for city building.19 However, Cerds theory was not just an urban design manual, but rather an epistemological enquiry whose aim was to redefine what until then was still referred to as the city.. About EnEr4xA6atK'qmX. A key element in Cerds project was the unprecedented use of statistical data as a support for the project. Peter Halley, The Crisis in Geometry, Arts Magazine, vol. We are currently in Beta version and updating this search on a regular basis. Your design should include white, four shades of grey, and a black stroke color. In a lively study informed by Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, and other social theorists, this book presents abstraction in architecture not as an aesthetic tendency but as a movement that arises from modern divisions of labor and consequent social asymmetries. USA, How to reproduce reality within thinking? Far from being an invention of the fifteenth century, perspective in the form of mathematically quantifiable space was already at work in the design of Florence major public spaces. Here perspective acts as a projective geometry that links the totality of space within one commensurable system. Detail of the expansion plan for Barcelona proposed by Ildefonso Cerd in 1859. And it is precisely this commensurability that allows perspective to become the spatial embodiment of a world dominated by the equivalence of exchange value. MIT Press Directis a distinctive collection of influential MIT Press books curated for scholars and libraries worldwide. His demonstration consisted in paintings depicting, with striking perspectival effect, the two most important public buildings of Florence in his time: the baptistery and the Palazzo Pubblico, the town hall of the city. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/architecture-and-abstraction, International Affairs, History, & Political Science, The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture. Here abstraction manifests itself both as a process and as a form that makes explicit the conditions of its (industrial) production. Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labor: A Critique of Epistemology (London: The MacMillan Press, 1978). As he wrote in a crucial passage of the introduction to the Grundrisse: On the other side, this abstraction of labour as such is not merely the mental product of a concrete totality of labours. This is the ultimate paradox of perspective: on the one hand, it is intended as a veridical representation of space as it is seen by the human eye; on the other, it is a construction whose principle is to exclude the accidents of seeing, to reduce the gaze to the certitude of a repeatable formula. As Bernard Cache has observed, Drers Instructions is a treatise made up not of theoretical propositions, but of procedures, i.e., algorithms illustrated by geometrical figures.12 By virtue of their resolute abstraction, these procedures could be applied to myriad cases by a multitude of makers. However, while in antiquity this social force was limited to the exchange of commodities as objects, with the rise of modernity the abstraction of exchange and the equivalence of value begin to include human labor, since the latter is no longer slave labor devoid of wage, but rather becomes sold and purchased as a commodity among free citizens. See Ross Exo Adams, The Burden of the Present: On The Concept of Urbanization, Society and Space . Marx arrived at the conclusion that in the most advanced industrial societiessuch as the United States in Marxs timeabstraction had become an ethos. As Sohn-Rethel notes, within the practice of exchange, where commodities travel great distances and their temporality is suspended while being exchanged, space and time become completely homogenous and continuous in order to not upset the exchange equation. See Marvin Trachtenberg, Dominion of the Eye: Urbanism, Art, and Power in Early Modern Florence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). With the rise of private property and the possibility of exchanging products for money, the abstractness of geometry and mathematics became a ubiquitous social force. Pier Vittorio Aureli is an architect and educator. Time and space assume thereby that character of absolute historical timelessness and universality which must mark the exchange abstraction as a whole and each of its features.7. <>/ProcSet[/PDF/Text/ImageB/ImageC/ImageI] >>/MediaBox[ 0 0 595.2 841.92] /Contents 4 0 R/Group<>/Tabs/S/StructParents 0>> Then I will show how fundamental paradigms of architectural culturesuch as the rise of design as a practice distinct from building, the invention of perspective, and the discourse on urbanizationcan be seen as the embodiment of the impact of abstraction on the world. Arturo Soria y Puig (Madrid: Electa, 2000). In a different manner, this is also true for architecture and the urban world. Furthermore, the affirmation of abstract knowledge as the motor of capitalistic production was not limited to economy, but also brought to the foreground a new form of life in which abstraction became the basis of experiencing the world. How to build a set of categories that allow one to comprehend and represent complex social conditions? It is precisely at this juncture that we see the rise of architecture as a project practiced by a new specialized professional: the architect.
