Architecture and Abstraction

Architecture and Abstraction

Writing Architecture Series

A project of the Anyone Corporation

Cynthia Davidson, editor

1995 Bernard Cache, Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories 1995 Kojin Karatani, Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money 1996 Ignasi de Solà-Morales, Differences: Topographies of Contemporary Architecture 1997 John Rajchman, Constructions 1998 John Hejduk, Such Places as Memory: Poems 1953–1996 1998 Roger Connah, Welcome to The Hotel Architecture 2000 Luis Fernández-Galiano, Fire and Memory: On Architecture and Energy 2000 Paul Virilio, A Landscape of Events 2001 Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space 2007 Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts 2007 Michael Cadwell, Strange Details 2008 Anthony Vidler, Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism 2009 Léon Krier, Drawing for Architecture 2009 K. Michael Hays, Architecture’s Desire: Reading the Late Avant-Garde 2011 Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture 2011 Mario Carpo, The Alphabet and the Algorithm 2012 Massimo Scolari, Oblique Drawing: A History of Anti-Perspective 2013 Georges Teyssot, A Topology of Everyday Constellations 2013 Marco Biraghi, Project of Crisis: Manfredo Tafuri and Contemporary Architecture 2013 Jeffrey Kipnis, A Question of Qualities: Essays in Architecture 2016 Hubert Damisch, Noah’s Ark: Essays on Architecture 2017 Mario Carpo, The Second Digital Turn: Design Beyond Intelligence 2018 Edward Eigen, On Accident: Episodes in Architecture and Landscape 2021 Andrew Witt, Formulations: Architecture, Mathematics, Culture 2023 Catherine Ingraham, Architecture’s Theory 2023 Pier Vittorio Aureli, Architecture and Abstraction

Architecture and Abstraction

Pier Vittorio Aureli

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2023 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN: 978-0-262-54523-5

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Contents

Introduction

1 Architecture, Abstraction, and the Prehistory of the Project

2 From Disegno to Design

3 Appropriation, Subdivision, Abstraction: A Political History of the Urban Grid

4 Without Architecture: The Townhouse, the Factory, and the Abstraction of Building Form

5 Formalism, Rationalism, Constructivism

6 Experience and Poverty: Abstraction and Architecture from Dom-ino to Data Centers

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Introduction

The abstraction, or idea, however, is nothing more than the theoretical expression of those material relations which are their lord and master.

Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, 1857

In his essay Abstraction and Culture the American painter Peter Halley lamented the persistent belief that abstraction is a stylistic device or invention, born out of the artist’s formal concerns.¹ For Halley, abstraction unfortunately continues to be seen as a free play of form that is completely self-referential and detached from social and political issues. In thinking about this most rarefied of visual languages, Halley writes, it seems we intellectually retreat into the cloister of high culture; we deny that abstraction is a reflection of larger historical and cultural forces. We deny that the phenomenon of abstraction only gains meaning to the extent to which it does reflect larger forces and is embedded with their history.² The understanding of abstraction as a retreat from the world is dominant within the discipline of architecture, where it is associated with modernist formal simplicity and the reduction of architecture to Platonic objects. This book aims to overcome this interpretation by situating the relationship between architecture and abstraction within a wider social and political context.

What Is Abstraction?

