On the ruins of Babel : architectural metaphor in German thought / Daniel L. Purdy.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Purdy, Daniel L.

, Cornell University Library, Author.

Contributor:

funder.

Series:

Signale (Ithaca, N.Y.)

Signale : modern German letters, cultures, and thought

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Architecture and philosophy--Germany--History.

Architecture and philosophy.

Philosophy, German--History.

Philosophy, German.

Architecture and literature--Germany--History.

Architecture and literature.

German literature--History and criticism.

German literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (328 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press : Cornell University Library, 2011.

Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, [2011]

Language Note:

English

Biography/History:

Daniel Purdy is Director of Graduate German Studies at Penn State University. He is the author of The Tyranny of Elegance and editor of The Rise of Fashion.

Summary:

The eighteenth century struggled to define architecture as either an art or a science-the image of the architect as a grand figure who synthesizes all other disciplines within a single master plan emerged from this discourse. Immanuel Kant and Johann Wolfgang Goethe described the architect as their equal, a genius with godlike creativity. For writers from Descartes to Freud, architectural reasoning provided a method for critically examining consciousness. The architect, as philosophers liked to think of him, was obligated by the design and construction process to mediate between the abstract and the actual.In On the Ruins of Babel, Daniel Purdy traces this notion back to its wellspring. He surveys the volatile state of architectural theory in the Enlightenment, brought on by the newly emerged scientific critiques of Renaissance cosmology, then shows how German writers redeployed Renaissance terminology so that "harmony," "unity," "synthesis," "foundation," and "orderliness" became states of consciousness, rather than terms used to describe the built world. Purdy's distinctly new interpretation of German theory reveals how metaphors constitute interior life as an architectural space to be designed, constructed, renovated, or demolished. He elucidates the close affinity between Hegel's Romantic aesthetic of space and Daniel Libeskind's deconstruction of monumental architecture in Berlin's Jewish Museum.Through a careful reading of Walter Benjamin's writing on architecture as myth, Purdy details how classical architecture shaped Benjamin's modernist interpretations of urban life, particularly his elaboration on Freud's archaeology of the unconscious. Benjamin's essays on dreams and architecture turn the individualist sensibility of the Enlightenment into a collective and mythic identification between humans and buildings.

Contents:

The decline of the classical orders

Science or art? : architecture's place within the disciplines

Architecture in Kant's thought : the metaphor's genealogy

How much architecture is in Kant's architectonic of pure reason?

The house of memory : architectural technologies of the self

Goethe's architectural epiphanies

The building in Bildung : Goethe, Palladio, and the architectural media

Goethe and the disappointing site : buildings that do not live up to their images

Gothic deconstruction : Hegel, Libeskind, and the avant-garde

Benjamin's mythic architecture.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

This eBook is made available Open Access under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780801476969

0801476968

9780801460050

0801460050

OCLC:

757669354