Papers by Francesco Marullo
Journal of Architectural Education, Jul 2, 2023
Journal of Architectural Education
Journal of Architectural Education
Journal of Architectural Education
Journal of Architectural Education
The ambition of Footprint 23 is to provide a critical survey of the architecture of logistics, un... more The ambition of Footprint 23 is to provide a critical survey of the architecture of logistics, unfolding the multivalences of its apparatus, dissecting its buildings and spaces, its technologies and labour relations, its historical evolutions as well as its future projections. Gathering academic papers and visual essays from researchers and emerging scholars in the field, the issue follows three main directions of inquiry. The first trajectory attempts to define what logistics is and how it operates, focusing on the inherent ambivalence of its apparatus, able to cope with different scales and various temporal dimensions – from barcodes and gadgets to global routes and territorial infrastructures – constituting both a physical and abstract framework supporting, measuring and quantifying movements and actions, thoughts and desires. The second trajectory investigates the way logistics penetrates our existences, not simply by affecting how we live and work but the way in which it provid...
107th ACSA Annual Meeting Proceedings, Black Box, 2019
Acceleration and Rationalization.
Oswald Mathias Ungers and the Architecture of Logistics.
(Pub... more Acceleration and Rationalization.
Oswald Mathias Ungers and the Architecture of Logistics.
(Published in Volume no.47, spring 2016 Volume Magazine)
A city is not a uniform entity but rather the assemblage of self-standing parts dialectically juxtaposed, each resulting from stratifications of diverging uses and activities, political intentions and economic processes, geographical conditions and typological configurations.
From here, the ambivalent architectural understanding of logistics: either as the apparatus framing and exploiting the unmeasurable value produced by such a hybrid ensemble of clashing differences, or, to the contrary, as the system for exchanging goods and information indispensable to support every form of human conglomeration and collective production.
Despite not excluding each other, these two approaches move towards diverging strategies of opposition. Moving from the assumption that the vulnerability of capitalism lies in the system of distribution, the ‘logistics as exploitative frame’ approach endorses breakage, sabotage and interruption as possibilities for antagonism. The other, deliberately accepting the necessity of logistics, seeks to hijack its network of power towards common benefits, either by way of collectivisation or by acceleration.
A paradigmatic example of architectural acceleration was Archizoom’s 1969 project for a No-Stop City, which attempted to intensify the apparatus of production by extending the plan of the factory across the whole planet in order to make “the brain of the system mad.” The exponential increase of exchange and communications would have turned logistics into a self-destructing machine, internally dismantling the apparatus of exploitation by means of its own spatial principles.
A coeval yet reversed example of acceleration were the Oswald Mathias Ungers’ experiments on post-war Berlin, which extracted, introjected and multiplied the logistic order of the metropolis into a constellation of specific architectural forms. Recovering logistics as a “art of war” Ungers dissected the circulatory lymph of the metropolis into parts to conjecture new strategies of arrangement, able to intensify their collective assemblage without limiting their specific singularities.
If logistics aimed at the reduction of friction to facilitate the flow of people and commodities, then it was precisely by short-circuiting and accelerating these processes that the potential of the metropolis could have been redistributed and pushed towards different trajectories, creating new forms of resistance and overflow, breakage and organisation.
Along with creativity, optimism and will, the early 1970’s London architecture scene was a momen... more Along with creativity, optimism and will, the early 1970’s London architecture scene was a moment of ideological conflict between political factions over which direction progress should be oriented. Instead of a victor being declared and a single sector followed, what resulted, at the Architectural Association at least, was an academic framework set up to preserve and even encourage such tendencies for conflict and divergence. Behemoth Press introduces here a text by Elia Zenghelis first published in 1975 that was originally written as a polemical response to a growing movement for unionization; a political form of labor that surely threatens the great productive potentials of competition and precarity.
The term "logistics" derives from the Greek logizomai standing for the art of reckoning, organisi... more The term "logistics" derives from the Greek logizomai standing for the art of reckoning, organising, planning. Through time it achieved a strict military connotation, dealing with the composition, lodging and movements of troops, the arrangement of provisions in hostile territories, the transportation and storage of artillery, food, medicines and fuel. Logistics also entailed the organisation of the battlefield, the construction of defensive systems and urban settlements, the planning of infrastructures and communication networks.
Architecture is of logistic origin. Not by chance Vitruvius’ De Architectura, the first Western treatise on architecture, was written by a soldier for Julius Caesar as a technical compendium of concrete and abstract machines. The Renaissance exegesis of Greek and Roman military treatises, along with the revival of the Vitruvian machinatio, established the foundations of an architecture of logistics, able to frame the emerging capitalist system of production, exchange and labour division.
