Towards Edufactory: Architecture and the Production of Subjectivity

Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria S Giudici

In 1967 Cedric Price proposed to transform the ruined industrial region of North Staffordshire into a mobile university campus. The resulting Potteries Thinkbelt became the first large-scale project to anticipate the passage from material to immaterial production as the driving force of an advanced capitalist economy. Shortly afterwards, in 1969, the Open University was established as a new model of education, open to both country and city beyond the insularity of the campus. Both initiatives made clear that higher education was no longer an Ivory Tower of knowledge reserved for the ruling elite, but was becoming a mass phenomenon directly linked to economic production.

Today, when knowledge and information are bought and sold as if commodities, universities are at the centre of this production. The vehicles for this exchange, however, are not the various academic departments and a body of knowledge, whether artistic or scientific, but the students themselves – subjects controlled through the manipulation of their desires, feelings, affections and perspectives. Unlike material production (for example, manufacturing) in which commodities are objects detachable from the subject who produced them, within knowledge production it is not possible to detach the commodity from life itself. Bios, dynamis and experience become both means and product. And so rather than absorbing specific forms of knowledge, university students learn how to live, how to network, how to compete. In this way the university becomes an Edufactory – that is, empowered with the mass production of subjects ready to be implemented into the increasingly precarious conditions of work.

This year Diploma 14 will explore, question and re-imagine this scenario. The goal will be to define new forms of welfare that can counter the increasing precariousness of life and offer alternatives to neoliberal education policies. We will focus on London as a case study and propose welfare interventions in the form of specific architectural projects. Housing and new kinds of learning centres will be at the core of these interventions while other programmes and institutions will be decided according to the adopted interventions and strategies. A critical link between form and subjectivity will be the testing ground for the assessment of the proposed projects. These will be introduced and constantly complemented by theoretical reflections in the form of writing and research. In everything, Diploma 14 encourages a radical approach in which drawing and writing are reclaimed as the most essential means to produce architecture.

Unit Staff

Pier Vittorio Aureli is an architect and educator. He is the author of The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (2011), The Project of Autonomy: Politics and Architecture Within and Against Capitalism (2008), and other books. His writings and research focus on the relationship between architecture, the city and political theory. Together with Martino Tattara he is the co-founder of Dogma.

Maria S Giudici is an architect and writer. She is currently completing her PhD dissertation on the construction of the modern subject through the project of public space at the TU Delft/Berlage Institute. She has developed several large-scale urban projects in Eastern Europe and Asia with De Architekten CIE (Amsterdam), Donis (Rotterdam) and BAU (Bucharest).