ABSTRACT
Differentiating ‘the project’ from mere design has been crucial to the architectural theory
of Pier Vittorio Aureli, not least since his own oeuvre consists of something like a project
for the affirmation of the project.1 In The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture he
states, ‘Design reflects the mere managerial praxis of building something, whereas the
project indicates the strategy on whose basis something must be produced, must be
brought into presence’.2 Aureli’s discourse is nothing if not decisive. Decision – originally
from the Latin decaedere, ‘to cut’, as he reminds his readers – in fact constitutes the
form and the content of his project.3 The separation of the project from design is just one
in a series of cuts from which the project itself is fashioned. The political is separated
from the economic, the architectural from the urban, the limited from the totality, the
object from the field, the fixed from the circulating. The positive terms of each opposition
– the political, architecture, limit, object, fixity – are stacked up to one side, forming the
basis of the project. The procedure seeks out fundamentals and establishes identities,
the fixed points of origin for words, meanings and practices; the essential loci around
which architecture and its political potential should be understood and refounded as a
formal project. Its case is argued through exemplars – Boullée, Hilberseimer, Red
Vienna, Ungers. It understands architecture as the possibility of establishing the limits
that protectively frame the life of the subject and its small-scale communal relations,
securing its integrity from the economic currents circulating in the realm of the urban. Its
object is autonomy – individual, political, architectural.
