Pier Vittorio Aureli

A project is a
lifelong thing; if
you see it, you will
only see it at the end
PETER EISENMAN: What do you think the state of pedagogy-
is today in terms of the schools that you participate in and how
they relate to other schools?

PIER VITTORIO AURELI: First of all, pedagogy, for me, is

a very important issue because educating students has been
the main part of my work in architecture. And I've been do-
ing that over the last 15 years, during one of the major trans-
formations of education in Europe. This is the shift from the
idea of education as a kind of free knowledge or disinterested
knowledge, which is the way I was educated, to a model that
is very much directed toward the professionalization of archi-
tecture, making architecture a practice, something that you
can apply.

PE: Rather than a discipline. The disinterested view was the

disciplinary view.

PVA: Yes. Or knowledge as such, with no immediate profes-

sional application. For example, when I was a student, we
would spend a lot of time reading art history or philosophy,
and the teachers were never concerned to justify this, although
it wasn't needed for the demands of the market.

PE: There were no market demands that influenced the

curriculum.

PVA: Absolutely not. But I became a teacher the moment the

situation dramatically changed.

PE: Why did it change? And this is Europe we're talking

about, not America?

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PYA: Yes. It changed because in the late '90s
there was a major restructuring of the uni-
versity system in Europe. The main event of
this transformation was the approval of the
Bologna Declaration, which was a treaty
that made all the universities of Europe
comparable, or basically running the same
system. One of the principles of the declara-
tion was that knowledge was not only consid-
ered simply the formation of the good citizen,
but also the formation of an entrepreneurial Aldo Rossi (center) and Carlo Aymonino (right), 1904.

subject. So knowledge was considered within

an economic purview.
PE: I want to go back to before the Bologna
Declaration, to when you were educated, and
even the generation before you. First of all, the
idea was that architecture was taught as a way
of educating - not to learn about architecture,
but as a means to understand society. So when
you had 7,000 students at the University of
Yenice, they were not all going to be architects,
but they were using architecture, as previous
generations used the law, as a way of under-
standing society.
PVA: Yes, especially with the extreme politi -
calization of the university. This idea of
knowledge as something autonomous from
the profession became very important. Think
of Tafuri's research, which had nothing to do
with the operativity of architecture as a pro-
fession. When I was a student in Venice, we
considered his lectures to be the most impor-
tant, the core of our education. Today that
is unthinkable. History and theory are now
a kind of secondary appendix to the design
courses. I think this model has been forcefully
pushed into education in the last 15 years.

PVA: Yes, the humanities were a fundamental
component of the education of an architect.
PE: But they weren't educating architects, they
were educating people through architecture.
Then came *68.
PYA: No, on the contrary. What you're saying
was the outcome of '68.
PE: What was before '68? [Ludovico] Quaroni curriculum and embrace the forces of the
and these people, what was that?
PE: By the Bologna Declaration?
PVA: Bologna is one example. I started
teaching at the Berlage Institute, which
actually was one of the first places in
Europe to develop postprofessional pro-
grams in architecture. When Alejandro
[Zaera-Polo] became the dean, there was
an especially large emphasis that archi-
tecture should go beyond its humanities
market. I remember I had this discussion

with Alejandro and he told me, "I'm not

PVA: Quaroni and these people were the interested in politics, I'm only interested
"avant-garde" of what came after '68. He in the market." And that was exactly what
anticipated the pedagogy of people like [Aldo] was happening at that point. In a way, my
Rossi, [Carlo] Aymonino, [Manfredo] Tafuri. work was also a reaction to that condition.

Pedagogy became a project for me. I real-

PE: Anticipated, but it was different after '68. ized that I could not rely anymore on what

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was given to me as a context. I would have when Jeff Kipnis and Alejandro were teach-
to rethink my own context. ing there in the early '90s. Of course this has
collapsed in the last three or four years, in
PE: So you're saying that there was an enor- the sense that students have started to revolt

mous change between when you started to
learn and when you started to teach.
PVA: Absolutely, yes. Don't forget that I stud-
ied in Venice.
PE: Yes, at the end of Tafuri.
against this kind of theocracy of the digital.
PE: To replace it with what?
PVA: That's the thing. There is not yet a new
paradigm, so this is a situation where there
are many voices and many directions.

