Philosophy of Architecture Book-Of-Abstracts

philosophy &
architecture
international
postgraduate
conference
book of
abstracts
edited by
Tomás N. Castro
Lisbon | 2015
Center of Philosophy of the University of Lisbon
table of contents
organizing committee 3
scientific committee 4
keynote speakers 6
keynote speakers’ abstracts 7

Filipa Afonso 8
Luís Santiago Baptista 9
Inês Moreira 11
Carlos Jacques 12
special session’s abstracts 14
papers’s abstracts 19
(in order of presentation)
authors’ names 64
authors’ names 67
(in alphabetical order)
2

organizing committee
Maribel Mendes Sobreira

(maribel.sobreira@campus.ul.pt)
&
Tomás N. Castro
(tomas.castro@campus.ul.pt)
3

scientific committee
Adriana Veríssimo Serrão

University of Lisbon
Ana Vaz Milheiro

ISCTE-University Institute of Lisbon
Armando Rabaça
University of Coimbra
Carlos Machado
University of Porto
Diogo Ferrer
Gonçalo Byrne
Catholic University of Portugal
Inês Moreira
University of Porto / IHA—New University of Lisbon
Jorge Figueira
José Bragança de Miranda

New University of Lisboa / Lusófona University
José Duarte Gorjão Jorge

José Jaraíz Pérez

Superior Technical School of Architecture of Madrid
4

José Miranda Justo
Luís Santiago Baptista

Lusófona University
Margarida Brito Alves

New University of Lisbon
Manuel Graça Dias

University of Porto
Michel Toussaint
Neil Leach
Harvard GSD / European Graduate School /
University of Southern California
Vítor Moura
University of Minho
Yolanda Espiña
Catholic University of Portugal
5

keynote speakers
Filipa Afonso
Inês Moreira

Carlos Jacques
Al Akhawayn University
6

keynote
speakers
7

Filipa Afonso
fafonso@campus.ul.pt
Metaphysical Architectures and Architectural Metaphysics

in the Middle Ages
The relationship between Medieval Philosophy and Architecture in the

Middle Ages has been explored by several authors, such as Erwin Panofsky and
Conrad Rudolph. Gothic Architecture has already been stated as a concretion or an
offspring of metaphysical ideas which can be found in Hugh of Saint Victor or
Thomas Aquinas. The aim of this paper is to pursue this research, shedding some
light to this debate, through a consideration of Bonaventure’s writings, namely
Itinerarium mentis in Deum. Therefore, we will first examine what architecture
would mean to Bonaventure, bearing in mind his conception of the liberal arts and
the architectural metaphors than punctuate his work. Then, we will analyze how
Bonaventure’s writing itself engages in an architectural model, and for what
purpose. Finally, we will focus on the affinity between Gothic Architecture and
Bonaventure’s metaphysics, using examples taken from Medieval Monuments, like
the Basilica of St. Francis or the Parisian Cathedral of Notre-Dame.
Filipa Afonso is an Invited Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the

University of Lisbon, where she teaches Medieval Philosophy, Medieval Metaphysics, Art
and Philosophy in the Middle Ages, Interference of Arts. She received her PhD in Medieval
Philosophy from the University of Lisbon with a thesis on Bonaventure’s Metaphysics of
Light. Her current research is focused on Eriugena’s Ontology. Filipa Afonso is vice-director
of the Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa, and a member of the Société
Internationale pour l’Étude de la Philosophie Médiévale, International Society for
Neoplatonic Studies and Sociedade Portuguesa de Filosofia Medieval.
8

lsantiagobaptista@gmail.com
Derrida on architecture: the (im)possibility of deconstruction
‘One could say that there is nothing more architectural than deconstruction
but also nothing less architecture,’ affirmed enigmatically Jacques Derrida in 1986.
This statement means trouble when we assume the task of discussing the relation
between philosophy and architecture in the context of Derrida’s thought. But there
is more. It is in this extend striking that Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, the curators
of Deconstructivist Architecture at MoMA in 1988, had refused in the exhibition
any structural relation between philosophical deconstruction and architectural
deconstructivism. Further surprising in this refusal is the fact that Wigley presented
in 1987 his PhD precisely on the relation between Derrida’s thought and
architecture, later published in 1993 as the book The Architecture of
Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt. On the other hand, prior to the exhibition,
Derrida and the architect Peter Eisenman had collaborated, between 1985 and
1987, in a project for Parc La Villette, after an invitation from Bernard Tschumi.
This famous event, published in 1997 in book form as Cora L Works: Jacques
Derrida and Peter Eisenman, ‘was fecund but infertile’, as Jeffrey Kipnis brilliantly
showed in his critical essay of the event, that was then followed by a violently polite
exchange of correspondence between the philosopher and the architect. Therefore,
the interpretation of the influence of Derrida’s deconstruction in architecture is
circumscribed by a theory intentionally blocked from practice and a casting mistake
that derived in an unproductive event. But there is a black hole here. If Wigley’s
theoretical approach to Derrida’s thought, published in 1993, was in effect written
in the middle of the 1980s, in this way before the most important essays of Derrida
on architecture, that were therefore left out of the reflection, the spectacular
collaboration between the philosopher and Eisenman obscured other potential
disciplinary crossings between deconstruction and architecture, that eventually
could me more insightful. The truth is that the texts Derrida presented at and wrote
for architectural audiences remain largely unnoticed, essays in which the
philosopher addresses explicitly architecture or is speaking among architects or
architectural thinkers. Thus, we will focus our critical analysis on Derrida’s texts for
the architectural deconstruction events, in the end of the 1980s, and his
participation on the two first Any Conferences, in the beginning of the 1990s, just
before his disappearance behind the wave of deleuzian emergence. Hopefully, this
research may open new perspectives on the influence of deconstruction in
architecture, beyond illustrative theory and formalist practice.
9

