The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture

The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture PDF Author: Nadir Lahiji
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 147250982X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 494

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Book Description
The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture brings together a respected team of philosophers and architecture scholars to ask what impact architecture has over today's culture and society. For three decades critical philosophy has been in discourse with architecture. Yet following the recent radical turn in contemporary philosophy, architecture's role in contemporary culture is rarely addressed. In turn, the architecture discourse in academia has remained ignorant of recent developments in radical philosophy. Providing the first platform for a debate between critics, architects and radical philosophers, this unique collection unties these two schools of thought. Contributors reason for or against the claim of the "missed encounter" between architecture and radical philosophy. They discuss why our prominent critical philosophers devote stimulating writings to the ideological impact of arts on the contemporary culture - music, literature, cinema, opera, theatre - without attempting a similar comprehensive analysis of architecture. By critically evaluating recent philosophy in relation to contemporary architecture, The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture presents a thorough understanding of the new relationship between architecture and radical philosophy.

The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture

The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture PDF Author: Nadir Lahiji
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 147250982X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 494

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture brings together a respected team of philosophers and architecture scholars to ask what impact architecture has over today's culture and society. For three decades critical philosophy has been in discourse with architecture. Yet following the recent radical turn in contemporary philosophy, architecture's role in contemporary culture is rarely addressed. In turn, the architecture discourse in academia has remained ignorant of recent developments in radical philosophy. Providing the first platform for a debate between critics, architects and radical philosophers, this unique collection unties these two schools of thought. Contributors reason for or against the claim of the "missed encounter" between architecture and radical philosophy. They discuss why our prominent critical philosophers devote stimulating writings to the ideological impact of arts on the contemporary culture - music, literature, cinema, opera, theatre - without attempting a similar comprehensive analysis of architecture. By critically evaluating recent philosophy in relation to contemporary architecture, The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture presents a thorough understanding of the new relationship between architecture and radical philosophy.

Architecture Against the Post-Political

Architecture Against the Post-Political PDF Author: Nadir Lahiji
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131770231X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Written by a team of renowned contributors and carefully edited to address the themes laid out by the editors in their introduction, the book includes theoretical issues concerning the questions of aesthetics and politics and addresses city and urban strategies within the general critique of the "post-political". By focusing on specific case studies from Warsaw, Barcelona, Dubai, Tokyo and many more the book consolidates the contributions of a diverse group of academics, architects and critics from Europe, the Middle East and America. This collection fills the gap in the existing literature on the relation between politics and aesthetics, and its implications for the theoretical discourse of architecture today. In summary, this book provides a response to the predominant de-politicization in academic discourse and is an attempt to re-claim the abandoned critical project in architecture.

Architecture, Mentalities and Meaning

Architecture, Mentalities and Meaning PDF Author: Patrick Malone
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351675362
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
In order to function, architectural theory and practice must be shaped to suit current cultural, economic, and political forces. Thus, architecture embodies reductive logic that conditions the treatment of human and social processes – which raises the question of how to define objectivity for architectural mentalities that must conform to a set of immediate conditions. This book focuses on meaning, and on the physical and mental processes that define life in built environments. The potential to draw knowledge from aesthetics, psychology, political economy, philosophy, geography, and sociology is offset by the fact that architectural logic is inevitably reductive, cultural, socio-economic, and political. However, despite the duty to conform, it is argued that the treatment of human processes, and the understanding of architectural mentalities, can benefit from interdisciplinary linkages, small freedoms, and cracks in a system of imperatives that can yield the means of greater objectivity. This is valuable reading for students and researchers interested in architectural theory as a working reality, and in the relationships between architecture and other fields.

Perspective as Logic: Positioning Film in Architecture

Perspective as Logic: Positioning Film in Architecture PDF Author: Stefanos Roimpas
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000871029
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
Perspective as Logic offers an architectural examination of the filmic screen as an ontologically unique element in the discipline’s repertoire. The book determines the screen’s conditions of possibility by critically asking not what a screen means, but how it can mean anything of architectural significance. Based on this shift of enquiry towards the question of meaning, it introduces Jacques Lacan and Alain Badiou in an unprecedented way to architecture—since they exemplify an analogous shift of perspective towards the question of the subject and the question of being accordingly. The book begins by positing perspective projection as being a logical mapping of space instead of a matter of sight (Alberti & Lacan). Secondly, it discusses the very nature of architecture’s view and relation to the topological notion of outside between immediacy and mediation (Diller and Scofidio, The Slow House). It examines the limitation of pictorial illusion and the productive negativity in the suspension of architecture’s signified equivalent to language’s production of undecidable propositions (Eisenman & Badiou). In addition, the book outlines the difference between the point of view and the vanishing point by introducing two different conceptions of infinity (Michael Webb, Temple Island). Finally, a series of design experiments playfully shows how the screen exemplifies architecture’s self-reflexive capacity where material and immaterial components are part of the spatial conception to which they refer and produce. This book will be particularly appealing to scholars of architectural theory, especially those interested in the domains of philosophy, psychoanalysis and the linguistic turn of architecture.

