Join us tomorrow from 10 on at 37 Bedford Square, First Floor Front, for a day-long discussion with guests Charles Rice, Adrian Lahoud, Douglas Spencer, and Thomas Weaver. This year’s theme – the Grand Domestic Revolution – will be explored through 13 theses. The researches will touch a broad range of topics, from the discontents of suburban Melbourne to the construction of the Japanese housewife, from the ideology of the British Tower Block to the emergence of the networked family in contemporary China.
Morning session 10-13, and afternoon session 14-18.

Seminar in Diploma 14′s Unit Space, Tuesday, November 26, at 4 pm. Architecture d’accompagnement, or formulaic architecture, developed in Paris between the 1600s and the 1800s – a period marked by the emergence of modern government models. Accompagnement is a simplified classicism, devoid of figurative details and reduced to its most abstract form: an architecture that, for the first time, is concerned with the framing of empty (public) space rather than with the embellishment of built space. With its deliberate blankness, accompagnement shifts the focus of architecture from the objects to the milieu.
Until the reign of Henri IV, there was no specific architectural discourse on the quality of private housing and especially of its impact on the urban scale. At the same time, no formalized public space existed as such, as the very idea of a public sphere did not make sense until a secularized concept of state, based on a social contract, emerged.
Through an analysis of the prototypes of accompagnement – the place royale and the avenue – the seminar will argue that modern public space is essentially an invention of the age of government, the result of a conscious political and architectural choice. By comparing the development of these urban interventions with a rereading of key political theories of sovereignty from Bodin to Hobbes and Rousseau we will trace a genealogy of early European public space as social and cultural product seen as the negative of the space of reproduction. At the same time, accompagnement can also be seen as a first attempt at the standardization of living conditions starting from the design of the facade rather than from the organization of plans that are still largely non-typological. This condition that will find its golden age in the explosion of mass housing during the Third Empire, when Haussmann will consciously decide to design for the uprooted ‘nomads’ of the industrial city through an application of accompagnement on the scale of the metropolis itself.

Seminar on Tuesday, October 26, at 5 pm, Ground Floor Back Room, 33 Bedford Sq. Domestic architecture – the architecture of houses – has never been the obvious locus of action for architects, neither today, nor when architecture as a profession was born. Before the 16th century architectural expertise was mainly addressed towards the design of extraordinary buildings.
And yet it is precisely within the urge to reinvent domestic typologies between the 15th and 16th century, that the figure of the architect as a “specialized” practicioner emerges. Professional architects like Francesco di Giorgio, Baldassarre Peruzzi, Antonio Da Sangallo the Younger, Sebastiano Serlio, Jacopo Sansovino and later Palladio made their reputation not only by designing extraordinary buildings, but also by defining exempla for domestic architecture. It is within these exempla, that one can see how the emergence of the architect as a recognizable profession is parallel (if not tied) to the rise of the “question of housing” as a central problem for urban governance. A special case study in this sense is Sebastiano Serlio’s unpublished Sixth Book on Architecture, where for the first time in the history of architecture an architect proposes ready made typologies for all class of people including improbable clients for architecture such as the poor peasant, and the poor merchant.
What become clear with the advent of housing as a main focus of the architectural profession, is the clash between rarefied conditions such as land value and the management and reproduction of life, and the will of architects and their client to maintain a classical composition. This clash is not simply a matter of form, but also questions of ethics and political opportunism. The seminar will offer an overview of domestic projects from late 15th and early 16th (from Di Giorgio to Palladio) and speculate about their social and political background.

Seminar on Tuesday, October 22, Studio 2, 4 pm. If in ancient European and Mediterranean cultures the domestic environment had been hidden and protected by blank walls with little or no architectural features addressing the space of circulation, in the Middle Ages the rise of a new ethos produced an urban condition marked by the flourishing of façade designs. The façade becomes then the embodiment of the right to private property, a representation of the status of the individual, and the exuberant, stylistically diverse expression of a society that flaunted and displayed productivity as the main raison d’etre of the city. It is in this context that housing ceases to be a private concern and becomes, on the contrary, the key ingredient of urban form; while still typologically undefined, the domestic architecture of the late medieval period becomes the object of an increasingly refined linguistic experimentation precisely at the level of its façade. Through the paradigmatic case of medieval Siena, the seminar will look at the way in which the design of elevations went from mere necessity to self-representation to locus of the invention of the discipline of architecture. The Sienese case will therefore offer a chance to investigate the political and economic roots of the shift which turned the intimacy of the house inside-out proposing for the first time in European history a complete fusion of public and private, production and reproduction, ritual and labour.

