Paolo Deganello. Architecture, Operaismo and Autonomia.pdf (original) (raw)
Related papers
Questioni di architettura e urbanistica". Giancarlo De Carlo and the Unity of Disciplines
2019
In 1964, when Giancarlo De Carlo published Questioni di architettura e urbanistica, was already a well-known figure in Italian architectural culture; a reputation due above all to the professional activity, on which he built his fame. There are at least two orders of factors for which it is necessary to propose today the reading of this book. The first originates from an ever-increasing interest in the "urban space" that inevitably falls on modern urban research, the second imposes a "re-reading" of a book that becomes fundamental in the biography of a character like De Carlo, especially in the years that decree it the success.
The New Urban Scale in Italy. On Aldo Rossi's L'architettura della citta
Journal of Architectural Education, 2006
The publication of Aldo Rossi's L’architettura della città in 1966 marked the conclusion of several years of research and writing on architecture and urbanism. Rossi wrote the book as a treatise for a science of urbanism in an attempt to establish the principles and terms for analyzing existing urban conditions. His thesis responded to a polemical debate within Italian architecture of the early 1960s over the future form of the city brought about, in part, by unprecedented transformations in the postwar city. In this essay, I chronicle the cultural context of the debate over urbanism in Italy that motivated Rossi to establish objective principles for a new urban theory, distinguishing between “the architecture of the city,” autonomy, and the concept of la nuova dimensione.
The "Social Factory" In Postwar Italian Radical Thought From Operaismo To Autonomia
2014
This dissertation examines the "social factory" as it developed conceptually within postwar Italian Autonomist Marxism. This concept is defined historically as an outgrowth of the critique of political economy that accompanied a rethinking of Marxism in postwar Italian working class political thought through the experience of Quaderni Rossi, which culminated in the theoretical and practical work of Potere Operaio, with fragments in the area of Autonomia. Historically, this dissertation locates the "social factory" as derivative of two figures: Raniero Panzieri and Mario Tronti, as well as two subsidiary movements that were articulated, separately, by Antonio Negri and Mariarosa Dalla Costa. Conceptually, the "social factory" is understood in two differing modes: as the result of capitalist accumulation and, the other, as the consequence of the increasing tertiarization of economic life. Both are problematic and unresolved within Italian workerist thought; Negri and Dalla Costa contribute to the discussion of a "social factory" critique of political economy in terms of extending the conceptualization of class and the understanding of social relations within advanced, post-Fordist capitalism. The idea of the "social factory" is understood historically to signify the relationship between capital and class, to understand the role of capital as an element of command within a particular, historical mode of production. In this regard, the development of operaismo is delineated in terms of the critique of political economy and its secondary concept: class composition. The history of a rather rich and varied political orientation constitutes the substantive matter of this work, with the conceptual apparatus forming the definitive characteristics of a distinct political movement: operaismo. In short, the "social factory" is explained historically through its articulation in v Quaderni Rossi, Classe Operaio, the student movement, the "hot autumn," Potere Operaio, and Autonomia. Between the early-1960s and the mid 1970s Italy was the country of class conflict. This dissertation tells a story of that historical moment as understood through the development of its main concept, the "social factory," as a critique of political economy. vi Acknowledgements In the course of a dissertation there are many people that deserve recognition. First and foremost is the late Marshall Berman. He was the first person I spoke to of this work and he gave me a characteristic and practical piece of advice: "would you rather do research at 42 nd and 5 th or live in Italy for consecutive summers?" The iconic citizen of New York City instructed me to go abroad, to Italy, to enjoy my dissertation experience. Thank you. My adviser Jack Jacobs: always a mentor-supportive, challenging, and enlightening; steadfast and encouraging. This work bears the imprint of both of their influences. To Joan Tronto, thank you for being part of the proposal defense and for supporting the initial development of this work. To the staff at Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who assisted my archival researchparticularly David Bidussa, Loretta Lanzi, Massimiliano Tarantino, and Alfredo Puttini-thank you for welcoming me with open arms and for patiently dealing with my particular demands. To the staff at the Biblioteca Centrale at Palazzo Sormani, thank you for the endless days of microfiche tape and assistance in periodical research. To the staff at Libreria Calusca a.k.a. Cox 18-while I lived in Porto Ticinese, thank you for the introduction to your rich historical and cultural archives, preserved in the face of state terror. Thanks to the Centro Sociale Leoncavallo-for the informal conversations over dinner, the personal connections, and