Architectural forms and philosophical structures

Abstract

Architectural Forms and Philosophical Structures examines architectural and architectonic forms as products of philosophical and epistemological structures in selected cultures and time periods, and analyzes architecture as a text of its culture. Relations between architectural forms and philosophical structures are explored in Western civilization, beginning in Egypt and Greece and culminating in twentieth-century Europe and America. Architecture, like all forms of artistic expression, is interwoven with the beliefs and the structures of knowledge of its culture. Keywords: architecture, philosophy, cosmology, Egypt, Greece, Francesco Borromini (Oratorio di San Filippo Neri, San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, San Giovanni in Laterano), Guarino Guarini (Caelestis Mathematica, Euclides adauctus, Placita philosophica, San Lorenzo), Bernardo Vittone (Istruzioni diverse, Istruzioni elementari, Cappella della Visitazione, San Bernardino, San Gaetano, San Luigi, San Michele, Santa Chiara), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (Discourse on Metaphysics, Eléments de philosophie cache, Letters to Arnauld, Letters to de Volder, The Monadology), Baroque, Gianbattista Piranesi (Antichità romane, Carceri, Fall of Phaethon, Grotteschi, Opere varie, Parare su l’Architettura), unconscious, Gothic, Gothic Romance, psychophysiological space, Sigmund Freud, The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, Georges Bataille, Frederick Kiesler (Endless House, Inside the Endless House), Accademia di San Luca, Leon Battista Alberti (De ludi matematici, De motibus ponderis, De re aedificatoria, Sant’Andrea in Mantua), Anaximander, Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica), Aristophanes, Aristotle (De anima, Metaphysics), Daniele Barbaro (La pratica della perspettiva), Georges Bataille (Le Coupable; Eroticism, Death and Sensuality; Inner Experience), Charles Baudelaire (Les Fleurs du Mal), William Beckford (Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents; Vathek; The Vision), Gianlorenzo Bernini (Cappella Cornaro, The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa, Fountain of the Four Rivers), Ferdinando Galli Bibiena (Architettura civile), Umberto Boccioni (Unique Forms of Continuity in Space), Jacob Böhme (Theosophische Wercke), Orfeo Boselli (Osservazioni della Scultura Antica), Hermann Broch (The Sleepwalkers), Giordano Bruno (De triplici minimo, Lampas trigenta statuarum), Edmund Burke (A Philosophical Enquiry), Bernard Cache (Earth Moves), Roger Caillois (The Necessity of the Mind, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia”), Coop-Himmelblau (Rooftop Remodeling Prokect), Pietro da Cortona, Counter Reformation, Nicolas Cusanus (De Beryllo, De circuli quadratura, De coniecturis, De docta ignorantia, De Staticis Experimentis, De Visione Dei, Dialogue sur la pensée), Egnazio Danti (Le Due Regole della Prospettiva Pratica), Gilles Deleuze (The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque), René Descartes (La Dioptrique), Marcel Duchamp (Le Grand Verre), Albrecht Dürer (Melancholia), Peter Eisenman (Cities of Artificial Excavation), Arthur Evans (Mycenean Tree and Pillar Cult), Marsilio Ficino (Corpus Hermeticum, De amore, De Christiana religione, Opera Omnia, Theologia Platonica), Robert Fludd (Microcosmic History), Henri Focillon (The Life of Forms in Art), Sigmund Freud (Civilization and Its Discontents, The Interpretation of Dreams, On Creativity and the Unconscious, On Dreams, The Problem of Anxiety, Totem and Taboo), Galileo Galilei, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Theory of Colors), Martin Heidegger (Poetry, Language and Thought), Hermann von Helmholtz (Treatise on Physiological Optics), Hermeticism, Hesiod (Theogony), Eva Hesse (Right After), Homer (Iliad, Odyssey), Horapollo (Hieroglyphica), Victor Hugo (Les rayons et les ombres), Carl Jung (Memories, Dreams and Reflections), Johannes Kepler, Athanasius Kircher (Arithmologia, Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, Musurgia Universalis, Oedipi Aegyptiaci, Pamphili Obelisci, Phonurgia Nova, Primitiae Gnomonicae Catroptique, Prodromus Coptus Sive Aegyptiacus), Rosalind Krauss (The Optical Unconscious), Jacques Lacan (Écrits, The Ethics of Psycho-Analysis, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis), Ernst Mach (The Analysis of Sensations), Man Ray (Anatomies), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Phenomenology of Perception), John Milton (Paradise Lost), Robert Morris (Blind Time, Continuous Project Altered Daily, Passageway), Alfred de Musset (Confession d’un Enfant du Siècle), Neoplatonism, Frederich Wilhelm Nietzsche (On the Genealogy of Morals), Organic Rationalism, Ovid (Metamorphoses), Erwin Panofsky (Perspective as Symbolic Form, Studies in Iconology), Francesco Patrizi (Nova de universis philosophia), Phenomenology, Alessandro Piccolomini (De la sfera del mundo), Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (Heptaplus, Oration on the Dignity of Man), Plato (Laws, Phaedrus, Republic, Timaeus), Plotinus (Enneads), Edgar Allan Poe (“The Fall of the House of Usher”), Pseudo-Dionysius (Celestial Hierarchy, Epistles, Mystical Theology), Marquis de Puységur, Pythagoras, Thomas de Quincey (Confessions of an English Opium Eater), Renaissance, Arthur Rimbaud (“Après le deluge,” “Le bateau ivre,” “Les Ponts”), Martin del Rio (Disquisitionum magicarum), Cesare Ripa (Iconologia), Romanticism, Colin Rowe (The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa, “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal”), Sebastiano Serlio (Architettura), Lorenzo Sirigatti (La practica di Prospettiva), Manfredo Tafuri, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (Scherzi di Fantasia, Vari Capricci), Paolo Toscanelli, Bernard Tschumi (Architecture and Disjunction), Anna Teresa Tymieniecka, Piero Valeriano (Hieroglyphica), Giorgio Vasari (Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects), Vienna, Virgil (Aenead), Vitruvius, Horace Walpole (Anecdotes of Painting in England, The Castle of Otranto), Wilhelm Worringer (Abstraction and Empathy), Edward Young (Night Thoughts), Federico Zuccari (Origine e Progresso dell’Academia del Disegno