Logistics not only revolutionised the form of battles, cities and fortifications but also the way architecture was produced. The evolution of firearms demanded economical investments and geographical expeditions, geometrical calculations of ballistic trajectories and accurate territorial surveys. The introduction of orthogonal projections detached the act of vision from the singularity of an observer towards infinite point of views, as the objectivity of axonometry replaced the vanishing-point of perspective. Cities were analysed as assemblages of objects, people and fluxes of commodities: as measurable and controllable machines.
Thus, long before the industrial revolution and mass-production, it seems that the particular convergence of warfare, technical representation and civic organisation produced an apparatus for administering space and time through abstract rationality, which today provides the unavoidable condition for any metropolis to subsist. This essay will attempt to read logistics by means of its architecture, retracing its genealogy through some of the spatial devices it produced and the struggles which triggered its development between the 14th and the 21st century.
(http://www.anycorp.com/anycorp/article/261)
Architecture Against the Post-Political: Essays in Reclaiming the Critical Project, 2014
According to Carl Schmitt, XX century was the result of a series of secular progressive “neutrali... more According to Carl Schmitt, XX century was the result of a series of secular progressive “neutralizations and de-politicizations” aimed at dissolving antagonism within the sedating domain of market competition and technological religion.
Liberalism was nothing but the replacement of politics with policy, conflict with civilization, enmity with humanity, State with Society and, in this sense, the present “post-political” Empire, which governs through an extended universal neutral democracy made of control apparatuses, management and mass manipulation, seems the outcome of the economical prophecies of modernity, whose fundamental project was to subsume and tame the human generic nature – the innate engendering faculty – as fundamental source for production and development of its system of exploitation.
But if contemporary capitalism undermined any distinction between labor and life, salary and income, consumption and reproduction, work and political action, then precisely labor, in its precarious and most generic form, would offer the most profitable battlefield to elaborate new strategies of exodus “to make the brain of the system mad”.
This essay is thus an attempt to redefine the factory as the architectural paradigm of the modern metropolis, reconsidering “genericness” not as its mere steady default status but rather as its proper ontological source, which provides the conditions for any further evolution and, therefore, the possibility for politically acting within and against the total reality of production.
The City as a Project, 2013
The early stages of Fordism in Detroit, ranging between 1905 and 1941, knew an unprecedented leve... more The early stages of Fordism in Detroit, ranging between 1905 and 1941, knew an unprecedented level of labor struggle, devoid of any ideology and only “asking for more”: more wages, better working conditions and freedom of assembly. The radical and totally disenchanted bargaining strategy of the workers’ “rude pagan race” produced the finest capitalist technical response: the absolute industrial architecture of Albert Kahn.
His factories literally demonstrated how the opposition of the working class effectively generated the space of production and in which way all the peaks of strife, the “blood and fire” of the American labor history, have been translated into new rational configurations of the workshop layout and in more sophisticated strategies of social integration.
In order to understand the evolving logic of such a dialectics between struggle and development, architecture and revolution, there is nothing more revealing than retracing the evolution of the factory plan. For its intrinsic tendency to approximate the source of living labor, which was reduced by mass production to an abstract generic form - a labor “sans phrase” uniform in quality and only different in quantity - the industrial fixed capital progressively simplified towards its barest form of possibility: a “typical plan”, or a coherent, flexible and reproducible plan scheme, made of an homogeneous envelope, a technical core and a minimum of supports, able to make productive the human tacit potential by means of its calculated indeterminacy, suitable either to force the employees in rational choreographies or simply to let them free of “performing themselves”.
Following the path traced by Mario Tronti in his postscript to Workers and Capital, in which the straight political strategy of the American pre-union workers is elected as a model for the European working class movements in the 60s, a genealogy of the Albert Kahn’s industrial buildings would conceptually redefine the “typical plan” not as a mere default condition of the modern metropolis but rather as the true measure of its deepest principle of growth: the generic ability to produce proper of the human species-being.
San Rocco Magazine, 7: Indifference, 2013
Beside a magnificent flight of staircases in Kislovodsk, Leonidov did not build anything in his l... more Beside a magnificent flight of staircases in Kislovodsk, Leonidov did not build anything in his life. Nevertheless, the thin white lines on black backgrounds, the vivid colours and the controlled dynamism within the absolute silent rigour of his plans were totally unknown to the exuberant constructivist explorations of his OSA colleagues and against a certain idealist Soviet avant-garde: his hazardous juxtaposition of pure volumes - mindful of Malevich suprematist compositions - were in fact never utopian or simply conjectured but minutely calculated in each detail and almost ready to be constructed.
