Architecture and Abstraction

What role does abstraction play in architectural thinking, design, and building? What does it mean to be an architectural worker today? How does the division of labor shape architecture? How to articulate a truly critical theoretical thinking on architecture in our present times of crisis? In Architecture and Abstraction (MIT Press, 2023), Pier Vittorio Aureli argues for a reconsideration of abstraction in architecture as determined by the material conditions of the buildings themselves, considering abstraction in architecture not as an aesthetic tendency but as a movement that mirrors modern divisions of labor and society. Pier Vittorio Aureli and Jana Ndiaye Berankova will address the possibility of articulating a Marxist-oriented criticism of the canon of Western theory of architecture and the role of the project, the language, and the plan in architectural theory, criticism, and practice.

Pier Vittorio Aureli is an architect and educator. He is currently the director of the Institute of Architecture at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. He has taught at the Architectural Association in London, Yale School of Architecture, Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, Columbia University in New York. Aureli is the author of several books including The Project of Autonomy: Politics and Architecture Within and Against Capitalism (2008), The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (2011), Less is Enough. On Asceticism and Architecture (2013), The City as a Project (2014), Ritual and Walls: The Architecture of Sacred Space (2016, with Maria Shéhérazade Giudici), The Room of One’s Own. The Architecture of the Private Room (2017, with Dogma), Loveless. Minimum Dwelling and its Discontents (2019, with Dogma), Platform. Architecture and the Use of the Ground (2021, with Dogma), Living and Working (2022, with Dogma) and Architecture and Abstraction (forthcoming in Spring 2023). Together with Martino Tattara, he is the co-founder of Dogma, an office for architecture based in Brussels. Dogma has developed a specific interest in large-scale interventions, urban research, and especially domestic space and its potential for transformation. 

Jana Ndiaye Berankova is an art and architecture theorist, philosopher, writer, and publisher. She studied art history and comparative literature at the École normale supérieure and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris, France) and architecture at Columbia University, where she completed her PhD dissertation on the links between architecture theory and French philosophy 1965 to 1990. At the Institute, Ndiaye Berankova is working on a project focusing on the theoretical discourse on architecture and urban planning between the 1960s and the end of 1980s in Senegal. She runs a non-profit publishing house Suture Press focusing on carefully designed hardback books on continental philosophy, contemporary art, and architectural theory. Her book of interviews with Alain Badiou L’Éclat de l’absolu questioning the intersections between his philosophical system and the thinking of Plato, Hegel, Sartre, Althusser, Lacan, and Deleuze is scheduled for publication in early 2024.

This event is co-organized by the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination and l’École Spéciale d’Architecture.