#operasimo

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Archizoom, No-Stop City, 1968-70 (images from the book Project of Autonomy) “The idea of an inexpressive, catatonic architecture, the outcome of the expansive forms of logic of the system and its class antagonisms, was the only modern architecture of interest to us: a liberating architecture, corresponding to mass democracy, devoid of demos and of cratos (of people and of power), and both centerless and imageless. A society freed from the rhetorical forms of humanitarian socialism and rhetorical progressivism: an architecture that gazed fearlessly at the logic of gray, unaesthetic, and de-dramatized industrialism… The colorful visions of Pop architecture were replaced by Ludwig Hilberseimer’s pitiless urban images, those of city without qualities designed for people with out preordained qualities─free, therefore, to express in an autonomous way their own creative, political, and behavioral energies. The greatest possible freedom occurred where integration was strongest…. Alienation was a new artistic condition.

－Andrea Branzi, post script, in No-Stop City, Archizoom Associati, pp148-49

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“The more capitalist development advances, which means the more the production of relative surplus extends itself, the more the capitalist cycle of production-distribution-consumption becomes one. At this point the relationship between bourgeois production and capitalist production between society and the factory, and between society and the state, is organic. At the highest point of capitalist development, social production becomes a moment of the process of production which means that all of society lives within the factory, and the factory extends its dominion over the whole of society.”

— Mario Tronti, “La fabbrica e la Società,” originally published in Quaderni rossi 2 (1962), pp. 1-31)

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“The modern city is born out of capitalism and develops within its logic: capital dictates to the city its general ideology, and this in turn conditions its development and configuration. This general ideology consists of the policy of the “balance of opposites,” pursued in relation to economic demands and “produced del facto” in relation to the plan of urban operation…. What is vital to say first and foremost is that the working-class metropolis does not exist. The birth of the modern capitalist city does not make it possible for the city actually to enjoy autonomous political growth (something possible for the working class itself), but merely to acquire features which, once ideological mystification have been left behind, permit a scientific development of the debate. What is thus involved is a theory and not an alternative proposition. Just as there is no class-based political economy, so there can only be a class critique of urbanism. To carry forward this endeavor, we have used a classic written language along with a graphic language that is more specific to our discipline.”

— Archizoom, “Città, Catena di Montaggio del Sociale. Ideologia e Teoria della Metropoli,” in Branzi, Non-Stop City, Archizoom Associati, pp. 156-57. Originally published in Casabella 350-51 (1970), pp.22-34

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Claudio Greppi, diploma project for a territorial factory near Prato, Italy, 1964-65. General plan and typical plan of one unit. A militant member of Mario Tronti’s group Classe Operaia and later Potere Operaio (Worker’ Power), Greppi assimilated Frederick Engels’ thesis that there is no such a thing as a working-class city, only a working-class critique of the existing city, and took up Tronti’s hypothesis of society as a factory. His Diplomat project radicalized the expansion of the production-consumption network by proposing the factory itself as the “real” form of the contemporary city. Also inspired by Louis Kahn ‘s architecture and Kenzo Tange’s 1960 plan for Tokyo, Greppi’s project reduced the city to its vertical and horizontal infrastructure. Unlike its references, the project had no progressivist or humanistic aspiration, only that of making visible the urban conditions imposed by capitalism. It would be a crucial inspiration for Archizoom’s No-Stop City.

— Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Project of Autonomy (2008))

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“… If bourgeois power in the city was shaped by exceptions and singularities rather than systems and programs, these same exceptions and singularities could potentially become forms representing the autonomous power of the workers. But such an approach required an entirely different reading of the city. It required an understanding if the city as a place of political formation─of contingencies, actions, and exceptions─rather than as a place based on abstract mechanisms of planning and development. It is within this perspective that Aldo Rossi’s conception of an autonomous architecture firmly based on the idea of the singularity of the locus rather than on the science of planning came close to the Operaist’ conclusion─paradoxically enough, much closer than did Tafuri’s critique of ideology.”

— Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Project of Automomy (2008), p.53

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“Capitalism identifies in its own way the unity between the process of producing goods and the process of producing value: the more it creates this unity, the more it develops, and the more it develops, the more the forms of capitalist production invade every sphere of society and proliferate within the whole network of social relations.”

— Mario Tronti, “La fabbrica e la Società,” originally published in Quaderni rossi 2 (1962), pp. 1-31)