Life, Abstracted: Notes on the Floor Plan

A fundamental explanation of the phenomena of reification is contained in Georg Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness in the chapter “Refication and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.” Glossing Marx’s discussion on the passage from use value to exchange value within the organization of labor, Lukacs emphasize how the pervasive organization of labor as a process capable of making human labor itself a commodity required a vast “quantifiable continuum filled with quantifiable “things.” As Lukacs wrote in a crucial passage: “We are concerned above all with the principle at work here: the principle of rationalisation based on what is and can be calculated. The chief changes undergone by the subject and object of the economic process are as follows: (1) in the first place, the mathematical analysis of work-processes denotes a break with the organic, irrational and qualitatively determined unity of the product. Rationalisation in the sense of being able to predict with ever greater precision all the results to be achieved is only to be acquired by the exact breakdown of every complex into its elements and by the study of the special laws governing production. Accordingly it must declare war on the organic manufacture of whole products based on the traditional amalgam of empirical experiences of work: rationalisation is unthinkable without specialization.” George Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness. Studies in Marxist Dialectic, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin Press, 1971), p. 84.

Karl Marx, “Chapter 2: The Process of Exchange” in Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes (Penguin Classics: London, 1990), 178–188.

Alfred Sohn-Retel, Intellectual and Manual Labor. A Critique of Epistemology (The Macmillan Press: London, 1978), 90.

“Hence geometry did not appear to the cultivators in their own garb, but in the attire of the Pharaoh’s tax officials accompanied by their field measurers.” Ibid. 91.

Gill Harklay, Avi Gopher, “A New Look at Shelter 131/51 in the Natufian Sit of Eynan (Ain-Mallaha), Israel” in PLoS ONE 7, 10 (2015), ➝; See also: A. Nigel Goring-Morris and Anna Belfer-Cohen, “A Roof Over One’s Head: Developments in Neolithic Transition,” in: Jean-Pierre Bocquet-Appel and Ofer Bar-Yosef, The Neolithic Demographic Transition and its Consequences (Berlin: Springer, 2008), 239–286. Because the architectural refinement of Shelter 131/51, Haklay and Gopher have interpreted as the communal room of the village, yet its form is exemplary of many Natufian dwellings some of which were often use as communal spaces or even graves.

See: Paolo Virno has defined this line of anthropological thought “the tradition of modesty” because it theorized the human animal as deprived of those specialized instincts that characterized all the other animal species. For Virno language itself and the human ability to make a “world” are faculties that supply to the lack of specialized instincts. This hypothesis has been further developed by philosopher Massimo De Carolis who has interpreted the ritual as praxis related to the human species’ lack of specialized instincts. See: Paolo Virno, Scienze Sociali e “Natura Umana” Facoltà di linguaggio, Invariante Biologico, Rapporti di Produzione (Rubettino: Soveria Mannelli, 2003), 26; Massimo De Carolis, “La costruzione della Normalità:dal rituale al mercato’ in “Filosofia Politica” n. 1, 2014, 59-76; see also: Johann Gotfried Herder, “On the Origin of language” in Jean-Jacque Rousseau and Johann Harder, Essay on the Origin of Language, trans. John Moran and Alexander Gode (University of Chicago Press: Chicago 1986).

See: Kurt Goldstein, Human Nature in the Light of Psychopathology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1940). In commenting the thought of Kurt Goldestein in relationship with abstraction Matteo Pasquinelli has argued that for the German Neurologist “Antagonism with the environment, the struggle for adaptation, always proceeds by the invention of new equilibria, habits, norms, and categories. Adaptation always happens via the production of new abstractions.” See Matteo Pasquinelli, "The Alien Hand of Technosphere: Kurt Goldestein and the Trauma of Intelligent Machines" in Technosphere Journal (October 2015), ➝.

