Cultura libertății politice și arhitectura limitei« ... afirmația lui Tocqueville : ‘Trecutul nu mai luminează viitorul, iar spiritul își croiește drum prin beznă ».

« Platon descria sfera problemelor umane – tot ceea ce aparține conviețuirii oamenilor într-o lume comună – din perspectiva întunericului, a confuziei și a decepției de care cei care aspira la adevărata existență trebuie să se îndepărteze dacă vor să descopere cerul clar al Ideilor eterne. Sfârșitul [acestei tradiții europene] a venit cu declarația lui Marx că filozofia și adevărul ei sunt situate nu în afara problemelor oamenilor și a lumii lor comune, ci exact în ele, și că pot fi ‘realizate’ numai în sfera vieții comune, pe care el o numește ‘societate’, prin apariția ‘omului socializat’ ... Sfârșitul a venit atunci când un filozof s-a îndepărtat de filozofie astfel încât să o ‘realizeze’ în politică » (H. Arendt).

Dimensiunea politică a arhitecturii. « But what form can architecture define within the contemporary city without falling into the current self-absorbed performances of iconic buildings, parametric designs, or redundant mappings of every possible complexity and contradiction of the urban world? What sort of significant and critical relationship can architecture aspire to in a world that is no longer constituted by the idea and the motivations of the city, but is instead dominated by urbanization? In what follows I will attempt to reconstruct the possibility of an architecture of the city that is no longer situated only in the autonomous realm of its disciplinary status, but must directly confront urbanization. This possibility is put forward in two ways: first, by critically understanding the essential difference between the concept of the city and the concept of urbanization — how these concepts overlap, as well as how they address two radically different interpretations of inhabited space — and second, by looking at how urbanization has historically come to prevail over the city. I will show the rise of urbanization not through its presumed “real” effects, but through exemplary projects for cities, which here are understood as effective representations not simply of urbanization itself but also of its logic. In an argument critical of the logic of urbanization (and its instigator, capitalism), I will redefine political and formal as concepts that can define architecture’s essence as form ... – Aristotle made a fundamental distinction between politics and economics — the distinction between what he defines as

technè politikè and technè oikonomikè. What he calls technè politikè is the faculty of decision making for the sake of the public interest — decision making for the common good, for the way individuals and different groups of people can

live together. Politics in this sense comes from the existence of the polis (and not the other way around). The polis is the space of the many, the space that exists in between individuals or groups of individuals when they coexist ... Political space is made into the institution of politics precisely because the existence of the space in between presupposes potential conflict among the parts that form it. This possibility is the very foundation of technè politikè — the art of politics — the decision making that must turn conflict into coexistence (albeit without eradicating the possibility of conflict). Precisely because politics is incarnated in the polis — the project of the city — the existence of the polis holds the possibility of conflict and the need for its resolution as its very ontological foundation. (...) Facing this scenario of infinite urbanization—which today is no longer just theory but daily practice — I would argue that the time has come to drastically counter the very idea of urbanization. For this reason I propose a partisan view of the city against the totalizing space of urbanization. In order to formulate a metacritique of urbanization as the incarnation of infinity and the current stasis of economic power over the city, I propose to reassess the concepts of the political and the formal as they unfold into an idea of architecture that critically responds to the idea of urbanization. In this proposal, the political is equated with the formal, and the formal is finally rendered as the idea of a limit. Arendt writes, “Politics is based on

the fact of human plurality.” Unlike desires, imagination, or metaphysics, politics does not exist as a human essence but only happens outside of man. “Man is apolitical. Politics arises between men, and so quite outside man,” she writes.

“There is no real political substance. Politics arises in what lies between men and it is established as a relationship.” The political occurs in the decision of how to articulate the relationship, the infra space, the space in between. The space in between is a constituent aspect of the concept of form, found in the contraposition of parts. As there is no way to think the political within man himself, there is also no way to think the space in between in itself. The space in between can only materialize as a space of confrontation between parts. Its existence can only be decided by the parts that form its edges. (...) The task of architecture is to reify — that is, to transform into public, generic, and thus graspable common things — the political organization of space, of which architectural form is not just the consequence but also one of the most powerful and influential political examples. (...) An architecture that is defined by and makes clear the presence of limits which define the city. An absolute architecture is one that recognizes whether these limits are a product (and a camouflage) of economic exploitation (such as the enclaves determined by uneven economic redistribution) or whether they are the pattern of an ideological will to separation within the common space of the city. Instead of dreaming of a perfectly integrated society that can only be achieved as the supreme realization of urbanization and its avatar, capitalism, an absolute architecture must recognize the political separateness that can potentially, within the sea of urbanization, be manifest through the borders that define the possibility of the city »1.

1 Pier Vittorio Aureli, THE POSSIBILITY OF AN ABSOLUTE ARCHITECTURE, Massachusetts, 2011