To abstract means to pull something out from the totality of which it is a part. It comes from the Latin verb trahere, which means to draw or drag out. To put it in very simple terms, abstraction is a process through which humans seek generic frameworks rather than specific solutions. For example, when two objects are compared in order to find common properties, those objects undergo a process of abstraction, because they are being addressed not in their singularity but only in those terms that support the comparison. Perhaps the most basic form of abstraction is language, in which existing things are translated into words that address classes of objects rather than describing them one by one. The word apple does not refer to a specific apple but to an idea which brings together in one class of things all existing apples regardless of their contingency. Precisely because of its high level of generality, language is abstract. It is not surprising that in Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie the entry abstraction is discussed in terms of language. For César Chesneau Dumarsais, who wrote the entry, abstraction consists in the process of forming a concept by separating it from the sensible reality that stimulated its formation.³ In order to express this concept, the abstraction of words is necessary. He wrote: "We live in a real and physical place, but we speak, if I may, the language of the country of abstractions. We say: I’m hungry, I want, I’ve mercy, I fear, it’s my intention etc. in the same way as we say I have a clock."⁴ This definition of abstraction centered on language was clearly indebted to John Locke, who, at the end of the seventeenth century, was responsible for claiming abstraction as a central philosophical theme.⁵ Notably, Locke’s understanding of abstraction did not emerge from metaphysics or idealism but from an empirical approach to the world. Locke argued that due to the abundance of stimuli in the sensible experience of the world, it would be impossible to name them one by one.⁶ For this reason, the human mind synthesizes each particular aspect of reality into general ideas that are independent of sensible reality. According to Locke, sensible reality is abstracted not only by language but also by signs—the study of which Locke defined as semiotike (semiotics), the science that concerns the way signs such as written words are used to understand things and transmit knowledge. This understanding of language and signs as abstractions grounded in our experience of sensible reality constituted a materialist interpretation of abstraction that counters the customary idealist interpretation. With Locke, abstractions are not understood as the outcome of some metaphysical conception of the world, but as something derived from material conditions. Besides being concerned with abstraction as a central faculty of human understanding, Locke was also busy with very concrete and political problems: the writing of a constitution for a newly founded (colonial) state in America, and the definition of the modern conception of private property as a natural right founded on the cultivation of land. In both efforts, the bridge between concrete material conditions and abstract law became a fundamental weapon which imposed colonial government not only through military coercion but also, and especially, with the power of civilian law.⁷ Indeed, property and law—which Locke considered the essential aspects of government—can be considered abstractions that emerge from the concrete ground of power relationships.

Although abstractions are fabricated by the human mind, the stimulus motivating their formation comes from outside the mind. Therefore, abstractions are not timeless, but contingent on given social and political conditions. Within human history, the power of abstractions developed in proportion to social complexity, and indeed abstractions became a conditio sine qua non with the rise of early large-scale societies.

The administration of large quantities of people, animals, and goods required their reduction into abstract signs in order to be computed. Early forms of written language appeared not for writing poems or stories, but for counting the surplus of goods accumulated in the storage of rulers. Even before the invention of mathematics and geometry, many ancient societies functioned as machines of social organization in which abstractions such as numbers, algorithms, and systems of measure played a crucial role. These abstractions emerged from tangible human actions such as ritual, labor, disciplining, marking, and counting. In summary of this first definition of abstraction, it is evident that abstractions are rooted in real things and in turn inform how things work. To paraphrase Karl Marx, who analyzed the dominance of capitalism by abstractions: abstractions are concrete.⁸

Exemplary of a concrete abstraction is geometry, which evolved—as the name itself reveals—from the act measuring land in order to give it an economic value. Geometry played a fundamental role in architecture because it made buildings measurable, allowing those who initiated a construction project to control built form with exactitude and thus estimate the amounts of materials and labor needed for the project’s completion.

Although geometric ordering is common to many cultures around the world, within the historical lineage that links the Near East, ancient Egypt, and ancient Greece it acquired an unprecedented level of abstraction in measuring and ordering the world. It is for this reason that I trace the prehistory of the project as we understand it today within this lineage. In this book I argue that the rise of abstraction within architecture consists not in the visible form of a structure—its appearance—but rather in the way it is produced, especially in the way the exactitude of measurement has been systematically applied to building in order to control construction and separate intellectual from manual labor.

Architecture has always been a labor-consuming undertaking that requires careful planning. Planning—the very idea of a plan—concerns both the ideation of the structure to be built and the logistics of its implementation: instructions for the builders, estimation of labor force required and amounts of resources, transportation of materials. Since ancient times, geometry and calculation were considered inevitable frameworks for the realization of large-scale buildings. In the Western tradition of architecture, the plan became a project, a strategy that guides the production or materialization of a thing. My thesis, which I present in the first chapter, is that the project’s planning is geared toward the prefiguration of the building form, the organization of the labor force, and the management of resources. In many ancient cultures, building a large-scale artifact was a ritual that communities performed to reinforce social ties. There is archaeological evidence that the building of large-scale complexes such as temples predates the advent of cities or even of sedentary cultures. Yet in some early cities and states such as the civilization of Sumer, building large-scale structures by mobilizing massive quantities of people and resources coordinated by the ruling class was one of the most powerful representations of sovereign power. The making of architecture was thus deeply intertwined with the institutional functioning of societies and their power relationships. While this is already implicit in the way architecture—especially monumental architecture—was produced since antiquity, it would be explicitly theorized in the Renaissance, when the project became the prerogative of the professional architect. Geometrizing, measuring, calculating, and drawing architecture empowered the architect and the engineer (as ancillaries of the patron) to take control of the building process, widening the gap between intellectual and manual labor in architecture.