Luís Santiago Baptista is an architect and has developed a multifaceted activity
encompassing professional practice, academic teaching, architecture criticism, exhibition
curatorship and publishing. He has a master degree in Contemporary Architectural Culture
(FA-UTL) and is PhD candidate in Architecture and Urban Culture (DARQ-UC). He was
teaching assistant in FA-UTL and is now invited assistant professor in ECATI-ULHT and
researcher of LabART. He is editor-in-chief of arqa magazine. He publishes regularly in
national and international magazines and have made conferences in several institutions.
He was among the curators of Habitar Portugal 2006-2008 (Ordem dos Arquitectos), was
co-curator of “«Let’s talk about houses»… in Portugal” (Lisbon Architecture Triennale
2010), consultor of Becoming Minor: Architectures and Critical Spatial Practices in Ibero-
America (Guimarães 2012), the curator of Generation Z: Emergent Portuguese
Architectural Practices and curator of ARX archive (Centro Cultural de Belém). He is author
of the project Modern Masterpieces Revisited.
10

Inês Moreira
inexmoreira@gmail.com
On disturbances, figurations, allegories and

other oblique strategies to curate architecture and space
Architecture, as a field of knowledge and of practice, has its wide theoretical

disciplinary references, including a diversity of discourses set along the centuries.
Though, until very recently, its cultural/curatorial side has been understood as an
extension of architectural history and theory, or even as a formal extension of
exhibition making. This research proposes wider theoretical scaffoldings set to
operate curatorial research on architecture and space from a transdisciplinary and
critical position.
Departing from the understanding of the “architectural” as a heterogeneous
and processual field, beyond its disciplinary borders, the lecture explores
transdisciplinary strategies to address and support research on heterogeneous
entities, so to propose a theoretical approach to curating architecture. Ours´ is an
attempt to set a methodology for curatorial research on hybrid and complex entities,
beyond the strict authorial, objectual or disciplinary delimitations.
This lecture visits social and cultural sciences, namely, material-semiotics,
assemblage theories and the critique of techno-science, so to outline a proposal for
depiction of heterogeneous objects, supporting strategies to interdisciplinary work.
Analysing the work of authors studying hybrid and heterogeneous entities, we focus
mostly on reading/writing strategies: performative actor-networks as defined by
Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and John Law; Donna Haraway’s strategy of
densification of figurations; and John Law´s method assemblages. Along the lecture,
we propose a curatorial method that dialogues, non-illustratively, with the
theoretical scaffolding acting beyond the traditional centrality of designed objects
and heroic authors, and manoeuvring the foregrounding of a non-unifying proposal:
curating in/on/through space.
Inês Moreira (b.1977) is an architect, researcher and curator. Guest Auxiliary Professor
lecturing on Contemporary Culture and on Curatorial Studies at FBAUP - Faculty of Fine
Art, University of Porto. Post-Doctoral Researcher at IHA - Instituto de História da Arte,
FCSH-UNL. She obtained her PhD in 2014, from Goldsmiths College, University of
London, with an epistemological and process-oriented research on the issues of curating
architecture, space and exhibition display, presented under the title Performing Building
Sites, a curatorial research in/on/through space. Master in Master in Theory of Architecture
and Urban Culture from UPC-Barcelona in 2003; graduated from the Faculty of
Architecture of Porto University in 2001. Her curatorial projects approach specific spaces
(as post-industrial hangars, burnt historical buildings, minor architectures, or abandoned
museums) exploring knowledge oriented research/production in the intersection of art,
architecture, techno-science and the humanities.
11

Carlos Jacques
Al Akhawayn University
jacquescarlos@hotmail.com
Playing in space: Profaning architectural practice
This reflection on architecture was inspired by the eruption of occupations

of city squares in early 2011, a movement in which anonymous people re-
appropriated public spaces for purposes no longer permitted or imagined. As
cityscapes, with their streets, plazas and structures, have been moulded by the
sanctities of power and the flows of wealth, the occupation movements of our “time
of riots” profaned these spaces, redefining them as open and horizontal, without
closure. Like a child who turns reality into a play thing, rendering it susceptible to
multiple uses, oblivious to what should and should not be done except as its
imagination dictates, the occupation of squares rendered them festive,
carnivalesque, revealing dimensions of constructed space forgotten or repressed,
and opening thresholds onto new spatial possibilities. The city was freed, however
momentarily, for unprogrammed uses, for radical desires. The striated landscapes
of urban space were transgressed in a proliferation of spatialities that testified to a
profaning of the urbe by ways of life, bearers of new ways to make space.
There are no intrinsically radical or revolutionary ways of moulding
architectural space. But then once it is understood that space is made through
social relations, that it is as a social practice, and not a fixed reality, that space is
spatialities made and re-made, then what emerges is the need to imagine spatial
practices, in urbanism, architecture, or whatever, beyond their subservience to
regimes of oppressive power. What then might, for example, a radical architectural
practice look like? Without any pretence to proposing norms or pre-set goals, and
in consonance with the idea that human spaces are created through the many
practices that engender social relations, then a liberating architecture cannot be
reduced to any fixed aesthetic and/or functionally defined form. It must rather be
conceived of as a practice that creates spatial forms open to the multiplication of
desires, and not their domestication.
This reflection then is an invitation to question, to reject, functionalist
orderings of architectural space. It is an apology for an architecture of excess, of
the monstrous; an architecture that allies itself with overflowing energies, wild
experimentation, iconoclastic irreverence. To profane architectural practice is to
render it anarchic.
Dr. Carlos Jacques is Assistant Professor at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences
of Al Akhawayn University, Ifrane, Morocco, where he has taught for over ten years in a
variety of disciplinary areas and programs (e.g. in the University’s common core of liberal
arts, courses such as Philosophical Thought, History of Ideas, Comparative Religion,
12

