two – Rie-do

Essays

Lectures

Architecture and Abstraction: Pier Vittorio Aureli and Jana Ndiaye Berankova (February 20, 2025)

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.

On February 20, 2025, Pier Vittorio Aureli and Jana Ndiaye Berankova addressed 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.

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

Charles Jencks Award winner 2023: Dogma’s lecture (2024)

Given annually, the Jencks Award recognizes an individual or practice who has made a major contribution to both the theory and practice of architecture. In 2023 the Jencks Foundation at The Cosmic House and the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) announced Dogma, a Brussels-based practice focused on the relationship between architecture and the city, as the recipient of the Charles Jencks Award.

Founded in 2002 by Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara, Dogma’s work on large-scale urban design projects and exploration of the relationship between theory and practice continues to have a major influence on the profession, particularly among students, through both their thought processes and representation of architecture. In addition to design projects, members of Dogma engage passionately with teaching, writing and research, with Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara teaching at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the Faculty of Architecture, KU Leuven respectively.

The award was celebrated with a lecture by Dogma on their significant portfolio of work and approach to Architecture at RIBA on Thursday 16th May 2024.

Pier Vittorio Aureli: Processes of abstraction in modern architecture (2024)

Episode 105 of ⁠A is for Architecture⁠ (http://tinyurl.com/mrxusjv4) is with Pier Vittorio Aureli, writer and educator, and founder and principal of Dogma (https://www.dogma.name/) , the much-acclaimed architecture and research group founded in 2002 by Pier Vittorio and Martino Tattara. We talk about Pier Vittorio’s 2023 book, Architecture and Abstraction (https://mitpress.mit.edu/978026254523…) , published by MIT Press.

Architecture and Abstraction, so the gloss has it, ‘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, [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’, and the outcome of emergent socio-technical, economic and political realities. In the face of the AI-ification of the public imagination and, increasingly, material culture itself, this argument has great pertinence for design in and of the contemporary commonwealth.

Pier Vittorio Aureli teaches at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (https://people.epfl.ch/pier.aureli?la…) (EPFL), and can be found on through Dogma on Instagram ( / dogma.name ) .

Architecture and Abstraction, Pier Vittorio Aureli (Spring, 2024)

Neighbors — Lectures on History & Theory of Architecture (Vol. 3, Spring 2024)

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 is co-founder of Dogma and teaches at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. His lastest book is Architecture and Abstraction (2023).

Neighbors is a lecture series on history and theory of architecture organized by Pier Vittorio Aureli (TPOD), Sarah Nichols (THEMA), Alfredo Thiermann (HITAM), and Christophe van Gerrewey (ACHT) at EPFL.

Pier Vittorio Aureli, “The Longhouse” (November 9, 2023)

Pier Vittorio Aureli, “The Longhouse” (Audio Description Version)

Event Description: The lecture presents Dogma’s research of the longhouse, the linear, long, and narrow habitation typology that existed and still exists in many parts of the world, including South-East Asia, Europe, and North America. While there are numerous scholarly investigations of specific cases of longhouses, a comparative study of this ubiquitous type of habitation is missing. This lacuna is both surprising and understandable. It is surprising because the longhouse is among the most ubiquitous forms of pre-modern dwellings. Alternatively, it is comprehensible because the longhouse represents a type of habitation whose form, materiality, inhabitation and especially building techniques are at odds with modern domesticity. Unlike dominant forms of domesticity that reinforce private property and the nuclear family, longhouses were instead communal structures that could house an extended family, kin group or entire community under one roof. Longhouses often blurred the distinction between the sacred and profane, public, and private, residence and workplace. We have to be careful to not romanticize – or worse fetishize – the longhouse, but its many declensions throughout many parts of the world inevitably challenges many contemporary assumptions about domestic space and its history.

Speaker: Pier Vittorio Aureli (Rome, 1973) is an architect and educator. He studied at the Istituto di Architettura di Venezia (IUAV) and later at the Berlage Institute and TU Delft where he earned his PhD. Aureli currently teaches at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne where he directs the Laboratory Theory and Project of Domestic Space. 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. Aureli has published many essays and several books, such as The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (2011), Living and Working (with Dogma, 2022) and Architecture and Abstraction (2023). He is currently working on an anthology of Manfredo Tafuri’s writings. 00:00 Welcome by Paige Johnston 01:59 Introduction by Grace La 09:07 Lecture by Pier Vittorio Aureli 01:04:29 Discussion and Q+A

‘The Fifth Typology’ symposium and workshop ‘On Type and Architecture’ – Introduction Workshop (Spring, 2023)

On the 4th and 5th of April, we organized ‘The Fifth Typology’ symposium and workshop ‘On Type and Architecture.’ The abstract, as published, made the following claim:

