Pier Vittorio Aureli - Design Without Qualities: Architecture and the Rise of Abstraction - Part 1

Lecture date: 2013-10-16 A Brief History of Abstraction in Architecture: Design and the Administration of Life ’Let us hope that from time to time the individual will give a little humanity to the masses, who one day will repay him with compound interest.’ Walter Benjamin, ’Experience and Poverty’, 1933 Abstraction addresses the process of removal in order to reach the essential datum of things. In a design world increasingly dominated by organic and redundant forms, abstraction is likely to be one of the most unpopular concepts in the field of architectural theory. While it is a mistake to think abstraction opposes the complexities and contradictions of our world, we deny that it is the very outcome of larger historical and cultural forces.  Pier Vittorio Aureli will investigate the issue of abstraction and its relation to architectural form to propose a different interpretation of this historical phenomenon. Paraphrasing Marx, abstraction – in the form of categories such as geometry, measure, modulari