Science and Society, as well as courses in political and social philosophy in the
International Studies and Women’s Studies programs, and Philosophy of Religion in the
Islamic Studies program). Dr. Jacques was a student of philosophy and did all of his
academic cursus in Canada, having graduated with a Ph.D from York University, Toronto,
Canada in 1993. After completing his studies, he had the opportunity to teach in various
universities and in different countries (e.g. Ryerson University (Canada), University of
Ghana, Universidade Lusófona (Portugal)). His principal areas of research interest are
political and social philosophy, African philosophy and aesthetics.
13

special
session
Thinking and Walking
in the Landscape
to built the City
14

Dirk-Michael Hennrich
dirk.hennrich@gmx.ch
Foundation and Possibilities of Philosophy of Landscape
Philosophy of Landscape is a relatively recent area in the Humanities,

emerging through the 19th and 20th Centuries as a very peculiar connection
between different fields of knowledge, like Geography, Geology, Arts, Architecture,
and Ecology, trying to rethink the status of Nature and Culture in the industrial or
even Anthropocene Epoch. The first communication of the panel Thinking and
Walking in the Landscape to built the City will focus on the foundations and
possibilities of Philosophy of Landscape, explaining how this new point of view
must be considered as a Propaedeutic for every human activity and creation that is
occupied with the habitation (and the architecture) of mankind on earth. In the so
called Anthropocene, the opposition between Nature and Culture needs to be
substituted by the thinking of the ‘Third’, as a real overcoming of all polemic and
destructive actions on our planet. Philosophy of Landscape is related to
Architecture of Landscape but it is before this, an authentic approach to bring
together Geo-Science, Geo-Politics, Geo-Philosophy and Geo-Ethics. Talking
about Landscape and Philosophy of Landscape means to reconsider our world-
experience as a body-mint experience in constant movement through space and
time. The return of a certain ‘Philosophy of Embodiment’ is therefore another index
that Philosophy of Landscape is crucial for the Humanities in the 21th Century.
Dirk-Michael Hennrich finished his PhD in 2014 at the University of Lisbon with a grant
from the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) and holds a Master in Philosophy,
Modern German Literature and History from the University of Basel/Switzerland (2003).
He is an integrated member of the Centre of Philosophy of the University of Lisbon, foreign
collaborator of the CISC (PUC-São Paulo), collaborator of the Centre for Studies in
Portuguese Thought (CEPP) from the Catholic University of Porto and member of the
Instituto de Filosofia Luso-Brasileira (IFLB). His main fields of research are Philosophy of
Landscape, Media Philosophy, German Idealism, Early German Romanticsm and
Philosophy in Portugal and Brasil.
15

Moirika Reker
moirika.reker@gmail.com
The dialectic between city and landscape

through interventions in the landscape
City and landscape co-exist and complement each other. But they are,
nonetheless separate entities, or distinctive ideas. In fact, the problem arises when
this distinction fades, when the extra-urban space is not the otherness of the city,
but a spreading urbanity, or urban sprawl that covers all usurping the space of the
landscape; when the outside of the city is the non-city instead of the landscape.
However, the fact that the landscape is the city’s otherness does not mean that there
are no elements in the city that are bridges to the landscape. Those are either
‘naturally’ there—as a river that cuts through the city, or the sea that borders it—or
are interventions that transport us back to the landscape, places with a landscape
essence, if one can put it like this, the importance of which lays in their being a
counterpoint to the city, bringing a balance, or antidote to cities that are too dense
and overly man-made. We will thus address the otherness in the city-landscape
opposition and discuss some examples of interventions that succeed in bringing the
landscape into the city.
Moirika Reker, Master of Fine Arts by Columbia University’s School of the Arts, New York,
with a grant from the Office of International Relations - Portuguese Ministry of Culture
(1999/2001). Exchange student between ar.co Lisbon and the School of Visual Arts, New
York with a grant from the Luso-American Foundation. Studied Visual arts at ar.co Lisbon
and Free Media at Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam. Currently develops an R&D
project researching the implementation of Urban Orchards as strategy for the appropriation
of the public space by the community and its relation with the aesthetic experience of the
city, funded by the European Cultural Foundation. The practical part of the project is being
developed in the project “Fruta à mão” at Quinta dos Lilases, Lisbon (a winner of Lisbon’s
Participatory Budget 2014). Member of the Center of Philosophy of the University of
Lisbon. Main research topics include Philosophy of Landscape, Philosophy of Nature, the
Garden and the City, Ethics and Aesthetics in Urban Intervention, and Public Space.
16

Sandra Escobar
sandraesc06@hotmail.com
The aesthetic ecology of environment
The environmental crisis of the 1960s puts on the agenda the issue of urban
sustainability and the need to convert biocides cities in ecological ones. The project
of a sustainable city has been developing along these lines, based overall on an
environmental policy emphasising the eco-system and the bio-physical-chemical
components of the urban environment. However, from my point of view and
according to Nathalie Blanc, the project of the sustainable city should embrace
these components as well as the cultural dimension, which includes the
actors/spectators of the city. Therefore, this paper aims at showing in what extent
the aesthetic ecology of environment, as proposed by Arnold Berleant, provides a
axiological model for the appreciation and construction of an ecological city.
Sandra Escobar, graduated in Philosophy, holds a Master degree in Aesthetics and

Philosophy of Art from University of Lisbon, and is currently a PhD student in Philosophy
of Nature and of the Environment with a grant from FCT. She studied at the University Tor
Vergata in Rome (1998/1999), was a high school Philosophy teacher (2001-2011), and an
invited assistant at Portuguese Open University (2011/2012). She is a collaborating
member of the Center of Philosophy of the University of Lisbon and a member of Sociedade
de Ética Ambiental. Her main areas of research are Aesthetics and Environmental Ethics,
Philosophy of Landscape, Bioethics and Gender Studies.
17

