Bad Infinity

"The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction cannot so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact. Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial."

-Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor.


"A fundamental aspect of No-Stop City is the disappearance of architecture and its replacement by furniture design, which was seen as a more effective form of urbanization because it is more flexible, and therefore more consumable and reproducible, than architecture. But if No-Stop City was imagined as the ultimate shock therapy for urbanization by its exaggeration of urbanizations' consequences, in reality, the tendency described by No-Stop City evolved not toward infinity and the final dissolution of the city, but rather toward a process of bad infinity. Following Hegel, the condition of the noncity proposed by No-Stop City perpetually undergoes a process of compulsive repetition, in which any complexity or contradiction, any difference or novelty, is an incentive for the infinite reproduction of the system itself and thus for its stasis."

-Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Possibility of An Absolute Architecture.

Archizoom Associati. No-Stop City, 1968-1972.