Architecture of Thought

Notes

Introduction 1. Marxist art theories and literary studies have identified similar issues but associated them with determinism of social or political processes. Raymond Williams, for example, discusses structures of feelings as “affective elements of consciousness” that could either explicitly manifest existing social structures or be a part of “a social experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating.” He also says that “the idea of a structure of feelings can be specifically related to the evidence of forms and conventions—semantic figures— which, in art and literature, are often among the first indications that such a new structure is forming.” Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 132–3. Following Williams’s notion of “structures of feelings,” Edward Said proposed a similar concept of verbal “structures of attitude and reference,” the formation of which he identified as essential in the processes of colonization . Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Random House, 1994), 52. 2. Esther Pasztory asserts that material objects of art were essential in thinking new ideas. Esther Pasztory, Thinking with Things: Toward a New Vision of Art (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005). 3. Even those, like William Whyte, who see built environments as a medium of communication , acknowledge that architecture “remains remarkably under-theorized” and its interpretations have suffered from a variety of reductive and logocentric practices. See William Whyte, “How Do Buildings Mean? Some Issues of Interpretation in the History of Architecture,” History and Theory 45 (May 2006): 153–77. 4. Louise Pelletier, Architecture in Words: Theatre, Language and the Sensuous Space of Architecture (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 1. 5. Adrian Snodgrass and Richard Coyene say, for example, that the UK system of architectural services and education is grounded in the superficial belief that “what constitutes an architect is well de- fined, and the problems the professional encounters are assumed to be well stated.” Adrian Snodgrass and Richard Coyene, Interpretation in Architecture: Design as a Way of Thinking (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 89. 6. According to Iain Borden and Jane Rendal, this superficiality of approach has been instilled by architectural education. Citing an unnamed master, they say that “those who [are] invested in thinking theoretically could never be architects.” Multiple examples challenge such an assertion, many dating from the last quarter of the twentieth century, from the time before the postcritical mood dominated the market of architectural services. The fact remains that the architectural profession is frequently understood as an unselfconscious craft and architecture as “what the architect does.” Iain Borden and Jane Rendal, “From Chamber to Transformer: Epistemological Challenges and Notes 268 Notes to Introduction Tendencies in the Intersection of Architectural Histories and Critical Theories,” in Iain Borden and Jane Rendal eds., InterSections: Architectural Histories and Critical Theories (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 3–4. 7. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1977), 194, 195–228. Foucault discusses how a particular type of building, the Panopticon design by Jeremy Bentham, marks the transition in the way individuals related to society and its power structures, how the prison transformed an individual into a visible “object of information” controlled by omnipresent and invisible power. 8. Henri Lefebvre sees architecture as a constructed social space, which serves when “hegemony makes use of it.” Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 11. Denis Hollier, while discussing ideas of Georges Bataille, makes a similar assertion that architecture is an oppressive space of representation. Denis Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). 9. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (Methuen: New York and London, 1987), 77–78. 10. The notion of thinkability was problematized by Theodor Adorno in Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge, 1973 [1966]) in his discussion of its opposite, the concept of unthinkability, specifically unthinkability of death and despair. I am using it here in a sense of cultural thinkability, which is related to what Kenneth Surin studied as synonymous with the cultural specificity of thought. He says, for example, that “every culture generates for itself its own ‘thinkability’ (and concomitantly its own ‘unthinkability’ as the obverse of this very ‘thinkability’), and its concepts are constitutive of that ‘thinkability.’” Kenneth Surin, “On Producing the Concept of a Global...