Pier Vittorio Aureli

Klaus Platzgummer met Pier Vittorio Aureli to discuss the contemporary condition in the production of architecture. Aurelis writings are often related to political and economic theories and conditions. One mode of life and its relation to architecture Pier Vittorio Aureli recently addressed in his writings is "Asceticism", a possible counter term for "Lust". What is the relevance of "Asceticism" and "Lust" in our contemporary architectural production?

The City in the City. Berlin: A Green Archipelago manages population reduction through nodal limits while Peter Smithson’s Hauptstadt Berlin Competition entry encourages growth through a network. This paper compares and unpacks these nodal and network concepts in five different areas, including 1. Form; 2. Greek and Roman concepts; 3. Accommodating the individual and the collective; 4. Impact
on urbanism; and, 5. Arendt’s pluralism

Seminar held for the Department of Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics, TU Wien, Summer Semester 2019.

From the early Greek myth of Atlantis and Plato’s theory of the Republic, to the Christian image of the ‘Heavenly Jerusalem’, until the properly ‘utopian’ projects of the Renaissance, European thought has never really been contempt with (and within) the limits of an immanent ground, but always projected itself beyond any here-and-now.
Yet, with the arise of nihilism and after the “death of God” (Nietzsche), not only the place, but also the time in which such a transcendent projection might find its realisation seemed to disappear from the horizon of thought, casting it to the domain of the ‘untimely’, or ‘u-chronic’—something which can never possibly be realised.
What implications does such a history have for Europe today? How can architecture—as the techne more than any other able to ‘project’, to ‘cast a form in advance’—help in the understanding of the problem (by nevertheless going beyond mere planning)? In other words: can we conceive of Europe as  project?
In order to avoid reducing Europe to a mere geo-political issue, and therefore trying to go beyond any ‘positive’ affirmation of it , the course will address the complex ‘nature’ of such continent through the eye of contemporary philosophy and architecture theory, with a particular regard to the work of Massimo Cacciari.
Such a perspective will be enriched by outlooks on a kaleidoscope of different concerns: the quest over the ‘origin’ of Europe in mythography (Calasso); the understanding of politics as the ‘in-between’ (Arendt); the relationship between economy (as money) and truth (Hénaff), or money and ‘good’ (Coccia); the ‘exodic’ perspective of transcendence (Corbin); and of course the role of architecture, both in the historical importance of utopia for European urban planning (Klein), as well as in the understanding of the City as a ‘project’ (Aureli).

Seminar at Master of projectual investigation, POIESIS Center, Facultad de Arquitectura, Diseño y Urbanismo de la Universidad de Buenos Aires, 18 and 25 October, 14 November 2019.
Transcription Delfina Ameijeiras
Edition Santiago Miret, Roberto Lombardi.