A4589 Spacing and Timing
History/Theory LectureAndrew Benjamin
The aim of this lecture course is twofold. In the first instance it will provide a sustained introduction to the work of a number of philosophers whose writings have had a profound effect on contemporary architectural; practice as well as on contemporary architectural theory. To this end significant writings by Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze and Lyotard will be studied. The second aspect of the course will involve establishing ways of reading philosophy's encounter with the architectural as well as architecture's encounter with philosophy. Rather than the simply reading what one has to say about the other, an attempt will be made to interconnect these two different practices via the themes of space and time. Here space and time will be taken as active and thus as part of what allows the architectural or the philosophical to be. The activities of spacing and timing will be used as ways of analyzing, philosophically, the work of Libeskind, Eisenman , Tschumi and Koolhaas, and then of developing the criteria in terms of which it will become possible to judge that work.
BASIC READING
Martin Heidegger, Building Dwelling, Thinking, in Basic Writings
Gilles Deleuze, The Fold
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology
J.-F. Lyotard, The Inhuman