This Thing Called Theory

Description

In the age of post-digital architecture and digital materiality, This Thing Called Theory explores current practices of architectural theory, their critical and productive role. The book is organized in sections which explore theory as an open issue in architecture, as it relates to and borrows from other disciplines, thus opening up architecture itself and showing how architecture is inextricably connected to other social and theoretical practices. The sections move gradually from the specifics of architectural thought - its history, theory, and criticism - and their ongoing relation with philosophy, to the critical positions formulated through architecture's specific forms of expression, and onto more recent forms of architecture's engagement and self-definition. The book's thematic sessions are concluded by and interspersed with a series of shorter critical position texts, which, together, propose a new vision of the contemporary role of theory in architecture. What emerges, overall, is a critical and productive role for theory in architecture today: theory as a proposition, theory as task and as a 'risk' of architecture. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of illustrations List of contributors Acknowledgments 1 This thing called theory Part I: Theories and histories 2 Manfredo Tafuri and the death of architecture 3 Theories and history of architecture (museums) 4 Architecture in/out of the boudoir? The autonomy of architecture and the architecture of autonomy 5 Repositioning. Before theory Part II: Between history and philosophy 6 Which ‘humanism’? On the Italian theory of architecture, 1951–1969 7 Philosophical thinking as political praxis: Giorgio Agamben and inoperative architecture 8 Affective encounters amidst feminist futures in architecture? 9 Repositioning. The after(s) and the end(s) of theory Part III: Beyond the image 10 Drawing Jerusalem: notes on Hans Bol’s Jerusalem, with Christ and the Good Shepherd (1575) 11 Architectural drawing: architecture’s speculative visual history 12 God’s eye view Part IV: Critical displays 13 Aktion 507: politics become theory become praxis 14 Architecture and the neo avant-garde: some theories of history in architectural criticism 15 Exhibits that matter: material gestures with theoretical stakes 16 Repositioning. This think called crit … Part V: Theories of things 17 Pragmatics: towards a theory of things 18 Ready, steady, cook with Bergson, Plato and Gordon Matta-Clark 19 Architecture’s thing and the thingness of theory Part VI: The transactions of architecture 20 Architecture and the promise of post-capitalism 21 Domestic, production, debt: for a theory of the informal 22 White, wide and scattered: picturing her housing career 23 Toward a theory of Interior 24 Repositioning. Theory now. Don’t excavate, change reality! Part VII: Forms of engagement 25 (Un)political 26 Prince complex: narcissism and reproduction of the architectural mirror 27 Less than enough: a critique of Aureli’s project 28 Repositioning. Having ideas 29 Post-scriptum. ‘But that is not enough’ Index