intellectual dialogue that "liberated spaces" offer (and many others who nourished my spirit as a foreigner investigating Italian history and politics). I would like to thank the Graduate Center of the City University of New York for its material support, particularly the staff in the Mina Rees Library's Inter-Library Loan office who found and retreated the bulk of my initial secondary sources, but also to the administration who thought my work of enough interest to award me funding to conduct research and to write. Second to them is the staff at the New York Public Library's "Schwarzman Building" and "Science, Industry, and Business Library." Studying Italian political thought and history in New York City would have proved impossible without these institutions. I would like to individually acknowledge Professors Frances Fox Piven and Mary Gibson: the latter, for her commitment to students of Italian history and ideas; the former, for her unceasing support for students interested in working class studies and the social movements that they create. Lastly, thanks to my immediate family. Mom, thank you for your unquestioning support. Thanks to Rabab Elfiky for her support and encouragement at the culmination of this work. In a general sense, this work was made possible by the rich history of working class peoples who vii struggle, and have struggled, to attain a better life for themselves, outside the boundaries of the wageslavery offered to them by capital. I'm proud to have written this for my father. Thanks dad for being union and talking about your work-life. I have undoubtedly overlooked many people who in myriad ways contributed to this work (especially my professors from URI who, in my undergraduate years, were remarkable). To the Italians who constitute this history, I've tried my best to represent what I know of your struggles honestly and without discrimination. Yet, in standard fashion, all the errors within are my own. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1: Working class politics from the Resistance to the Economic Miracle 12 CHAPTER 2: The crisis of 1956 and the birth of Autonomist Marxism: Raniero Panzieri and the origins of Quaderni Rossi 57 CHAPTER 3: The "social factory" and socialist revolution in the theoretical and political work of Quaderni Rossi 96 CHAPTER 4: Classe Operaia: The primacy of working class struggle and the organization of revolution CHAPTER 5: Students and revolutionary class politics: capitalist planning, the scholastic system, and student revolt CHAPTER 6: The "social factory" and workers' liberation from work: the "hot autumn" and working class revolution CHAPTER 7: The "social factory" and the question of "worker centrality" CONCLUSION WORKS CITED CHAPTER 1 WORKING CLASS POLITICS FROM THE RESISTANCE TO THE ECONOMIC MIRACLE …[it is] the principle of authority which must perforce be respected… Now the concept of workers' control threatens that principle of authority; it is the superior who must control the inferior, never the inferior who controls the superior.-Angelo Costa, Confindustria The committees of liberation are the authority of the people, the only legitimate and the only guardians of the interests and liberty of the people: they are as such the true foundation and the incoercible force of the new democracy.-Rodolfo Morandi, Italian Socialist Party …when we speak of the new party we intend, before everything else, a party which is capable of translating in its politics, in its organization, and in its daily activity, those profound changes that have occurred in the position of the working class with respect to the problems of the national life.-Palmiro Togliatti, Italian Communist Party 10 The Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity existed from 1943-1947. During the 25 th Congress in January 1947 Giuseppe Saragat led a "right-wing" or social democratic faction that split the Psiup between his newly created Italian Socialist Workers' Party (PSLI) and the "leftwing" worker-centered politics of Nenni, Morandi, and Lelio Basso which formed the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) [Di Scala 1988, 47-65]. While the call to Marxism is becoming for the most part (from right to left) a cover for an ideological emptiness without precedent, and Leninism as an occasion to make citations, revolutionary theory needs to be constructed from the base, in praxis and in social analysis.-Danilo Montaldi, "Sociology of a Congress" CLASSE OPERAIA: THE PRIMACY OF WORKING CLASS STRUGGLE AND THE ORGANIZATION OF REVOLUTION We too have worked with a concept that puts capitalist development first, and workers second. This is a mistake. And now we have to turn the problem on its head, reverse the polarity, and start again from the beginning: and the beginning is the struggle of the working class. At the level of socially developed capital, capitalist development becomes subordinated to working class struggles; it follows behind them, and they set the pace to which the political mechanisms of capital's own reproduction must be tuned.-Mario Tronti, Lenin in England The political work of the class consists today essentially in keeping alive in the practice of every workers' struggle the strategic proposal of the conquest of power through the revolution. The organization and the revolution coincide in the same strategic moment. The organization is the revolution. To organize signifies tying together, in the struggle, the mass organizations internal to the factory, at a national and international level, unifying the struggle in time and in space-Padua Autonomia Operaia To realize an economically and politically stable society, with the active collaboration of the working class, is the legitimate dream of intelligent bourgeois politicians: if such a dream represents the highest plan of a communist party, more than a million workers strong, the conflict between a reformist strategy and revolutionary tactics becomes inevitable-Rita di Leo, Operai e Pci