But the project became even more crucial with the rise of capitalism in the sixteenth century, since the extraction of profit from everything was possible only if everything was planned accordingly. The project therefore represented not only the authority of the architect, but also a wider apparatus in which politics and economics merged as one force. With the advent of capitalism, the project’s commanding logic was increasingly driven by the most powerful abstraction ever invented: money. By presupposing the equivalence of all things, money is the ultimate social abstraction that translates everything into economic value. Within this ubiquitous condition, architecture ceased to be valued only for its use and was instead—and especially—valued for its potential to generate profit. In the age of capitalism, a house is not only a space to inhabit but a financial asset. The sharpest definition of this predicament was perhaps given by Manfredo Tafuri: the modern city is nothing more than a machine for the extraction of surplus value.⁹ With the commodification and financialization of building processes, architecture was transformed into a built register of economic interests. Superstudio’s Histograms of Architecture are perhaps the crudest allegory of this fate, completely subsumed by the abstract logic of financialization. Their gridlike form, which expands ad infinitum and takes myriad shapes, aptly represents a world where everything that exists can be quantified into measurable assets. This understanding of abstraction, which I’ll disentangle in the chapters of this book, offers a completely different perspective from that of abstraction as a modern style. Yet even an art-based conception of abstraction originates in the same sources briefly outlined above.

The Nature of Abstract Art

The beginning of abstraction in the arts is customarily identified with breakthroughs such as the first seven of Wassily Kandinsky’s Composition series painted between 1910 and 1913, Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square in 1915, and more recently with the paintings of Hilma af Klint, such as her stunning Swan completed in 1915. Yet the belief that abstraction emerged as an instant epiphany obscures its long incubation in theories and discussions about art since the nineteenth century. With the application of Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics to the arts, art theorists, art historians, and artists were increasingly focused on the formal properties of the work of art (and architecture, as discussed in chapter 5), which were interpreted independently of any symbolic or social meaning. To put it simply, by reducing the artwork to its sensible perception, the aesthetic approach implied a process of abstraction in which artworks were voided of any symbolic allusion and treated as mere perceptual data. This essentializing attitude emerged in the first discussion of abstraction in the visual arts in Friedrich Faber, Lorenz Clasen, and Johannes Andreas Romberg’s influential Conversations-Lexicon für Bildende Kunst (1845). The Lexicon defines abstraction as the mental activity through which artists reach the essential aspects of a work of art. From the outset abstraction is understood in the arts as the act of essentializing or clearing out in order to arrive at the essence of artworks. This tendency compelled artists to comprehend their medium not as a means of representation but as something in itself. Indeed, the transition from impressionist to fauve and cubist painting reflects a gradual process of abstraction in which the depiction of reality was simplified, inevitably leaving nothing more than a composition of colors on a flat surface. Freed from the burden of representation and subject, artists were able to conceive art in mere formal terms. However, this idealist and essentialist understanding of abstraction as focused on the formal properties of art conceals the fact that abstraction was also the consequence of the historical context in which it emerged.

In his seminal essay Nature of Abstract Art (1937), Meyer Shapiro argued that abstraction in painting was not the consequence of the artist’s will to turn art into a pure aesthetic activity, but of a new way of seeing reality, influenced by the rise of capitalist industrialization.¹⁰ According to Shapiro, in the early twentieth century, under the pressure of the industrial mode of production, artists looked at the world differently: The older categories of art were translated into the language of modern technology; the essential was identified with the efficient, the unit with standardized element, texture with new materials, representation with photography, drawing with the ruled or mechanically traced line, color with the flat coat of paint.¹¹

