The dying dreamer: architecture of parallel realities

Technoetic Arts 1 (1):61-68 (2003)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Architectural experience and creation is studied through a selection of projects, each driven by an obsessive creator towards particular levels of architectural experience, both physical and virtual. The article investigates the processes of turning dreams into physical space, exemplified by four extraordinary creators and collectors of space, each one a pursuer of obsessive architectural activities, all haunted by transitive dreams: Baron Des Esseintes, Joris-Karl Huysmans’ fictional character in the novel À Rebours (Against Nature) from 1884; Kurt Schwitters, the dadaist painter and constructor of the Merzbau created in Hannover between 1919 and 1937; Sir John Soane, the architect and collector, who arranged his home as a museum from 1790 until 1837; and the German artist Gregor Schneider, whose home in Rheydt since 1985 is slowly folding in on itself under the name Haus Ur. Whereas Des Esseintes is a fictional builder of dreams in physical form; Schwitters, Soane and Schneider are real builders of dreams in physical form - the author Huysmans is a real builder of dreams in fictional form. Three of the four selected projects introduce layers of hybrid existence into ordinary building shells, and one represents the virtual architecture of narrative space. Their creators are driving architectural space into different ontological states, providing a field of perceptional and representational problems. The architects of parallel realities are subsequently challenging our basic understanding of architectural organization, aesthetics and methods. This erratic field of subjective and obsessive architecture serves my purposes of investigating architectural imagination as the main asset of virtual space.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 91,963

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

“Parallel architecture” as a variety of stratificationalism.David G. Lockwood - 2003 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 26 (6):686-687.
Prospects for an Ethics of Architecture.William M. Taylor - 2011 - Routledge. Edited by Michael P. Levine.
Parallel architectures and mental computation.Andrew Wells - 1993 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 44 (3):531-542.
Theater and Architecture.Curt Dilger - 1988 - Semiotics:421-428.
Architecture: The Making of Metaphors.Barie Fez-Barringten - 2012 - Cambridge Scholars Press. Edited by Edward Hart.

Analytics

Added to PP
2014-01-26

Downloads
23 (#682,859)

6 months
6 (#522,028)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references