2023
The “Renaissance” gardens of Villa Madama, Raphael’s late masterwork for the Medici popes, were actually completely recreated in the twentieth century, although little information about them has previously emerged. Based on abundant material from private archives, this book reveals an unknown story of the gardens’ creation by an international cohort of designers and patrons. It further details how the restored villa came to be integrated into one of the most significant urban initiatives of the Fascist ventennio—the neighboring Foro Mussolini (current Foro Italico)—and linked with the seat of the Foreign Ministry in a verdant garden park. This novel account of the synergy among these coeval projects traces the interwar development of this symbolic entry zone to Rome, demonstrating the power of urban landscape for constructing political and cultural identity. This narrative integrates the histories of architecture, of gardens and landscape, of urban form, and of restoration with the storia del gusto and political history. It also introduces the villa’s owners—a French engineer, then an Italian count and a flamboyant American heiress—interweaving stories of their lives with their restoration of this significant heritage site, set against the political backdrop of the Fascist ascendency. The richly textured narrative yields a new portrait of the villa as an international salon for soft diplomacy, and examines the mythologizing of Renaissance heritage by ideologues and propagandists establishing the Third Rome. Ultimately it is a tale of diachronic political theater in the palimpsestic gateway to Rome, at a crucial moment for the formation of Italian cultural identity and Roman urban form. ==== I giardini “rinascimentali” di Villa Madama, ultimo capolavoro di Raffaello per i papi Medici, furono in realtà completamente ricreati nel XX secolo, anche se finora sono emerse poche informazioni su di essi. Basato su un abbondante materiale proveniente da archivi privati, questo libro rivela la storia sconosciuta della creazione dei giardini da parte di un gruppo internazionale di designer e mecenati. Viene spiegato in modo dettagliato come la villa restaurata fu integrata in una delle iniziative urbane più significative del ventennio fascista – il vicino Foro Mussolini (attuale Foro Italico) – e collegata con la sede del Ministero degli Esteri all’interno di un verdeggiante parco. Questo nuovo resoconto della sinergia tra questi progetti coevi ripercorre lo sviluppo tra le due guerre di questa simbolica zona di ingresso a Roma, dimostrando il potere del paesaggio urbano per la costruzione di un’identità politica e culturale. Questa narrazione integra la storia dell’architettura, dei giardini e del paesaggio, della forma urbana e del restauro con la storia del gusto e la storia politica. Presenta inoltre i proprietari della villa – un ingegnere francese, poi un conte italiano e una fiammeggiante ereditiera americana – che intrecciarono le loro vite con il restauro di questo importante sito storico, avvenuto all’interno del contesto politico dell’ascesa fascista. La narrazione riccamente strutturata fornisce un nuovo ritratto della villa come salone internazionale di diplomazia mondana ed esamina la mitizzazione dell’eredità rinascimentale da parte di ideologi e propagandisti che fondarono la Terza Roma. Infine, è un racconto storico del teatro politico di Roma, in un momento cruciale per la formazione dell’identità culturale italiana e della forma urbana romana.
Architectural Histories, 2021
De Raedt, N. A Review of Fabrizio Nevola, Street Life in Renaissance Italy. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2020. Sands, F. A Review of Matthew M. Reeve, Gothic Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020. Campbell, E. A Review of Carla D’Arista, The Pucci of Florence: Patronage and Politics in Renaissance Italy. Turnhout: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2020. Vanden Berghe, V. A Review of Louise Campbell, Studio Lives: Architect, Art and Artist in 20th-Century Britain. London: Lund Humphries, 2019.
2017
This paper seeks to redefine the scholarship on Aldo Rossi (1931-1997), an Italian architect known for having reintroduced symbolism to European architecture after the 1960s. My thesis addresses questions surrounding the development of Rossi’s theory of city morphology, proposing that it was rooted in antifascist sentiments and influenced by politics of the Cold War. Rossi’s professional growth is outlined through a period conditioned by the reactionary ideologies of postwar Europe, which deeply influenced the nation’s culture and shaped artistic production. This thesis relies on unpublished archival material from Rossi’s early career that documents the leading political and philosophical ideas of his time. It reveals Rossi’s growing interest in developing a theory for a type of architecture and urban design rational in form and socialist in content, driven by the ethos of an emerging political Left. In this narrative, Rossi’s work is contextualized in the efforts of a generation of...