This paper examines the concept of the project through a tragic but significant example, namely Albert Speer’s project. Speer, like any architect worthy of the name, does not drop his designs from some hyperuranium of creativity, nor does he confine them to a drawing board for the benefit not of the inhabitants, but of the readers; and even more, unlike a machine, he does not merely execute the prescriptions of an algorithm. It is, on the contrary, rooted in a soil. (...) By defending himself, by digging a hole of words, by invoking devices and programmes, by hiding behind a Diktat, Speer opens up a path that will be beaten after him, that, to express himself with Heidegger, of the ‘thrown project’, of the fact that all our designing is nothing but the execution of a Message from the Emperor, the submission to the injunctions of technology. But the project, if it is a project, is lagging behind the programme, and conversely a programme that is not lagging behind (the laws of nature or trains when it goes well) is not a project. The project has a constitutive delay, it always has a delay, and that is why it is the delay, it does not have a delay. (shrink)

The paper analyses possible contributions of philosophy and philosophers to architecture and architects’ work. During the twentieth century, a number of dominant positions in philosophy, such as the view that all thinking is verbal or that conceptual thinking determines the contents of perception, significantly limited the ground for productive intellectual interaction between architects and philosophers. With the demise of such positions in recent decades, one can hope that philosophy and philosophers could make genuine contributions to architectural theory.

This reflection is an attempt to bridge Architecture Philosophy, supported by two main drives: a Wittgensteinian form and a Nietzschean intempestiveness. This means that the final result, besides being fragile, fragmentary, and slightly unorthodox, will only make sense if the reader abandons himself to the proposals to think with the text, accompanying the challenges that each proposition entails, like a peripatetic dialog in a philosophical garden.

Philosophy deals with aspects of architecture that cannot be grasped by the established methods of history of art and theory of architecture, and proposes approaches which can help elucidate the key concepts of architecture, including aesthetic, ethical or social dimensions. My paper tries to sketch the scope of the questions architectural philosophy asks and give a short genealogy of its emergence. Furthermore, it argues for a specifically materialist understanding of the way in which architecture and philosophy correlate.

In the connection between architecture and philosophy, the “and” connects and separates at the same time. In classical rhetoric, the concept and technique of ekphrasis stands for this. Ekphrasis means transfer from the medium of sensual experience into the medium of language and back into the realm of sensual imagination. As will be shown here, however, the “and” unfolds its full functionality only in the failure of ekphrasis. Only in failure does the “and” become the medium of intellectuality and sensuality, (...) that is, when the “and” no longer designates a center and a place of symmetry, but when it describes a marginal condition, when it shifts the discourse toward the margins, when it clears the space and gives freedom a place. An example of the creative failure of ekphrasis is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin by Peter Eisenman. In the failed translation of sensory and cognitive experience, Eisenman forces architecture and philosophy into a unity that cannot be resolved into a dialectical third. Thus, the memorial creates a void in the center of Berlin that becomes a trigger of sensual and intellectual imagination for the unimaginable of the Holocaust. (shrink)

What might be meant by the phrase “architecture and philosophy”? I distinguish what it might mean from three other possibilities, “philosophy of architecture,” “philosophy as architecture,” and “architecture as philosophy.” The first refers to a subfield of academic aesthetics, itself a subfield of academic philosophy; the second to the use of architectural metaphors in philosophical writing; the third to the idea that works of architecture should express abstract, philosophical ideas. I discuss the pitfalls in the last of these. Instead, I (...) argue, going back to Vitruvius, that the phrase “architecture and philosophy” should be taken to connote the architect’s obligation to satisfy through her building (firmitas) the program for her work, thus the client’s and users’ needs (utilitas) as well as aesthetic considerations (venustas), but beyond that to be sensitive to all ethical issues broached by her work and to have an understanding of the way or ways of life in which her work and its use will become involved.”. (shrink)