Victor Gonçalves
victorgoncalves2@gmail.com
Friedrich Nietzsche, from Landscape to Architecture
Friedrich Nietzsche was a hopeless walker. In his work the idea that one
thinks better when the muscles are tense by the harshness of a mountain trail is
recurring. The contemplation of nature, of nature as landscape, would be the first
step towards a re-naturalization of man and a radicalization of the illuminist critical
project, body and mind emerging in a kôra made of biomass and senses, entwining
natural and human. It was abandoned, withheld from civilization, immersed in the
alpine landscapes that Nietzsche composed some of the most important and
brilliant texts of his oeuvre. In this sense, his philosophy is more physiological than
psychological.
This also explains why already at the end of his intellectually active life,
1888, decides to substitute the predominance of music within the system of the arts,
by architecture. In The Twilight of the Idols holds that ‘Architecture is a kind of
eloquence of power [Macht-beredsamkeit] that is expressed through shapes,
oftentimes persuasive, or even pleasant, others merely imperative.’ Architecture, in
the manner of music in Schopenhauer, becomes an art of a different kind, outside
Dionysian inebriation (music) and apollonian inebriation (poetry). It translates
directly the very will to power, draws in the undefined space, from pure
determination of settling the formless, to draw an inhabitable place.
In our presentation we intend to demonstrate that these two fields are
connected, the elevation of architecture to main art form stems from Nietzsche’s
unrestrained and permanent need to walk for long hours through landscapes. Need
that derived from his chronic health problems, but also from the incessant desire to
think better, freer and lucidly.
Masters in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art (University of Lisbon). Almost concluding the
PhD in Contemporary Philosophy - Nietzsche, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze: beyond a
hermeneutics of true. (University of Lisbon). With a PhD FCT scholarship. Philosophy
Teacher in a secondary education (School Damião de Goes, Alenquer). Member of Center
of Philosophy University of Lisbon. I published several articles in national and international
magazines about Nietzsche, Foucault and Philosophy landscape. Held some papers on
topics related to contemporary philosophy.
18

papers’
abstracts
19

Luciana Fornari Colombo
Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul
luci.colombo@gmail.com
Tracing connections between the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas

and the architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, one of the most influential architects of the
twentieth century, often remarked that philosophy was an important source of
clarification and guidance for his work. For example, Mies affirmed that the
definition of truth maintained by the Medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas played
a crucial role in his effort to understand the authentic nature of architecture in a
context marked by diverse views on how an architecture for a technological society
should be. Despite being notably recurrent in Mies’s discourse, this affirmation has
not yet been subject to closer scrutiny, including in publications by Fritz Neumeyer
(1991), Franz Schulze (1985, 2012) Detlef Mertins (2014) and other authors who
have dealt with Mies’s philosophical foundations. To address this research gap, the
paper traces connections between Thomas Aquinas's concept of truth and Mies’s
concept of architecture based on the analyses of the philosopher's writings; and of
the architect's personal book collection and discourse excerpted from interviews,
lectures, manifestos, oral history, letters, and manuscripts. Arranged in three parts,
the paper introduces Thomas Aquinas's concept of truth, explores Mies’s modern
interpretation of this medieval concept, and then reflects on how this concept
informed Mies’s understanding of architecture. Ultimately, the paper argues that,
like Thomas Aquinas's view of truth as adaequatio rei et intellectus, Mies’s view of
architecture as Baukunst points to an equilibrium between thing and thought,
object and subject, facts and ideas, thus promoting a close and harmonious
relationship between construction and structure, building and art. In this manner,
the paper corroborates Mies’s claims about the influence of Thomas Aquinas's
philosophy on his work, and helps illuminate the relevance of philosophy to
architecture.
Luciana Fornari Colombo is a faculty member of the Department of Architecture at the

Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. She completed her Ph.D. in Architecture
at the University of Melbourne, Australia, in 2012.
20

Lidia Gasperoni
Technische Universität Berlin
lidia.gasperoni@mailbox.tu-berlin.de
Diagrammatic thinking in architecture
In order to explain how architecture has an own spatial reflection, I would

like to focus my talk on the use of media in design process and in particular on the
function of diagrams as hybrid forms relating space and time, perception and
thought. Even if diagrams recur constantly in the design process, a proper definition
is still missing. There are multiple ways in which architects make us of diagrams,
so that we could assert that there are as many diagrams as architectural projects.
Furthermore, diagrams define an important link between architecture and
philosophy. Foucault, Deleuze and Peirce are only some examples of philosophical
reflection of the use of diagrams in architecture, as works of Peter Eisenman,
UNStudio and FOA show.
The purpose of my presentation is to pick out the central question, whether
the diagram is only a particular and historical notion or, on the contrary, an
indispensable medium within the design process. Starting from single projects that
focus on diagrams, I firstly explain the philosophical sources of diagrammatic
theory in architecture and secondly the medial qualities of diagrams. At last I
propose my own conception of diagrammatic thought in architecture,
understanding the diagram not as a medium, but as a way of thinking and using
media in architecture.
Lidia Gasperoni achieved her PhD in Philosophy at the TU Berlin under the supervision of
Prof. Günter Abel and funded by DAAD fellowship. Since 2014 she is research fellow at
the Faculty of Architecture of the TU Berlin. Since 2010 she is Co-Director of the Freigeist-
Akademie für Geisteswissenschaften. She studied at the University La Sapienza of Rome,
at the Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg in Breisgau and at the TU Berlin. The subject-
matter of her dissertation is the relation of sensibility and conceptuality within the theory
of Schematism in Kantian and Post-Kantian Philosophy and within contemporary theories
of knowledge.
21

