bodyoftheory
Martin Heidegger
Ingold on Making – Agency and Animacy
In his latest collection of essays subtitled ‘Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture’ [1] Tim Ingold continues his interdisciplinary investigations into the messy world of making. Written in a typically lively, direct and highly accessible style, one of the strengths of Ingold’s approach is the intimate connection between philosophy and field work – you get the … Continue reading
Harman on Heidegger: ‘Buildings as Tool-Beings’
Much of Graham Harman’s so-called ‘object-oriented philosophy’ takes up Martin Heidegger’s account of the nature of tools and equipment, as set out in the first part and first division of his major work Being and Time. The key problem I have with Harman’s reading of this account is the overly binary view of perception which … Continue reading
Critical Phenomenology
One of the latest products of Columbia University’s formidable factory of theory is Jorge Otero-Pailos’ book Architecture’s Historical Turn [1] which threatens to overturn at least two longstanding conventions. One is that the rise of postmodernism in architecture was mainly due to the influence of structural-linguistic and semiotic models of meaning and communication; the other … Continue reading
Making Sense in the Mid-Lands
In a recent lecture at the University of Nottingham, David Leatherbarrow (University of Pennsylvania) set out what might be called – in an echo of his Philadelphia neighbours Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown – a ‘gentle manifesto’ for a not-too-complex-but-just-a-little-bit-contradictory approach to contemporary design. [1] In a typically precise and measured delivery, and in language … Continue reading
Architecture as Process: Objects-Things-Lines
Tim Ingold likes to rough-up the edges of things. As an anthropologist he’s more interested in people than architecture-as-such, but whether he’s talking about objects, buildings or bodies, the boundaries between them soon become fuzzy. In a way reminiscent of the philosopher David Hume’s idea of the self as a ‘bundle or collection of different … Continue reading
Latest Book
BORSI, K., EKICI, D., HALE, J., HAYNES, N., ed's. Housing and the City (AHRA 2020). Abingdon: Routledge, 2022.
Latest Article
JIN, X., & HALE, J., Unbinding architectural imagination: Wang Shu’s textual bricolage in theoretical writing and design. Journal of Architecture, 28(1), 2023.
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