Pier Vittorio Aureli: Less is Enough

Inspirational essay examining capitalism, austerity and architectural fashion.

There is an increasing interest in more socially oriented ways of living such as co-housing or sharing domestic space between the compound of the family apartment. But what is seldom discussed is that this way of life requires some effort. To live together requires less individual freedom, although that maybe no bad thing. The question is whether such a way of life might only be developed out of economic necessity, or because it is only by sharing and coexisting that we can reclaim the true subjectivity that Marx beautifully described with the oxymoron ‘social individual’ – individuals who only become so among other individuals. Here, less means precisely the recalibration of a form of reciprocity that is no longer driven by possession but by sharing; the less we have in terms of possessions, the more we’ll be able to share. To say enough (instead of more) means to redefine what we really need in order to live a good life – that is, a life detached from the social ethos of property, from the anxiety of production and possession, and where less is just enough.

Owen Hatherley: Ministry of Nostalgia

Gill sans, muted colours, Blitz spirit, crown logos, wartime cooking, duplicate ration cards...


'Austerity Britain', the period roughly from the 1940s until around 1955, when rationing was finally lifted by a Conservative government, is the direct opposite of ‘Austerity Britain’ Mark Two, the period from 2009/10 until the present when a financial crisis caused by property speculation and ‘derivatives’ culminated in massive state bailouts of the largest banks, followed by an assault on what remained of the public sphere after thirty years of neoliberalism. But this most recent austerity has nonetheless been overlaid with the imagery of that earlier era. At times this has been so pervasive that it felt as if parts of the country began to resemble a strange, dreamlike reconstruction of the 1940s and 1950s, reassembled in the wrong order.


So what emerges particularly clearly from all of this is that austerity - in terms here of developers and investors wanting safety and predictability - has pushed much of the very fabric of London towards an austerity-nostalgic aesthetic. Whereas in very recent memory London seemed to want to look like Dubai-on-Thames, it now increasingly resembles a cross between Islington in the 1820s and Poplar in the 1950s, two moments of austerity and rectitude. [...] Boris Johnson hasn’t the power and certainly hasn’t the will to build thousands of new council flats in London, but what he and his administration have managed to do is help developers build thousands of luxury flats which look like council flats, and can appear to be ‘in keeping’ with them.


In Britain today we are living through exactly the kind of housing crisis for which council housing was invented in the first place, at exactly the same as we’re alternately fetishising and privatising its remnants. From substandard speculative housing development to runaway inflation of mortgages and rents, from resurrected Rachmanism to houses in garden sheds and garages, from empty flats in the north to neo-Victorian overcrowding in the south, from a forced exodus due to to unemployment in one city to a forced exodus due to house prices and rents in another, we face a massive problem for which, once, the solution was the building of well-designed, well-considered, well-planned modernist buildings, often erected on the ashes of shoddily-designed, unplanned, badly made, profit driven housing of the past. Instead, what is actually happening is that we’re transforming the surviving fragments of that solution into one of the main contributors to the problem, as social housing becomes the new front of gentrification, and the architect-designed modernist flat the new loft conversion.


... an architecture voided of its original content - at the very moment when it is most needed.

Architekturzentrum Wien Az W: Soviet Modernism 1955-1991: Unknown History

Ross King: Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture

The Black Death was a faithful visitor to Florence. It arrived, on average, once every ten years, always in the summer.

Perspective is the method of representing three-dimensional objects in recession on a two-dimensional surface in order to give the same impression of relative position, size, or distance as the actual objects do when viewed from a particular point. Filippo is generally regarded as its inventor, the one who discovered (or rediscovered) its mathematical laws. For example, he worked out the principle of the vanishing point, which was known to the Greeks and Romans but, like so much other knowledge, had long since been lost.

Freshly cut from a quarry, limestone and sandstone smell of rotten eggs, and the stronger this sulfurous stench, the better the quality of the stone.

In 1492, Filippo Maria captured both Brescia and Genoa, and a year later seized the town of Forli, only 50 miles from Florence. The following year, as plague raged through Tuscany, his forces defeated the Florentines at Zagonara, in Romagna. There were only three casualties, all Florentine soldiers who fell from their horses and drowned on the battlefield in their heavy plate armor (it had rained heavily in Zagonara the night before). This lack of bloodshed shows that warfare in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, contrary to popular conceptions, could be reasonably civilized. Most battles resembled chess matches in which opposing commanders sought to outmaneuver each other, the loser being the one who conceded that his position was technically vulnerable. These engagements were fought by mercenaries who settled the terms of warfare in advance, rather like sportsmen deciding the rules of the game.