André Patrão
KU Leuven / Lunds Universitet
andrefpatrao@gmail.com
The inbetween: on the essence of architectural design
Philosophy’s traditional categorization of architectural design amongst

various forms of fine arts is both an inadequate assumption for its genuine
theoretical comprehension and dangerously misleading for its practice. This critical
claim has been voiced by more and more philosophers and designers in recent
years, yet both struggle to present a solid, coherent, holistic alternative which
convinces one another and even themselves. The detachment of architectural
design from the arts implies opening a space of its own, under its specific norms
and purpose, but it is one impressively hard to pin down and remarkably apt to
slither through any attempt to do so.
The challenge is then to articulate architectural design’s own proper space
as a discipline. Within and through philosophical discussion, it is shown to yield a
unique role of ontological representation and reconfiguration partially shared with,
but ultimately beyond, that of art. The fundamental ontological difference, and
defining characteristic, of architectural design as a discipline is its inbetweenness:
inbetween science and art; abstraction and utility; determinacy and indeterminacy;
theory and practice; ontical and ontological; beings and Being; and modes of Being.
In this mediatory space is its realm, one which hold on to and moves all others, yet
is irreducible to and uncategorizable under any other than its own.
This reflection as such also occurs in the inbetween, specifically of
philosophy and architectural design. The grounding reference author is Martin
Heidegger, whose work found translation into design through the (mis)interpreter
Christian Norberg-Schulz. Though both architectural theory and ontological
thought grew beyond these thinkers – as does this exposition – the first coherent
expression of architectural design’s inbetweenness discloses itself in their work.
André Patrão is a young Master of Sustainable Urban Design — Lund University, Sweden
– currently completing a Philosophy Master thesis — with KU Leuven, in Belgium – having
previously earned both a Bachelor of Architecture — with the University of Lisbon – and
an Abridged Bachelor of Philosophy — again, with KU Leuven. Focusing on different
concerns, both Master theses investigate the mutual singular benefit of a dialogue between
philosophy, art, and design, namely aesthetics and metaphysics, and architectural and
urban design. Given the benefit of each discipline in understanding the other, André
researches and writes about both topics per se and about their fascinating yet challenging
inbetween space.
22

Mahroo Moosavi
The University of Sydney
mmoo5607@uni.sydney.edu.au
Existentialism or Essentialism:
An Investigation of the Architecture of Safavid Persia
Developed in the 17th century, ‘Transcendent Theosophy’ as defined by the

thinker Mulla Sadra, illustrated a major transition from essentialism to existentialism
in Islamic thought. According to Sadra, ‘something has to exist first and then have
an essence.’ Cast in opposition to the idea that ’essence precedes existence,’
previously introduced by Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi and Avicenna, Sadra’s
achievement was to reconcile opposing conditions including reason and intuition
within a largely late-Neoplatonic paradigm. Such complementary natures are also
found within the architecture of the same period. How buildings in Isfahan, Persia
such as Shaykh Lutfullah Mosque (1613-1619), were predisposed, if not
determined, by an intimate knowledge and practice of Transcendent Philosophy is
central to this investigation.
If one considers Safavid-era Isfahan as both an arbiter and physical symbol
within ‘Transcendent Theosophy,’ then it may be argued that complementary
natures found within architecture engendered the capacity for contemplating
philosophic ideals. As Mulla Sadra demonstrates, the physicality of a substance is
the same as its existence. Due to the uniqueness of existence, architecture and
urbanism, which take place through the appearance of a building or a city, should
be an expression and representative of that unique existence. While Safavid
architects tried to embody Heaven on earth, this paper illustrates how individual
buildings in Isfahan extended instrumental approaches to the substantiation of
existence. Constructed ‘frozen’ forms of existence are ultimately translated as tools
of a mediated architectonics across Safavid theosophy.
Linking Transcendent Theosophy to the architecture of the Safavid era (16th-
18th centuries), associative meanings including the deployment of metaphor,
allegory and paradox were intensified in both philosophy and architecture. As a
result, these associative meanings allied architectonic approaches to philosophical
principles embedded in the form of buildings.
Mahroo Moosavi is a PhD Candidate in Architecture in the Faculty of Architecture, Design

and Planning at The University of Sydney. Her thesis is entitled, “Translating Essence: The
Evolution of Persian Theosophy in the Architecture of Shaykh Lutfullah Mosque”. An
architect, with degrees from the University of Tehran and the University of New South
Wales, Mahroo recently presented the paper “Translating Essence: Conceptions of the City
in Safavid Poetics” at Symposia Iranica: The Second Biennial Graduate Conference on
Iranian Studies, hosted by the University of Cambridge.
23

Tamanna Ahmed
University of Évora
tamannahmed.arquitectura@gmail.com
Vihara Architecture:Defining the existential foothold of

‘Somapura Mahavihara’ of ancient Bengal, VIII century AD
‘When we treat architecture analytically, we miss the concrete

environmental character, that is, the very quality which is the object of man ́s
identification, and which may give him a sense of existential foothold.’1
‘Existential space,’ comprises the basic relationships between man and his
environment. Existential Foothold of ‘Somapura Mahavihara’ refers the factors that
shape the monument upon which it was anchored, to establish the relation between
men with his environment on a specific time period.
Buddhist Architecture had been playing a vital role in shaping the
Architecture of greater Asia as early as VI century B.C. The earliest evidence of
historical monumental architecture derived itself from the Buddhist monastic
architecture i.e. Vihara architecture since history.
In line of history, the Pala Dynasty (750-1155 A.D.) of ancient Bengal,
contributed numerous significant Viharas, among which the ‘Somapura
Mahavihara’ (770 AD), attests the sensitivities of a highly sophisticated
architectonic typology of Vihara architecture, announcing the flourishing minute of
art and architecture of the era. Being significant in character, this monument has
been enlisted as UNESCO Heritage Monument since 1992.
This research paper aims to explore the existential foothold of ‘Somapura
Mahavihara,’ in terms of its territorial, functional, structural, social, cultural,
religious symbolic hierarchies of human achievement while clarifying the
architectonic typology that shaped ‘Somapura Mahavihara’ through evolution
process.
This understanding intends to combine the archaeological knowledge with
architectural analysis to portray the glorious past of ‘Somapura Mahavihara’ that
echoes the cultural symbolism of human civilization in a modest way, while
defining the singularity of it through the evolution process of Vihara Architecture,
since 530 BC in the region of ancient Bengal.
1
Norberg-Schulz C. Genius Loci: towards a phenomenology of Architecture. Academy
Editions, London. 1980, p. 5.
Tamanna Ahmed. 2012: Bachelor of Architecture, BRAC University, Dhaka, BD. 2012-
current: Integrated Masters in Architecture. Universidade de Evora, Evora, Portugal.
http://www.catedra.uevora.pt/unesco/index.php/unesco/content/view/full/1420
24

