The Singular Objects of Architecture

by Baudrillard, Jean; Nouvel, Jean; Bononno, Robert; Hays, K. Michael

• ISBN13: 9780816639120
• ISBN10: 0816639124
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-11-01
• Publisher: Univ of Minnesota Pr

Summary

What is a singular object? An idea, a building, a color, a sentiment, a human being. Each in turn comes under scrutiny in this exhilarating dialogue between two of the most interesting thinkers working in philosophy and architecture today. From such singular objects, Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel move on to fundamental problems of politics, identity, and aesthetics as their exchange becomes an imaginative exploration of the possibilities of modern architecture and the future of modern life.

Among the topics the two speakers take up are the city of tomorrow and the ideal of transparency, the gentrification of New York City and Frank Gehry's surprising Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. As Nouvel prompts Baudrillard to reflect on some of his signature concepts (the virtual, transparency, fatal strategies, oblivion, and seduction, among others), the confrontation between such philosophical concerns and the specificity of architecture gives rise to novel and striking formulations -- and a new way of establishing and understanding the connections between the practiti

Table of Contents

Foreword

K. Michael Hays

Acknowledgments

First Interview

Radicality

Singular Objects in Architecture

Illusion, Virtuality, Reality

A Destabilized Area?

Concept, Irresolution, Vertigo

Creation and Forgetfulness

Values of Functionalism

New York or Utopia

Architecture: Between Nostalgia and Anticipation

(Always) Seduction, Provocation, Secrets

The Metamorphosis of Architecture

The Aesthetics of Modernity

Culture

A Heroic Architectural Act?

Art, Architecture, and Postmodernity

Visual Disappointment, Intellectual Disappointment

The Aesthetics of Disappearance

Images of Modernity

The Biology of the Visible

A New Hedonism?

Second Interview

Truth in Architecture

Another Tower for Beaubourg

A Shelter for Culture?

On Modification: Mutation or Rehabilitation

Architectural Reason

The City of Tomorrow

Virtual Architecture, Real Architecture

Computer Modeling and Architecture

Lightness and Heaviness

What Utopia?

Architecture as the Desire for Omnipotence

Berlin and Europe

Architecture as the Art of Constraint

Transparency

Light as Matter

Disappearance

What Does Architecture Bear Witness To?

Singularity

Neutrality, Universality, and Globalization

Destiny and Becoming

The Idea of Architecture and History

Another Kind of Wisdom

The Question of Style

Inadmissible Complicity

Freedom as Self-Realization