In this second volume in the Chora series, contributing authors take an interdisciplinary approach to architecture and other cultural concerns, challenging readers to consider alternatives to conventional aesthetic and technological reductions.

Karsten Harries provides a new and long-overdue reading of Martin Heidegger's well-known essay "Building Dwelling Thinking." Donald Kunze and Stephen Parcell consider possibilities of meaningful architectural space for a visual culture, continuing themes they addressed in Chora 1. Further reflections on the spaces of literature, cinema, and architecture include an interview with French writer and film maker Alain Robbe-Grillet and articles by Dagmar Motycka Weston on the surrealist city, Tracey Eve Winton on the museum as a paradigmatic modern building, and Terrance Galvin on spiritual space...

Provocative views on why architecture matters offer vital information for developing a richer architecture.

Provocative views on why architecture matters offer vital information for developing a richer architecture.

Contents Chora: The Space of Architectural Representation - Alberto Perez-Gomez - The Measure of Expression: Physiognomy and Character in the Nouvelle Methode of Jean-Jacques Lequeu - Jean-Francois Bedard - Michelangelo: The Image of the Human Body, Artifice, and Architecture - Helmut Klassen - Architecture as Site of Reception - Part I: Cuisine, Frontality, and the Infra-thin - Donald Kunze - Fictional Cities - Graham Livesey - Instrumentality and the Organic Assistance of Looms - Indra Kagis McEwen - Space and Image in Andrey Tarkovsky's "Nostalgia": Notes on a Phenomenology of Architecture...

Different concepts of the machine are pursued in essays on Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Alfred Jarry's pataphysical machines, and cosmological and political orders in sixteenth-century utopias. Cross-cultural tensions are examined in essays on the Christian appropriation of Aztec symbolism, and on Jesuit perspectives in an imperial Chinese garden in Beijing. Architectural origins and education are revisited in essays on fire and language in Vitruvius, on storytelling by Spanish theorist Juan Caramuel de Lobkowitz, and on the role of history in the design of the Prato della Valle, a public square...

Different concepts of the machine are pursued in essays on Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Alfred Jarry's pataphysical machines, and cosmological and political orders in sixteenth-century utopias. Cross-cultural tensions are examined in essays on the Christian appropriation of Aztec symbolism, and on Jesuit perspectives in an imperial Chinese garden in Beijing. Architectural origins and education are revisited in essays on fire and language in Vitruvius, on storytelling by Spanish theorist Juan Caramuel de Lobkowitz, and on the role of history in the design of the Prato della Valle, a public square...

Where does architecture belong in the larger scheme of things? Is it a liberal art? Is it related to painting, music, medicine, or horse training? Is it timeless, or does it have a beginning? To pursue such questions, Stephen Parcell investigates four historical definitions of Western architecture: as a techne in ancient Greece, a mechanical art in medieval Europe, an art of disegno in Renaissance Italy, and a fine art in eighteenth-century Europe. These definitions situated architecture within larger classifications of knowledge, establishing alliances between architecture and other...