Each Leonidov’s project constituted a ‘step towards socialism’, in which he managed to converge the purest idea of plan with Lenin’s critique of the capitalist state-form, promoting innovative strategies of organization, collective dwelling, education and production to integrate the entire Russian territory within a new ways of living (byt): “an architecture of pure program and almost no form” - Koolhaas would later claim - “which could indifferently coexist with whatever other type of architecture opposing the intelligence of Leonidov to the intimidations of Tafuri.”
In this sense, after his outstanding graduation project for a Lenin’s Institute (1926), his internationally acclaimed entries for the Centrosoyuz (1928) and the Palace of Culture (1929), Leonidov’s rectangular typical plan for the House of Industry (1929) epitomised the whole Soviet project for the city between the NEP and the first Five-Years plan, juxtaposing cognitive labour, physical exercise, leisure activities and daily-life rituals across the same horizontal plane, eliminating any distinction between production and reproduction, labour and life: an indifference that would rapidly become a generalised global condition and would unavoidably subvert the typical plan into a managerial apparatus of exploitation.
San Rocco Magazine, 4: Fuck Concepts! Context!, 2012
Referring to the disunion between the plebs and the roman senate which constituted the very prope... more Referring to the disunion between the plebs and the roman senate which constituted the very propelling source of the republican freedom, in his Discorsi sopra la prima Deca di Tito Livio Niccolò Machiavelli contested the traditional cult of civic concordance assuming conflicts and turmoils as necessary fundament for the state power. In this sense a city that aimed at extending its hegemony over the neighbouring states had to rely both on the faithful support of a popular army and on the art of government of its prince, whose virtuosity should have been aimed at controlling the intestine humores and the territorial extension of the conquered provinces through an organic deployment of political and economical institutions.
For these reasons, the two fundamental forms of Renaissance utilitarian architecture were military constructions, which paralleled the innovations of fire-arms technologies, and the building of bureaucratic apparatuses, related to the progressive capital accumulation managed by what Weber defined a new rising army devoid of condottieri. Deeply influenced by the reiterative modularity of the medieval Procuratie Vecchie in Venice while distant from the authoritarian nobleness of Bramante’s Palazzo dei Tribunali in Rome, Giorgio Vasari’s Uffizi in Florence and Loggia in Arezzo could be considered as two radical paradigmatic projects generated to frame the economical and political context of Cosimo I de’ Medici dukedom (1537-1574) which was characterised by large defence investments and by a marked proliferation of specific ‘immaterial’ professions such as banking, trading, administrative and forensic activities.
If the Uffizi reversed the logic of the architectural ‘objecthood’ by modulating the irregularity of urban texture around the negative void of the strada nuova, the Loggia provided a subtle infrastructure for the trade businesses taking place in the overlooking Piazza grande, hosting shops, offices rooms and residential units for the Monte di Pietà, the Chancellery and the Customs House functionaries within a single building devoid of ornaments, a continuous multi-functional slender slab able to mediate the complex topographical conditions without compromising the overall equilibrium of the massive preexisting buildings.
While the first, as a modern epicentre for the citygovernment, exerted its control over the continuous field of the urban production by structuring the different guilds and magistracies through a unique spatial office module and interiorizing the public soil as a propelling element of the building itself; the latter, conceived as a strategical financial outpost at the confines of Tuscany, acted as homogeneous stable background to control the internal productive activities and commercial exchanges between the princedom and the outer bordering states, in linewith the close Medicean Fortress and the bastioned walls.
Conference Presentations by Francesco Marullo
The factory could be defined as the very first architecture of the ‘whole’. More than a building,... more The factory could be defined as the very first architecture of the ‘whole’. More than a building, it embodies a complex system of spatial and labour relations extending far beyond the limits of its enclosure. The factory is able to convey the wide reality of production in all its distinct phases into a present and tangible form, from the extraction of materials kilometres away to the assembling of products and their final distribution across foreign lands.
Its architecture is entirely derived from the necessities of production rather than from formal composition: the very notion of plan in the factory is replaced by a purely technical scheme – or layout – organising the logistic chain of operations and combining spaces with movements for an efficient management of workers and machinery. Yet, the logistic order of the factory did not only pertain to manufacture, but gradually penetrated every field of production – from heavy industry to domestic architecture, from office buildings to universities – transforming assembly lines into ‘think-belts’, smoothing functional and sequential arrangements into open spaces and flexible plans, disguising coercion as neutral free competition or cooperation.
