Walter Benjamin and Architecture

ISBN-13: 9780415482929 / Angielski / Twarda / 2009 / 182 str.

Gevork Hartoonian

Opis

The essays compiled in this book explore aspects of Walter Benjamin’s discourse that has contributed to the formation of contemporary architectural theories. Even though issues such as technology and history have been considered central to the very modernity of architecture, Walter Benjamin’s reflection on these subjects has elevated the discussion to a critical level. And this in the context of digitalization of architecture where one’s perception of the object is transformed beyond its auratic dimension; a process by which architecture is pushed into the whirlpool of what Benjamin called the phantasmagoria of the commodity world. This historical development demands rewriting the implications of the crisis of architecture. The project’s importance has to do with the early modernist infatuation with the machine, but also the current use of electronic technologies to the point that, it is not the image of the machine anymore but the very technique itself that determines the processes of design and the final form. On the other hand, Benjamin’s anthropological approach to the historicity of architecture should be considered as a major way out of historicism and the inclination to gauge the contemporaneity of architecture in association with technological progress.

This book was published as a special issue of Architectural Theory Review.

Spis treści

1. Introduction Gevork Hartoonian  2. Manfredo Tafuri and the Age of Historical Representation  Andrew Leach  3. Looking Backward, Looking Forward: Delightful Delays  Gevork Hartoonian  4. Porosity at the Edge: Working through Walter Benjamin’s ‘Naples’  Andrew Benjamin  5. From Baldwin’s Paris to Benjamin’s: The Architectonics of Race and Sexuality in Giovanni’s Room  Magdalena J. Zaborowska  6. Architecture Under the Gaze of Photography: Benjamin’s Actuality and Consequences  Nadir Lahiji  7. The Techno-Aesthetics of Shock: Mario Sironi and the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution  Libero Andreotti  8. Mimesis  Neil Leach  9. Daniel Among the Philosophers: The Jewish Museum, Berlin, and Architecture after Auschwitz  Terry Smith  10. Portbou and Two Grains of Wheat: In Remembrance of Walter Benjamin  Renee Tobe

O autorze

Gevork Hartoonian is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Canberra. He has practised architecture and taught at several universities in America, including Columbia University and the Pratt Institute. He is a member of the editorial group of Architectural Theory Review. His most recently published book is Crisis of the Object (Routledge, 2006). A Korean edition of his Ontology of Construction (Cambridge University Press, 1994) is scheduled for 2010.