Climatic Universal System
Architecture and Living Knowledge
Published in Journal of Architectural Education, Vol. 73, Issue 2, edited by Peggy Deamer and Tsz Yan Ng, with contributions by Marc Neveu, Rashida Ng, Aaron Tobey, Joseph M. Watson, Aaron Cayer, Francesco Marullo, Naomi Stead, Pia Ednie-Brown, Fleur Watson, Kate Rhodes, Danielle Briscoe, Leslie Forehand, Ang Li, Beth Weinstein, Anna Goodman, Maura Lucking, Kiel Moe, Bryan E. Norwood, Kristine Stiphany, Daniel Jacobs, Brittany Utting, Amelyn Ng. Publisher: Taylor&Francis, Fall 2019: 168-177. What follows is only the introduction to the piece: you can read the full article here
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In 1970, Archizoom Associati submitted an entry to an international competition to expand the University of Florence. Launched in response to the increasing enrollment at the university, the competition solicited ideas for relocating educational facilities, decongesting the city center, and planning new strategic administrative functions across an area of 80 acres toward Prato and Pistoia.
Titling their proposal Projects Need to Be Signed, Archizoom indeed signed their boards despite the requirement of anonymity, thus deliberately disqualifying themselves from official consideration. In their introductory text, the group rejected any “funny utopia,” proposing instead a “rigorous experiment based on rigorous premises.” Submitting only a series of unlimited plans and a continuous cross-section, they circumvented the problem of architectural form altogether, conceiving territory as a neutral surface and denying the existence of any outside beyond the pervasive relations of production.
“The only architectural form we wanted to propose was a fogbank roaming between Firenze and Pistoia,” they claimed. “This is not just as inspiration or poetic invention, for we refuse to design an object, preferring instead to design its use.” For them, the problem of inventing a better or more efficient form for the university was irrelevant. A new form would not affect its institutional structures or change its academic ranks and obsolete programs. They sought instead to expose and exacerbate to its extreme limits the logic on which the university, and the city at large, was based.
In opposition to a university campus conceived as an accumulation of objects, Archizoom offered their Universal Climatic System, a stratified surface on which all components would be evenly distributed, each affording an equal degree of autonomy. Exploiting air conditioning, artificial ventilation, and electric lighting to design infinite hermetic interiors, Archizoom envisioned the space of the university as any other architecture of production, whether factory or supermarket, warehouse or housing complex.
The project consisted of a series of superimposed platforms stretched to a geographical scale, evoking the productive plinth of Ludwig Hilberseimer’s Hochhausstadt or the stacked floors of Mies van der Rohe's concrete Bürohaus, yet unconstrained by any perimetric definition. These massive platforms, punctuated with supports, toilets, shafts, and elevators, featured floors dedicated to any kind of program: from recreational facilities, libraries, and classrooms to information centers, research laboratories, and parking for residents.
The conceptual premises for the university project were first formulated in their manifesto “City Assembly Line of Social Issues: Ideology and Theory of the Metropolis,” published in the July/August 1970 issue of Casabella, just before the competition launched. There, Archizoom defined the modern metropolis as the culmination of capitalist production: an assembly line driven by its inherent contradictions, the irreducible distance between individual impulse and collective interests, irrational desires and moral order, technology, and nature. Social struggle feeds the metropolitan machine, which, to preserve and control its divisions, must constantly fabricate new ideologies, masking the logic of exploitation beneath commercial slogans and cultural facades, or what they ironically defined as the “Policy of Balance between Opposites.”
Nevertheless, behind the whirl of consumerism and the farce of difference is the repetition of the identical and the isotropic artificial nature of exchanges that recognize only quantitative distinctions: a “Marble Chicken that you can neither eat nor move.” Traditional urban forms such as squares and blocks, parks and streets, were no longer viable categories of intervention “as the city was no longer a place but a market condition” which transformed the whole territorial extension into an endless exploitable surface: a “homogeneous living diagram” exemplified as an infrastructural grid silently wrapping the entire surface of the planet, eliminating the problem of urban form and architecture once and for all.
This homeostatic spectacle had to be broken, awakening rather than sedating the many-headed hydra of knowledge production. To destroy the capitalist utopia of balance required demolishing its same mathematical principle of equilibrium, enhancing the production across the whole territory without solutions of continuity, transforming society itself into an organized workforce, blowing up all its ideological dissimulations and revealing its embedded regime of exploitation. An endless university would have increased the power of the working-class into a uniform battlefield beyond any possible control, eventually making the “Brain of the System mad.”