This short presentation will go through a series of plans, investigating old and present day ‘factories’, their forms of exploitation and subjection of labour-power vis-à-vis the unavoidable genericness of the architecture of production.
Reviews by Francesco Marullo
Talks by Francesco Marullo
Using the projects of Moisej Ginzburg and Ivan Leonidov, the fourth chapter will extend the conce... more Using the projects of Moisej Ginzburg and Ivan Leonidov, the fourth chapter will extend the concept of typical plan beyond its conventional use as instrument of management and control, considering it instead as a pedagogical and psychological device to let its inhabitants learn by their own way of dwelling in space, and thereby achieving a higher consciousness of their own lives. From the first elaborations of the American female reformist’s experiments to the modern CIAM congresses in Frankfurt and Brussels in 1929-1930, the typical plan had been traditionally employed as a basis for the scientific management and the standardization of domestic chores, aiming at transforming the household into a “machine for living” modeled on the rhythms of the factory. Yet, precisely such an increased mechanization of dwelling definitely revealed how, for centuries, the capitalist accumulation had gratuitously exploited gender divisions and domestic work as instruments to ensure the reproduction of the labor-force with the hideous enslavement of the body and the commodification of life. Conversely, at the same time in Soviet Union the working class struggle created the premises for a totally different approach to the domestic typical plan, employed as a frame to emancipate their inhabitants from the burdens of reproduction. In particular, there the rhythm of the typical plan was considered in its spatial and psychological implications, as a strategy of organization for the workers and for the consolidation of their new forms of life.
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Papers by Francesco Marullo
Oswald Mathias Ungers and the Architecture of Logistics.
(Published in Volume no.47, spring 2016 Volume Magazine)
A city is not a uniform entity but rather the assemblage of self-standing parts dialectically juxtaposed, each resulting from stratifications of diverging uses and activities, political intentions and economic processes, geographical conditions and typological configurations.
From here, the ambivalent architectural understanding of logistics: either as the apparatus framing and exploiting the unmeasurable value produced by such a hybrid ensemble of clashing differences, or, to the contrary, as the system for exchanging goods and information indispensable to support every form of human conglomeration and collective production.
Despite not excluding each other, these two approaches move towards diverging strategies of opposition. Moving from the assumption that the vulnerability of capitalism lies in the system of distribution, the ‘logistics as exploitative frame’ approach endorses breakage, sabotage and interruption as possibilities for antagonism. The other, deliberately accepting the necessity of logistics, seeks to hijack its network of power towards common benefits, either by way of collectivisation or by acceleration.
A paradigmatic example of architectural acceleration was Archizoom’s 1969 project for a No-Stop City, which attempted to intensify the apparatus of production by extending the plan of the factory across the whole planet in order to make “the brain of the system mad.” The exponential increase of exchange and communications would have turned logistics into a self-destructing machine, internally dismantling the apparatus of exploitation by means of its own spatial principles.
A coeval yet reversed example of acceleration were the Oswald Mathias Ungers’ experiments on post-war Berlin, which extracted, introjected and multiplied the logistic order of the metropolis into a constellation of specific architectural forms. Recovering logistics as a “art of war” Ungers dissected the circulatory lymph of the metropolis into parts to conjecture new strategies of arrangement, able to intensify their collective assemblage without limiting their specific singularities.
If logistics aimed at the reduction of friction to facilitate the flow of people and commodities, then it was precisely by short-circuiting and accelerating these processes that the potential of the metropolis could have been redistributed and pushed towards different trajectories, creating new forms of resistance and overflow, breakage and organisation.
Architecture is of logistic origin. Not by chance Vitruvius’ De Architectura, the first Western treatise on architecture, was written by a soldier for Julius Caesar as a technical compendium of concrete and abstract machines. The Renaissance exegesis of Greek and Roman military treatises, along with the revival of the Vitruvian machinatio, established the foundations of an architecture of logistics, able to frame the emerging capitalist system of production, exchange and labour division.
Logistics not only revolutionised the form of battles, cities and fortifications but also the way architecture was produced. The evolution of firearms demanded economical investments and geographical expeditions, geometrical calculations of ballistic trajectories and accurate territorial surveys. The introduction of orthogonal projections detached the act of vision from the singularity of an observer towards infinite point of views, as the objectivity of axonometry replaced the vanishing-point of perspective. Cities were analysed as assemblages of objects, people and fluxes of commodities: as measurable and controllable machines.
