Customer Reviews

Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Writing Architecture)

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Initially I was impressed with this book, it seemed to be well written and to raise some interesting questions concerning architectural ideas of the present and future. As the book progresses the author's rhetoric gets a bit thin, causually citing references that are never elaborated upon leaving many of her arguements baseless. If you suffer from the ability to develop your own questions concerning the future of architectural thought/theory, whether you are an architect or from the 'outside', buy this book. Otherwise find an author that can actual communicate an idea beyond an initial thought.

The most enlightening chapter is "The Future of Space: Toward an Architecture of Invention". For that essay alone, buy or read this book. Ms Grosz problematizes philosophies with virtualities, logics, or spaces they have long overlooked. Moving away from a tired tradition of coherentism and rigor (phallocentric logocentrism), Aristotelian logic and argumentation, Ms. Grosz takes us on a journey through space and time, before or after space and time, and in between time and space or space and time (the interval). It constitutes a journey, as such, that won't soon be forgotten. Ms. Grosz offers insights such as the following:

"Space itself, the very stuff of architectural reflection and production, requires and entails a mode of time, timeliness, or duration. Indeed, space must always involve at least two times, or perhaps two kinds of time. The first is the time of the emergence of space as such, a time before time and space, a temporalization/spatialization that precedes and renders the organization or emergence of space as such and time as such and thus emerges before a scientific understanding of a space-time continuum." (p. 110)

Time, as such, is represented by the virtual (virtuality), "a concept that requires not only a time before time but also a time after time" (p. 111).

Ms. Grosz's essays are informed by her expansive and extensive knowledge and erudition of Aristotelian logic, contact physics, maths, and postmodern philosophy.

Her insights into the mysteries of space and time, the suchness of the now, the virtuality of the actuality or the potentiality, and the "hesitation" of durationality will have your head spinning as it's nodding in agreement.

Professor Grosz as done it again. In her latest work she as out done herself. Enjoy the read