A type is not a model or an image to be copied, but the deep structure of how things are put together. The Symposium revisits the concept of type by critically reading its previous deﬁnitions and by offering a new interpretation of this rather elusive, but crucial architectural concept. The main thesis that will be discussed in the Symposium is that type should be reconsidered as one of the most productive ways to teach, study and criticize architecture. The Symposium will debate how this concept could offer a precise understanding of the social and political forces that produce architecture. Historically, architectural types have always been spatialisations of the governing politics through which society is organized. Following Anthony Vidler’s seminal essay ‘The Third Typology’ (1978) which addressed the ﬁrst three historical turns of the concept of type, Enlightenment, modernity, and the 1970s return to the discipline, the Fifth Typology acknowledges a return to this concept in the last decade — the ‘Fourth Typology’ — but aspires to push it further as a method of formal and political investigation on architecture. Contributions will reconsider typology with concrete case studies that range from the feminist and class critique of type to its use in the building and managing of institutions.

Lecture Series: Martino Tattara, Dogma (February 2, 2023)

See more information about the lecture here: https://www.torontomu.ca/architectura…

Living and Working

Despite the increasing numbers of people who now work from home, in the popular imagination the home is still understood as the sanctuary of privacy and intimacy. Living is conceptually and definitively separated from work.

In this lecture, we will argue against such a separation, countering the prevailing ideology of domesticity with a series of architectural projects that illustrate alternative approaches. These projects reenvision home as a cooperative structure in which it is possible to live and work and in which labor is socialized beyond the family—freeing inhabitants from the sense of property, and women from the burden of domestic labor. The projects aim to move the house beyond the dichotomous logic of male/female, husband/wife, breadwinner/housewife, and private/public. They include the reinvention of single-room occupancy as a new model for affordable housing and a plan for a modular, adaptable structure meant to house a temporary dweller.

Dogma is a Brussels-based architectural studio that focuses on urban design and large-scale projects. The work of the office has been exhibited at various venues including the Tallinn Architecture Biennale 2014, the HKW Berlin 2015, the Biennale di Venezia in 2016 and 2021, the Chicago Architectural Biennial in 2017, the Flemish Architectural Institute in Antwerp, the Seoul Architecture Biennale and the Sharjah Architecture Triennale in 2019. It was co-founded and is led by Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara. Martino Tattara is associate professor at the Faculty of Architecture, KU Leuven (Belgium).

Pier Vittorio Aureli. The project of autonomy (ITA) (2017)

The seminal essay rediscusses the concept of autonomy in politics and architecture by tracing a concise and polemical argument about its history in Italy in the 1960s and early 1970s, in a context characterisd by strong economic development and intense political conflicts. Drawing on significant new source material, including recent interviews by the author and untranslated documents, Pier Vittorio Aureli analyzes the powerful and rigorous critique of capitalism put forward by the Operaist movement and its intersections with some of the most relevant architectural-urban theories of those years: from Aldo Rossi’s Architecture of the City to Archizoom’s No-stop City.

AE2 Pier Vittorio Aureli – Can Architecture be Political? (December 6, 2014)

The Architecture Exchange

Series #2: How is Architecture Political?

Mouffe on Architecture | Architecture on Mouffe

Talk #3: Pier Vittorio Aureli – Can Architecture be Political?

Dec 6, 2014 www.thearchitectureexchange.com

How architecture can be political? I will answer this question in two opposing ways. I believe that architecture cannot be political since historically the profession of the architect has been not only a practice dependent on consensus, but also an instrument of neutralization and depoliticization of the city. I also believe that architecture is always political even within the most modest job or tiny detail. By discussing case studies I will show how architecture has been both the embodiment of management and the possibility of disruption.

Pier Vittorio Aureli – Design Without Qualities: Architecture and the Rise of Abstraction – Part 6 (December 11, 2013)

Labour, City and Architecture: Cedric Price’s Pottery Thinkbelt and the Post-Fordist turn in Architecture

Design Without Qualities: Architecture and the Rise of Abstraction Series

Abstraction addresses the process of removal in order to reach the essential datum of things. In a design world increasingly dominated by organic and redundant forms, abstraction is likely to be one of the most unpopular concepts in the field of architectural theory. While it is a mistake to think abstraction opposes the complexities and contradictions of our world, we deny that it is the very outcome of larger historical and cultural forces.

