The Cunning of Architecture's Reason

In the past decade, what has been understood by the word 'theory' has been a discourse that has serviced two types of architectural positions. One the one side there is the language of ‘flow’ and its associated liberalist position of open-ended experientialism. On the other side there is ‘techtonics’ and its associations with reactionary imperatives of a phenomenological reclamation of essence. This paper tries to open a third space, one that has received less attention in recent years, but that hones closer to the philosophical problematic of architecture. To that purpose and to resist the tendency to pull philosophy into an operative design position, I will reassess the philosophies of Georg Friedrich Hegel and Martin Heidegger to argue that when taken together they constitute a type of closure to the conventions of theory that needs to be addressed before the potential for an exteriority to theory can be formulated. The question of how to locate theory, which is of course an extension of the question of how to locate modernity, is, I shall argue, still tied up in Hegel’s studied – and cunning – ambivalence to architecture as a philosophical project. It is this ambivalence that I attempt to deconstruct in order to make it more operational as a theoretical position

Leon Baptista Alberti : the philosophy of cultural criticism

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1986.MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH.Bibliography: leaves 355-362.This dissertation investigates Leon Baptista Alberti's cultural critique, taking into consideration a broad spectrum of Alberti's writings, including many which have remained relatively unknown and ignored. Alberti developed his cultural theories by means of a literary ontology which is based on the definition of the author, his role in society, and his function as catalyst for regeneration. His theory of art and of history, and even his views on the task of Humanism it self, are all subsumed in his comprehensive attempt to demonstrate that myth-making capabilities are central to society's self-definition. Unless society keeps alive the myths of destruction and regeneration, its historical viability, so Alberti argues, is endangered. Alberti's aesthetic theory, which has previously been sought exclusively in his treatises, De pictura and De re aedificatoria, emerges in this inquiry as inextricably interlocked with his cultural critique. For the first time, the treatises will be viewed from within the context of Alberti's own thought.by Mark Michael Jarzombek.Ph.D

Book review of: Italy: Modern Architectures in History

When we think of the history of modern architecture the story might revolve around the Germans and the Bauhaus, but Diane Ghirardo’s Italy: Modern Architectures in History might give us pause, since it reminds us of a more fundamental driver of “the modern,” namely, the rise of the nation-state. This was a significant aspect for the Prussians during the Enlightenment, and indeed some have argued that Friedrich Schinkel was, in a sense, the first modern for the Germans. But the German unification as such took place only in 1871, and though there are many parallels, the Italian situation was considerably more stressed, for they not only had to build a nation-state after 1861 out of the chaos of unification but also had to do so in the vortex of modern industrialization. Timing was everything; the Greeks won their independence in 1830, but the Greeks never accepted—or perhaps one can say embraced— “the crisis of modernity” in quite the same way as the Italians

Mark Jarzombek: Framing the Global

Architecture Fall 2009 Lecture Series - October 20, 2009 at Slocum Hall. Jarzombek is Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture and Associate Dean of MIT\u27s School of Architecture and Planning. He\u27s worked on a range of historical topics from the Renaissance to the modern, and worked extensively on 19th- and 20th-century aesthetics. He has received numerous awards for his research as well as for the various international conferences he\u27s organized. He is widely published and currently working on a set of essays on architecture and modernity

Are We Homo sapiens Yet?

We may appreciate the Enlightenment-era optimism about our intrinsic epistemological capacity, but when the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus (1707 - 1778) coined the term Homo sapiens, this was not the Socratic mandate to know thyself. Instead our “knowledge” belonged to a com-plex classificatory tree, the smallest element of which was a species and its ‘varieties’. It was a revolution just as significant as Darwin’s theory of evolution some hundred years later. Linnaeus’ Man was not a creature of the Bible tortured by the perplexing duality of body and spirit, but an animal, one of the thousands, that populates the world. And yet, Homo sapi-ens had a special gift, for it alone sees that everything fits into a single, vast imperium. The argument was the perfect and perhaps somewhat frightening fusion of reason and empire