Thus, long before the industrial revolution and mass-production, it seems that the particular convergence of warfare, technical representation and civic organisation produced an apparatus for administering space and time through abstract rationality, which today provides the unavoidable condition for any metropolis to subsist. This essay will attempt to read logistics by means of its architecture, retracing its genealogy through some of the spatial devices it produced and the struggles which triggered its development between the 14th and the 21st century.
(http://www.anycorp.com/anycorp/article/261)
Liberalism was nothing but the replacement of politics with policy, conflict with civilization, enmity with humanity, State with Society and, in this sense, the present “post-political” Empire, which governs through an extended universal neutral democracy made of control apparatuses, management and mass manipulation, seems the outcome of the economical prophecies of modernity, whose fundamental project was to subsume and tame the human generic nature – the innate engendering faculty – as fundamental source for production and development of its system of exploitation.
But if contemporary capitalism undermined any distinction between labor and life, salary and income, consumption and reproduction, work and political action, then precisely labor, in its precarious and most generic form, would offer the most profitable battlefield to elaborate new strategies of exodus “to make the brain of the system mad”.
This essay is thus an attempt to redefine the factory as the architectural paradigm of the modern metropolis, reconsidering “genericness” not as its mere steady default status but rather as its proper ontological source, which provides the conditions for any further evolution and, therefore, the possibility for politically acting within and against the total reality of production.
His factories literally demonstrated how the opposition of the working class effectively generated the space of production and in which way all the peaks of strife, the “blood and fire” of the American labor history, have been translated into new rational configurations of the workshop layout and in more sophisticated strategies of social integration.
In order to understand the evolving logic of such a dialectics between struggle and development, architecture and revolution, there is nothing more revealing than retracing the evolution of the factory plan. For its intrinsic tendency to approximate the source of living labor, which was reduced by mass production to an abstract generic form - a labor “sans phrase” uniform in quality and only different in quantity - the industrial fixed capital progressively simplified towards its barest form of possibility: a “typical plan”, or a coherent, flexible and reproducible plan scheme, made of an homogeneous envelope, a technical core and a minimum of supports, able to make productive the human tacit potential by means of its calculated indeterminacy, suitable either to force the employees in rational choreographies or simply to let them free of “performing themselves”.
Following the path traced by Mario Tronti in his postscript to Workers and Capital, in which the straight political strategy of the American pre-union workers is elected as a model for the European working class movements in the 60s, a genealogy of the Albert Kahn’s industrial buildings would conceptually redefine the “typical plan” not as a mere default condition of the modern metropolis but rather as the true measure of its deepest principle of growth: the generic ability to produce proper of the human species-being.
Each Leonidov’s project constituted a ‘step towards socialism’, in which he managed to converge the purest idea of plan with Lenin’s critique of the capitalist state-form, promoting innovative strategies of organization, collective dwelling, education and production to integrate the entire Russian territory within a new ways of living (byt): “an architecture of pure program and almost no form” - Koolhaas would later claim - “which could indifferently coexist with whatever other type of architecture opposing the intelligence of Leonidov to the intimidations of Tafuri.”
In this sense, after his outstanding graduation project for a Lenin’s Institute (1926), his internationally acclaimed entries for the Centrosoyuz (1928) and the Palace of Culture (1929), Leonidov’s rectangular typical plan for the House of Industry (1929) epitomised the whole Soviet project for the city between the NEP and the first Five-Years plan, juxtaposing cognitive labour, physical exercise, leisure activities and daily-life rituals across the same horizontal plane, eliminating any distinction between production and reproduction, labour and life: an indifference that would rapidly become a generalised global condition and would unavoidably subvert the typical plan into a managerial apparatus of exploitation.
For these reasons, the two fundamental forms of Renaissance utilitarian architecture were military constructions, which paralleled the innovations of fire-arms technologies, and the building of bureaucratic apparatuses, related to the progressive capital accumulation managed by what Weber defined a new rising army devoid of condottieri. Deeply influenced by the reiterative modularity of the medieval Procuratie Vecchie in Venice while distant from the authoritarian nobleness of Bramante’s Palazzo dei Tribunali in Rome, Giorgio Vasari’s Uffizi in Florence and Loggia in Arezzo could be considered as two radical paradigmatic projects generated to frame the economical and political context of Cosimo I de’ Medici dukedom (1537-1574) which was characterised by large defence investments and by a marked proliferation of specific ‘immaterial’ professions such as banking, trading, administrative and forensic activities.
