Book Talk on the Philosophy of Architecture: 4/27
Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern.
For those of you in New York, you are cordially invited to join me for a presentation and discussion on Tuesday April 27th at 7PM at:
536 West 112th Street
Between Broadway and Amsterdam
New York, NY 10025-1601
Phone: 212-865-1588
In Architecture’s Historical Turn, Jorge Otero-Pailos shows how architectural phenomenology radically transformed how architects engaged, theorized, and produced history. In the first critical intellectual account of the movement, Otero-Pailos discusses the contributions of leading members, including Jean Labatut, Charles Moore, Christian Norberg-Schulz, and Kenneth Frampton. For architects maturing after World War II, Otero-Pailos contends, architectural history was a problem rather than a given. Paradoxically, their awareness of modernism’s historicity led some of them to search for an ahistorical experiential constant that might underpin all architectural expression. They drew from phenomenology, exploring the work of Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Ricoeur, which they translated for architectural audiences.
Otero-Pailos reveals how, ultimately, the rise of architectural phenomenology played a crucial double role in the rise of postmodernism, creating the antimodern specter of a historical consciousness and offering the modern notion of essential experience as the means to defeat it.