Such an operation would firstly require understanding disciplinary aspects of architecture and their historical determinations not to be pitted against one another as in the fruitless cold war between “form” and “content.” Up until today, the history of architecture has been largely been written as a succession of styles. Another possible reading would focus on the way strategies of normalization, standardization, and typologization have been put forward in the attempt to conform lived space to certain economic and social conditions. While buildings’ elevations the use of specific ornamental features often present the most ideologically charged aspects of architecture, the floor plan of buildings reveal how inhabitation is organized in the most literal terms. As argued by Robin Evans, “If anything is described by an architectural plan, it is the nature of human relationships, since the elements whose trace record—walls, doors, windows, and stairs—are employed first to divide and then selectively to re-unite inhabited space.” A history of architecture through floor plans would reveal the way life has been constantly ritualized, abstracted, and thus reified in order to become legible and organizable. Understood in this way, the plan demystifies the naturalization of power relations since it shows how they have always been deliberately constructed by the formation of habit and perception.
Ivan Leonidov, Design for a Club of the New Social Type, Variant A, 1928.
Pier Vittorio Aureli
