Architecture and Abstraction

Architecture and Abstraction by Pier Vittorio Aureli (The MIT Press 2023) is a landmark study of abstraction in architectural history, theory, and practice that challenges our assumptions about the meaning of abstract forms.

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Architecture and Abstraction by Pier Vittorio Aureli (The MIT Press 2023) is a landmark study of abstraction in architectural history, theory, and practice that challenges our assumptions about the meaning of abstract forms.

In this theoretical study of abstraction in architecture – the first of its kind – Pier Vittorio Aureli argues for a reconsideration of abstraction, its meanings, and its sources. Although architects have typically interpreted abstraction in formal terms – the purposeful reduction of the complexities of design to its essentials – Aureli shows that abstraction instead arises from the material conditions of building production. In a lively study informed by Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, and other social theorists, Architecture and Abstraction presents abstraction in architecture not as an aesthetic tendency but as a movement that arises from modern divisions of labor and consequent social asymmetries.

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. Further abstractions arose as geometry, used for measuring territories, became the intermediary between land and money and eventually produced the logic of the grid. In our own time, architectural abstraction serves the logic of capitalism and embraces the premise that all things can be exchanged—even experience itself is a commodity. 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.
– Pier Vittorio Aureli, Architecture and Abstraction (The MIT Press, 2023), book description from the publisher’s website

The text is in English. The book is illustrated with black-and-white photographs and architectural drawings.

Weight 500 g
Dimensions 20,2 × 13,7 × 2,2 cm
Author(s)

Pier Vittorio Aureli

Publisher

The MIT Press

Publishing year

 2023

Language

Images

architectural drawings, b&w photos

Binding

Paperback

Condition

Number of pages

286

ISBN

978-026-2545-235