Pier Vittorio Aureli will investigate the issue of abstraction and its relation to architectural form to propose a different interpretation of this historical phenomenon. Paraphrasing Marx, abstraction – in the form of categories such as geometry, measure, modularity and scale – was born out of ‘fire and blood’, and the historical evolution of abstract forms in architecture, such as the rise of modular design, the importance of the plan in architectural design, and the simplification of architectural form, has taken place amid political conflicts and economic turmoil. The seminar will attempt to read issues such as form and design in relation to the history of political economy, revisiting the work of numerous architects along the way, in order to uncover abstraction not as stylistic movement, but as the very essence of the modern project of architecture.

Pier Vittorio Aureli – Design Without Qualities: Architecture and the Rise of Abstraction – Part 5 (November 27, 2013)

Barbarians in the Metropolis: Georg Simmel, Otto Wagner and Ludwig Hilberseimer

Pier Vittorio Aureli – Design Without Qualities: Architecture and the Rise of Abstraction – Part 4 (November 20, 2013)

Architecture as Economy: Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand and the Standardisation of Design

Pier Vittorio Aureli – Design Without Qualities: Architecture and the Rise of Abstraction – Part 3 (November 13, 2013)

Architecture Without Quality: The Rise of Urban Decorum and Architecture as Financial Strategy

Lecture 3 of 6

Pier Vittorio Aureli – Design Without Qualities: Architecture and the Rise of Abstraction – Part 2 (October 30, 2013)

A Grammar for Architecture: Filippo Bunelleschi and the advent of Syntactic Architecture

Lecture 2 of 6

Pier Vittorio Aureli – Design Without Qualities: Architecture and the Rise of Abstraction – Part 1 (October 16, 2013)

A Brief History of Abstraction in Architecture: Design and the Administration of Life

‘Let us hope that from time to time the individual will give a little humanity to the masses, who one day will repay him with compound interest.’

Walter Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, 1933

Pier Vittorio Aureli. Lecture “Less is Enough” (September 3, 2013)

“Less is more” goes the modernist dictum. But is it? In an age when we are endlessly urged to do “more with less”, can we still romanticise the pretensions of minimalism? Aureli examines how the basic unit of the reclusive life – the monk’s cell – becomes the foundation of private property. And from there, he argues, it all starts to go wrong.

Pier Vittorio Aureli is an architect and theorist. He currently teaches at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, and is visiting professor at Yale University. He is the author of many essays and several books, including The Project of Autonomy (2008) and The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (2011).

The lecture took place at Strelka in 2013.

Pier Vittorio Aureli – Projects (March 7, 2013)

The lecture, coinciding with the exhibition currently in the AA Gallery, will present projects that illustrate Dogma’s main concerns. Since 2002 Dogma has focused almost exclusively on urban projects. If the modern city was shaped by streets and roads, the studio’s project seeks a new form of urbanism made of walls. If one were to summarise life in a city and life in a building in one gesture, it would have to be that of passing through walls. Every moment of existence is a continuous movement through space defined by walls.

Pier Vittorio Aureli is an architect and educator. He teaches at the Architectural Association in London. He is the author of The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (2011), The Project of Autonomy: Politics and Architecture Within and Against Architecture (2008, reprinted 2012) and many essays. Aureli is the co-founder of Dogma an architectural studio focused on the project of the city.

Pier Vittorio Aureli: Theory & ethos (January 23, 2013)

Pier Vittorio Aureli warns the audience that his lecture will be the first presentation of his introduction to an upcoming book on the history of the architectural project. He begins by defining architectural form as a representation of ethos, in the sense of character but also in the sense of shared habits and beliefs. The earliest concept of the architectural project–a mediation between the designer and the builder–can be seen in Vitruvius. Aureli describes the rebirth of European cities in the 10th-12th centuries in terms of their significance shifting from military to economic functions, and describes perspective, as developed by Alberti and Brunelleschi, as a technique of measuring and ordering space. Aureli identifies Sebastiano Serlio’s early 16th century book on domestic architecture as an illustration of the moment when the architectural plan became the central organizational device for buildings and the city, and see it applied in Paris at the Place des Vosges (1605) and Place Vendôme (1699), and the Nolli map of Rome (1748). Aureli points out how Pierre Patte’s late 18th century drawings of Paris employ the section view to reveal infrastructure services such as sewers. Aureli discusses Nicholas de La Mare, whose 1707 Traité de la Police extends the concept of controlling and organizing the city from construction to services. He goes on to discuss Ildefons Cerdà’s 1859 plan for the extension of Barcelona as the first plan based on data, designed to maximize circulation. Aureli notes that Corbusier’s 1923 Towards an Architecture was originally titled Architecture or Revolution. He describes Corbusier’s Dom-ino plan of a basic building unit as a single pixel in an urban screen. Aureli describes post-World War II Athens as “a lava flow” created by multiplication of a Dom-ino-like polykatoikia basic building type, which was encouraged by municipal building codes. In contemporary Athens Aureli sees a realization of Archizoom’s infrastructural grid, stripped of utopianism. Aureli concludes that design is not enough, and that it might be necessary for architects to abandon the idea of the project in order to engage the urban totality.