If the Uffizi reversed the logic of the architectural ‘objecthood’ by modulating the irregularity of urban texture around the negative void of the strada nuova, the Loggia provided a subtle infrastructure for the trade businesses taking place in the overlooking Piazza grande, hosting shops, offices rooms and residential units for the Monte di Pietà, the Chancellery and the Customs House functionaries within a single building devoid of ornaments, a continuous multi-functional slender slab able to mediate the complex topographical conditions without compromising the overall equilibrium of the massive preexisting buildings.
While the first, as a modern epicentre for the citygovernment, exerted its control over the continuous field of the urban production by structuring the different guilds and magistracies through a unique spatial office module and interiorizing the public soil as a propelling element of the building itself; the latter, conceived as a strategical financial outpost at the confines of Tuscany, acted as homogeneous stable background to control the internal productive activities and commercial exchanges between the princedom and the outer bordering states, in linewith the close Medicean Fortress and the bastioned walls.
Conference Presentations by Francesco Marullo
Its architecture is entirely derived from the necessities of production rather than from formal composition: the very notion of plan in the factory is replaced by a purely technical scheme – or layout – organising the logistic chain of operations and combining spaces with movements for an efficient management of workers and machinery. Yet, the logistic order of the factory did not only pertain to manufacture, but gradually penetrated every field of production – from heavy industry to domestic architecture, from office buildings to universities – transforming assembly lines into ‘think-belts’, smoothing functional and sequential arrangements into open spaces and flexible plans, disguising coercion as neutral free competition or cooperation.
This short presentation will go through a series of plans, investigating old and present day ‘factories’, their forms of exploitation and subjection of labour-power vis-à-vis the unavoidable genericness of the architecture of production.
Reviews by Francesco Marullo
Talks by Francesco Marullo
Oswald Mathias Ungers and the Architecture of Logistics.
(Published in Volume no.47, spring 2016 Volume Magazine)
A city is not a uniform entity but rather the assemblage of self-standing parts dialectically juxtaposed, each resulting from stratifications of diverging uses and activities, political intentions and economic processes, geographical conditions and typological configurations.
From here, the ambivalent architectural understanding of logistics: either as the apparatus framing and exploiting the unmeasurable value produced by such a hybrid ensemble of clashing differences, or, to the contrary, as the system for exchanging goods and information indispensable to support every form of human conglomeration and collective production.
Despite not excluding each other, these two approaches move towards diverging strategies of opposition. Moving from the assumption that the vulnerability of capitalism lies in the system of distribution, the ‘logistics as exploitative frame’ approach endorses breakage, sabotage and interruption as possibilities for antagonism. The other, deliberately accepting the necessity of logistics, seeks to hijack its network of power towards common benefits, either by way of collectivisation or by acceleration.
A paradigmatic example of architectural acceleration was Archizoom’s 1969 project for a No-Stop City, which attempted to intensify the apparatus of production by extending the plan of the factory across the whole planet in order to make “the brain of the system mad.” The exponential increase of exchange and communications would have turned logistics into a self-destructing machine, internally dismantling the apparatus of exploitation by means of its own spatial principles.
A coeval yet reversed example of acceleration were the Oswald Mathias Ungers’ experiments on post-war Berlin, which extracted, introjected and multiplied the logistic order of the metropolis into a constellation of specific architectural forms. Recovering logistics as a “art of war” Ungers dissected the circulatory lymph of the metropolis into parts to conjecture new strategies of arrangement, able to intensify their collective assemblage without limiting their specific singularities.
If logistics aimed at the reduction of friction to facilitate the flow of people and commodities, then it was precisely by short-circuiting and accelerating these processes that the potential of the metropolis could have been redistributed and pushed towards different trajectories, creating new forms of resistance and overflow, breakage and organisation.
Architecture is of logistic origin. Not by chance Vitruvius’ De Architectura, the first Western treatise on architecture, was written by a soldier for Julius Caesar as a technical compendium of concrete and abstract machines. The Renaissance exegesis of Greek and Roman military treatises, along with the revival of the Vitruvian machinatio, established the foundations of an architecture of logistics, able to frame the emerging capitalist system of production, exchange and labour division.
Logistics not only revolutionised the form of battles, cities and fortifications but also the way architecture was produced. The evolution of firearms demanded economical investments and geographical expeditions, geometrical calculations of ballistic trajectories and accurate territorial surveys. The introduction of orthogonal projections detached the act of vision from the singularity of an observer towards infinite point of views, as the objectivity of axonometry replaced the vanishing-point of perspective. Cities were analysed as assemblages of objects, people and fluxes of commodities: as measurable and controllable machines.
