Pier Vittorio Aureli – författare

A fresh, groundbreaking analysis of renowned Renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti’s five built works, suggesting a new relationship of form to meaning.Much has been written about Renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti’s mantra of part-to-whole as one of the continuing conditions of architecture. While this underlying thesis has often been repeated in the annals of architectural history and theory, architects have rarely questioned the idea. In Rewriting Alberti, architect Peter Eisenman suggests, however, that Alberti provoked a radical discourse beyond the part-to-whole dialogue featured in his Ten Books of Architecture. Eisenman’s in-depth analysis of Alberti’s five built works reveals a disjunction between the architect’s buildings and theoretical writings, suggesting a new relationship of form to meaning based on the fragmentation of homogeneous space.Rewriting Alberti includes contributions by Pier Vittorio Aureli, Mario Carpo, and Daniel Sherer. Carpo, an architectural historian and critic, theorizes that Alberti’s work initiated an idea of the discipline as a notational system akin to contemporary computational logics. By way of comparison, Sherer, an architectural historian, reconsiders critic Manfredo Tafuri’s readings of Alberti, and architect and theorist Aureli draws on Alberti to propose another idea of the architectural “project.”Here, in one book are four different discourses (and more than 60 drawings) that look back at the origins of architectural signs and semiology and forward to understand the way that history informs architecture today.

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, 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. 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.

Manfredo Tafuri was one of the most influential architectural historians of the twentieth century, and his work continues to shape the landscape of architectural history and theory. This anthology presents—for the first time—a carefully curated selection of essays and interviews spanning his entire career, from 1964, the year in which Tafuri decided to focus exclusively on architectural history, to 1994, the year of his untimely death. These texts—most translated into English for the first time—reveal the extraordinary range of Tafuri’s scholarship, ranging from topics as diverse as the critique of architectural ideology and capitalist development, to the contradictions of the Soviet avant-garde, urban strategies in renaissance Italy, social democratic planning policies, and the work of architects including Giulio Romano, Le Corbusier, Aldo Rossi, and Carlo Scarpa.With essays devoted to the work of the architects Giulio Romano, Andrea Palladio, Francesco Borromini, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Aldo Rossi and Carlo Scarpa.Complemented by a biographical essay by Tafuri’s wife, Letizia RapisardaAccompanied by more than 700 images