PVA: That was really the end of the Venice
school, and immediately after I went to the
Berlage Institute, at a time when Holland was
the new paradigm for archi tecture. That sort
of passage, which in my case happened in a
very short time - between the '90s and early
2000s - gave me a lot to reflect upon. It made
me not take the idea of pedagogy for granted,
but to use pedagogy instead as a project.
PE: I don't want to get into project yet, be-
cause I want to stay with pedagogy. Let's go
from Italy and the Berlage to London. Is the
AA [Architectural Association] today a mar-
ket-driven school?
PVA: No. I think that the AA is an interest-
ing situation right now. What makes the place even in the '50s, but the movement itself in
very interesting and exciting for me is the
Design Research Laboratory model, which
has influenced the AA for the last 15 years.
PE: Which model is that?
PE: Do you think we're in the postdigital?
PVA: I think that we are certainly in a mo-
ment of disillusionment with the way the
digital was formulated in the '90s and the
whole group of architects that was associated
with the movement. Don't forget what Mario
Carpo has written lately about the digital. He
was very negative. Yet Mario was one of the
first historians of architecture to recognize the
importance of the digital. I think the digital is
very important. That's the paradox. The digi-
tal might even be more important now than
it was 15 years ago. But it's like surrealism in
the 1930s. Surrealism was very important in
the 1920s. And the topics that surrealism an-
ticipates were also important in the '40s and
the 1930s becomes completely unproductive. I
think the digital now has the same problem.
PE: Let's jump to the ETH. What is the situa-
tion like there? Is it market-driven?

PVA: The DRL is Patrik [Schumacher] 's PVA: Yes and no. You shouldn't forget that
program, the program that Patrik and Brett Switzerland still has a very strong welfare
[Steele] established in the '90s. This was a system. This protects its institutions from too-
very influential program that became one of strong pressure from the market, so the ETH
the major trademarks of the AA in the mid still has a very solid program of architecture.
'90s. This was very important. Don't forget There are very important and good architects
that the AA was the first school to embrace teaching architecture: Peter Märkli, Adam
parametric design, the first school to experi- Caruso, Hans KollhofF. These people are re-
ment with the computer, even from the time ally into architecture. Of course, it's an idea of

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architecture that is very much driven by prac-
tice, by building, by craftsmanship, but they
have a kind of project, which, in spite of the
talent of these architects, may run the risk of
falling into the myth of craft that is very popu-
lar today. Switzerland has always had one of
the greatest traditions of making architecture
as a craft, whether you like it or not.
PE: Are you referring to Peter Zumthor? Or
do you mean Diener & Diener?
PVA: Zumthor, yes. Diener & Diener, exactly.
PE: You're describing several other proj-
ects outside of the Italian orbit. But if we go
back to the ' 60s and '70s, there was only one
Tendenza, one leftist sociopolitical ideology
that animated Italy. It animated Controspazio ,
it animated Casabella in a certain way. Italy
was the strongest place for the postwar Left
in terms of the project of architecture. How is
it that this has disappeared?
PVA: Well, first of all, what helped a lot of
movements, like Tendenza, was the presence
of very strong political movements and po-
litical institutions like the Italian Communist
Party. Of course, the relationship was not di-
rect, but the fact that these people knew that
there was such a political . . .
PE: [Paolo] Portoghesi was never part of the
Communist Party.
PVA: No, but he was not part of the Tendenza.
PE: Yes he was, he promoted Controspazio.
PVA: Many of the people writing in Controspazio,
many of the people following Rossi, had an
intellectual connection with the culture of the
Left in Italy, being in the students' movement,
like in the case of Massimo Scolari, or in the
Communist Party, like in the case of Carlo
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Aymonino. Now, the thing is, after the '80s,
the culture of the Left collapsed. But what
emerged, which was to me a very important
tradition of thinking, was a series of political
movements: the post-1989, extra-parliamentary
political movements, of which a very important
one in Italy in the '90s was post-operaismo. My
work has been, to a certain extent, influenced
by this movement. Today, Anglo-Saxon uni-
versities call it, in a rather problematic way,
Italian theory - thinkers such as [Paolo] Virno,
[Christian] Marazzi, [Sandro] Mezzadra, fields
of study that go from class struggle to biopolitics.
PE: Yes, but you don't see its vibrations so
much in architecture.
PVA: No. In fact, it's starting now.
PE: Okay. But in terms of the schools, there's
no school . . .
PVA: But that's no longer the site for the devel-
opment of these things. Italian academia, for
example, had completely marginalized this
tradition of thought. I remember that professors
at the IUAV would consider Toni Negri a ter-
rorist. The funny thing about this movement
is that it has been mostly developed by people
working in the margins of the Italian univer-
sity - [Giorgio] Agamben never got tenure
from any university in Italy, Virno only very
recently. It's mostly developed by people living
outside of Italy, like in my case, for example.
PE: You're a strange case.
PVA: No, I'm not a strange case, actually.
PE: You're not developing Italian theory.
PVA: I did not invent the term myself, but it
refers conventionally to this tradition of thought,
which for me has now become much more rele-
vant than the legacy of French poststructuralism.
Log 28
PE: In what ways is it more important? Post-
structuralism was very important at one time.

