scholarly journals Sartre in Space: Rethinking Architecture & Rebuilding Philosophy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jane Mustard

<p>This thesis considers spatial and architectural language used in philosophical text to determine the value of a cross-disciplinary relationship between architecture and philosophy. It approaches architectural figure as more than just metaphor for philosophy, and proposes that philosophy relies on the spatial nature of architectural language to constitute itself. The case studies provided elucidate a realm where architecture and philosophy have been explored simultaneously; where architecture is used as a tool to develop philosophical propositions and where philosophical text generates architectural design. Ludwig Wittgenstein and Adolf Loos worked in this way, rethinking how architecture is done while rebuilding philosophical propositions. Wittgenstein’s work as an architect was not a break from philosophy but an exploration in architectural space that developed his philosophical perspective. The house he designed is considered here as an extension of the ‘visual room’, an aphorism about image forming in The Philosophical Investigations. Loos’s writing on an ethics of style is philosophy bound to a body of architectural work. His architecture, in particular the House for Josephine Baker, and its conflicts of modernity and the relationship between interior and exterior, is inextricably linked to his normative theories of how we should live. Maurice Merleau-Ponty defined phenomenology in spatial terms that depend heavily on the experience of architectural space. His description of the ‘phenomenal body’ and its ability to understand the ‘spatiality of a situation’ is evidence for an epistemological link between phenomenology and architecture. The architecture of Steven Holl is analysed for its reconstruction of Merleau-Pontian spatiality in the Residence for the Swiss Ambassador, a commission that offered Holl a generous affordance of space with which to explore this influence. The main philosophical text used in the thesis is the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre due to the largely ignored latent spatial nature of it. It is significant that the text relies on spatial relationships to convey its meaning. Sartre’s concepts have been defined, developed and implemented by architecture in the resulting design, ‘A House for Sartre’. The design builds on Sartrean concepts of the self, other people, objects in the world and consciousness. It does this by rethinking and rebuilding on this philosophy, while at the same time rethinking and rebuilding the architecture of the house, a domestic space. The programme of a ‘house’ offers concepts of domesticity as context for the design project, and this adds another dimension to the philosophy. The project pushes the limits of Sartre’s descriptions and tests his examples in the tangible realm of architecture. Through inhabitation of such an architecture, one can better gain an understanding of this philosophy. As Sartre so often appeals to his readers to inspect the state of their own consciousness, then perhaps most significantly, the architecture provides not only a conscious experience of the house, but an experience where inhabitants are conscious of their own consciousness in ‘A House for Sartre’.</p>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jane Mustard

<p>This thesis considers spatial and architectural language used in philosophical text to determine the value of a cross-disciplinary relationship between architecture and philosophy. It approaches architectural figure as more than just metaphor for philosophy, and proposes that philosophy relies on the spatial nature of architectural language to constitute itself. The case studies provided elucidate a realm where architecture and philosophy have been explored simultaneously; where architecture is used as a tool to develop philosophical propositions and where philosophical text generates architectural design. Ludwig Wittgenstein and Adolf Loos worked in this way, rethinking how architecture is done while rebuilding philosophical propositions. Wittgenstein’s work as an architect was not a break from philosophy but an exploration in architectural space that developed his philosophical perspective. The house he designed is considered here as an extension of the ‘visual room’, an aphorism about image forming in The Philosophical Investigations. Loos’s writing on an ethics of style is philosophy bound to a body of architectural work. His architecture, in particular the House for Josephine Baker, and its conflicts of modernity and the relationship between interior and exterior, is inextricably linked to his normative theories of how we should live. Maurice Merleau-Ponty defined phenomenology in spatial terms that depend heavily on the experience of architectural space. His description of the ‘phenomenal body’ and its ability to understand the ‘spatiality of a situation’ is evidence for an epistemological link between phenomenology and architecture. The architecture of Steven Holl is analysed for its reconstruction of Merleau-Pontian spatiality in the Residence for the Swiss Ambassador, a commission that offered Holl a generous affordance of space with which to explore this influence. The main philosophical text used in the thesis is the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre due to the largely ignored latent spatial nature of it. It is significant that the text relies on spatial relationships to convey its meaning. Sartre’s concepts have been defined, developed and implemented by architecture in the resulting design, ‘A House for Sartre’. The design builds on Sartrean concepts of the self, other people, objects in the world and consciousness. It does this by rethinking and rebuilding on this philosophy, while at the same time rethinking and rebuilding the architecture of the house, a domestic space. The programme of a ‘house’ offers concepts of domesticity as context for the design project, and this adds another dimension to the philosophy. The project pushes the limits of Sartre’s descriptions and tests his examples in the tangible realm of architecture. Through inhabitation of such an architecture, one can better gain an understanding of this philosophy. As Sartre so often appeals to his readers to inspect the state of their own consciousness, then perhaps most significantly, the architecture provides not only a conscious experience of the house, but an experience where inhabitants are conscious of their own consciousness in ‘A House for Sartre’.</p>