Suggested readings:

Frugoni, Chiara. A Distant City: Images of Urban Experience in the Medieval World. Trans. William McCuaig. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Nevola, Fabrizio J. D. “’Per Ornato Della Città’: Siena’s Strada Romana and Fifteenth-Century Urban Renewal”. In The Art Bulletin 82, no. 1 (March 2000): 26-50.

Rubinstein, Nicolai. “Political Ideas in Sienese Art”. In Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 21, no. 3-4 (Jul.-Dec. 1958): 201-202.

Skinner, Quentin. “Ambrogio Lorenzetti: The Artist as Political Philosopher”. In Proceedings of the British Academy LXII: 1-56.

Diploma 14′s book Rituals and Walls, based on the work of the academic year 2013-2014 on sacred space, will be published by AA Publications in Spring 2014. Fourteen projects – from an interfaith school in Strasbourg to a mosque prototye for Moscow, from an Islamic Women’s Centre in Paris to a coptic church in Cairo – will be complemented by essays by Pier Vittorio Aureli, Maria S. Giudici and Hamed Khosravi. We are delighted to have the opportunity to share with a larger public a research that we found extremely stimulating and exciting.

Find online now at diploma14.com the extended brief of The Grand Domestic Revolution, Diploma 14′s research for the Academic Year 2013-2014.

While the noun ‘house’ emphasizes the symbolic dimension of the domestic realm, the term ‘housing’ focuses on the functioning of the house – the process of containing subjects bysubtly defining their way of life. In this sense, Le Corbusier gave the most precise definition of housing when he said that the house is a machine à habiter. This definition allows us to understand housing not only as the space of the ‘everyday’ but also as a multifarious apparatus which puts together social, economic, juridical and cultural issues.

This year Diploma 14 will depart from this understanding of housing towards the invention of new forms of domestic space. Once believed to be a place of stability and recovery from the social world of production, housing has become the most uncertain domain, which, more than anything else, reveals the most subjective dimensions of the current economic crisis. As Maurizio Lazzarato has recently argued, the neoliberal economy is a subjective economy that is no longer based – as classical economics was – on the barterer and the producer. A key figure of the neoliberal economy is the ‘indebted man’ – that is, the indebted consumer, the indebted user of the welfare state and, in the case of nation-state debt, the indebted citizen.

Housing in the form of property has played a fundamental role in the making of the indebted man. In light of this system’s failure to ‘take care’ of its subalterns, the time has come to propose alternatives to traditional forms of home-ownership. The question of this year’s unit will be to rethink forms of housing, moving beyond home ownership towards more shareable and collective ways of inhabiting space.

The fundamental focus of the unit will be the idea of domestic space, and how its radical

reform can be understood as an act of political and social imagination.

Out now for Strelka Press Less is Enough by Pier Vittorio Aureli, a reflection that redefines asceticism not as reductionist call to sacrifice but rather as an art form, act of political resistance, conceptual strategy – from cistercian monasteries to Absalon’s cells (pictured here). Check it out at http://www.strelka.com/press_en/less-is-enough/?lang=en

If you are in Rome, you’re welcome to join us! For the detailed schedule, please contact info@diploma14.com.

Diploma 14 discussed their 14 in-progress theses with guests Carlos Villanueva Brandt (AADip10), Natasha Sandmeier (AADip9), Monia De Marchi (AA First Year Director), John Palmesino (AADip4), Javier Castanon (AA TS),  Adrian Lahoud (UCL Postgrad Master in Urban Design Director), Aristide Antonas (UCL), Douglas Spencer (AA Landscape Urbanism), and Tom Van de Putte (Oase).

The Great Mosque of Timbuctu, redrawn by René Caillié around 1830. The mosque was built with sundried mud blocks.