[ebooks] Sex Pistols: The Inside Story by Fred Vermorel; Judy Vermorel at Arts-Photography

Description

The eighteenth century struggled to define architecture as either an art or a science-the image of the architect as a grand figure who synthesizes all other disciplines within a single master plan emerged from this discourse. Immanuel Kant and Johann Wolfgang Goethe described the architect as their equal; a genius with godlike creativity. For writers from Descartes to Freud; architectural reasoning provided a method for critically examining consciousness. The architect; as philosophers liked to think of him; was obligated by the design and construction process to mediate between the abstract and the actual.In On the Ruins of Babel; Daniel Purdy traces this notion back to its wellspring. He surveys the volatile state of architectural theory in the Enlightenment; brought on by the newly emerged scientific critiques of Renaissance cosmology; then shows how German writers redeployed Renaissance terminology so that "harmony;" "unity;" "synthesis;" "foundation;" and "orderliness" became states of consciousness; rather than terms used to describe the built world. Purdys distinctly new interpretation of German theory reveals how metaphors constitute interior life as an architectural space to be designed; constructed; renovated; or demolished. He elucidates the close affinity between Hegels Romantic aesthetic of space and Daniel Libeskinds deconstruction of monumental architecture in Berlins Jewish Museum.Through a careful reading of Walter Benjamins writing on architecture as myth; Purdy details how classical architecture shaped Benjamins modernist interpretations of urban life; particularly his elaboration on Freuds archaeology of the unconscious. Benjamins essays on dreams and architecture turn the individualist sensibility of the Enlightenment into a collective and mythic identification between humans and buildings.