Thus, long before the industrial revolution and mass-production, it seems that the particular convergence of warfare, technical representation and civic organisation produced an apparatus for administering space and time through abstract rationality, which today provides the unavoidable condition for any metropolis to subsist. This essay will attempt to read logistics by means of its architecture, retracing its genealogy through some of the spatial devices it produced and the struggles which triggered its development between the 14th and the 21st century.
(http://www.anycorp.com/anycorp/article/261)
Liberalism was nothing but the replacement of politics with policy, conflict with civilization, enmity with humanity, State with Society and, in this sense, the present “post-political” Empire, which governs through an extended universal neutral democracy made of control apparatuses, management and mass manipulation, seems the outcome of the economical prophecies of modernity, whose fundamental project was to subsume and tame the human generic nature – the innate engendering faculty – as fundamental source for production and development of its system of exploitation.
But if contemporary capitalism undermined any distinction between labor and life, salary and income, consumption and reproduction, work and political action, then precisely labor, in its precarious and most generic form, would offer the most profitable battlefield to elaborate new strategies of exodus “to make the brain of the system mad”.
This essay is thus an attempt to redefine the factory as the architectural paradigm of the modern metropolis, reconsidering “genericness” not as its mere steady default status but rather as its proper ontological source, which provides the conditions for any further evolution and, therefore, the possibility for politically acting within and against the total reality of production.
His factories literally demonstrated how the opposition of the working class effectively generated the space of production and in which way all the peaks of strife, the “blood and fire” of the American labor history, have been translated into new rational configurations of the workshop layout and in more sophisticated strategies of social integration.
In order to understand the evolving logic of such a dialectics between struggle and development, architecture and revolution, there is nothing more revealing than retracing the evolution of the factory plan. For its intrinsic tendency to approximate the source of living labor, which was reduced by mass production to an abstract generic form - a labor “sans phrase” uniform in quality and only different in quantity - the industrial fixed capital progressively simplified towards its barest form of possibility: a “typical plan”, or a coherent, flexible and reproducible plan scheme, made of an homogeneous envelope, a technical core and a minimum of supports, able to make productive the human tacit potential by means of its calculated indeterminacy, suitable either to force the employees in rational choreographies or simply to let them free of “performing themselves”.
Following the path traced by Mario Tronti in his postscript to Workers and Capital, in which the straight political strategy of the American pre-union workers is elected as a model for the European working class movements in the 60s, a genealogy of the Albert Kahn’s industrial buildings would conceptually redefine the “typical plan” not as a mere default condition of the modern metropolis but rather as the true measure of its deepest principle of growth: the generic ability to produce proper of the human species-being.
Each Leonidov’s project constituted a ‘step towards socialism’, in which he managed to converge the purest idea of plan with Lenin’s critique of the capitalist state-form, promoting innovative strategies of organization, collective dwelling, education and production to integrate the entire Russian territory within a new ways of living (byt): “an architecture of pure program and almost no form” - Koolhaas would later claim - “which could indifferently coexist with whatever other type of architecture opposing the intelligence of Leonidov to the intimidations of Tafuri.”
In this sense, after his outstanding graduation project for a Lenin’s Institute (1926), his internationally acclaimed entries for the Centrosoyuz (1928) and the Palace of Culture (1929), Leonidov’s rectangular typical plan for the House of Industry (1929) epitomised the whole Soviet project for the city between the NEP and the first Five-Years plan, juxtaposing cognitive labour, physical exercise, leisure activities and daily-life rituals across the same horizontal plane, eliminating any distinction between production and reproduction, labour and life: an indifference that would rapidly become a generalised global condition and would unavoidably subvert the typical plan into a managerial apparatus of exploitation.
For these reasons, the two fundamental forms of Renaissance utilitarian architecture were military constructions, which paralleled the innovations of fire-arms technologies, and the building of bureaucratic apparatuses, related to the progressive capital accumulation managed by what Weber defined a new rising army devoid of condottieri. Deeply influenced by the reiterative modularity of the medieval Procuratie Vecchie in Venice while distant from the authoritarian nobleness of Bramante’s Palazzo dei Tribunali in Rome, Giorgio Vasari’s Uffizi in Florence and Loggia in Arezzo could be considered as two radical paradigmatic projects generated to frame the economical and political context of Cosimo I de’ Medici dukedom (1537-1574) which was characterised by large defence investments and by a marked proliferation of specific ‘immaterial’ professions such as banking, trading, administrative and forensic activities.