PVA: Yes, but poststructuralism exhausted

itself by obsessively focusing on language
as the house of being, while language is not
just the house of being but is a productive
tool through which capital reproduces itself.
Thinkers like Virno and Marazzi have been

able to link the issues of language with politi-

cal economy. French poststructuralism, with
the exception of Foucault and Deleuze, has
rarely been able to address political economy
and class composition.

PE: Before we shift to project, I have one

more question. How does the pedagogical
structure of schools in the US, particularly
the East Coast graduate schools, affect your Colin Rowe at Cornell University, Ithaca,
view of the situation today? New York, c. 1967. Photo: Anthony Eardley.

PVA: It's new territory for me, but my feeling[Sigfried] Giedion or [Nikolaus] Pevsner. But
is that there is a huge pressure, which I find the historical project of Tafuri is also operative,
sometimes a bit unproductive, as a result of because there is a purpose, there is a project.
the very high degree of scholarship that exists
in these schools. In other words, research in PE: So compare this kind of thinking to the US.
these schools is too academic, in the sense that
it is very much administered through PhD PVA: In the US it's so compartmentalized.
scholars or peer-reviewed journals. I refuse You can hardly find this kind of synthetic
to write for peer-reviewed journals. I think possibility to really construct a project that
it makes students and architects incapable of would bring issues from history, from archi-
using history as a tool to invent a culture for tecture, from design, from political theory.
architecture. Think of the monographs and What you see more and more in schools of
research and all kinds of minutiae that the architecture is a complete separation between
army of scholars and PhDs produces every year. scholars and historians on the one hand and
They prevent the possibility of figures like designers on the other.
Colin Rowe to use history as an operative tool.
PE: But that is also a positive thing, because
A figure like Colin Rowe could not exist today.
if you look at the energy of young criticism,
PE: But Tafuri was against history as an op- whether it be Mark Wigley or Bob Somol or
erative tool. Jeff Kipnis . . .

PVA: Tafuri' s critique of operative criticism PVA: I don't know their work very well. For
was very particularly against the kind of re- me, the kind of figure that I would say is
formist attitude of the historical projects of missing today is precisely a figure like Colin

