Spatial Infrastructure: Essays on Architectural Thinking as a Form of Knowledge

Description

Spatial Infrastructure is a collection of essays crafting a self-consistent project that recasts architectural thinking as a form of knowledge by addressing a number of fundamental questions relevant to the reading of works across styles, time-periods, and geographic boundaries. Jose Araguez's second book revolves around a new concept in architecture, spatial infrastructure , that operates both as a design tool capable of projecting architectural thinking forward, and as an analytical category that shifts our understanding of the history of the field and contemporary production. Taken together, the collection of essays presented here investigates some of the most intractable issues pertaining to architectural discourse, while also examining scientific, critical, and cultural dimensions where relevant. Key subjects include a building's discursive building, engineering patents and spatial disposition in architecture, typological invention and sponge surfaces, 'the organic' at the intersection of architecture and philosophy, imageability in the context of an evolving market economy, language vis-a-vis self-determinacy in creative practices, a building's spatial kernel, and the possibility of architectural metacriticality. Building upon each other to engender a coherent and distinct outlook on twentieth-century and contemporary architecture, these essays put forth a strong argument for architectural thinking that emerges from intimate knowledge of its capacities, as well as an ability to maintain epistemological clarity and integrity when purporting to expand our horizons of understanding.

Jose Araguez, PhD is a licensed practicing architect, writer, and educator. For years he has been leading design studios and seminars at schools of architecture in universities including Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Penn, Rice, Texas Tech, and University of Granada. Araguez obtained a PhD in the History and Theory of Architecture from Princeton University. Earlier he graduated with a Master of Architecture and Urbanism from the University of Granada, Spain (Honorable Mention, University Graduation Extraordinary Award, and 1st National Prize in Architecture) and, from Columbia GSAPP, with a post-professional Master's degree (Honor Award for Excellence in Design) and a Graduate Certificate in Advanced Architectural Research. Araguez has lectured extensively across Europe and North America--including most of the top schools--in addition to the Middle East and Japan. His recent five-year project, involving the publication of The Building (2016, Lars Muller Pub.), is widely regarded in international circles as one of the most significant contributions to architectural discourse in the 2010s. His writings have also appeared in e-flux, Flat Out, EAHN Proceedings, Pidgin, The Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture and Design (Routledge, 2018), Radical Pedagogies (MIT Press, 2022), and TECNOSCAPE: The Architecture of Engineers (Fondazione MAXXI, 2022), among other media. Araguez is the founding principal of Jose Araguez Architects, a practice for architecture, urbanism, and the production of discourse. In the past, he worked as an architect for Antonio J. Torrecillas (Spain), MVRDV (Rotterdam), and Idom/ACXT (London).