Lezing: The untapped potentials of a missed encounter

Spinoza’s philosophy harbors untapped potentials for architecture. It defines architectural modalities no longer in terms of their immutable essence or fundamental properties, but by way of their underlying potentials. It houses some of the sharpest critical tools to challenge the dominant modes of hierarchy that elevate architecture over nature, mind over body, form over matter, and humans over nonhumans. There are ethico-aesthetic processes underlying architectural design and experience that can only be accessed through Spinoza’s hypersensitive lens, which fuses individual, collective, and cosmic dimensions. Spinoza holds provocative insights of conceiving ourselves and architectural modalities, not as autonomous enti­ties, but through intricate modes of technological, political, and ecological enmeshment. And as opposed to reducing buildings to lifeless objects and passive automata, Spinoza’s philosophy affirms them as full-fledged subjects, active and alive [animata]. Yet we have never fully explored the promising cross-pollina­tions of this missed encounter. Breaking this three-and-a-half-centuries-long silence, this lecture is a first step in introducing the latent connections between Spinoza’s philosophy and architecture, which wields the potential to redefine all of the established terms we take for granted at the junction of both fields.

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• Please contact Salma Ibrahim for more information.