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Portrait of Manfredo Tafuri, c. 1960s.
Rowe. Colin Rowe, for me, is the best product
of American schools, because Colin Rowe was
neither a practicing architect nor a profes-
sional historian. He really had an in-between
position, which more and more I see as inspi-
ration for what I'm doing.
PE: Rowe is from the past.
PYA: Yes, that's what I'm saying. Colin Rowe
was very knowledgeable about architecture,
about examples of architecture, about the his-
tory of architecture, and history in general,
and yet he never actually relied on erudition as
a kind of scholarly knowledge. He always used
that erudition as a kind of operative pedagogy.
PE: Yes. But he was also very dangerous in
terms of where he went.
PVA: Any project always has its shortcomings.
Actually, the weakness of many projects is that
in the end they are so ductile to the wishes of
many people. The real project is the one that
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in the end will never arrive at the conclusion
you want. And I think that Colin Rowe was
able to produce a very strong pedagogical
project that had the strength of not being
cluttered within the folders through which
American academia is administrated.
PE: Would you say that the différence between
Rowe and Tafuri is precisely American and
European?
PYA: Well, I think the Tafuri project was heavily
influenced by the politics of his time, which
were not the same politics that influenced
Colin Rowe. In a way, Tafuri used history not
as a form of pedagogy, but as a radical form of
criticism to dismantle the illusion that there is
something progressive in architecture.
PE: Okay, let's go to project now. I would ar-
gue that the condition of the idea of "project"
seems to be weaker at this moment than, say,
40 or 50 years ago. If that's true, why is it so?
Would you say it's because of the instrumen-
talization of pedagogy?
PVA: Yes, that is one aspect. The second aspect
is that a project is necessarily a lifelong under-
taking, and today, with the speed at which
information is produced and with the state of
permanent destruction in which we are forced
to live and produce, a lifelong project, which
requires years and years of accumulation of
things, is completely impossible. How can
you put forth a project when there are people
destroying other people with just 140 letters,
tweeting. That's actually the scale through
which information is produced today, and of
course a project is something that requires a
lot of time. The institutions that produce
knowledge today don't grant us this time.
PE: So you think it's a societal condition
charged by constantly renewing media that
makes the possibility of the project problematic?
Log 28
PVA: Yes, but first we have to understand
something that for me is crucial as a precon-
dition to discussing the role of media in the
formation, or destruction, of the project: me-
dia is not an instrument of capital, media is
capital itself. And, of course, today this form
of mastery in a way is so distributed and so
fragmented, its totalities made by this kind of
leviathan of which you cannot see any begin-
ning or any end€ This basically prevents any
possibility of seizing a form or a spot that can
be the point of entry of a project, because to
start a project you need a kind of moment,
that kind of moment in which you find the
form or something through which you can
evolve a project.
PE: But does it also depend upon something
outside of this idea of capital, upon the pos-
sible epistemic or paradigmatic appearance
of something like the modern? There was
Marxism, there was Freudianism, there
were any number of isms that accrue to
the late 19th century.
PVA: There is one of these epistemic frame-
works. It has been given the rather clumsy
name of post-Fordism.
PE: Do you think architecture has responded
to that?
PVA: Of course, and from the very beginning.
Architecture even anticipated post-Fordism.
Think of projects like Cedric Price's Potteries
Thinkbelt.
PE: Yes, but that was 50 years ago. I'm talking which is the idea of the groundless condition
about today. There seems to be a problem, be- of any political decision, the fact that there is
cause whatever seems to be in the conscious-
ness is not post-Fordism.
PVA: But the work of Rem [Koolhaas], for
example, is one of the most outstanding
symptoms of post-Fordism.
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PE: One.
PVA: Yes, one. But the influence of his work
is immense. An entire generation has been
influenced by his work.
PE: But there aren't many projects afoot. I
mean, there are no Italian, no Japanese, no
German. I'm talking about the places where
these usually incubate.
PVA: I don't believe that you can taxonomize
the emergence of projects through categories
such as Italy or Japan. I think it's more a matter
of communities and groups of people. Even
schools are unable to formulate a project, be-
cause schools are too big, there are too many
students, too many teachers. It's more a matter
of community, people who talk to each other.
At least that is my experience. What has been
important so far is to always be in those small
communities of people with whom I can have a
real discussion, not an occasional exchange in a
symposium or conference. This is actually the
scale at which a project can be formulated today.
