Description
Book SynopsisDriven by the Foucauldian attitude of subsuming architectural history into a genealogy of techne, Architectures of Life and Death advances a transdisciplinary approach rethinking subjectivity and exploring the political ramifications of these processes for the discipline of architecture and beyond. In contrast to mainstream approaches, architecture will not be seen as representative of culture, but as the mechanism of culture, the ‘collective equipment’ that rests on the reciprocal determination of social habits and technological habitats. In this sense, the idea that we shape our environments, therefore they shape us, is not to be taken as a metaphor. The animate has always been utterly dependent on the inanimate. A livable habitat is one which the inhabitant actively co-evolves with and which does not constitute a ready-made condition to which the inhabitant would simply have to passively adapt.
Table of ContentsIntroduction, Andrej Radman and Stavros Kousoulas
Part One: Metamodelling
Chapter 1, Andrew Ballantyne ‘Ecologies of Fear and Desire’
Chapter 2, Gökhan Kodalak ‘Are Architectural Modalities Alive?’
Chapter 3, Dulmini Perera ‘Fun Machines: Rethinking Mess and Method in Architecture’
Intermezzo I: Priming
Yota Passia and Panagiotis Roupas ‘An Index of Affective Mechanisms: Deciphering the Pre-Subjective Power of Spatial Assemblages’
Part Two: Asignifying Semiotics
Chapter 4, Renske van Dam ‘Reversed Encounters: Constructing Life with Arakawa and Gins’
Chapter 5, Robert A. Gorny ‘A Diagrammatic Cartography of Discourses: On Architectures Of Life And/or Death’
Chapter 6, Antonio Paoletti ‘Lilacs Out of the Dead Land’
Intermezzo II: Primacy of Action
Renske van Dam, Cocky Eek, et al ‘Moment Matters’
Part Three: Pedagogy of Senses
Chapter 7, Stavros Mouzakitis ‘The First Crematory of Greece’
Chapter 8, Ayesha Sarfraz and Arsalan Rafique ‘Necrotic Urbanism: A Critique of Violence And Resistance’
Chapter 9, Karin Reisinger ‘Radically Alive: A Disappearing Mining Town at Europe’s Margins’
Glossary
Index