On this exceptional document of ancient Rome see: Gianfilippo Carettoni, Antonio M. Colini, Lucos Cozza, and Guglielmo Gatti, La pianta marmorea di Roma antica. Forma urbis Romae (Rome: Danesi Editore, 1960). See also: David West Reynolds, Forma Urbis Romae: The Severan Marble Plan and the Urban Form of Ancient Rome (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Michigan, 1996).

See: Liba Taub, ‘The Historical Function of the ‘Forma Urbis Romae’” in Imago Mundi 45 (1993), 9–19.

Yan Thomas, “La valeur des choses. Le droit romain hors la religion,” Annales. Histoire, Science Sociales 57, 6 (November/December 2001): 1431‒62.

Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, eds. Ingrid D. Rowland and Thomas Noble Howe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1.2.2.

On the history of monastic architecture in the West see: Wolfgang Braunfels, Monasteries of Western Europe: The Architecture of the Orders (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972). For a radical interpretation of monasticism as the making of a form of life see: Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-life, trans. Adam Kotsko (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2013).

This is why the plan of Benedectine and later Cistercians monasteries was often organized according to modular structures.

On this drawing see the important: Walter Horn, Ernest Born, Plan of St. Gall: Study of the Architecture and Economy of, and Life in, a Paradigmatic Carolingian Monastery (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980).

Facilities were planned to enact specific uses of space. The lack of heating in the dining hall, for instance, was meant to discourage the excessive enjoyment of meals.

This also because Benedictines gave so much importance to labor and production making monasteries not just places of contemplation but “factories.”

This tendency will manifest itself in the increasing standardization of architectural components both in terms of their design and materialization and in the rise of what in lack of a better term we can define as “generic architecture.” Francesco Marullo has identified the rise of generic architecture in the emergence of a specific kind of floor plan: the “typical plan.” See: Francesco Marullo, Typical Plan. The Architecture of Labor and the Space of Production (Ph.D. Dissertation, Technische Universiteit Delft, Berlage Institute, 2014). See also: Francesco Marullo, “The Typical Plan as Index of the Generic,” in The City as a Project, ed. Pier Vittorio Aureli (Berlin: Ruby Press, 2014), 216–260.

See: Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1977); see also Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (London: Continuum, 2006).

See: Richard Bradley, Ritual and Domestic Life in Prehistoric Europe (Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2005); See also: Richard Bradley, “A Life Less Ordinary: The Ritualization of the Domestic Sphere in Later Prehistoric Europe,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 13, 1 (2003): 5–23.

See: Gwendolyn Leick, Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City (London: Penguin Books, 2003).

See: Aristotle, The Politics, trans. T.A. Sinclair (New York: Penguin, 1957), 62; Scott Meikle, Aristotle’s Economic Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Aristotle himself implicitly acknowledged this paradox when he spent the first book of Politics on the organization of the household.

The plan a taxonomic ordering of space has been investigated by Alejandra Celedon Forster. See: Alejandra Celedon Forster, Rhetorics of the Plan. Architecture and the City (Ph.D. Dissertation, Architectural Association, 2014).

Xenophon, Oeconomicus, trans. Ralph Doty (Bristol: Bristol Classic Press, 1998), 23.

See: Henry Roberts, The Improvement of the Dwellings of the Labouring Classes (London: Ridgway, 1859); See also: Robin Evans “Rookeries and Model Dwellings. English Housing Reform and Moralities of Pivate Space” in Translation from Drawing to Building and Other Essays (London: Architectural Association Pubblication, 1997), 93–117.

Ibid., Roberts, 10.

Ibid., 12.

In other words, the system of orthogonal projections praised by architects and artists such as Leon Battista Alberti, Raphael, and Palladio as the most trustable representation of architecture, before such as system would be finally codify by Gaspard Monge in his Géométrie descriptive, was only possible when the space of these projections was quantifiable.

Robin Evans “Figures, Doors, Passages” in in Translation from Drawing to Building and Other Essays (London: Architectural Association, 1997), 56.