PE: This is where you and I go down different
roads. If we're talking about Italian theory,
I would argue one of the underpinnings of
Italian theory is [Gianni] Vattimo's work on
weak thought.
PVA: In Italy in the '80s, weak thought was
just an alibi for accepting the status quo,
which was the collapse of ideologies like so-
cialism or communism. But there is some-
thing that for me has been very important,
no intelligible finite ground for the ultimate
unfolding of politics.
PE: That's why there's no paradigmatic mo-
ment. If there's no ground, there's no mo-
ment. There's no time. If there's no place,
Log 28
there's no time for a project. It seems to me,
for example, that the digital promised some-
thing that it hasn't produced.
PYA: Yes, because it was immediately exhausted
by the naivety of literally translating the digi-
tal into a style. What I am referring to, first of
all, is not immediately about architecture; it
is more about the fact that at certain moments
in the history of thought and the history of
philosophy there has been recognition that
there is no ultimate institution - the state or
anything else - that can ground the ultimate
political decision. This is different from the
groundless condition you are describing now,
where people are unable to define positions.
PE: Define project.
PVA: A project is the act of putting forward
something according to which things can be
organized. Such an act is ultimately ground-
less. One of the biggest problems today is that
many things that are understood as projects
are simply a matter of style.
PE: Yes, but do you think it's possible to have
a project or to evolve a project in today's . . .
PVA: I think it's possible, but you really have to
be, as [Walter] Benjamin put it, a commander
of the field, meaning you really have to un-
derstand where you are. And if you just jump
on your style in your genius, in your creativity,
you will be the first victim of the impossibil-
ity of defining any project. To make a project
you have to renounce your genius and your
authorship to become what Benjamin called a
producer, a commander of the field. Most ar-
chitects rely on intuition, on their own genius,
and after a while this becomes a dead end.
PE: But let's take someone like Alejandro
Zaera-Polo or Greg Lynn and the generation
of the '90s digital architects.
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PVA: They had a project, which was to develop
an architecture that was fine-tuned with certain
paradigmatic conditions of the 1990s, such as the
impact of digital technology, a new economy,
etc., but I don't see an evolution of that project.
PE: Or you don't like the evolution of that
project.
PVA: That's the paradox of a generation
that based its discourse on change and inno-
vation. Now, instead of attacking with their
project, it seems to me they are defending
their project. They are realizing that you
can't evolve something that was, from the
beginning, about newness and innovation.
When it gets old, it's no longer new and novel.
PE: But to embrace the digital was always
about the new and the novel.
PVA: Yes, and now, after 20 years, it's becom-
ing pathetic. That's the problem of relying on
novelty and innovation: it becomes old, but it
is unable to become old. The 1990s generation
suffers from Peter Pan Syndrome.
PE: Let's go back. If a student in a design studio
is given a program, a project, a potential proj-
ect, what is a student to do? Fifty years ago,
we had precedent in Le Corbusier and Mies
van der Rohe, many different precedents that
one could look at and animate and transform.
It seems to me there are no precedents that
animate students' work today, neither histori-
cal nor modern nor postmodern precedents. It
seems to me they don't know what to do, they
honestly don't know why they put marks on
paper. They're trying to do clever things, but
they have no basis for understanding. How
did we get into this situation? It has not al-
ways been this way.
PYA: First of all, there are far more architects
and students of architecture than there have
Log 28
been in the past. You have to deal with this
kind of mass. Quantity matters.
PE: But you can get quality out of quantity.
PVA: Yes, exactly. What I try to do is increase
as much as I can the literacy of the students.
That's why I constantly show them references.
I teach courses on architectural history, not to
give them a tradition but to give them a sort of
edge against which they can invent something
that is meaningfiil and not just another brick
in the wall.
PE: But it seems to me the students are less
and less receptive to this kind of teaching.
media, branding, etc. Now media has become
so pervasive that what clients first say is, "Will
this project be in the New York Times ?" That's
what they're interested in, and they hire ar-
chitects who are able to be mediated. They are
willing to spend anything as long as it's poten-
tially mediated. That was not always the case.
PVA: As I said, media is what organizes every-
thing. In the culture of clients today, what is
fundamental for anything to be administered
successfixlly is consensus. Let's not forget that
behind any project today there is an enormous
financial operation, and in order for that op-
eration to attract investment, it has to attract
consensus. The extreme media culture of ar-