Global Perspectives on Critical Architecture

Global Perspectives on Critical Architecture PDF Author: Gevork Hartoonian
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317127447
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Judging from the debates taking place in both education and practice, it appears that architecture is deeply in crisis. New design and production techniques, together with the globalization of capital and even skilled-labour, have reduced architecture to a commodified object, its aesthetic qualities tapping into the current pervasive desire for the spectacular. These developments have changed the architect’s role in the design and production processes of architecture. Moreover, critical architectural theories, including those of Breton, Heidegger and Benjamin, which explored the concepts of technology, modernism, labour and capital and how technology informed the cultural, along with later theories from the 1960s, which focused more on the architect’s theorization of his/her own design strategies, seem increasingly irrelevant. In an age of digital reproduction and commodification, these theoretical approaches need to be reassessed. Bringing together essays and interviews from leading scholars such as Kenneth Frampton, Peggy Deamer, Bernard Tschumi, Donald Kunze and Marco Biraghi, this volume investigates and critically addresses various dimensions of the present crisis of architecture. It poses questions such as: Is architecture a conservative cultural product servicing a given producer/consumer system? Should architecture’s affiliative ties with capitalism be subjected to a measure of criticism that can be expanded to the entirety of the cultural realm? Is architecture’s infusion into the cultural the reason for the visibility of architecture today? What room does the city leave for architecture beyond the present delirium of spectacle? Should the thematic of various New Left criticisms of capitalism be taken as the premise of architectural criticism? Or alternatively, putting the notion of criticality aside is it enough to confine criticism to the production of insightful and pleasurable texts?

Event-Space

Event-Space PDF Author: Dorita Hannah
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135053782
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
As the symbolists, constructivists and surrealists of the historical avant-garde began to abandon traditional theatre spaces and embrace the more contingent locations of the theatrical and political ‘event’, the built environment of a performance became not only part of the event, but an event in and of itself. Event-Space radically re-evaluates the avant garde’s championing of nonrepresentational spaces, drawing on the specific fields of performance studies and architectural studies to establish a theory of ‘performative architecture’. ‘Event’ was of immense significance to modernism’s revolutionary agenda, resisting realism and naturalism – and, simultaneously, the monumentality of architecture itself. Event-Space analyzes a number of spatiotemporal models central to that revolution, both illuminating the history of avant-garde performance and inspiring contemporary approaches to performance space.

The Ethics of a Potential Urbanism

The Ethics of a Potential Urbanism PDF Author: Camillo Boano
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134883358
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
The Ethics of a Potential Urbanism explores the possible and potential relevance of Giorgio Agamben’s political thoughts and writings for the theory and the practice of architecture and urban design. It sketches out the potentiality of Agamben’s politics, which can affect change in current architectural and design discourses. The book investigates the possibility of an inoperative architecture, as an ethical shift for a different practice, just a little bit different, but able to deactivate the sociospatial dispositive and mobilize a new theory and a new project for the urban now to come. This particular reading from Agamben’s oeuvre suggests a destituent mode of both thinking and practicing of architecture and urbanism that could possibly redeem them from their social emptiness, cultural irrelevance, economic reductionism and proto-avant-garde extravagance, contributing to a renewed critical ‘encounter’ with architecture’s aesthetic-political function.

Adventures with the Theory of the Baroque and French Philosophy

Adventures with the Theory of the Baroque and French Philosophy PDF Author: Nadir Lahiji
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474228534
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Analysing the reception of contemporary French philosophy in architecture over the last four decades, Adventures with the Theory of the Baroque and French Philosophy discusses the problematic nature of importing philosophical categories into architecture. Focusing particularly on the philosophical notion of the Baroque in Gilles Deleuze, this study examines traditional interpretations of the concept in contemporary architecture theory, throwing up specific problems such as the aestheticization of building theory and practice. Identifying these and other issues, Nadir Lahiji constructs a concept of the baroque in contrast to the contemporary understanding in architecture discourse. Challenging the contemporary dominance of the Neo-Baroque as a phenomenon related to postmodernism and late capitalism, he establishes the Baroque as a name for the paradoxical unity of 'kitsch' and 'high' art and argues that the digital turn has enhanced the return of the Baroque in contemporary culture and architectural practice that he brands a pseudo-event in the term 'neobaroque'. Lahiji's original critique expands on the misadventure of architecture with French Philosophy and explains why the category of the Baroque, if it is still useful to keep in architecture criticism, must be tied to the notion of Post-Rationalism. Within this latter notion, he draws on the work of Alain Badiou to theorize a new concept of the Baroque as Event. Alongside close readings of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault related to the criticism of the Baroque and Modernity and discussions of the work of Frank Gehry, in particular, this study draws on Jacque Lacan's concept of the baroque and presents the first comprehensive treatment of the psychoanalytical theory of the Baroque in the work of Lacan.

Can Architecture Be an Emancipatory Project?

Can Architecture Be an Emancipatory Project? PDF Author: Nadir Z. Lahiji
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 178279736X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Can architectural discourse rethink itself in terms of a radical emancipatory project? And if so, what would be the contours of such a discourse?

An Architecture Manifesto

An Architecture Manifesto PDF Author: Nadir Lahiji
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429885067
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
In this manifesto, the author takes a leap of faith. It is a faith in Lost Causes. He asserts that today, architectonic reason has fallen into ruins. As soon as architecture leaves the limits set to it by architectonic reason, no other path is open to it but the path to aestheticism. This is the wrong path contemporary architecture has taken. In its reduction to a pure aesthetic object, architecture negatively affects the human sensorium. Capitalist consumer society creates desires by generating ‘surplus-enjoyment’ for capitalist profit and contemporary architecture has become an instrument in generating this ‘surplus-enjoyment’, with fatal consequences. This manifesto is thus both a critique and a work of theory. It is a siren, alarm, klaxon to the current status quo within architectural discourse and a timely response to the conditions of architecture today.