In this way Brunelleschi introduced an architectural language in which every building was dominated by an overall disegno. Indeed, perspective can be seen not so much as an innovation in terms of representation, but as a revolution in the conception of space. Instagram MIT Press began publishing journals in 1970 with the first volumes of Linguistic Inquiry and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. With his General Theory of Urbanization, Cerd introduced into the discourse on the city and its project a new epistemology whose object of enquiry was of a paradoxical nature: the urban is both intangible and concrete. The Vitra Fire Station, designed for the factory complex of the same name in Weil-am-Rhein, Germany, was the among the first of Hadids design projects to be built. 2 0 obj It is for this reason that the task of the coming architecture is not simply to unmask the undeniable abstraction of architecture as a process, but to make legible a form of architecture in which the awareness of the conditions in which we dwell can become the precondition for new forms of life within and against the power of abstraction. It is not by chance that mathematically constructed perspective was invented in Florence: throughout the twelfth and fifteenth centuries the city developed as one of the most economically advanced cities in the Western world, with merchants and especially bankers playing a decisive role. It is within this context that the fundamental problems of geometry were defined, such as the tripartition of angles and the magnification and diminution of volumes, including the doubling of cubes. See also: Sergio Rossi, Dalle botteghe alla accademie. Unlike Brunelleschi, who was secretive about his techniques and plans, Drer wanted to instruct craftsmen on how to draw complex geometrical figures using the most advanced mathematics. The entire empirical reality of facts, events and description by which one moment and locality of time and space is distinguishable from another is wiped out. For Marx, an example of concrete abstraction is the notion of labor not as a specific activity, but as labor in general. q+Npm6f lgG;8u+l+[jBGto8+ Instructions for Measuring with Compass and Ruler is thus the clearest example of the extent to which, at the turn of the sixteenth century, the act of design not only involved a knowledge that went far beyond the object-oriented craft of traditional artisanal culture, but also became an abstract scientific knowledge whose procedures were independent from specific applications. From this passage it is clear that Marx understood abstraction as the product of historical circumstances in which the exploitation of human labor on a vast scale became the fundamental objective of the economic process. 1 0 obj At the same time, he recognizes that perspective is a highly constructed way to see, which has little to do with our eyesight.13 Perspective is thus a system within which perception is no longer understood as the realm of fleeting impressions, but as the possibility of a fixed and shareable knowledge of things. Twitter Brunelleschi, who was familiar with examples of ancient Roman architecture, took from them the possibility of a design method. Hans Belting, Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011), 15062. Realt sociale e teorie artistiche a Firenze dal XIV al XVI secolo (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1980), 5473. Drers social utopia of empowering artisans so that they could remain independent producers clashed with the difficulty craftsmen and artists inevitably found in learning a body of knowledge whose sophistication was more appropriate for scientists such as Galileo than for artists like Michelangelo or Titian. To resist this turn, Aureli seeks a critique of architecture that begins not by scaling philosophical heights, but by standing at the ground level of material practice. Take for example one of the most famous images of modern architecture: Le Corbusiers drawing of the structural skeleton of Maison Dom-ino, a prototype for mass housing where structure was reduced to horizontal slabs and thin columns. He is the author of The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (2011), The Project of Autonomy: Politics and Architecture Within and Against Architecture (2008, reprinted 2012) and many essays. See Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (London: Penguin Classics, 1993), 81114. %PDF-1.5 Architecture itself began to be imagined as a perspectival framework in which sequences of elements, such as columns and arches, could physically embody a unifying, homogenous, and thus systemic space. Towers and low-rise buildings merge together to form familiar yet unimaginably intricate cityscapes with complex spatial arrangements, and, in some cases, in human form. It is interesting to note that Sohn-Rethel addresses the theoretical work of the German artist Albrecht Drer as a paradoxical manifestation of the importance of intellectual labor in the exchange economy of early capitalism.11 Drer was not an architect, but his theoretical interests, especially in the fields of measurement, perspective, and military engineering, pervaded the design culture of the early Renaissance. (For example, characteristic and distinctive shapes on the faade of Fathers include the triangle of the pediment, the arches, and the outline of the bell tower.). The most obvious manifestation of the architecture of the city is solid things, but their coming into being and their functioning is largely dependent on a multitude of abstractions such as design methods, representational conventions (plans and sections, for example), proportions, functions, building codes, measurements, and financial parameters. As such, abstractions dissolve the traditional antinomy between the concrete and the abstract, the tangible and the intangible, since abstractions are