chitecture is a kind of machinery to create con-

PVA: Not in my case. The students I've had so
far, both at the Berlage and at the AA, have been
very good. I've been influenced by them,
which is why I've been so invested in teaching.
PE: This is a very elusive thing. They can read
very carefully your book The Possibility of an
Absolute Architecture , and then they sit down
with a piece of paper and draw the most in-
credibly god-awful things you can imagine.
They don't seem to process what they readģ
PVA: There are limits. You have to teach them
sensus and possibility for investment, for these
financial operations. And architects, of course,
are the first victims of this process, because
they are literally the image of this investment.
What is funny is that it is not the building that
is the image, but the architects themselves.
PE: The Venice Biennale last year was called
"Common Ground," but the way it's been
represented in magazines like Mark , for ex-
ample, is with photos of Norman Foster,
Steven Holl, even me, not the projects.

how to formulate an argument, you have to PVA: Yes, because everything is driven by con-
teach them how to think conceptually. That sensus. Of course, institutions like the Biennale,
takes time. But that's my job in the end. And Documenta, or Manifesta want to have the
students are eager to learn. I don't know whatcutting-edge artists, but in the end the medi-
my experience will be at Yale, but at the AA ocrity that you see emerging stems from the
and the Berlage, that has been very much the fact that whoever is behind them has to make
case. I have to say, students' responses have everyone happy, and that will never produce
always been very interesting for me; they anything. Can you imagine Baudelaire writing
have helped me refine my own project. a poem thinking that everybody would like it?

PE: In the 1920s and 'JOs - and even in the '50s,PE: No. So why is that attitude so pervasive?
whether we like that architecture or not -

clients were willing to take risks. Even though PVA: This is what Debord in 1967 called the
they may have been inspired by capital, they "Society of the Spectacle." Spectacle is not lit-
were willing to do things unencumbered by erally the spectacle; it's this kind of pervasive

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Individuals associated with the Tendenza standing in front of a mural by Arduino Cantafora during opening

of the Fifteenth Triennale of Milan, 197?.

managerial condition in which everything is fracturing, I don't see an architectural para-

has to fit into this culture of consensus. It's digm emerging from that fracturing.
exactly why Benjamin wrote on Baudelaire.
Because Baudelaire found himself in Paris PYA: First of all, I don't think you can see some-
during the reign of Napoleon III, which was thing like that emerging. You can only see that
really a moment of cultural immobility and afterward. I think shows like "Deconstructivist
enormous consensus. Haussmann had trans- Architecture" at MoMA are sometimes prema-
formed Paris. Benjamin analyzed the form ture, because you can't see a paradigm emerg-
and the aesthetics of Baudelaire's poetry, ing. The paradigm can only be described within
which were from within, and the humble- the perspective of an angelus novus, with our
backs to the future.
ness of his work as a fundamental critique of
that condition. That's why I think today you
can't just look at schools and institutions. You
PE: Lyotard's "Les Immatériaux" at the Centre
have to look at works and projects that have Pompidou in 1985 was a prophetic show.
the potential to break through. The problem
with the people you have been mentioning, PYA: Yes, but you can only say that afterward,
with all my respect for these architects, and not at the moment. Think of the Biennale that
whose talents I recognize, is that the level of Portoghesi directed: today there is a consensus
fetishization of this kind of architecture is that it was very important.
so huge that it makes it completely useless as
material for a project. PE: It was. It signaled the end of something.
The last Biennale that was of any value to me
PE: It isn't a project. But what I'm saying was Rossi's Biennale, which was very differ-
is that the social situation today - in Italy, in ent. And the first one, [Vittorio] Gregotti's
Biennale, was nothing like Portoghesi's. There
France, in Spain, in Portugal, in Greece, in the
US - seems to suggest that we cannot continuewere ideological clashes between Tafuri and
to support the social promise of late capital in [Aldo] Van Eyck and people who were clearly
the 21st century. It doesn't seem to be working.of different tendencies. We couldn't have