Khuat Tan Hung
Hanoi Architectural University
khtahung@yahoo.com
Manifestation of ancient Vietnamese philosophy concept in architecture

of communal houses in the Red River delta of Vietnam
Red River delta is one of the earliest wet rice agricultural centers of Vietnam.
There are still many architectural heritages associated with the socio-cultural life of
local residents in the delta. The best example of which is the communal house –
famous with the name ‘Dinh’. This is a genre of traditional architecture familiar in
most of the Red River delta villages, whose role is both a place for worship and a
place for community events.
The origin of the village's communal houses is currently a controversial
issue. The earliest traces of the communal houses date from the early 16th century.
Over hundreds of years of existence through many historic events, Dinh continues
to be an integral part of village’s socio-cultural life in the Red River delta. Its
architecture is still the most characteristic image, the most mentioned when talking
about traditional villages.
However, these characteristics in terms of architectural form and spatial
organization of the Dinh as well as their origin are still mysteries to explain. For
example, why the most of the earliest communal houses have stilt structure? Why
the worship space in the house is located in the lowest position close to the ground?
Why the sculptures and decorations in the house located mainly in the overhead,
dark and difficult to see, etc.?
This paper explains these mysteries while finding out the relationship
between the architecture of the communal house and the philosophy concept and
world view of the ancient Vietnamese like Yin and Yang Philosophy, their notion
about the nature and structure of the universe etc. This paper also points out the
specific manifestation of the philosophical concepts in the structure of the house,
its roof features and the characteristic decorative details… as well as behaviour of
the local people in and around the house.
BIO TBA
25

Philippe Zourgane
École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture Paris Val de Seine
philippe.zourgane@gmail.com
Rewriting Another Modernity from the Global South Viet Minh

and the use of Vegetation as a Political Agent
Plant life is central in the development of modern spatial operational

framework. Plant life has been a subject of study and contemplation for botanists,
a source of wealth via spices or coffee, a field of production for the agricultural
plantations, and an exotic subject for travel tales literature. During the 17th and
18th century vegetation had a central position in the whole Western society. But its
power became even greater: the plants analysed by botanists, drawn by naturalists,
and acclimatized in the botanical gardens were modified to be more robust and
productive. For this reason, plants are fundamental to the creation of colonial space
from the very beginning. It is well-known that flows of capital, maritime industry
and market capitalization were worked around plants. But we can also say that the
colonial territory was structured at the service of plants. There is a reversal of the
rules of the game: the cultivated areas are ordering the whole territory, even the
city. To that extent plant life has a certain autonomous agency, the major/minor
relationship between built and non-built space is inverted. Linking this inversion to
the economic, financial, and political conditions of colonialism and post-
colonialism allows us to re-read these territories in a different way: their planning
and their iconic architectures. To treat vegetation – plant life – as a political agent
enables us to foreground the ways in which vegetation orders social and economic
relations. It is an ordering agent of the colonial and postcolonial territory, of
agricultural planning and of urban space.
I will discuss in this paper vegetation as a tool employed in the struggle by
the weakest against the strongest. I do not refer here to the art of camouflage, nor
to a return to a primitive state: rather it is used as a subordinate weapon for the
preservation of autonomy. In that case, Vegetation is no more a planning tool or a
management tool, it offers a possibility to escape from the colonial grid to
disappear. Vegetation as also been used to create the conditions to live different
and autonomous lives apart from state authorities as James Scott describes it in his
book The Art of not Being Governed or as Philippe Zourgane describes it in his text
Architectural Free Zone.
Vegetation was often used as a political agent in asymmetrical or
revolutionary wars, during decolonizing process, as theorised by Mao Tse-Toung
and Ho Chi Minh. I will use archive images extracted from the film Chiến thắng
Tây Bắc' (The victory of the North West) shot in 1952 by the military forces in Viet
Minh during the war against French occupation. These images also demonstrate a
form of counter-planning of the land that allows topography (plains and mountains),
geography and the ecosystem (the forest or the savana) to be used as a weapon.
26

These images depict the strength of the soldiers who become one with their
territory. I am the
territory. They inhabit it, and reconstruct it as something else. Thousands of soldiers
travel across the country without using the established infrastructure. Instead they
use pathways that allow them to avoid detection by the French occupiers. In this
way they invent a new map. This map subverts the relationship between city and
countryside, and the new territory is built from nature (the countryside) towards
culture (the city). Where, previously, bamboo rafts were used to cross rivers, here
Giap built invisible bridges, along the Ho Chi Minh route, made from bamboo and
positioned 10 centimetres under the surface of the water to allow them to escape
the enemy's bombardment of the infrastructure. As well as the refinement of these
particular inventions, what stands out is the use of vegetation to support the
resistance effort.
From a theoretical point of view it was the reconstruction of another
modernity turning upside down the conceptualization of culture as a key point
reference for modern society. Nature replaced Culture to form a new agency that
was able to destroy a modernity construct on infrastructure and total territorial
planning. Nature was defined a the new point of departure instead of culture, to
form a revolutionary society.
Philippe Zourgane is an architect, researcher, assistant professor of Architecture and Theory

in Paris (ENSAPVS) and director of RozO architecture landscape environment. Researcher
in the Architecture Milieu Paysage lab in Paris. He is a co-founder with Severine Roussel
of the firm RozO in 1998. He developed and realized architectural and landscape projects
in different countries (including France, Reunion Island, Senegal, Italy). He completed his
PhD in the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths college (University of London) in
2013. He studied Architecture in ENSA Paris Versailles where he obtained his diploma. He
is currently writing on different collective books in France, Canada and Austria.
27