Piet Mondrian, perhaps more than anyone else, connected the idea of abstraction in painting with the world in which he was living. In his first contribution to the journal De Stijl he argued that today the life of people is moving away from the natural: life becomes increasingly abstract.¹² Mondrian evoked a world so dominated by science and calculations that abstraction becomes not just an aesthetic experience but a way of life. In his text Nieuwe Beelding he went further and declared that the abstract was not produced by simplification or purification but was the manifestation of what he called the universal, or the general as such.¹³ But what is the universal in Mondrian’s terms? The Dutch painter remained elusive about this term, but he suggested that the universal was a social and cultural condition produced by the urban environment of the metropolis. With his evocative prose, Mondrian wrote: In the reality of our environment, we see the predominantly natural gradually disappearing through necessity. The capricious forms of rural nature become tautened in the metropolis.¹⁴ Even within his deeply formalist and idealist perspective, Mondrian made clear that he saw a link between abstraction and the industrial age.

Mondrian practiced abstract painting in two ways: initially by abstracting formal motives from real objects (think of his paintings of trees, where he gradually moved from a naturalistic to a stylized representation of vertical and horizontal lines); and then as the creation of abstract paintings completely devoid of any reference outside themselves (think of his compositions of lines and rectangles of color). In the first approach, abstraction was a process of essentializing what exists, and thus can be understood as continuing and heightening to an extreme limit the idea of abstraction that emerged in the nineteenth century. In the second approach, abstraction is no longer a process, but a condition that represents relationships between plastic elements such as color and lines that do not refer to anything beyond themselves. For Mondrian, it was this second approach that manifested the universal and the general, rather than the first, which was still tied to sensible reality. Yet the gridlike form of Mondrian’s paintings and the sharp contrast of primary colors can also be perceived as evoking the experience of the metropolis, which he often alluded to in the titles of his paintings and in his writings as the inspiration to his art. In his text House—Street—City (1927) he argued that abstraction takes place in the landscape of the street with its artificial lights, advertisements, and utilitarian architectures.¹⁵ For Mondrian, abstract painting was a fragment of a whole abstract environment of which modern architecture, with its straight lines and new materials such as reinforced concrete, was a forerunner. He shared the aspiration toward the integration of painting, sculpture, and architecture within an environmental totality with the artists gathered around the journal De Stijl, edited by Theo van Doesburg. For both Mondrian and Van Doesburg, architecture—especially modern utilitarian architecture with its bare structure and unadorned walls—offered an example of a realm in which abstraction was already realized. As noted by Yve-Alain Bois, for Van Doesburg the idea of planarity was the common denominator of painting and architecture.¹⁶ In his famous axonometric drawings and models for a Maison Particulière (done in collaboration with Cornelis van Eesteren), Van Doesburg intensified the coincidence of planarity in painting and architecture by devising a house as a simple assemblage of slabs and walls rendered as neutral supports for color. This radical abstraction, which reduced both painting and architecture to compositions of surfaces, was not a self-reflexive, inward-looking meditation on art, but rather a formal sublimation of a built environment defined by standardization and elementarization of building components. Felicia Rappe identified the kinship between De Stijl’s impetus toward abstraction and J. J. P. Oud’s projects such as the Tusschendijken housing blocks in Rotterdam built in 1920, where the Dutch architect worked with the prefabrication of building elements.¹⁷ Although De Stijl artists rejected repetition in favor of composition, as is visible in Van Doesburg and Van Eesteren’s Maison, their pursuit of abstraction resonated with an architecture reduced to its planar datum of unadorned walls pierced by unadorned openings—as in Oud’s housing blocks. De Stijl’s art demonstrates the constitutive ambivalence of artistic abstraction as something where the perfectly pure of art evokes the raw real of a world increasingly dominated by the social abstraction of capitalist industrialization. This ambivalence was reflected in the role of De Stijl artists as exemplars of twentieth-century avant-garde cultural producers. Indeed, these artists were both aestheticians of capitalist abstraction and freelance workers whose professional precarity was, ironically, the consequence of the system they were trying to aestheticize.