Thus, rather than indulging in a symbolical recovery of the past, Archizoom accelerated the conditions of the present to ultimately reveal the absurd contradictions of capitalism itself: unlimited extension, defeating the idea of form, property, and subdivision; unlimited genericness, ensuring freedom and indefinite possibilities for any expression of life, knowledge, and communication as primary sources of wealth; and unlimited precariousness, destabilizing societal roles and rules, moral constraints and fixed contracts, and traditional behaviors.
This paper extrapolates and retroactively discusses these three modes of acceleration, whose radical tendencies still resonate within the current architectural debate and which have been reversed, integrated, and everywhere deployed by the neoliberal regime of production. Following Archizoom’s trajectory, the Climatic Universal System did not only prefigure the dissolution of architecture into a generic layout overcoming any distinction between city and countryside, living and working, rent and profit, but also anticipated the progressive dismantling of salaried labor and the emergence of a multifarious landscape of employment forms and workers who no longer have any specific or circumscribable workplace but leverage their precariousness as source of value.
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1 Of the 18 submissions, the jury awarded prizes to three projects for a new urban core. Each of the winners epitomized three typical design approaches to competitions in those years: the “professional,” focused on developing a pragmatic intervention with a realizable object; the “critical,” contesting the premises of the competition and architecture as an operative tool; and finally the “analytical,” which did not provide solutions to the question but aimed to discover and test new relations between the proposed theme and context. The winning entry, titled Amalassunta, consisted of a linear series of parallel building blocks hosting educational facilities and commercial and business functions. The repetition of these territorial walls at calculated intervals measured and delimited the plain around Florence into functional compartments, while the buildings’ spacious interiors ensured openness and flexibility for the “dense spatial fragmentation that the complex university functions demand.” The team was composed by Emilio Battisti, Edoardo Detti, Gian Franco Di Pietro, Giovanni Fanelli, Teresa Cobbò, Vittorio Gregotti, Raimondo Innocenti, Marco Massa, Hiromichi Matsui, Mario Mocchi, Paolo Sica, Bruno Viganò, Maria Zoppi, Francesco Barbagli, Peo Calza, Gian Franco Dall’Erba, Franco Luis Neves, Franco Purini. Second prize went to a project titled Aquarius by Luigi Cervellati and Italo Insolera, which rejected the idea of a confined campus outside the city center, imagining the university as a public cultural forum, offering both students and citizens the ability to reinvent daily the most appropriate form for the production and distribution of knowledge. The third prize winner, Sistemi Congiunti Tre, by Ludovico Quaroni and Pierluigi Spadolini, proposed a meta-project: “A Method for studying a University Structure”, calling attention to the vagueness of the brief with a sophisticated programmatic elaboration, definition of primary activities, spatial requirements. On the competition and the troubled events related to the jury, see “Una Università di Carta” in Domus, 509 (1972): 1-12, “Firenze Università: Concorso per pochi intimi,” Casabella 361 (1972): 19-28; “Firenze città di concorsi,” Casabella 434 (1978): 19–60; Progetti per due città: Firenze e Perugia, Controspazio, no. 1–2 (Rome: Dedalo Edizioni, 1972).
2 Archizoom Associati, “Una Università di Carta” in Domus, 509 (1972): 1-12. See also Andrea Branzi, No-Stop City, (Orléans: Editions HYX, 2006): 80-88 and Roberto Gargiani, Dall’onda pop alla superficie neutral. Archizoom Associati, 1966-1974, (Milan: Electa, 2007):195-201..
3 Massimo Morozzi, Claudio Greppi, Paolo Deganello, Gilberto Corretti and Andrea Branzi met during the first occupation of the Architecture Faculty in Florence in 1963 and were among the founders of the League of Architecture Students, which was largely influenced by the magazine Classe Operaia led by Mario Tronti and Alberto Asor Rosa. See Paola Navone, Bruno Orlandoni, Architettura Radicale, Documenti di Casabella: Milan, 1974: 19; and Andrea Branzi, “Postface”, in No-Stop City, Orléans: Editions HYX, 2006.
4 Archizoom Associati, “Città catena di montaggio del sociale,” Casabella (July/August 1970); and “No-Stop City: Residential Parkings, Climatic Universal System,” Domus 496 (March 1971).
Image above: Tavole Comparative (Comparative Panels. Boards no.1-2- copies). Progetto di Concorso per la sede dell’Università degli Studi di Firenze, 1970-71. Courtesy of CSAC (Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione, Università di Parma) and Studio Andrea Branzi
