The Cunning of Architecture's Reason
Name
Jarzombek footprint article.pdf
Description
A reading of Hegel's theory on architecture
Size
276.62 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
3949573d9ebe1f361d8660e5529e9fce
Author(s)
Jarzombek, Mark
Date Issued
January 2007
Journal
Footprint
Citation
Jarzombek, Mark. The Cunning of Architecture’s Reason. FOOTPRINT, 1 Jan. 2007, p.1-46.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
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.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.7480/footprint.1.1.666
