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Surrealism and Architecture
Twenty-one essays examining the relationship of surrealist thought to architectural theory and practice.
Kōjin Karatani’s Philosophy of Architecture
In this book, Nadir Lahiji introduces Kōjin Karatani’s theoretical-philosophical project and demonstrates its affinity with Kant’s critical philosophy founded on ‘architectonic reason’. From the ancient Greeks we have inherited a definition of the word ‘philosophy’ as Sophia—wisdom. But in his book Architecture as Metaphor Kōjin Karatani introduces a different definition of philosophy. Here, Karatani critically defines philosophy not in association with Sophia but in relation to foundation as the Will to Architecture. In this novel definition resides the notion that in Western thought a crisis persistently reveals itself with every attempt to build a system of knowledge on solid ground. This book reveals the implications of this extraordinary exposition. This is the first book to uncover Kōjin Karatani’s highly significant ideas on architecture for both philosophical and architectural audiences.
An Architecture Manifesto
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.
How Does Architecture Distribute the Sensible?
Leading architectural theorists exchange ideas with the contemporary philosopher Jacques Rancière in order to debate what architecture's fundamental relationship is with aesthetics.
Architecture, Mentalities and Meaning
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.
Can Architecture Be an Emancipatory Project?
Can architectural discourse rethink itself in terms of a radical emancipatory project? And if so, what would be the contours of such a discourse?
Analogical City
In Analogical City, Cameron McEwan argues for architecture’s status as a critical project. McEwan revisits architect Aldo Rossi as a paradigmatic figure of the critical rational tradition, studying a neglected aspect of his thought — the analogical city — to excavate its potential. McEwan develops a grammar of the analogical city under the headings of Imagination, Transformation, City, Multitude, and Project. McEwan argues that the analogical city is critical, collective, and emancipatory. Analogical thought and understanding cities as analogical might open the conditions of possibility for rethinking the critical project in architecture. At a time when the humanities and the sciences ...
Architecture, Philosophy, and the Pedagogy of Cinema
Philosophers on the art of cinema mainly remain silent about architecture. Discussing cinema as ‘mass art’, they tend to forget that architecture, before cinema, was the only existing ‘mass art’. In this work author Nadir Lahiji proposes that the philosophical understanding of the collective human sensorium in the apparatus of perception must once again find its true training ground in architecture. Building art puts the collective mass in the position of an ‘expert critic’ who identifies themselves with the technical apparatus of architecture. Only then can architecture regain its status as ‘mass art’ and, as the book contends, only then can it resume its function as the only ‘artform’ that is designed for the political pedagogy of masses, which originally belonged to it in the period of modernity before the invention of cinema.
Architecture Against the Post-Political
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.
Kōjin Karatani's Philosophy of Architecture
"In this book, Nadir Lahiji introduces Kojin Karatani's theoretical-philosophical project and demonstrates its affinity with Kant's critical philosophy founded on 'architectonic reason'. From the ancient Greeks we have inherited a definition of the word philosophy as Sophia-wisdom. But in his book Architecture as Metaphor Kojin Karatani introduces a different definition of philosophy. Here, Karatani critically defines philosophy not in association with Sophia but in relation to Foundation as the Will to Architecture. In this novel definition resides the notion that in Western thought a crisis persistently reveals itself with every attempt to build a system of knowledge on solid ground. This book reveals the implications of this extraordinary exposition. This is the first book to uncover Kojin Karatani's highly significant ideas on architecture for both philosophical and architectural audiences"--