Pier Vittorio Aureli “The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture” (March 21, 2012)

Pier Vittorio Aureli presenting his book “The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture” followed by a discussion with Sven-Olov Wallenstein.

Pier Vittorio Aureli – AA PhD Open Seminar Series – Part 6 (November 27, 2012)

Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Aldo Rossi’s Architecture of the City

A series of six lunchtime seminars delivered by Pier Vittorio Aureli hosted by the AA PhD Programme. Open to all.

Ethos is a Greek word that can be roughly translated as ‘character’. Ethos addresses the ethical principles and guiding beliefs of a given society. It is possible to argue that every architectural theory – implicitly or explicitly – addresses the ethos of the historical time in which it is written in the form of architectural principles. Even if, traditionally, architectural theory mainly addresses practical issues – such as problems of construction, design, and ornament – it nevertheless casts a light on the peculiar subjectivity of the period in which is formulated.

Pier Vittorio Aureli – AA PhD Open Seminar Series – Part 5 (November 13, 2012)

Le Corbusier’s Towards an Architecture, Ludwig Hilberseimer’s Metropolis Architecture

AA PhD Open Seminar Series

Pier Vittorio Aureli – AA PhD Open Seminar Series – Part 4 (Noverber 6, 2012)

Claude Perrault’s Ordinance for the Five Kinds of Columns after the Method of the Ancients, Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand’s Précis of the Lectures on Architecture

AA PhD Open Seminar Series – A series of six lunchtime seminars delivered by Pier Vittorio Aureli hosted by the AA PhD Programme.

Pier Vittorio Aureli – AA PhD Open Seminar Series – Part 3 (October 23, 2012)

Sebastiano Serlio’s Seven books on Architecture, Jacopo Vignola’s Canon of the Five Orders of Architecture, Andrea Palladio’s Four books on Architecture

Pier Vittorio Aureli – AA PhD Open Seminar Series – Part 2 (October 16, 2012)

Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria

AA PhD Open Seminar Series – A series of six lunchtime seminars delivered by Pier Vittorio Aureli hosted by the AA PhD Programme.

This seminar argues that although theories of architecture address how to design and build as well as govern a city, all theories of architecture can be considered political theories, since their precepts address the way space is materially organised and constructed. Treatises and texts on architecture from Vitruvius to Alberti, Vignola to Perrault, and Durand to Venturi will be introduced throughout the course. The seminar aims to investigate how the considered texts can be used as projects for the city.

Pier Vittorio Aureli is an architect and educator. His research and projects focuses on the relationship between architectural form, political theory and urban history. Aureli teaches at the Architectural Association in London, and he is Davenport Visiting Professor at the School of Architecture at Yale University. He is the author of many essays and of The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (2011), The Project of Autonomy: Politics and Architecture Within and Against Architecture (2008). Aureli is co-founder of Dogma, an architectural studio based in Brussels that focuses on the project of the city.

Pier Vittorio Aureli – AA PhD Open Seminar Series – Part 1 (October 9, 2012)

Vitruvius’s On Architecture

AA PhD Open Seminar Series ‘Theory and Ethos: Towards a Common Architectural Language’ – A series of six lunchtime seminars delivered by Pier Vittorio Aureli hosted by the AA PhD Programme. Open to all.

Manifesto Marathon 2008: Pier Vittorio Aureli

Manifesto Marathon, the third in the Serpentine Gallery’s acclaimed series of Marathon events, took place in the closing weekend of the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2008, designed by Frank Gehry.

Pier Vittorio Aureli – After the Diagram (October 25, 2005)

‘Trying to visualise today’s practice of architecture and urbanism without the use of diagrams is an almost impossible exercise. Diagrams have incredible power to simultaneously construct, design, and expose an idea while at the same time, simplifying and idealising the complexity of the work into one simple sign. The diagram is “potential” but also “problematic” because it is constantly updating the representation of the work, and thus reducing it to an always-changing figure. The diagram, therefore, tends to be a very accessible consumption of events and things, a consumption of our experience of the world. My argument is that diagrams are not just a camouflage of reality or, as Witttgenstein would argue, a social constructed reality, but also (and especially) a form of nihilism.’

Pier Vittorio Aureli is currently working on a study on the representation of the city through architectural form, from Bramante to Koolhaas. Aureli coordinates the second year research program at the Berlage and teaches a Diploma HTS course at the AA entitled ‘Towards the Archipelago’, which considers a radical cognitive alternative to the present way of thinking the urban world.

Author: two

James S. Ackerman

Pier Vittorio Aureli

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