The terms rational and rationalism entered architectural discourse in the early 20th century, but they are rooted in architectural culture since the Enlightenment - and even before. Rational architecture consists into an approach driven by reason, that is by the knowledge of the concrete terms through which architecture is built. This approach emerged when architecture was deduced no longer from the imitation of nature understood as divine or metaphysical concept, but from the logic itself of building, understood as scientific fact. Yet, the emergence of rationalism is profoundly intertwined with rise of Capitalism and its abstracting logic connected with trade and industry. With the advent of the industrial revolution, building form underwent a process of rationalization and optimization that escaped ancient forms of building craft. Moreover, the emergence of what Henri Lefebvre called 'abstract space' - that is, space informed by the intensification of the industrial and financial organization of society - manifested itself into an increasingly abstract construction system, that often architects attempted to mask with ornaments and classicizing forms.

It is possible to argue that rational architecture was a willful sublimation of building form, intensively reified by its industrialization. The rationalist language that emerges from the architecture of Henri Labrouste, Auguste Perret, Le Corbusier, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Mies van der Rohe, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, can be understood as a sublimation of the industrial logic of capitalist space. Precisely for this reason, rationalism is an architecture that accepts and yet idealizes its real conditions of production. This is both the quality, and the problem of rationalist architecture. The idealizing and essentializing tendency of rational architecture is especially visible in architecture produced within totalitarian regimes, such as Fascist Italy.

At the same time, rational architecture was also understood as an architecture governed by the possibility of judging architecture according to shared criteria. Rational architecture was the architecture of scientific reasoning about large-scale social problems, the architecture of high-modernism, the welfare state and its even distribution of resources. In this context, rational architecture consisted into a partially decommodified architecture focused on its use value. The last iteration of rationalism in architecture was its reappraisal in the 1960s and 1970s by the architects affiliated with the Tendenza movement and the 'Scuola Ticinese'. In both cases, rationalism was understood as the possibility to define the architectural project as driven by legible and thus sharable criteria that would manifest into what Italian architect Giorgio Grassi defined as 'the logic construction of architecture'.

The course will aim to reconstruct a possible history of rationalist architecture from the 'Medieval machine' to the rise of the Engineer, from Henri Labrouste to Hannes Meyer, from Ludwig Hilberseimer to Aldo Rossi.

Course sessions

1st Lecture

Medieval machine

Cistercian Architecture and the rationalization of building form

2nd Lecture

Rationalism ante-litteram

The civil and military architecture of Francesco di Giorgio

3rd Lecture

The 'Rigoristi'

Francesco Milizia, Carlo Lodoli, Andrea Memmo and the foundations of Rational Architecture

4th Lecture

Construction first

The Rise of the Engineer in 18th century France

5th Lecture

Form first

The architecture of Etienne Louis Boullée, Claude Nicholas Ledoux and the teaching of Jean-Louis-Nicholas Durand at the École Polytechnique

6th Lecture

Eclectic Rationalism

The architecture of Karl Friedrich Schinkel and Henri Labrouste

7th Lecture

Rational architecture for Real

Capitalism and the advent of the Factory in England and United States

8th Lecture

Architecture or Revolution

Le Corbusier, planning and Capitalism

9th Lecture

The ambiguities of Rationalism

Modern architecture in Fascist Italy

10th Lecture

Rationalism and Social Democracy

Rational architecture in Weimar Germany

11th Lecture

God is in the Detail

The anti-formalist architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

12th Lecture

Back to Basics

Rationalism in the architecture of Aldo Rossi and Giorgio Grassi and the Scuola Ticinese

Assistants: Marson Korbi, Theodora Giovanazzi, Constantinos Marcou, Jolanda Devalle