Bare Architecture: A Schizoanalysis

Description

Bare Architecture: a schizoanalysis, is a poststructural exploration of the interface between architecture and the body. Chris L. Smith skilfully introduces and explains numerous concepts drawn from poststructural philosophy to explore the manner by which the architecture/body relation may be rethought in the 21st century. Multiple well-known figures in the discourses of poststructuralism are invoked: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Jorges Luis Borges and Michel Serres. These figures bring into view the philosophical frame in which the body is formulated. Alongside the philosophy, the architecture that Smith comes to refer to as 'bare architecture' is explored. Smith considers architecture as a complex construction and the book draws upon literature, art and music, to provide a critique of the limits, extents and opportunities for architecture itself. The book considers key works from the architects Douglas Darden, Georges Pingusson, Lacatan and Vassal, Carlo Scarpa, Peter Zumthor, Marco Casagrande and Sami Rintala and Raumlabor. Such works are engaged for their capacities to foster a rethinking of the relation between architecture and the body.

Chris L. Smith is Associate Professor of Architectural Design and Techne, The University of Sydney, Australia.

Located in that intimate and transitory sensation between losing and finding oneself in a world, Chris L. Smith presents a poetics of poststructuralist thinking-with-architecture. He unfurls the delicacy of a bare life of architecture emerging between spasms of embodied subjectivity and designed milieus. Smith elegantly demonstrates how the productions of architecture arouse desire at the same time as dissipating the subject in its relation to space. He elaborates an aesthetics for architecture that treats every spatial encounter as hyper-sensory and extraordinary. -- Helene Frichot, Associate Professor and Docent Director of Critical Studies in Architecture, Royal Institute of Technology, University in Stockholm, Sweden Chris L. Smith's passionately written Bare Architecture is proof of what it means to be done with the principle of non-contradiction. His schizoanalysis lives up to the promised logic of the included middle where (or is it when?) here-and-now actively coexists with otherwise-or-whatever. At last one can wholeheartedly recommend the long-overdue clinical critique of architecture's proverbial propensity for over-coding. Most importantly, the reader (to come) is given the sense of what the architecture of immanence does. -- Andrej Radman, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Architecture & the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands A brilliant book. In Bare Architecture Chris L. Smith describes architecture as a vehicle for departing from a spatial and temporal present; allowed to stray, to be set adrift, the body arrives at new formations by letting go of the here and now. In escaping, architecture and body become dislocated senses of form and force. Written with intellectual rigour and grace, Bare Architecture is an astonishing piece of research. * Claudia Perren, Director, Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, Germany *