“Philosophy in the Studio”: Symposium
on Contemporary Philosophy of Architecture.
VENUE:
BERLAGE ZAAL, Bouwkunde Delft / 1 April 2014, 11:00-17:00
A joint venture of Prof. Michiel Riedijk, Chair of
Architecture at BK/TUD, and Profs. Van der Poel and Kroes of the Section of Philosophy,
TPM/TUD, and a ‘kick off’
event for the international conference on ‘Ethics in Architecture and Urbanism’ at Delft in July
9-11, 2014 (see isparchitecture.com, ‘Events’)
Mies quoted Plato and Aquinas to explain his architecture, Le
Corbusier tapped into Kant’s aesthetics to unravel his revolutionary vision of
architecture. But where is the philosophy of architecture today?
To probe this question, TU Delft presents speakers currently at
the fore front of this exciting, nascent field. Key presentations are given by
Branko Mitrovic, author of the best selling ‘Philosophy for Architects’ in
Princeton’s ‘Elements of Architecture’ Series, and ETH Zürich's Christoph
Baumberger, leading the latest anthology on the topic. Six more speakers,
including them professionally trained philosophers and architects with known
expertise in the field, will present their latest research too. Together they
probe whether philosophy holds a place in the architecture studio at all, and
more generally, which questions the two disciplines open up for each other.
The venue is there to pique interest among students wanting to
learn more about architecture philosophy today. But it is also there to discuss
the opportunities of the use of philosophy in the context of architecture
education -and hence is openly geared at studio instructors with mixed
experiences of the use of philosophy in the studio today.
ABSTRACTS
BRANKO
MITROVIC
Philosophy
and Architecture in Contemporary Architectural Education
My
presentation surveys the problems and dilemmas pertaining to the introduction
of philosophical contents in architectural education. Paradoxically, since the
1980s (at least), the culture of architectural academia has been marked by
substantial hunger for philosophical material on the one hand and a refusal to
engage with philosophical arguments on the other. I will try to analyse the
trends within architectural academia that have led to this situation, as well
as the nature of the material that architects could have received from
philosophers. A philosopher may be frustrated by the impression that architects
merely want philosophical phrases and citations that they can recycle in the
narratives they produce to talk about their works. But it is also true that until recently, due to the
influence of the linguistic turn, the dominant streams of analytic and continental
philosophy have been programmatically anti-visual and had few genuinely
interesting arguments to offer to architects. Finally, I will argue that changes
in contemporary philosophical culture promise a much more fruitful relationship
between the two disciplines in the future.
CAROLYN
FAHEY
Architecture's
Color Games: investigating Wittgenstein's color philosophy
Wittgenstein’s
spatially defined investigations of transparency provide the basis for
understanding how accounts of color in architecture are present and active.
Through a series of investigations Wittgenstein engages color as an
experiential phenomenon of our being in the world. He engages many ordinary
questions surrounding the physics of energy, the physiology of the body, and
the propensities of cognition, arriving at a position in which color is a
concept in itself. The color concept itself, the point of departure in this
analysis, is a socio-cultural construction, constructed through language-games
and its grammar. The analysis presented here looks to architecture’s
contemporary language-game in an effort to both to identify contemporary color
concepts and to reveal these concepts' role and position in the contemporary
situation. In doing so, spatial interpretation is shown as the means through
which a color concept has both meaning and use in architecture.
SABINE
ROESER
The
Role of Art in Moral-Emotional Reflection on Technological Risks
Current debates about technological
risks such as nuclear energy, climate change and genetic modification are
frequently heated and end up in stalemates, due to the scientific and moral
complexities of these risks. In my previous research I have shown why and how
taking emotions seriously is crucial in debates about technological risks,
because emotions point out what morally matters. In this presentation I will
examine the role that works of art can play in enticing moral emotions
concerning technological risks. Works of art can enhance emotional moral
reflection by making abstract problems more concrete, letting us broaden narrow
personal perspectives, exploring new scenarios, going beyond boundaries and challenging
our imagination.
Recently, artists have become involved with risky
technologies, such as Adam Zaretsky in the context of genomics, and William
Verstraeten, the artist who designed the acclaimed building of the Dutch
nuclear waste organization, COVRA. Scholars from a variety of disciplines have
started to study the role of art in relation to technology, but they do not
focus on emotions. There are empirical studies on the role of images,
narratives and emotions in climate change risk perception, but they do not
focus on art. Philosophers who study the role of art for emotional-moral
reflection focus on interpersonal relationships. However, the context of
technological risks gives rise to important conceptual and normative questions
about art and moral emotions. In this presentation I will sketch possible lines
of philosophical investigation.