If the Uffizi reversed the logic of the architectural ‘objecthood’ by modulating the irregularity of urban texture around the negative void of the strada nuova, the Loggia provided a subtle infrastructure for the trade businesses taking place in the overlooking Piazza grande, hosting shops, offices rooms and residential units for the Monte di Pietà, the Chancellery and the Customs House functionaries within a single building devoid of ornaments, a continuous multi-functional slender slab able to mediate the complex topographical conditions without compromising the overall equilibrium of the massive preexisting buildings.
While the first, as a modern epicentre for the citygovernment, exerted its control over the continuous field of the urban production by structuring the different guilds and magistracies through a unique spatial office module and interiorizing the public soil as a propelling element of the building itself; the latter, conceived as a strategical financial outpost at the confines of Tuscany, acted as homogeneous stable background to control the internal productive activities and commercial exchanges between the princedom and the outer bordering states, in linewith the close Medicean Fortress and the bastioned walls.
Its architecture is entirely derived from the necessities of production rather than from formal composition: the very notion of plan in the factory is replaced by a purely technical scheme – or layout – organising the logistic chain of operations and combining spaces with movements for an efficient management of workers and machinery. Yet, the logistic order of the factory did not only pertain to manufacture, but gradually penetrated every field of production – from heavy industry to domestic architecture, from office buildings to universities – transforming assembly lines into ‘think-belts’, smoothing functional and sequential arrangements into open spaces and flexible plans, disguising coercion as neutral free competition or cooperation.
This short presentation will go through a series of plans, investigating old and present day ‘factories’, their forms of exploitation and subjection of labour-power vis-à-vis the unavoidable genericness of the architecture of production.
The rise of such isometrical language could be traced back to the very first treatise of architecture by Vitruvius, in which the analytical disposition of objects through plans, elevations and sections was explicitly related to the military procedures of surveying the battlefield, layouting the camp and ordering the legions. For a soldier-architect as Vitruvius there was a sharp distinction between reason and ingeniousness. While ratio mostly referred to a static knowledge based on a superordinate set of rules and proportions, sollertia alluded to the deepest human ingenious faculty, synthesis of cunning intuition and pragmatic thought, which could be attained only at war: conflict constituted both a source of technical innovation and a trigger for a scientific investigation of reality.
In its Renaissance reception, the Vitruvian machinatio was productively transformed into operative diagrams of organization. The evolution of artillery required a prompt measurement of the fire- trajectories and an accurate survey of the opponent forces, to strategically modulate the line of bastions and to rearrange the urban fabric accordingly. The symbolical and subjective vanishing- point of the costruzione legittima was thus gradually replaced by the neutral objectivity of the axonometric view, constructed by dissecting reality into orthogonal projections, and by posing the view-point at an infinite distance.
Typical Plan, in its tautological reiteration as nth plan, is intrinsically axonometric. Conceived as an abstract device which constantly develops by absorbing and framing the inner and outer struggling pressures of its own ‘content’ without restraining its productive potential, it definitely embodied the diagram of the late capitalist exploitation. Therefore this essay would be an attempt to retrace a prehistory of the Typical Plan from the Vitruvian machinatio and its Renaissance reception, between the two paradigmatic ‘projects’ of Francesco Di Giorgio Martini and Archizoom Associati.
The succession of the buildings analyzed in the article, from the Aula Quadra and Pecile in Villa Adriana, through Palazzo Ducale in Urbino and Saint Peter in Rome, clearly demonstrates how the internal stereometric articulation in architecture has progressively simplified through history: from the rich variety of the enclosed great interiors of antiquity, through the rigorously calculated harmonies of the Renaissance, to the standardized repetitive unities of Modernity, towards a unique generic volume, in which the interiors are turned in unfocused fields and unlimited spatial planes.
Such a simple hollow space, the rational outcome of the technical and structural improvements occurred at the beginning of XX century, embodies one of the highest challenges of Modern Architecture: the planned ‘destruction’ of the city from within, through a calculated subtraction and clearing of its obsolete content and the parallel rational construction of a pure ‘enabling’ volume, based on economy, on the perfect disposal of internal energies and on the resistance to any exerted pressure.
Through a series of examples, spanning from Behrens’ Kleinmotorenefabrik, Tessenow and Appia’s Hellerau Festspielhaus, Malevich’s Architecktona, through Mies’ Bürohaus and Hilberseimer’s Citybebauung, the following essay is an attempt to extend and project the conclusions of Moretti’s studies beyond a purely formal consideration: the development of the Halle, as a paradigm for an Architecture of the hollow space, a ‘mould’ developed in parallel to the rising of the Angestellten, the salaried workers, during the critical transition between the Wilhelmine and the Weimar period in Germany.