This Thing Called Theory

✍ Scribed by Teresa Stoppani; George Themistokleous; Giorgio Ponzo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 337
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

In the age of post-digital architecture and digital materiality, This Thing Called Theory explores current practices of architectural theory, their critical and productive role. The book is organized in sections which explore theory as an open issue in architecture, as it relates to and borrows from other disciplines, thus opening up architecture itself and showing how architecture is inextricably connected to other social and theoretical practices.

The sections move gradually from the specifics of architectural thought - its history, theory, and criticism - and their ongoing relation with philosophy, to the critical positions formulated through architecture's specific forms of expression, and onto more recent forms of architecture's engagement and self-definition. The book's thematic sessions are concluded by and interspersed with a series of shorter critical position texts, which, together, propose a new vision of the contemporary role of theory in architecture. What emerges, overall, is a critical and productive role for theory in architecture today: theory as a proposition, theory as task and as a 'risk' of architecture.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of illustrations
List of contributors
Acknowledgments
1 This thing called theory
Part I: Theories and histories
2 Manfredo Tafuri and the death of architecture
3 Theories and history of architecture (museums)
4 Architecture in/out of the boudoir? The autonomy of architecture and the architecture of autonomy
5 Repositioning. Before theory
Part II: Between history and philosophy
6 Which ‘humanism’? On the Italian theory of architecture, 1951–1969
7 Philosophical thinking as political praxis: Giorgio Agamben and inoperative architecture
8 Affective encounters amidst feminist futures in architecture?
9 Repositioning. The after(s) and the end(s) of theory
Part III: Beyond the image
10 Drawing Jerusalem: notes on Hans Bol’s Jerusalem, with Christ and the Good Shepherd (1575)
11 Architectural drawing: architecture’s speculative visual history
12 God’s eye view
Part IV: Critical displays
13 Aktion 507: politics become theory become praxis
14 Architecture and the neo avant-garde: some theories of history in architectural criticism
15 Exhibits that matter: material gestures with theoretical stakes
16 Repositioning. This think called crit …
Part V: Theories of things
17 Pragmatics: towards a theory of things
18 Ready, steady, cook with Bergson, Plato and Gordon Matta-Clark
19 Architecture’s thing and the thingness of theory
Part VI: The transactions of architecture
20 Architecture and the promise of post-capitalism
21 Domestic, production, debt: for a theory of the informal
22 White, wide and scattered: picturing her housing career
23 Toward a theory of Interior
24 Repositioning. Theory now. Don’t excavate, change reality!
Part VII: Forms of engagement
25 (Un)political
26 Prince complex: narcissism and reproduction of the architectural mirror
27 Less than enough: a critique of Aureli’s project
28 Repositioning. Having ideas
29 Post-scriptum. ‘But that is not enough’
Index