Archives for April 2020

Emptying the Human

"There is no such thing as criticism, there is only history. What usually is passed off as criticism, the things you find in architecture magazines, is produced by architects, who frankly are bad historians. As for your concern for what should be the subject of criticism, let me propose that history is not about objects, but instead is about men, about human civilization. What should interest the historian are the cycles of architectural activity and the problem of how a work of architecture fits in its own time. To do otherwise is to impose one’s own way of seeing on architectural history." Manfredo Tafuri (Interview with Richard Ingersoll, 1986) "One of the greatest problems of our own … [Read more...]

The Magic Kingdom

"Following from the way that Adorno reads the disenchantment thesis, the distortion that leads to the harmful consequences of disenchantment occurs when the calculative thinking associated with the purposive-practical attitude begins exclusively to usurp the authority to determine when experience can count as cognitively significant." Roger Foster (Adorno and The Recovery of Experience) "Metaphysics must question whether, and to what extent, thought can transcend the sphere of concepts to grasp objects. Although philosophy’s con dence in its ability to transcend concepts is as “doubtful as ever”, it is both one of philosophy’s “inalienable features and part of the naïveté that ails … [Read more...]