CHRISTOPH
BAUMBERGER
Philosophy
of Architecture: Its Relation to Architectural Theory and its Place within Philosophy
In
the last few years, it has occasionally been suggested to acknowledge the
philosophy of architecture as a new philosophical sub-discipline which embraces
the various philosophical approaches to architecture. My presentation
scrutinizes how well founded this proposal is, and how one could develop it
further. Hence, I open with a general characterization of the philosophy of
architecture as a field to be distinguished from architectural theory and to be
placed within philosophy. In the first part, I discuss several attempts to
distinguish it from architectural theory by means of author-related or
content-related criteria, and propose – as an alternative – to effect that
distinction by appeals to more formal criteria. In the second part, I turn to
the aesthetics and the ethics of architecture as the two best established
branches of the philosophy of architecture. I characterize these branches by
suggesting a list of issues they are dealing with, and discuss whether philosophical inquiry into architecture
requires distinct fields of applied aesthetics and of applied ethics. Finally,
I argue that it is useful to conceive of the philosophy of architecture as a
distinct philosophical discipline with the aesthetics and the ethics of
architecture as two of its sub-disciplines.
PIETER
VERMAAS
Taking
Architectural Claims More Seriously: Philosophy and Research Methodology
Philosophy
may contribute to architecture by analysing claims made in architecture, by
identifying their empirical content and by giving methods to test their truth.
My case is a claim made as part of the development of computer supported tools
for architectural design. The claim concerned a Shape Grammar Systems that can
generate designs for refurbishing Rabo-de-Bacalhau apartments, a
type of apartment of which there are about 30.000 instances in the city of Lisbon.
The claim made is that the quality of the generated designs is equal to that of
designs made by human architects. In architecture this claim, rather than being
assessed, resulted in angry discussions about the threat it may pose to the
profession. Philosophy can help determining whether the claim is actually true
by analysing what it means and identifying ways to test it, as I will sketch in
my contribution.
ANDREJ
RADMAN
Ecosophical
Cartography: Space Always Comes After, It Is Good Only When It Comes After
The
degree zero of spatial experience occurs at the level of the unconscious and is
proto-subjective and sub-representational. In terms of architectural thinking
everything begins from the sensible. However, the task of speculative thinking
is to go beyond the sensible to the potentials that make sensibility possible.
After all, the basic medium of the discipline of architecture, as we see it, is
the ‘space of experience’. This spatium, which is not to be confused
with the ‘experience of space’, does not pre-exist but subsists as a
virtuality. Once aesthetics is drawn into the context of production its realm
expands to become a dimension of being itself. Both subjects and objects come
to be seen as derivative. Consequently, the mereological relationship -which is
perfectly suitable for the realm of the extensive -needs to be radically
revamped in order to become capable of capturing topological transformations.
But what we are advocating is not a formalisable model. Quite the contrary, any
technological determinism needs to be kept at bay. What is needed instead is
heuristics as a practice of material inference. However disadvantageous this
may seem to the architect, it will prove not to be so once we fully grasp the
Affective Turn and its implications for the discipline. It might become
apparent that it is through habit, rather than attention, and collectivity,
rather than individualism, that we find the (royal) road to the understanding
of ‘space’, or better still, that we take a (minor) apprenticeship in spatialisation.
JACOB
VOORTHUIS
Thinking,
practice, and the production of social space
Philosophy should surely be concerned
with the analysis and critique of questions regarding any aspect of any
discipline. Philosophy in architecture might then concern itself with the
analysis and critique of questions concerning architecture as a human product
and design as an aspect of human endeavour. Architecture's engagement with
theory and practice form the subject of philosophical discourse; philosophy
asks questions, submitting every theory and any instance of practice to scrutiny.
As Alain Badiou pointed out: philosophy is the thinking of theory and practice
(Badiou, 2006). A question any philosopher teaching in a school of architecture
might then wrestle with is: how do we usefully involve philosophy in teaching
architecture and developing a research-based design ethos? With the help of two
case studies, Master Design Projects conducted over the last academic year,
this paper will propose a discursive method in which students' engagement with
philosophy is made concrete, workable and above all useful within a studio
setting. The discursive approach proposed here, of which the game rules will be
elucidated and elaborated upon later on, makes possible a socially and
architecturally relevant interaction between thinking and practice, allowing
students to sharpen their theoretical stand with regard to the role of
architectural design in society and to critique their design decisions within
its framework.
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