ECOSOPHICAL THINKING OF SOCIAL SPACE

Philosophy should surely be concerned with the analysis and critique of questions regarding any aspect of any discipline. The degree zero of spatial experience occurs at the level of the unconscious and is proto-subjective and sub-representational. In terms of architectural thinking everything begins from the sensible. However, the task of speculative thinking is to go beyond the sensible to the potentials that make sensibility possible. After all, the basic medium of the discipline of architecture, as we see it, is the ‘space of experience’. This spatium, which is not to be confused with the ‘experience of space’, does not pre-exist but subsists as a virtuality. Once aesthetics is drawn into the context of production its realm expands to become a dimension of being itself. Aesthetics and the ethics of architecture are the two best established branches of the philosophy of architecture. It is useful to conceive of the philosophy of architecture as a distinct philosophical discipline with the aesthetics and the ethics of architecture as two of its sub-disciplines. Both subjects and objects come to be seen as derivative. But what we are advocating is not a formalisable model. Quite the contrary, any technological determinism needs to be kept at bay. It might become apparent that it is through habit, rather than attention, and collectivity, rather than individualism, that we find the (royal) road to the understanding of ‘space’, or better still, that we take a (minor) apprenticeship in spatialisation. As Alain Badiou pointed out: philosophy is the thinking of theory and practice (Badiou, 2006). A question any philosopher teaching in a school of architecture might then wrestle with is: how do we usefully involve philosophy in teaching architecture and developing a research-based design ethos?

Harvard Citation Guide: Baumberger, C. (2014) Philosophy of Architecture: Its Relation to Architectural Theory and its Place within Philosophy, International Society for the Philosophy of Architecture, [blog] 19 May 2014, Available at: http://isparchitecture.com

Harvard Citation Guide: Voorthuis, J. (2014) Thinking, practice, and the production of social space, International Society for the Philosophy of Architecture, [blog] 19 March 2014, Available at: http://isparchitecture.com.

Harvard Citation Guide: Radman, A. (2014) Ecosophical Cartography: Space Always Comes After, It Is Good Only When It Comes After, International Society for the Philosophy of Architecture, [blog] 19 March 2014, Available at: http://isparchitecture.com.