2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 61
Author(s):  
Muhammad Heru Arie Edytia ◽  
Zulhadi Sahputra ◽  
Mirza Mirza

This paper explains the idea of inception space from Inception (2010), a movie directed by Christopher Nolan, to explore the inception space potential in designing architectural space. Inception space is an architectural space design mechanism that translates the essential experience of space users as an effort to implant idea in the form of positive emotions. In other words, the architectural space is a medium of inception to a space user or a target (mark). The main purpose of inception space design is to affect the target (mark) by planting the idea ‘secretly’. The target is unaware of the intervention and considers the idea presented itself. This process becomes the beginning of an idea to grow in one's mind the beginning of mindset and behavior change. In other words, architects or planners can apply this mechanism to design and influence users so that the design success rate can be improved. The main design keywords as part of the inception process are perception, memory, scenario, layer, and labyrinth. The development of design methods of inception space can be explored and applied to different targets and contexts by applying these design keywords. For example, this design mechanism can be applied to people with dementia who experience memory and visuospatial deficit through wayfinding programming.


Philosophy ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Simpson

The identity of Albert Camus (b. 1913–d. 1960) as a philosopher is ambiguous, and his own relation to philosophy was ambivalent. He hesitated to identify as a philosopher, and following his publication of The Rebel, and his confrontation with Jean-Paul Sartre, his standing and ability as a philosopher was often dismissed. In the popular imagination, he became an existentialist, the “philosopher of the absurd,” and the “conscience of postwar France.” There seem to be two explanations for the ambiguity and ambivalence. First, Camus clearly wasn’t, and didn’t see himself as or desire to be, a discursive theoretical philosopher. He was skeptical of the efficacy of systematic philosophy and metaphysical thinking, and none of his mature writing fits this mold. He is instead what Alexander Nehamas has called a “philosopher of the art of living,” like Socrates, Nietzsche, or Foucault. Or, as Matthew Sharpe (see Sharpe 2015, cited under Intellectual Biographies of Camus) and others have claimed, Camus was a “philosophe,” an expression evoking 18th-century, mainly French, thinkers such as Rousseau, de Condorcet, and Voltaire: public intellectuals focused on worldly, political problems, rather than abstract concerns of theoretical philosophy. Second, much of Camus’s writing, both the clearly fictional and the more clearly philosophical, can be understood as a response to contingent historical circumstance, and his work might therefore be seen, from a philosophical perspective, as anachronistic and of little philosophical relevance. However, while this is partly true, it is perverse to deny the continuing relevance of a writer who addresses issues such as the challenge for an individual finding himself or herself in a meaningless life or an impossible situation, the difference between enlightened rebellion and reactionary irrationalism, the ethics of violence, and the complexity of anti- and postcolonialism. The approach taken in this bibliography is that Camus is not a theoretical philosopher, but a philosopher in Nehamas’s or Sharpe’s sense. After his death, and perhaps in the period leading up to his death, Camus lost prominence. His novels remained in print, and L’Étranger became a standard high school text around the world, but Camus the thinker and activist was relegated to a historical niche. Outside France he retained popularity among the New Left, offering a progressive alternative to Stalinism, but that movement had waned by the 1970s. Since the last decade of the 20th century, however, there has been a significant revival of interest, and the majority of the works in this bibliography have been drawn from this “revival.”


1995 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 254-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard W. Zobel

Architecture, which is by its very nature a three-dimensional art, has in the last 500 years evolved to a stage where nearly all of the design exploration and visualization occur in any of a number of two-dimensional media. These media do not effectively portray the experiential quality of approaching, entering, and moving through an architectural space, an aspect which is primary to any design. In discussing this, James J. Gibson's concept of affordance will be used as a basis for the examination of a variety of media that are commonly used to describe the experiential quality of architecture, and how each of these media speaks to this frequently neglected characteristic. Particular attention will be given to the new technology of computer-generated immersive environments, which as a design medium promises to bring the issue of experiential quality in architecture to the forefront of design. Examples of each of the most common media, physical models, perspectives, noninteractive screen-based architectural walk throughs, interactive screen-based architectural walk throughs, and computer-generated immersive environments, will be examined as to their utility in experiential description. A discussion of the specific characteristics of each of the electronic media and the applications benefits and drawbacks will be included.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Thomas Le Comte

