- Hardcover: 524 pages
- Publisher: The MIT Press (May 14 2004)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0262220679
- ISBN-13: 978-0262220675
- Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 18.4 x 2.9 cm
- Shipping Weight: 1.2 Kg
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,536,770 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Review
"Vesely's book is...intelligible, generous in form and content, concisely illustrated and designed to last." -- Helen Mallinson, Building Design "Spanning from medieval optics to perspectival invention, and from baroque rhetoric to Cartesianism and the paradoxical instrumentality of contemporary aesthetics, Dalibor Vesely's critical-phenomenological thesis establishes a new theoretical datum for all discourse concerning the predicament of architecture in our time." --Kenneth Frampton, Ware Professor of Architecture, Columbia University "This remarkable book is unique in its brilliant density, every word distilled from a thousand thoughts, articulating possibilities for the practice of architecture by weaving together the deep threads of the Western tradition, from the Middle Ages to the present day. Vesely demonstrates the centrality of architecture to culture--not as a dream, nor as an aesthetic or functional artifact, but as a communicative practice. This rare work, combining historical erudition with philosophical insight, lives up to Socrates' demand that wisdom remain alive, even when written down; a 'living, breathing word.'" --Alberto Perez-Gomez, Saidye Rosner Bronfman Professor of the History of Architecture, McGill University "This is an extraordinary and wonderful book. Deeply researched but unlike any other study in architectural history, it both illuminates and stirs apprehension, a deep unease." --Robin Middleton, Columbia University "This book illuminates a critical issue: the place of creativity in a time dominated by modes of thought that reduce design to a method of production. Vesely's insightful studies advance a number of compelling arguments: that the Greek sense of praxis can be identified with the phenomenological description of pre-reflective experience; that the absence of a 'ground' for contemporary culture need not lead to relativism, because history itself confers cultural orientation; and that the prospect of representation in contemporary architecture can only be understood in the light of its historical antecedents, from the development of pictorial perspective through to cubism, surrealism, and most recently telepresence." --David Leatherbarrow, University of Pennsylvania
Book Description
In this long-awaited work, Dalibor Vesely proposes an alternative to the narrow vision of contemporary architecture as a discipline that can be treated as an instrument or commodity. In doing so, he offers nothing less than an account of the ontological and cultural foundations of modern architecture and, consequently, of the nature and cultural role of architecture through history. Vesely's argument, structured as a critical dialogue, discovers the first plausible anticipation of modernity in the formation of Renaissance perspective. Understanding this notion of perspective against the background of the medieval philosophy of light, he argues, leads to an understanding of architectural space as formed by typical human situations and by light before it is structured geometrically. The central part of the book addresses the question of divided representation--the tension between the instrumental and the communicative roles of architecture--in the period of the baroque, when architectural thinking was seriously challenged by the emergence of modern science.Vesely argues that to resolve the dilemma of modernity-- reconciling the inventions and achievements of modern technology with the human condition and the natural world--we can turn to architecture and its latent capacity to reconcile different levels of reality, its ability to relate abstract ideas and conceptual structures to the concrete situations of everyday life. Vesely sees the restoration of this communicative role of architecture as the key to the restoration of architecture as the topological and corporeal foundation of culture; what the book is to our literacy, he argues, architecture is to culture as a whole. He concludes by proposing a new poetics of architecture that will serve as a framework for the restoration of the humanistic role of architecture in the age of technology.
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5.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)
1 of 4 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Categorial Background, Mar 7 2008
By C. Kim "the magnet" - Published on Amazon.com
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This review is from: Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production (Hardcover)
This insightful book provided me with a fundamental understanding of not only the history of architectural representation, but also scientific, psychological, philosophical and metaphysical backgrounds of the architectural expressions of epochs throughout the Western culture. What is especially interesting to me is how the idea of 'architecture as language' especially in relation to Bauhaus and modernism is investigated. Since the manifestation of fragments of contemporary cities continuously surfaces in our environments to be comprehended or to take in charge, the text seems to be very relevant to our present time, perhaps even more so in developing countries. One passage reads: "... (I)n amnesic aphasia, the discontinuity between the possible and actual reality of words, between their concrete and abstract meanings, destroys the physiognomic qualities of experience, perception, and language. The loss of physiognomic qualities is directly related to the loss of categorial background, affecting language and perception... This shows just how critical is the communication between articulated, conceptual experience and its background; even more important, it shows that the background is common to our experience as a whole, including our language."
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