Spinoza on Falsity
Contrary to most philosophy, which struggles to arrive at truth and yield access to true ideas, Spinoza’s epistemological conundrum is how to arrive at falsity and produce false ideas. Because his theory of knowledge is inextricably linked to his ontology, because modal ideas are God’s ideas (by 1P15), and because all God’s ideas are true [...]
Borromini’s Bricks: Matters of Immanence in the Roman Oratory
And if you think of Brick, for instance, and you say to Brick, “What do you want Brick?” And Brick says to you, “I like an Arch.” – Louis Kahn [1] A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window. [...]
Tearing Real Images from Clichés: Edward Burtynsky’s Industrial Landscapes
Such a voyage does not necessarily imply great movements in extension; it becomes immobile, in a room and on a body without organs—an intensive voyage that undoes all the lands for the benefit of the one it is creating. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 319) Edward Burtynsky’s manufactured landscapes – large-format, photographic compositions of industrially-transformed [...]
James Stirling and the Post-War Crisis of Movement: An Architectural Model of the Smooth and the Striated
Gilles Deleuze transitions between the two volumes of his cinema project by identifying a crisis of movement in post-War cultural and aesthetic practices. As film liberates itself from causal logic and linear displacements, introducing a differential subjectivity to replace static identity, space and time are (re)conceptualized to accommodate incompossible worlds. In establishing these late modern [...]
In the Metal and in the Flesh: The Materiality and Individuation of Information through Architecture
The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.[1] – Baruch Spinoza Thoughts in the concrete are made of the same stuff as things are.[2] – William James (1912) In the decades immediately following the Second World War, architectural practice and spatial theory experienced a crisis of legitimacy [...]
Architecture between East and West: The Emergent Practices of Arbeitsgruppe 4 in Cold War Austria
The Third Man immortalized post-war Vienna, creating the architectural images most closely associated Austria’s geopolitical position at the time. Physical destruction served as a constant reminder of Austria’s immediate past and its bleak outlook for the future. The decay also served as a material manifestation of the guilt and repression associated with Austria’s role in [...]
Clip/Stamp/Fold
The Exhibition Catalog for Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X – 197X magazines is now available at Amazon. The catalog is edited by Beatriz Colomina, and the content is based on research conducted by her students at Princeton.
Simulacrum in the Tableaux Vivants of Thomas Demand
How the ‘True World’ Ultimately Became a Fable: Simulacrum in the Tableaux Vivants of Thomas Demand Friedrich Nietzsche introduces a chapter of Twilight of the Idols entitled “How the ‘True World’ Ultimately Became a Fable: A History of an Error” with six concise points that purport to overturn Western philosophy by replacing representation with simulacra.[1] [...]
The Wilderness Downtown and The Poetics of Space
I just discovered “The Wilderness Downtown“, an interactive video for Arcade Fire’s “We Used to Wait,” from their new album Suburbs. The project was created and directed by Chris Milk, who is responsible for a number of interesting videos and commercials, including one my favorites.
James Corner on Duration
Inhabitat interviewed James Corner recently regarding his (and Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s) High Line project. The project is notable as an exercise in progressive, adaptive re-use, as well as for its novel capacity to affords (literally) new perspectives on the city. However, Corner offers duration as the key to the project, focusing on the issue [...]
Lebbeus Woods on the Ineffable
In a recent blog post, “Terrible Beauty 2: The Ineffable,” Lebbeus Woods laments the unwillingness of architects to design the ineffable, as well as architectural commentators to broach the topic. Woods begins by defining his subject. He writes: The ineffable is sometimes called ‘the beauty beyond expression,’ having to do with the apprehension of the [...]
On the Death and Life of Cities
Only by enlisting the movements of a building and accounting carefully for its “tribulations” would one be able to state its existence: it would be equal to the building’s extensive list of controversies and performances over time, i.e. it would be equal to what it does, to the way it resists attempts at transformation, allows [...]
David Byrne on Architecture and Musical Evolution
David Byrne recently (I’m not sure how recently, but the video is new to me) gave a Ted Talk on the relationship between architecture and music (see video below). Byrne begins by considering the architecture of CBGBs, a venue that facilitated the early career of the Talking Heads, as well as countless other punk and [...]
R&Sie(n) on Stuttering
On its “New Territories” blog, R&Sie(n) just published, “Stuttering,” the transcript of a recent dialogue between Natanel Elfassy and François Roche. The essay reads more like a manifesto duet rather than an interview between the two. There are no questions posed, though as the dialogue progresses, the comments do become more closely linked and sequential. [...]
R&Sie(n) on Unknow
At the “New Territories” blog, R&Sie(n) posted “Unknow,” a video featuring the firm’s andgrogynous spokesperson. The video, along with theBuildingWhichNeverDies, another one of their projects, will be exhibited as part of “People Meet in Architecture“, during the 2010 Venice Biennale. The title of the piece, “Unknow,” suggests a particularly useful and relevant word. It probably [...]
The Archigram Archival Project
Earlier this month, the University of Westminster published the current results of its Archigram Archival Project. According the site: The Archigram Archival Project makes the work of the seminal architectural group Archigram available free online for public viewing and academic study. The project was run by EXP, an architectural research group at the University of [...]
Stacking Architecture and the Art of Designing in Section
(For a slideshow of projects mentioned here, click a thumbnail at the bottom of the page.) I recently discovered the video above detailing the completed version of VitraHaus, Herzog & de Meuron’s new addition to the Vitra complex in Weil am Rhein. The project (of which Cool Hunting has a good review here) is interesting [...]
Bioreboot: The Architecture of R&Sie(n)
Earlier this month, Princeton Architectural Press published Bioreboot :The Architecture of R&Sie(n) by Giovanni Corbellini, Alessandro Rocca and François Roche. The book is the most comprehensive overview so far of R&Sie(n)’s work to appear in print, representing 19 projects accompanied by imagery, photos and insightful essays that will appeal as much (if not more) to [...]
The Ethics of Dust as Sheets of the Past
“You may at least earnestly believe, that the presence of the spirit which culminates in your own life, shows itself in dawning, wherever the dust of the earth begins to assume any orderly and lovely state.” -John Ruskin, The Ethics of Dust (XVIII, 346) I recently visited The Ethics of Dust, an experimental approach to [...]
The Limits of Control as Machinic Opera
If a quality has motifs and counterpoints, if there are rhythmic characters and melodic landscapes in a given order, then there is the constitution of a veritable machinic opera tying together orders, species, and heterogeneous qualities. What we term machinic is precisely this synthesis of heterogeneities as such. Inasmuch as these heterogeneities are matters of [...]
