1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910524683403321

Autore

Purdy Daniel L

Titolo

On the ruins of Babel : architectural metaphor in German thought / / Daniel L. Purdy

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Ithaca, N.Y., : Cornell University Press, : Cornell University Library, 2011

ISBN

0-8014-7696-8

0-8014-6005-0

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (328 p.)

Collana

Signale : modern German letters, cultures, and thought

Disciplina

720.1

Soggetti

Architecture and philosophy - Germany - History

Philosophy, German - History

Architecture and literature - Germany - History

German literature - History and criticism

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

The decline of the classical orders -- Science or art? : architecture's place within the disciplines -- Architecture in Kant's thought : the metaphor's genealogy -- How much architecture is in Kant's architectonic of pure reason? -- The house of memory : architectural technologies of the self -- Goethe's architectural epiphanies -- The building in Bildung : Goethe, Palladio, and the architectural media -- Goethe and the disappointing site : buildings that do not live up to their images -- Gothic deconstruction : Hegel, Libeskind, and the avant-garde -- Benjamin's mythic architecture.

Sommario/riassunto

The eighteenth century struggled to define architecture as either an art or a science-the image of the architect as a grand figure who synthesizes all other disciplines within a single master plan emerged from this discourse. Immanuel Kant and Johann Wolfgang Goethe described the architect as their equal, a genius with godlike creativity. For writers from Descartes to Freud, architectural reasoning provided a method for critically examining consciousness. The architect, as philosophers liked to think of him, was obligated by the design and construction process to mediate between the abstract and the actual.In On the Ruins of Babel, Daniel Purdy traces this notion back to its



wellspring. He surveys the volatile state of architectural theory in the Enlightenment, brought on by the newly emerged scientific critiques of Renaissance cosmology, then shows how German writers redeployed Renaissance terminology so that "harmony," "unity," "synthesis," "foundation," and "orderliness" became states of consciousness, rather than terms used to describe the built world. Purdy's distinctly new interpretation of German theory reveals how metaphors constitute interior life as an architectural space to be designed, constructed, renovated, or demolished. He elucidates the close affinity between Hegel's Romantic aesthetic of space and Daniel Libeskind's deconstruction of monumental architecture in Berlin's Jewish Museum.Through a careful reading of Walter Benjamin's writing on architecture as myth, Purdy details how classical architecture shaped Benjamin's modernist interpretations of urban life, particularly his elaboration on Freud's archaeology of the unconscious. Benjamin's essays on dreams and architecture turn the individualist sensibility of the Enlightenment into a collective and mythic identification between humans and buildings.