As No-Stop City developed, it acquired structure as an endlessly
repeated field of gigantic structures, themselves nearly limitless,
modeled on the supermarket and the factory. For Archizoom, these
were the structures of programming, the natural consequence of
emerging social organizations:
Production and Consumption possess one and the same ideology,
which is that of Programming. Both hypothesize a social and physical
reality completely continuous and undifferentiated. No other
realities exist. The factory and the supermarket become the specimen
models of the future city:
optimal urban structures, potentially
limitless, where human functions are arranged
spontaneously in a free field, made uniform by a system of microacclimatization
and optimal circulation of information. The ‘natural
and spontaneous’ balance of light and air is superseded: the house
becomes a well equipped parking lot. Inside it there exist no hierarchies
nor spatial figurations of a conditioning nature.”39
In Archizoom’s big box, interior climates were perfected through
artificial light and ventilation while limitless communication was
made possible through information networks. These structures’
exterior boundaries are merely arbitrary, not privileged in any way
in plan. Branzi would later reflect on the project:
By introducing the principle of artificial lighting and ventilation on
an urban scale, the No-Stop City avoided the continual fragmentation
of real property typical of traditional urban morphology: the
city became a continuous residential structure, devoid of gaps,
and therefore of architectural images. By the installation of a regular
grid of lifts, the great levels, theoretically infinite, whose
boundaries were of no interest whatsoever, could be laid out freely
in accordance with differences in function or new forms of social
aggregation.40
When Archizoom did represent the exterior of No-Stop City, they
often merely placed models in a mirror box, creating an endless,
banal repetition of one giant structure after another. Inside, NoStop
City serves as a kind of residential Büro Landschaft, allowing
the individual’s full realization within utterly neutral spaces. The
freestanding structures and landscape deployed within No-Stop
City at random intervals ensure that one’s scope of vision is localized
to a discrete area of the gargantuan floorplate. Having eliminated
architecture’s representational role, Archizoom proposes,
“the problem becomes that of freeing mankind from architecture
insomuch as it is a formal structure.”41
If Tafuri had earlier declared the death of architecture,
Archizoom did no less in this statement. However a crucial difference
emerges. Tafuri believed the death would be punctual and
final whereas Archizoom saw death as a means of the discipline’s
growth.
In a later interview, Branzi recalled:
All the most vital aspects of modern culture run directly toward
that void, to regenerate themselves in another dimension, to free
themselves of their disciplinary chains.
When I look at a canvas by Mark Rothko, I see a picture dissolving into a single color. When I
read Joyce’s Ulysses, I see writing disappearing into thought.
When I listen to John Cage, I hear music dissipating into noise. All
that is part of me. But architecture has never confronted the
theme of managing its own death while still remaining alive, as all
the other twentieth-century disciplines have. This is why it has
lagged behind…42
Unlike Hilberseimer’s fatal compulsion to repeat the Hochhausstadt project, Archizoom, which dissolved in 1974, never replicated NoStop City, nor did they or Branzi nostalgically return to traditional ideas of architecture and planning. Branzi later reflected on the plan:
The idea that the architect is a person who expresses himself only through his plans is stupidity. Today, industry and the metropolis require different contributions than the simple plan, which always presupposes the quest for a formal, figurative solution to problems. At the same time, it may also be that the problems do not need to be resolved or represented; it may be more important to invent them…43
Instead, architecture is free to pursue a new project—that Tafuri could not or would not envision—in the postindustrial society, that of creating new relationships. This new, expanded architect “takes some logical mechanisms and analytical processes from modern architecture but disdains the tools of the discipline.”44
For Branzi, the architect becomes invaluable as a technocratic “co-ordinator of human and technical resources,” abandoning the old role of “a constructor of artifacts” once and for all.45 Much like Freudian therapy, No-Stop City served as both diagnosis and cure. Archizoom named the problem—that late capitalism has no use for the traditional bounded city and substitutes instead a blank, limitless field, be it the physical terrain vague or the global telecommunications network—and allowed architects to understand how to go beyond the world of physical objects and enter into a collision of codes that marks the new transurban condition.
This issue is of even greater consequence today. No-Stop City is now a fact: globalization has spread the market’s reach to the furthest ends of the Earth, telecommunications has radically reconfigured our notions of space, and the device of the Big Box—so well anticipated in No-Stop City’s limitless structures—is now ubiquitous, in exurbia, suburbia, and city alike.46
- Kazys Varnelis, Programming After Program
Unlike Hilberseimer’s fatal compulsion to repeat the Hochhausstadt project, Archizoom, which dissolved in 1974, never replicated NoStop City, nor did they or Branzi nostalgically return to traditional ideas of architecture and planning. Branzi later reflected on the plan:
The idea that the architect is a person who expresses himself only through his plans is stupidity. Today, industry and the metropolis require different contributions than the simple plan, which always presupposes the quest for a formal, figurative solution to problems. At the same time, it may also be that the problems do not need to be resolved or represented; it may be more important to invent them…43
Instead, architecture is free to pursue a new project—that Tafuri could not or would not envision—in the postindustrial society, that of creating new relationships. This new, expanded architect “takes some logical mechanisms and analytical processes from modern architecture but disdains the tools of the discipline.”44
For Branzi, the architect becomes invaluable as a technocratic “co-ordinator of human and technical resources,” abandoning the old role of “a constructor of artifacts” once and for all.45 Much like Freudian therapy, No-Stop City served as both diagnosis and cure. Archizoom named the problem—that late capitalism has no use for the traditional bounded city and substitutes instead a blank, limitless field, be it the physical terrain vague or the global telecommunications network—and allowed architects to understand how to go beyond the world of physical objects and enter into a collision of codes that marks the new transurban condition.
This issue is of even greater consequence today. No-Stop City is now a fact: globalization has spread the market’s reach to the furthest ends of the Earth, telecommunications has radically reconfigured our notions of space, and the device of the Big Box—so well anticipated in No-Stop City’s limitless structures—is now ubiquitous, in exurbia, suburbia, and city alike.46
- Kazys Varnelis, Programming After Program
