Repulsion and Nostalgia: Looking back on ‘The City as a Factory’
When, during the 1970s, the concept of autonomy in architecture started to acquire worldwide currency within architectural theory; it was as an exhortation to disciplinary moat-building, or as the framing for an apolitical ‘radicalism’ of formalist intricacy. This is the image which Pier Vittorio Aureli wants to move beyond. In The Project of Autonomy (2008) ‘beyond’ means before — into the early-to-mid sixties, before the defeats of post-1968 and the translation of the ‘project’ from Italy to America and the wider world (associated particularly with figures like Aldo Rossi and the journal Oppositions).
Placing the genesis of architectural ‘autonomy’ into the context of operaismo or ‘workerism’ during the decade previous makes a lot of later developments clearer . I must admit to always having been a bit hazy about the link between Rossi’s apparently Marxist politics and the anti-functionalist urban analysis of The Architecture of the City. His pondering on the tragic ‘interrupted destiny’ of the individual, the ceaseless confrontation between mute and wordless lumps of matter, and the relentless passage of time… a typical revolutionary program it is not.
In context, the significance of Rossi’s ‘discovery’ of mechanisms driving the evolution of the city which are outside of the prevalent economic and technological forces is clear. The importance of the urban artefact, locus, monument as agents acting on the city — has to understood not only within the new emphasis on political agency within operaism, but also in opposition to the then-current image of state-capitalist dystopian futurity — the City as a Factory. This image, appearing in projects by architects like Archizoom and Claudio Greppi, is a provocation derived from Mario Tronti’s concept of the new model of capitalism as Society as a Factory — a unified system in which every element of life is integrated into a cycle of production and consumption.
Among many other things, the book is a startling reminder of how long ago the sixties were, and how strangely different. The conditions of architecture and politics then, seem at times to be even more different to the present day than were the pre- or inter-war periods. Reading the Operaists’ prospectus on the capitalism of their day, the concerns articulated seem almost quaint. Raniero Panzieri’s denunciation of the ‘enlightened’ factory owner Adriano Olivetti, with his model community of workers and his coterie of liberal intellectuals — a ‘feudal court,’ a ‘masquerade’, a ‘vicious facade’ — leaves the sympathetic reader charmed by its misplaced concern. The overly nice, smugly paternalistic factory owner might not be such a bad problem to have in the era of Sports Direct, Uber, under the shadow of the ‘end of work’ and Exterminism.
Images of the projects are distorted by a different reversal. Claudio Greppi’s ‘territorial factory’ (1964–5) presents vast clusters of circular factory floor-plates, speared by a grid of expressways, and spreading geometric shadows across the plain between Florence and Prato. A unified megastructure of production and consumption in which the ‘true condition’ of the city is rhetorically ‘laid bare’, the intended ironic charge is now muddied by a subsequent historical one. In the fifty years since, the formal elements of high welfare state modern which he deploys — cantilevers, chamfers, grids, shades and textures of concrete — have become the fragments of a vague and aesthete Brutalism — in which are now sought (by some) the same ‘potential for resistance’ to Capital which Rossi et al were then looking for almost anywhere else. The repulsive object becomes disconcertingly tinged with a sort of guilty and incoherent nostalgia.
The abstract structure and orthography of Archizoom’s ‘No-Stop City’ (1968–70) place it in a different and less material category. Even so, the distance between their critical stance, and the techno-optimism of Superstudio or the British collective Archigram (in opposition to whom they named themselves) is telescoped by time and history. The limitless plans of uninhabited spaces, the deep sections with metro lines to everywhere, are perhaps as open to a perverse reading as images of mobility and freedom as they are to their original intention as symbols of total capitalist integration.
In the contemporary city, the architectural image of capitalist domination looks less like Production than Unproduction. Bubble development — think of the mushroom-like proliferation of empty investment apartments and unused luxury student halls — yield an image of the City-dystopic as a crystalline and static prison, gradually ossifying into pure, unusable and inaccessible surplus. The system’s drive towards integration (a motif of Operaist writing) is replaced by displacement. At least the sixties factory-megastructure devouring the plain evinces a certain capacity for action.
