Here abstraction manifests itself both as a process and as a form that makes explicit the conditions of its (industrial) production. What mattered in the definition of real objects in space was the possibility of quantifying the distance between them. This article was originally published on April 21, 2016. 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. Starting in the fourteenth century, the practice of exchange imposed a radically different way of experiencing the world through the lens of abstract knowledge. Use the Shape Builder Tool. 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. <> All images are each office/photographer mentioned. 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. The Hungarian artist Lszl Moholy-Nagy was one of the most influential thinkers, designers and art educators of the first half of the twentieth century. q+Npm6f lgG;8u+l+[jBGto8+ As Sohn-Rethel writes: Time and space rendered abstract under the impact of commodity exchange are marked by homogeneity, continuity and emptiness of all natural and material content, visible or invisible (e.g. %PDF-1.5 All rights reserved. A detail of Brunelleschi's Portico of the Ospedale degli Innocenti exemplifies his use of repeated modules. The urban condition as described by Cerd arises from the necessity of keeping people alive and thus productive. Radka Donnell (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 24. 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. STEP 5: After you have arranged the shapes into a unified composition, make two additional copies of the artboard. Unlike the physiocratic economists who identified labor with agricultural labor, for Smith labor as such was not reducible to any activity such as manufacture, agriculture, or commerce. In ancient Rome the urbe was the city, but contrary to the definition of the city as civitas, which referred to the city as a political institution (made of civis, the citizens), urbe defined the city as material organization made of buildings and infrastructures whose goal was similar to that of domestic space: to sustain the lives of its inhabitants. 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. Activate the edges of your composition by extending some of the elements off the page. 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. Adolf Max Vogt, Le Corbusier, the Noble Savage: Toward an Archaeology of Modernism, trans. Among those impressed by Moholy-Nagy's work was Walter Gropius, German architect and founder of the Bauhaus School, who made Moholy-Nagy one of the youngest instructors in the history of the Bauhaus. And yet what makes labor as such abstract is the fact that not only labor in general is the synthesis of the myriad forms of production, but rather that labor has become a commodity, that is, a thing measurable in terms of the ultimate abstract system of universal equivalence: money. 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. 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. Peter Halley, The Crisis in Geometry, Arts Magazine, vol. 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. For example, in the Ospedale degli Innocenti the entire complex is determined by the module exhibited in the loggia facing the piazza. In what follows I would like to define the relationship between abstraction and architecture, avoiding the trap of identifying abstraction as a style. Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. 2 0 obj With Pelacanis mathematical space, empty space is no longer an incommensurable reality, external to the world of physical objects, but a quantifiable space that measures the objects it contains. In contemporary urbanization, a plethora of symbols and meanings has become the generic curtain behind which the abstraction of capital operates. His experimentation with light, space and form generated international attention. MIT Press Directis a distinctive collection of influential MIT Press books curated for scholars and libraries worldwide. But, as Sohn-Rethel notes, this project failed. ArchDaily 2008-2022. Marx arrived at the conclusion that in the most advanced industrial societiessuch as the United States in Marxs timeabstraction had become an ethos. 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. See Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (London: Penguin Classics, 1993), 81114. What was crucial in this demonstration was not how a painted image was similar to the painted object in reality, but the fact that the resemblance between the painted baptistery and the real one could be rigorously mathematically constructed. As such, abstractions dissolve the traditional antinomy between the concrete and the abstract, the tangible and the intangible, since abstractions are concrete. 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.4 In an advanced capitalist society, reasoningthat is, the recomposition of a multiplicity of things and events within a coherent scientific system of thoughtis not a simple depiction of reality, but what makes reality work. 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. It is precisely at this juncture that we see the rise of architecture as a project practiced by a new specialized professional: the architect. endobj In this depiction of a house structure we see two apparently opposing conditions for architecture that, in Adolf Max Vogts words, are the perfectly pure and the raw real.1 While the perfectly pure is the structures bareness, the raw real is its construction system, where Le Corbusier adapts the technology of industrial architecture to the architecture of the house. <>>> About Such a state of affairs is at its most developed in the most modern form of existence of bourgeois societyin the United States. In this way Brunelleschi introduced an architectural language in which every building was dominated by an overall disegno. (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 expansion envisioned by Cerd consisted in a grid through which an even redistribution of social wealth would become possible. In this context, advancements were triggered in calculus and mathematics. See: Mario Carpo, The Alphabet and the Algorithm (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011). Within this example we see how abstraction in architecture is inextricably linked to industrial production processes.
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. 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. Arturo Soria y Puig (Madrid: Electa, 2000). endobj Brunelleschis architectural language is instead based on a strict modularity within which ornament becomes a device used to visually confirm the relationship between each element and the whole system. Using the elements of simple geometric shapes, line, and color, we have applied the principles of balance, contrast, and varied repetition to give our designs a sense of overall cohesion and structure. These were the questions that Marx asked himself when facing the task of describing the reality of capitalistic modes of production. Privacy Policy The exchange abstraction excludes everything that makes up history, human and even natural history. See also: Sergio Rossi, Dalle botteghe alla accademie. That is, identify a number of characteristic and distinctive shapesperhaps five or sixassociated with the building you choose. 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. To read the stories behind other celebrated architecture projects, visit our AD Classics section. A key element in Cerds project was the unprecedented use of statistical data as a support for the project. 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. Indeed, perspective can be seen not so much as an innovation in terms of representation, but as a revolution in the conception of space. 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. And yet for such a system to work, it needs to reduce the experience of space to the abstraction of mathematical space. 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. 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. Hold down the Option Key and trim the elements to the artboard. 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. To abstract comes from the Latin verb trahere, which means to pull something essential out from the totality of which it is a part. Cerd wrote his general theory after designing the expansion of Barcelona in 1859. Detail of the expansion plan for Barcelona proposed by Ildefonso Cerd in 1859. 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.
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. Today we publish over 30 titles in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and science and technology. 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. However, while Smith hypostatized the category of labor as such, i.e., as a timeless category that would have been applicable throughout the entire course of history, Marx understood that labor as a general category could only exist as the result of the historical development of capitalism. x=koGr ?GnM?u1H: %ZL.i~Ut3zW7O7Oiy}uzW~#6ih?vso6oo~07?n0jl8af_`M 7OMu>^m~;}&6 ]Y#O[);u7\Of;'hOo `7r t 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. 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. Once the mirror was removed, the viewer was able to appreciate the correspondence between the painted version of the building and the building itself. On abstraction as ontologically part of human experience see: Paolo Virno, Convenzione e Materialismo. Egyptian "stretchers of the rope pictured in the tomb of Menna, Luxor (1200 BC). Ildefonso Cerd, Cerd: The Five Bases of the General Theory of Urbanization, ed.
A commodity as a thing or a person cannot be changed in terms of shape or consistency. Instagram 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. In Brunelleschis idea of architecture, the building is no longer a singular and finite artifact, but a system that can expand ad infinitum. The instrument of such coordination was the systematic use of columns and arches (the latter always inscribed within a half-square). The buildings obliquely intersecting concrete planes, which serve to shape and define the street running through the complex, represent the earliest attempt to translate Hadids fantastical, powerful conceptual drawings into a functional architectural space.