1st Edition

Architecture, Animal, Human The Asymmetrical Condition

By Catherine T. Ingraham Copyright 2006
    376 Pages
    by Routledge

    376 Pages
    by Routledge

    This book looks at specific instances in the Renaissance, Enlightenment and our own time when architectural ideas and ideas of biological life come into close proximity with each other. These convergences are fascinating and complex, offering new insights into architecture and its role. Establishing architecture as a product of the ascendancy of the position of human life, the author shows here that while architecture is dependent on life forces for its existence, at the same time it must be, at some level, indifferent to the life within it. Life, for its part, privileges itself above all else, and seeks to continuously expand its field of expression. This, then, is the asymmetrical condition, and to understand it is to gain important new theoretical perspectives into the nature of architecture.

    Introduction  Part I: Life (Before)  1: Partitioning the Orthopedic Whole  2: Inside and Outside  3: Life (Before)  Part II: Life (After): Post-Animal Life  4: Post-Animal Life  5: After  6: Ways of Life  7: Hyena: Totem Animal of the Late Twentieth Century  Part III: The Divide  8: Birds (From Above)  9: Birds (From Below)  10: Space: The Animal-Field  11: Praying Mantis: Totem Animal of the Thirties  12: Mimicry  Part IV: Milieu  13: Vertical, Standing Upright  14: Framing  15: Lascaux: Totem Milieu of the Sixties  Part V: Animal Urbanism  16: Stock Exchange: Standing Upright, Idle  17: The City: Horizontal, Upright, Working  Part VI: Processing  18: Engineering  19: Processing

    Biography

    Catherine Ingraham is Professor of Architecture at Pratt Institute. She is the author of Architecture and the Burdens of Linearity (Yale University Press, 1998), co-editor of Restructuring Architectural Theory (Northwestern University Press, 1989), and was an editor of the critical journal Assemblage from 1991-1998.