<p>Architects use computers predominantly to digitise a design process that has been in use prior to the advent of the computer. Traditional analogue concepts are transferred into and sculpted through the digital world but the overall process has remained mostly unchanged for decades. Merely digitising a known process does not utilise the full power of the computer and its near limitless ability to compute.  For an architect, design of the built environment is highly important especially if they are to optimise the physical, phenomenological and psychological aspects of the space. The process of designing an architectural space is riddled with possibilities or variables that architects have used historically to aid in the design of the built environment, including but not limited to: object relationships, climate, site conditions, history, habitibility and the clients input - all project requirements that must somehow be quantified into a built object. This information is key for an architect as it will inform and form the architecture which is to be designed for the project at hand.  This information, however useful, is not easy to integrate into every aspect of the design without intensive planning, problem solving and an exploration of almost an infinite number of possibilities. This is where parametric design can be used to aid in the design. More of the fundamental aspects of the information gathered in a project can be programmed into a computer as parameters or relationships. Once this information has been quantified, the designer can run through iterations of a design which are defined by these parameters. This is not a random process. It is controlled by the designer and the outcome is a product of how the architect designs the parameters, or relationships between components of the design.  Parametric design offers a shift from merely digitising design ideas to using programmed constraints derived through the design process to influence and augment the design envisioned by the architect. Parametric design allows the system to be changed holistically and updated through the alteration of individual components that will then impact the form of the design as a whole – creating a non-linear process that is connected throughout all design phases.  This thesis seeks to explore parametric design through its implementation within a group design project to decipher how a parametric process grounded in an understanding of contemporary digital fabrication can inform architectural space. To explore parametric design, this thesis will practice this re-envisioned design process through three design phases. The first phase is the foundational knowledge stage where the applications of digital workflow, computer models, tools and material explorations are examined. Second is the production of a prototype to investigate lessons learnt from phase one and apply these lessons to an actual parametric system used to design a prototype. The final stage will be a developed design process that will further explore a parametric system and its architectural applications. These phases will be developed through a series of prototypes in the form of material explorations and scale artefacts which will explore how it would be used to address many of the designs facets from sensual to corporeal.</p>


2019 ◽  
Vol 72 ◽  
pp. 04007
Author(s):  
Marina Danilova ◽  
Anatoliy Enikeev

The article considers the problem of topological descriptors of a philosophical text. Topological descriptors act as discursive points for the localization of the philosophical text, which allow us to describe its role and place in the production of modern humanitarian knowledge. Three perspectives of the analysis of the philosophical text in the contemporary sociocultural situation are outlined: the perspective of historical and philosophical research, the perspective of cultural research and the perspective of modern humanitarian knowledge. The historical and philosophical perspective from the point of view of topology is described through genre differences between philosophical texts, and also taking into account the differences between philosophical schools, trends, styles of thinking in intellectual history. The perspective of cultural research includes a philosophical text in a wide context of political, social and cultural transformations of modern society, and it becomes possible to talk about social topology. The perspective of modern humanitarian knowledge is analyzed from the perspective of the rehabilitation of philosophical discourse, the need for detailed textual work for the full inclusion of philosophy in the production process of significant social and cultural knowledge. As an original methodological approach, the article describes topological analytics, which is actively used by modern researchers to solve a whole range of issues of localization, description and understanding of the role of a philosophical text in modern humanities. Conclusions are drawn about the prospects of further research in this direction.


Author(s):  
Philippe Rahm

Our study for a new Anthropocene style is to re-evaluate the domestic space today, to rethink their decorative style to meet the new thermal regulations and to invent the architectural language of the interior in the era of the Anthropocene. The ambition is to offer a new style in the History of Decorative Arts after the Regency Style, Louis XV style, the Empire style or Louis Philippe Style among others, to invent the Anthropocene style of today. Using elegant, innovative, discounting art of interior design and decoration to meet the contemporary challenges in sustainable development, reduction of energy and greenhouse gas emissions. Redrawing the lines, patterns and geometry of walls, ceiling, floors, woodwork, moldings according to the optical behavior of the solar rays to multiply natural sunlight, to reduce conduction of excessive heat accumulated on the ceiling, to increase the coefficient of thermal insulation of walls and impede cold bridges. Rethinking the intelligence of materials to choose the material basing on specific physical behavior such as optical, thermal, acoustic absorption or reflection, porosity or proofing to water vapor, air, their factor of conductivity or diffusivity. Rethinking materials in terms of its colors, textures with physical value, choosing innovative and non-toxic materials as interior materials, to reflect infrared, absorb the other wavelengths, let them go elsewhere, while at the same time they reflect the shorter wavelengths of white light or absorb to enjoy even their heat.


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