In Architectures of Time, Sanford Kwinter offers a critical guide to the modern history of time and to the interplay between the physical sciences and the arts. Tracing the transformation of twentieth-century epistemology to the rise of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, Kwinter explains how the demise of the concept of absolute time, and of the classical notion of space as a fixed background against which things occur, led to field theory and a physics of the "event." He suggests that the closed, controlled, and mechanical world of physics gave way to the approximate, active, and qualitative world of biology as a model of both scientific and metaphysical explanation.Kwinter examines theory of time and space in Einstein's theories of relativity and shows how these ideas were reflected in the writings of the sculptor Umberto Boccioni, the town planning schema of the Futurist architect Antonio Sant'Elia, the philosophy of Henri Bergson, and the writings of Franz Kafka. He argues that the writings of Boccioni and the visionary architecture of Sant'Elia represent the earliest and most profound deployments of the concepts of field and event. In discussing Kafka's work, he moves away from the thermodynamic model in favor of the closely related one of Bergsonian duree, or virtuality. He argues that Kafka's work manifests a coherent cosmology that can be understood only in relation to the constant temporal flux that underlies it.
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"In whose time do you and the work of art exist? Pamela Lee has written the founding question for a new criticism."--Molly Nesbit, Department of Art, Vassar College
"Readers of Deleuze will be attracted to this book's complexity. Architectures of Time poses real problems for use in considering modern culture and our own: How shall we understand the pressure of events? What constitutes a grasp of nature? How does a historical example help us? In the course of Kwinter's case studies, both time and design come alive." Molly Nesbit , Department of Art, Vassar College
"Readers of Deleuze will be attracted to this book's complexity. Architectures of Time poses real problems for use in considering modern culture and our own: How shall we understand the pressure of events? What constitutes a grasp of nature? How does a historical example help us? In the course of Kwinter's case studies, both time and design come alive."--Molly Nesbit, Department of Art, Vassar College
"Like Gyorgy Kepes and Moholy-Nagy before him, Kwinter touches everything. His real genius is his capacity to fold almost any object into the problem at hand. He builds a network of bridges between zones that seem impossibly distant--Kafka and Einstein, Bergson and Sant'Elia--and charges the terrain between them with potential."--Bruce Mau, Bruce Mau Design
"Kwinter's unspoken deconstruction of Sigfried Giedeon's space-time mantra frees architecture from its half-century bondage to classical modernism and opens an emergent organicism to a powerful window on contemporary thought."--Peter Eisenman, architect
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12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Simply Outstanding,
This review is from: Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture (Paperback)
Kwinter's analysis is extraordinary. His method is fairly eclectic, however, as some would issue this as a detraction, he compensates by having a wonderful writing style and a copious amount of mastery of the concepts that he addresses. I have read several treatises on architecture from 'philosophers'(i.e., Foucault, the Sitiuationists, et al.), but what is novel here is a designer explaining the epistemological frame of reference in the edifice, or engendering from it. Furthermore, it is completely amazing to think of the ostensibly disparate entities of Futurist architecture, quantum mechanics and relativity and Kafka as all burgeoning within the same epochal stuctures. I did find it odd that the author did not address Lefevbre's space/time tomes and rhythmanalysis. Kwinter is worth reading, and I think this book will be written about for years to come.
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