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Sean Pickersgill demonstrates that the goal of creating meaningful architecture can take a variety of critical and philosophical paths. The importance of architecture as an expression of broad, complex social drivers is complemented by the equally popular idea that architecture, as an intellectual pursuit, retains its own autonomy as a self-referential culture. This book uniquely places the emphasis for innovation in architecture within the domain of critical thinking generally, and a specific understanding of the semantics of built form.
The book draws on a broad range of subject areas, from film to philosophy to anthropology to mathematics and economics, to show that the path to meaningful creative practice is always based in an understanding of the principal drivers for change and meaning in society.
It is not a simple recipe book or workshop manual for others to reproduce. It requires the engaged reader to employ their own creative abilities to find what potential lies in each of the propositions, and it will encourage the scholastic architect to continue to mine the rich veins of intellectual culture to demonstrate the latent purposiveness inherent in all meaningful architecture.
Dr Sean Pickersgill is a senior architectural academic within UniSA Creative at the University of South Australia. He has published widely on the intersection of architecture, digital culture and philosophy.
Introduction: Architects Must Dream
1: The Mutability of Objects
Proposition 1: The Large Glass
Proposition 2: Inside the Box
Proposition 3: Life’s Harvest
Proposition 4: Site Cycle
2: Memory
Proposition 5: Calvino’s City of Memory
Proposition 6: The Machine of History
Proposition 7: Redemptive Objects
Proposition 8: Borges’s Library
3: Reflective/Reflexive
Proposition 9: Glass and Glas
Proposition 10: No City
Proposition 11: No Interior
Proposition 12: No Form
4: War
Proposition 13: Conflict
Proposition 14: Healing
Proposition 15: Hygiene
5: Language
Proposition 16: Language
Proposition 17: Ecological Symbiosis
Proposition 18: Flat Out
6: Destruction
Proposition 19: Fire
Proposition 20: Plato’s Cave
Proposition 21: Earth
Proposition 22: Clouds
Proposition 23: Perversions
7: Measure
Proposition 24: Money
Proposition 25: Wittgenstein
Proposition 26: Contractual Obligation
Proposition 27: Life
8: Site
Proposition 28: Site Affectivity/Transgressions
Proposition 29: Highway
Proposition 30: High Way
Proposition 31: Manufactured
Proposition 32: Other Ecologies
9: Fidelity
Proposition 33: Synaesthetic
Proposition 34: Fidelity
Proposition 35: Non-Euclidean
10: Melancholy
Proposition 36: Soap
Proposition 37: Shopping
Proposition 38: Working Models
Proposition 39: Odysseus
11: Metamorphosis
Proposition 40: Metamorphosis
Proposition 41: Bestiary
Proposition 42: Kennels
Proposition 43: Mechanization Takes Command
12: Fiction
Proposition 44: Future Archaeology
Proposition 45: Dreams
Proposition 46: Doppelgänger
Proposition 47: Cinema
Proposition 48: The Puzzle
13: Crime
Proposition 49: Forgeries
Proposition 50: Detectives
Proposition 51: TV Eye
Proposition 52: Punishment
Proposition 53: Cannibalism
14: Surface
Proposition 54: Knots
Proposition 55: Collage
Proposition 56: Discotheque
Proposition 57: Sfumato
15: Hope
Proposition 58: Hope
Proposition 59: Tractatus
Proposition 60: Trust
Afterword
Constant Gardening
Bibliography
Index