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This article close-reads Modernist architect Ludwig Hilberseimer&rsquo ; s early architectural projects, which employed a language of uniform fenestration, repetition and geometrically reduced typical forms, as embodying Georg Simmel&rsquo ; s blasé ; attitude in analogical form, and places this reading in relation to Aldo Rossi&rsquo ; s concept of the analogical city and the political theorist Paolo Virno&rsquo ; s notion of the multitude. The first part outlines the discourse around Simmel, Hilberseimer and Rossi to note salient connections between these figures, their thought and the process of modernization. The second part discusses Simmel&rsquo ; s and Hilberseimer&rsquo ; s readings of the metropolis and interprets Hilberseimer&rsquo ; s formal language as embodying the blasé ; attitude. The third part places Hilberseimer in dialogue with Rossi and interprets Rossi&rsquo ; s analogical city as inhabited by another of Simmel&rsquo ; s figures, the stranger. The article concludes by tracing a line from Simmel&rsquo ; s figures of the blasé ; and the stranger via Hilberseimer&rsquo ; s metropolis architecture and Rossi&rsquo ; s analogical city toward the contemporary multitude, a collective linguistic subject. In doing so Hilberseimer&rsquo ; s and Rossi&rsquo ; s grammar of the metropolis can be rethought in relation to contemporary subject positions as a critical project toward an architectural theory of the multitude pushing back against the increasingly individualised city and market urbanism prevalent today.

This essay argues that ghostwriting is a collective material practice that intervenes in the logic of the information political economy, which has commodified intellectual work as intellectual property. In everyday use, ghostwriting is when a text is written by an unnamed author and usually for the purposes of marketing. In this essay I retool ghostwriting as a critical and creative writing practice. It may be a strategy to resist the administrative and corporate attempts to interfere with academic intellectual property rights. It turns intellectual work that little bit more subversive. First I reflect on the relation between writing and the commons of knowledge. I then perform ghostwriting as an experimental practice that can put different fields into dialogue, and which use intellectual culture as common property. I quote the first and last sentence of 20 books that begin by reflecting on ideas about ghosts; but more broadly reflect on critical theory, practice, and architecture in the time of the Anthropocene. Texts are adjusted so that they talk to one another and through one another. I problematize authorship while allowing the shadow of the original authorial voice to remain. What is important is that ghostwriting frees the creative process from the private property of the knowledge industry. Ghostwriting is collective. It treats the commons of knowledge as the collective memory of intellectual culture. I argue that ghostwriting can articulate a different type of knowledge practice as a collective mode of authorship without aura.

This article develops a theory of the multitude for architecture. It is a close-reading of political theorist Paolo Virno's concept of the multitude and its associated categories of language, repetition and what Virno calls "real abstraction." The article transposes those categories to the thought of Aldo Rossi on typology, the city as a text and the analogical city. The aim is to explore the conditions of possibility for a renewed critical project for architecture and to articulate architecture's capacity for framing a collective political subject. The key questions addressed are therefore how does Virno's grammar of the multitude translate into an architectural grammar for the city; and how can architecture frame a collective political subject?.