Ramona Costea
G. M. Cantacuzino Faculty of Architecture of Iaşi
ramonna.costea@yahoo.com
The architecture of the memory. The memory of architecture
Architecture, where from, where to? Memory is as a modus operandi in

establishing rapports between the material and the metaphysical, such that objects
endowed with a forceful meaning permeate in the space of memory. The complex
evolution of humanity occurs with regards to the evolution of consciousness and
cognitive flow, understood not only through the intellectual lens, but through its
entire spectrum – identity, emotion, empathy. Considering that architecture is an
‘infusible fusion’ of culture, art, technology, functionality, vital and spiritual
support, augmenting society, we may state that consciousness, architecture and
memory determine the system of our conscious existence. The temporary character
of architecture represents the outgrowth of the society evolving at an accelerated
pace, surpassing the individual, thus making the evolution of memory
unpredictable and its life shorter.
This paper proposes an analysis regarding architecture and memory, starting
with the known phenomenon of memorizing and memory’s path through
architecture, continuing with “the built memory” within historical or contemporary
patterns of our cities and concluding with its complexities of philosophical and
metaphysical origin - the discourses of architecture – the implicit theoretical
discourse, the fictional discourse (the literary dimension of architecture) and the
philosophical discourse. In order to transcend into the space of long-term memory,
an object permeates through 3 essential perception stages: the sensorial stage
(regarding sensorial memory); the semantic stage (related to short-term memory)
and the emotional stage, triggering the long-term memory. Thus, in order to imprint
its values to long term memory, architecture should comply to these 4 conditions:
synesthetic, semantic and syncretic, and emotional.
Reinterpreting architecture through the way it is being memorized and
rediscovering memory as an architectural meta-language imply their reconnection
with the identity and consciousness of a culture. In conclusion, this gigantesque
consciousness, whose rhythm and hidden geometry operates as an artful
cryptographer of time embodied through architecture, must constitute an essential
part of every signified, without altering the experience of the new, but empowering
it and potentiating it with value, coherence and continuity.
Ramona Costea was born in Iaşi, Romania. She is an Architecture Graduate Student of G.
M. Cantacuzino Faculty of Architecture of Iaşi (2009 – 2015, including Master’s Degree
with the Dissertation Paper ‘Upon memory and architecture,’ evaluated with 9,00). She
recently finished an Internship at “Adam Bresnick Architects” Office based in Madrid,
Spain. She wishes to pursue the subject during a PhD Program regarding Architecture and
Neurosciences.
28

Aleksandra Paradowska
Uniwersytet Wrocławski
aleksandraparadowska@wp.pl
Architecture as public policy. Nazi architecture in occupied Poland

as a peripheral region of the III Reich
It has been a long period after the Second World War since Nazi architecture
became a subject of art-historical research. Increased interest on that subject arises
just in the last two decades of the 20th century. Nevertheless, the aspects of
architecture based in peripheral regions of the Third Reich have been overlooked
for many years.
This tendency began to slightly change in the last years thanks to
publications of German and Polish art historians (e.g. N.Gutschow, H.Grzeszczuk-
Brendel, J. Purchla). Their books and articles opened a wide discussion on Nazi
architecture in the incorporated region of Wielkopolska and a part of Masovia – the
so-called Reichsgau Wartheland, and the occupied southern areas of Poland – the
General Government.
The East was described by the Nazis as ‘unsettled,’ so it was necessary to
‘give a new shape to people and things,’ just as Wilhelm Hallbauer wrote in
reference to Łódź in 1940. German architects saw here a long-awaited chance; they
could draw new outlines for area planning of a ‘little motherland for German
citizens.’ Due to this ideology it is important to describe phenomena of nazi
architecture in occupied Poland in relation to philosophical diagnoses. Nazi
architecture should be understood not only as the product of the criminal system,
which existed in defined time frames, but also it is put in the context of a wider
timeless ethic problem of a dangerous collaboration between art and power.
Although in the last couple of years many blank spots on the map of Nazi
architecture were filled in, many uncertainties about its position in the occupied or
incorporated regions still exist. In short, the main aim of this paper is to extend
present research and define mechanisms of formulating ideological shapes of
architectural projects on peripheries, and in further perspective - to change the optic
for perceiving Nazi architecture as a whole.
PhD, research fellow in Art History Department, University of Wrocław, master's graduate
from Art History Department at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, studied also at
Universität Hamburg. Her research areas include history of architecture in 19th and 20th
century with a particular interest in the social connotations of architecture. Her recent
publications include articles about polish architecture in the interwar period, today's
meaning of nazi architecture and a book "Przeciw chorobie. Architektura szpitalna
Wielkopolski w dwudziestoleciu międzywojennym" ("Against illness. Interwar hospital
archtecture in Wielkopolska /Greater Poland/"), Wydawnictwo Nauka i Innowacje, 2015.
Currently she is working on a postdoctoral project about Nazi architecture in polish
territories incorporated by the III Reich (Wartheland).
29

Emilia Jarosova
Karlova univerzita v Praze
jarosovaemilia@gmail.com
Dealing with time, place and memory in contemporary architecture

