Architectures of Life and Death

The Eco-Aesthetics of the Built Environment

Edited by Andrej Radman and Stavros Kousoulas

Driven 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.

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers / Rowman & Littlefield International

Pages: 250 • Trim: 6½ x 9

978-1-5381-4752-8 • Hardback • June 2021 • $117.00 • (£90.00)

Subjects: Philosophy / Aesthetics, Philosophy / Continental Philosophy, Architecture / Criticism

Architectures of Life and Death

The Eco-Aesthetics of the Built Environment

Hardback

Summary

Driven 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.

Details

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers / Rowman & Littlefield International

Pages: 250 • Trim: 6½ x 9

978-1-5381-4752-8 • Hardback • June 2021 • $117.00 • (£90.00)

Subjects: Philosophy / Aesthetics, Philosophy / Continental Philosophy, Architecture / Criticism

Author

Andrej Radman is assistant professor of architecture and has been teaching theory courses and design studios at TU Delft Faculty of Architecture and The Built Environment since 2004. Radman is a production editor and member of the editorial board of the peer-reviewed architecture theory journal Footprint. He is also a licensed architect with a portfolio of built and competition-winning projects. His latest publication, coedited with Heidi Sohn, is Critical and Clinical Cartographies: Architecture, Robotics, Medicine, Philosophy.

Stavros Kousoulas studied architecture at the National Technical University of Athens and at TU Delft. Since 2012, as a researcher and lecturer, he has been part of the Theory Section of the Faculty of Architecture of TU Delft. He received his doctoral title cum laude from IUAV Venice participating in the Villard d’ Honnecourt International Research Doctorate. He is a member of the editorial board of Footprint journal of architecture theory since 2014.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
PART ONE: METAMODELLING
1. Introduction: Pings and Hups, Andrej Radman and Stavros Kousoulas
2. Ecologies of Fear and Desire, Andrew Ballantyne
3. From Architecture Lifeless to Architecture Alive, Gökhan Kodalak
INTERMEZZO 1: PRIMING
An Index of Affective Mechanisms: Deciphering the Pre-Subjective Power of Spatial Assemblages, Panagiotis Roupas and Yota Passia
PART TWO: ASIGNIFYING SEMIOTICS
4. Reversed Encounters: Initial Findings on Japan-ness in Arakawa and Gins, Renske Maria van Dam
5. A Cartography of Discourses on Architectures of Life and/or Death, Robert A. Gorny
6. Lilacs Out of the Dead Land, Antonio Paoletti
INTERMEZZO 2: PRIMACY OF ACTION
Grasping Ma, Renske Maria van Dam
PART THREE: PEDAGOGY OF SENSES
7. The Garden of Sisyphus: A Design Proposal for the First (Public) Crematorium in Greece, Stavros Mouzakitis
8. Towards a Playful Architecture: Crisis, Sense-Making and Questions Concerning Method, Dulmini Perera
9. Radically Alive: A Disappearing Mining Town at Europe’s Margins, Karin Reisinger
Index
Biographies

Reviews

Andrej Radman and Stavros Kousoulas' Architectures of Life and Death: The Eco-Aesthetics of the Built Environment is a joyous probing of the complex and often unknowable ecologies that come to constitute architecture. The chapters collectively assemble a logic whereby the ‘ethico’ becomes the ‘eco’ of an architectural aesthetics which wavers restlessly between the living and an equally lively inorganic.

— Chris L. Smith, professor of architectural theory, Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning

Caught up in the dynamic throes of life and death, shot through with light, darkened by shadows, and following the flow of materials, this collection tracks the effects of architecture in unexpected situations. From temples to mine sites and disappearing towns, immanent powers of expression mix meaning with sensation giving rise to strange ecologies that conjoin subjectivities with environmental milieus. This collection will take you on a wild journey through conceptual and affective twists and somersaults.

— Hélène Frichot, professor of architecture and philosophy, The University of Melbourne

Just as matter passes into sensation and sensation into matter, this volume reveals how the affective forces, inertias, and fluxes of death and life continually pass through and inhabit each other. Rather than an architecture that imagines itself stringing a high wire between life on one side and death on the other, these authors traverse an immanent milieu where every moment is saturated by their mutual imbrication.

— Gregory J. Seigworth, Professor of Communication Studies in the Department of Communication and Theatre, Millersville University, USA; Co-editor of the The Affect Theory Reader