concrete. Ildefonso Cerd, Cerd: The Five Bases of the General Theory of Urbanization, ed. stream A detail of Brunelleschi's Portico of the Ospedale degli Innocenti exemplifies his use of repeated modules. In a crucial passage, Cerd describes urbanization as a condition of limitlessness and the total integration of movement and communication, as a vast swirling ocean of persons, of things, of interest of every sort, of a thousand diverse elements that work in permanent reciprocity and thus form a totality that is uncontainable by any previous finite territorial formations such as the old walled city.20 For Cerd, the urban condition implied a completely new way of designing the city, which was no longer only about the form of buildings and spaces, but also about the whole functioning of the city as a large-scale infrastructural system. Within this example we see how abstraction in architecture is inextricably linked to industrial production processes. Radka Donnell (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 24. <> Here we see the raison dtre of abstraction as a way to further the division of labor. Your shapes should have a stroke color of black with no fill color. It is for this reason that Sohn-Rethel traces the division of mental and manual labor back to its earliest manifestation in history; he refers, for example, to Herodotuss account of the origin of the discipline of geometry in ancient Egypt, which emerged with the professional practice of the stretcher of the rope. This practice, in which rope was used to make the measurements necessary for building temples and granaries, found a significant application in parceling out the soil when it reemerged after the yearly Nile floods. A building, a bridge, a road, and even a person are not urban in themselves, but the urban condition informs each of these elements and makes them work within a totalizing system. Bernard Cache, lecture delivered at Environment Review Days, April 1012, 2013, a conference focusing on the theme of The Project. Arranged by the Strong Research Environment Architecture in the Making, Stockholm School of Architecture. The instrument of such coordination was the systematic use of columns and arches (the latter always inscribed within a half-square). Christopher Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 31. The regularization of urban space according to geometrical principles that started in the fifteenth century is unthinkable without the influence of perspectival view.15 The use of mathematically constructed perspective was necessary for measuring and planning vast regular spaces. This article was originally published on April 21, 2016. AD Classics: Vitra Fire Station / Zaha Hadid, https://www.archdaily.com/785760/ad-classics-vitra-fire-station-zaha-hadid-weil-am-rhein-germany, The Prolific Career of an Early Bauhaus Innovator: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, https://www.archdaily.com/898701/the-prolific-career-of-an-early-bauhaus-innovator-moholy-nagy, Dizzying, Abstract and Meticulous Worlds Created by Artist Benjamin Sack, https://www.archdaily.com/891926/dizzying-abstract-and-meticulous-worlds-created-by-artist-benjamin-sack, The Future of Architectural Visualization, Sustainability and Performance in Architecture. It is at this point that labor becomes what Marx defined as abstract labor. 172 Classon Avenue For Sohn-Rethel, meticulous calendars or even astronomy are stripped of their religious aura when we understand how they were instrumental in empowering the measuring prerogatives of the ruling class, made of state functionaries and priests. And yet for such a system to work, it needs to reduce the experience of space to the abstraction of mathematical space. His experimentation with light, space and form generated international attention. It is precisely the infinity of this system that best embodies the logic of perspective as potentially homogeneous and coherent space in which everything is commensurable. Cerd introduced a concept related to the material reality of the city that was not reducible to a material object such as a building or a road. However, when a commodity is sold and bought, it must adhere to a system of equivalencethat is, the monetary system within which all commodities can be exchanged.8 For this reason and according to Sohn-Rethel, the form of commodities is abstract, and abstractness is the character of the economic process that produces the commodity form. Like capital or labor as described by Marx, the urban for Cerd is a condition, not a thing, which influences everything and transcends the difference between what is material and what is immaterial. Here, then, for the first time, the point of departure of modern economics, namely the abstraction of the category labour, labour as such, labour pure and simple, becomes true in practice.5. In his time at the Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy utilized multi-disciplinary art practices to revolutionize abstract artistic media. Brunelleschis demonstration shows how perspective is not simply the representation of three-dimensional space, but rather a mathematical construction that implies the possibility of making three-dimensional space itself measurable. This brand of "abstract urbanism" introduces a provocative perspective on urban context and its relation to those who inhabit it. It is for this reason that perspective must be viewed not simply as a technique, but as an epistemological framework in which the act of seeing the world is reinvented on a scientific basis. Cerd wrote his general theory after designing the expansion of Barcelona in 1859.