Abstraction: Three Interpretations

One of the most penetrating interpretations of abstraction as a social condition is Henri Lefebvre’s concept of abstract space¹⁸ which he elaborates in his influential book The Production of Space (1974). Lefebvre’s theory is known for its concern with the everyday experience of space, and yet, as Japhy Wilson has remarked, Lefebvre’s interest in everyday space was focused on its alienation and abstraction within capitalist modernity.¹⁹ Influenced by Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts, in which the German thinker explored the alienation of capitalist society as a consequence of the separation of producers from their means of production, Lefebvre defined abstract space as the spatialization of capitalist alienation in all aspects of modern life. For the French philosopher, this expression is the product of a deep interaction between physical conditions and representations, between materiality and ideology. Thus abstract space was the outcome of a historical development that proceeded from nature to abstraction, which Lefebvre conceptualized as the transition from absolute to abstract space.²⁰ Absolute space emerged in ancient civilizations, where the consecration of natural features like mountains, caves, and springs gave origin to ceremonial complexes, quickly appropriated by priestly castes as the locus of their political and religious power. Lefebvre argued that, within absolute space, symbolic significance played a crucial role.²¹ There was a prolonged transition between the absolute and the abstract, and it consists of the incipient urban system of trade and commerce established in medieval Europe—a system in which the market and other civil institutions became sites of social interaction.²² Abstract space emerged from the commodification of land and labor which generated a vast network of banks, productive places, and transportation and information systems that were established with the aid of the modern state to serve the interests of capitalist accumulation. Lefebvre detected this condition in the hegemony of a Euclidean space which subjected everything to geometric commensurability. This space included cartographic representations of entire territories as well as the spatial architectonics of the industrial metropolis such as mass housing, factories, motorways, and railways lines.

The planning and standardization of the city and its infrastructure were, according to Lefebvre, not simply a process of rationalization but a way to gear social organization to the logic of production and profit.²³ While abstract space tended toward the infinite, this condition would never be achieved because its unfolding was deterred by frictional forces that produced contradictory space, a spatial condition where fragments of previous social constructs survived amid the ubiquity of social abstraction. Importantly, Lefebvre’s critique of abstract space particularly addressed large-scale planning as it emerged from welfare state capitalism, which powerfully manifested in postwar France.²⁴ Lefebvre observed abstract space in the way the state forcefully reorganized society by planning all of human life to strengthen the relationship between production and reproduction. In this process, capitalist social relations and reductive technocratic representation were concretized in lived material reality, of which the standardized forms of welfare architecture—especially mass housing—were the most prominent. It is ironic that Lefebvre advanced this critique of abstract space as embodied in the welfare state just before it was dismantled by neoliberal governance, within which the authority of the state was drastically undermined. Nonetheless, the criticality of Lefebvre’s abstract space remains intact, because abstraction is ultimately the outcome not only of technocratic organization but also of the hegemony of exchange value: a process in which everything that exists is subjected to a system of representation that allows quantification and calculation of profit.

As Łukasz Stanek has remarked, Lefebvre’s idea of space, and especially of abstract space, is deeply indebted to Marx’s theorization of concrete abstraction, which held that, far from being an escape from reality, abstractions were the driving force of capitalist accumulation.²⁵

Indeed, coming to terms with abstraction was one of the most pressing methodological issues for Marx.²⁶ Following Hegel, he was convinced that the correct methodology for grasping concrete reality was to proceed from the abstract to the concrete. For Marx, reality could only be recomposed within thought by taking seriously the most general and simple abstractions—that is to say, abstract categories—as real embodiments of existing processes. For Marx, an example of concrete abstraction is the notion of labor not as a specific activity but as labor in general. Marx noted that Adam Smith discovered labor as a general abstract category that designated a wealth-creating activity because the advent of industrialization reduced labor to its barest features, stripped of the individuality of the worker. Unlike the physiocratic economists who identified labor with agricultural labor, for Smith labor as such was not reducible to any activity such as manufacturing, agriculture, or commerce. However, while Smith hypostatized labor as a timeless category applicable throughout the entire course of history, Marx recognized that labor as a general category could only exist as the result of the historical development of capitalism. As Marx wrote, As a rule, the most general abstractions arise only in the midst of the richest possible concrete development, where one thing appears as common to many, to all.²⁷ In an advanced capitalist society, reasoning—that is, the reconstitution of a multiplicity of things and events within a coherent scientific system of thought—is not a simple depiction of reality, but in fact what makes reality work. Notably, Marx saw abstraction not only as a methodological category but also