that today.
So if that's the case, if this hegemonic consensus

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PVA: We're talking about something else. You're
asking a very specific question. You're saying
within our own condition today, you don't see
any possibility for putting forward a project.
PE: I said there are fewer possibilities for do-
ing so. There are only a few manifestations of
a project.
PYA: But my answer is that, on the contrary,
there are many possibilities for a project, but
you have to know this condition very well. I
don't think you will find answers in the ar-
chitects you are mentioning.
PE: I agree. But I don't see the same possi-
bility today of being able to do the kinds of
things we did in the '70s.
PVA: I disagree. I completely disagree.
PE: So you don't think there's any difference?
PVA: No, there are enormous differences.
Everything is different. But still, there are
spaces. First of all, there is one thing that is
very important that I learned for myself: if
you want to develop something that is more
enduring than a conference or a biennale,
you need time and you need to be away from
any pressure. I have learned that you have to
cultivate a community of people with whom
you can really talk. If you have that, you have
enormous potential for a project.
PE: I don't disagree with you. I would argue
it slightly differently.
PVA: The Institute [for Architecture and
Urban Studies] was possible because you
found a community of people who were will-
ing to be there.
PE: There were cracks in society. We existed
in the cracks.
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PVA: That is exactly the issue today. These
cracks also exist today, and you don't have to
expect anything to bloom immediately. That's
why, for me, phenomena like biennales are by
definition incapable of producing anything
relevant. Today, when you go to a confer-
ence, there are 200,000 people, everything is
broadcast. This is the culture of architecture
in the 21st century. These things don't pro-
duce anything relevant. "Tendenza," the ex-
hibition by Rossi at the Triennale, was a very
small show with a small number of people,
most of them unknown.
That's what has changed. Today there is
a culture of consensus that is much stronger
than in the past. If you do something wrong,
it's broadcast to the entire world within five
minutes. This makes things more difficult.
What is really funny about this culture of
consensus is that now it has almost biblical
overtones. For example, if you have Twitter
and you have followers, you have to become
my follower. There is this kind of transcen-
dental impetus toward consensus - likes, fol-
lowers - and if you put yourself in that kind
of context you will not produce anything. You
will be completely destroyed by this pressure.
You have to put yourself not in the margins
but in a situation that allows you to not be
completely destroyed by this condition.
PE: The difference today is that architecture
has changed from being in the margins to be-
ing productive. In the university, you can't
just have a research program.
PVA: You have to invent something else.
Like I said earlier, it's not something you
can see emerging. It's dangerous to catego-
rize it while it's emerging. It's good for it
not to get an identity. Identity kills things.
Naming things, taxonomizing them, is like
killing them. For example, a good friend of
mine, who is Chinese, told me that during
the Tiananmen Square protests, at a certain
Log 28
point students started to raise banners that eschatological and progressive view of history:
were completely blank. The police went history as a sequence of well-defined "para-
crazy because they couldn't understand digms" that lead us toward progress. So we
what they were. have classicism, then modernism, then post-
modernism, then the digital, and so on, and
PE: When we were doing these things in the the task of the avant-garde is to discover and
' 60s and '70s, we were not conscious. The fact announce the new paradigm. I think a lot of
that you are saying that we have to be con- people are still trapped in this very modernist,
scious of being unconscious shows that this 20th-century expectation. I've always rejected
is a different time. We didn't have to speak it. this idea of history. I don't believe that history
You're speaking it. is something you can reconstruct as a set of
well-defined paradigms in a linear sequence.
PVA: At that time, you had a position to put History is far from being linear or containable
forward, and whether this would become suc- within paradigms. Its course is far more un-
cessftil didn't matter. What mattered was that predictable, and a disruption can happen at any
you had something to say. Now you are say- moment and come to us like a thief at night.
ing the opposite thing. You are looking for the This understanding of history may force you
importance, for the paradigm, and you're not to re-evaluate something that we may consider
focusing on what is actually being said. completely obsolete and de-evaluate ideas or
concepts that until yesterday were considered
PE: I'm saying that because of the times. I can very advanced. For example, I've always found
no longer be naive about speaking. Mediation it interesting that Marshal McLuhan - some-
does not allow me to be naive. one who many would consider one of the most
progressive media theorists - was profoundly
PVA: I think you should also acknowledge that inspired by Scholasticism. His view of the
the same kind of unpredictability through contemporary world was informed by his
which a project like yours emerged is possible medieval sensibility.
today too. If from the beginning you want a
project to become the next big thing, which is PE: I believe you do have a project.
a completely commercial understanding of how
paradigms and epistemes work, then you kill it. PVA: A project is a lifelong thing; if you see
it, you will see it only at the end.
PE: I'm not saying that.
PE: In heaven.

PVA: But you are questioning all the time:

what is the new paradigm, what is the next
project? The moment you think in these
terms, it's impossible.
PE: I'm saying we knew what the new para-
digm was when we were working.
PVA: In heaven. Or maybe others will see it. In
the meantime you have to be the commander
of the field. Like a military strategist, you have
to constantly research the field where you are
operating. You cannot be naive about that.

PVA: I think we have a very different under- Pier Vittorio Aureli is an architect and educator.
standing of history. Your interest in the He is the cofounder of Dogma and teaches at the
Architectural Association in London.
current or next paradigm belongs to a very

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