Pier Vittorio Aureli's 'The Project of Autonomy' Translated into Italian

Quodlibet has published the Italian translation of Pier Vittorio Aureli's 2008 essay 'The Project of Autonomy: Politics and Architecture Within and Against Capitalism'. Aureli, a professor at the Architectural Association in London and co-founder of the research studio Dogma with Martino Tattara, analyzes Italian cultural history from the rise of operaismo in the mid-1960s through the consolidation of Aldo Rossi's tendency, Manfredo Tafuri's Marxist vision, and the affirmation of Radical Design in the 1970s. The book opens by defining autonomy through Cornelius Castoriadis' thought, linking it to operaismo and journals like Quaderni Rossi, Classe operaia, and Contropiano, directed by Mario Tronti and Raniero Panzieri. Aureli examines Archizoom's No-Stop City as a political attitude where urbanization reaches its peak, later used by Rem Koolhaas to legitimize speculative operations. Tafuri, in his essay 'Lavoro intellettuale e sviluppo capitalistico', positions the architect as a technician-organizer of processes, looking to Ludwig Hilberseimer and Le Corbusier's Plan Obus. Aldo Rossi's 'L'architettura della città' draws on anthropological studies by Marcel Mauss and Surrealist imagery from de Chirico, presenting the city as an archipelago of distinct places. In the final chapter 'Dopo', Aureli argues that academic and exhibition recovery of these figures has reinforced clichés, proposing architecture as a practice of knowledge to understand and change the world.