Architecture and Abstraction: Discussion with Pier Vittorio Aureli

February 20, 2025
Architecture and Abstraction
Discussion between Pier Vittorio Aureli and Jana Ndiaye Berankova
7 p.m.
Reid Hall | 4, rue de Chevreuse, 75006 Paris
Free and open to the public

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 (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.

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