— architecture between indexical and diagrammatic
Using the example of temporality and approach to time I would like to

demonstrate the connection of architecture as an index and as a diagram by
comparing two types of buildings, seemingly standing on opposite ends of spectrum
– shopping centre and library. Indexical concept of architecture (in the US the most
frequently used in critical theory based on Frankfurt school that influenced thoughts
of Manfredo Tafuri and subsequently other authors, for example M. Wigley or P.
Eisenman) considers the perception of architecture as a process of decoding
meaning. Important is what architecture means and how it is read. This concept is
based on semiotics (e.g., Ch. S. Peirce, U. Eco). Diagrammatic concept of
architecture, based on Gilles Deleuze, or Michael Foucault and embodied in
American theory mostly in the context of the projective theory, does not deal with
meanings, with what the architectural object is, but rather how it operates and
appeals, how it can change state of things, how virtual becomes actual. It does not
need a reader, it becomes deleuzian ‘fold’ of reality. In my dissertation I follow up
the connection between the two approaches, namely the examples embodying
these seemingly opposite poles, an indexical library and a diagrammatic shopping
centre. At this conference, I would like to focus specifically on the perception of
time in this context. Everything is changing too fast nowadays and the role of
architecture is particularly specific. It is not a medium which can be flexibly
changing according to circumstances. Therefore, there exist different approaches to
time within architecture. Indexical architecture, represented by library is going
against the time, defying it and presuming stability, long continuance and
personifying memory. Diagrammatic architecture, represented by shopping centre,
is functioning outside of time, trying not to create memory, adjusting to the
circumstance and changing with the contemporary era.
Mgr. Emilia Jarosova (1985) earned master degree at Faculty of Humanities, Charles
University in Prague (2011). She studies architecture at Czech Technical University in
Prague since 2010 (earned bachelor degree in 2013). She also studies PhD. program
Semiotics and philosophy of communication at Charles University in Prague from 2013.
Her research subject is connection between architecture and philosophy of
communication. She currently works in architectural office based in Prague on projects
related to the subject of her dissertation.
30

Philipp Kampschroer
philipp.kampschroer@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
Post-war reconstruction and spaces of memory in German cities.

The example of Bochum
In summer of 2015 the owners of North Station (Nordbahnhof) asked the

Town Council of Bochum for the authorization to pull down this historic monument
built in the 1870s. The request caused a considerable discussion in the local press
and media, with numerous associations underlining the historical relevance of the
building.
In Nazi Germany, the site served as the starting point for deportations of
local Jews. The construction of the station, however, appoints to the industrial
revolution and its infrastructural effects on Bochum and the Ruhr Area, Europe’s
major area of coal mining and steel production. Connecting the former rural
Bochum to train networks was one of the most essential project of this time, seeing
a 300 percent growth of the city’s population between 1871 and 1900. Such
increases wouldn't leave the architectural appearance of the city untouched: while
the historical center (predominately Truss structures) was repressed, new mines,
factory complexes, worker’s housing and classicist Gründerzeit blocks would
spread out, dominating the city’s face until the massive Allied Bombing in World
War II. As Martin zur Nedden points out, the post-war reconstruction of Bochum
should be considered as important as the Gründerzeit era, with few buildings being
restored and most of them being replaced by functionalist structures, built along
broadened streets (Nedden 2005, 281).
How can memory be experienced in a place ‘deprived’ of its architectural
legacy? In the case of Bochum (as well as many other German cities), historic
buildings (such as Nordbahnhof) are rather isolated carriers of symbolic memory in
the cityscape. Old street names refer to sites lost in the war and following
reconstruction, while commemorative panels can be considered ‘active’ references
to disappeared heritage. In the end, photo books presenting historical pictures
(alongside recent photographs) can probably transmit the most complete image of
the lost. The presentation will be divided into 1) a historical introduction to the
development of Bochum's architectural cityscape and 2) a reflection on the city’s
contemporary spaces of memory (refering to A. Assmann, Halbwachs, Lynch).
Philipp Kampschroer holds a B. A. in General and Comparative Literature and Philosophy

from Ruhr-Universität Bochum. He is a graduate student of Romance Philology (Portuguese
Literature) at the Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa. He has published a
translation (from Portuguese to German) and reviews.
31

Ana Luiza Nobre
Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro
nobre@puc-rio.br
Max Bense: Intelligence as Mobility
The series of four travels of German philosopher Max Bense (1910-1990) to

Brazil, between 1961 and 1964, is closely related to the rise of a new conception
of design in Latin America in the 1950’s and 60’s. The trips were recorded by the
author in the book Brazilian Intelligence. A Cartesian reflection, published in
Germany in 1965. By then Bense was a central figure in the exchange between
Latin-American and German constructive trends in arts, poetry and design. Brasília,
the new capital of Brazil, had just been built. And the country was just beginning
to face two decades of dictatorship.
Rather than reading the local context through a theoretical frame, Bense
observes a kind of local intelligence that is associated to a non-historical
consciousness embodied in design. To Bense, design in Brazil emerges as a
dialectical substitute of European historical consciousness. Thus the idea that the
tropical civilization expressed in the emerging idea of design in Brazil is the very
essence in progress of mankind, conveying a possibility of renewal long buried in
Europe.
Defined as the expression of a total design, by analogy with the German
notion of Gesamtkunstwerk, Brasilia is seen as embodying the concept of mobility,
key to theoretical debate in architecture then. Bense evokes Yona Friedman’s
spatial cities to explore the interchangeable aspect of Brasilia, found both in its
architecture and in its floating population that refuses sedentary lifestyle. Yet, the
term Mobilität is sometimes substituted by the term Beweglichkeit, which suggests,
more specifically, a movement capacity or potential.
What is Max Bense’s idea of mobility, then, when he speaks of Brasilia? This
is the main question we seek to explore, in an attempt to stress, with a philosophical
approach, a concept at the core of contemporary architecture.
Ana Luiza Nobre is a Brazilian architectural historian, author and critic, born in Rio de
Janeiro in 1964. She teaches Architectural History in the Department of Architecture and
Urbanism at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Brazil. Nobre received
her architectural training at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), where she
graduated in 1986. Later on she studied at the Politecnico di Torino, and received her PhD
in History in 2008 at PUC-Rio. She is a member of CICA/International Committee of
Architectural Critics, founder and ex-director of Casa de Lucio Costa, and currently Head
of the Learning and Research Department at Instituto Moreira Salles. She has also organised
a number of exhibitions and seminars, and was curator (with Guilherme Wisnik and Ligia
Nobre) of the X Bienal de Arquitetura de São Paulo, in 2013.
32

Fernando Curiel Gámez
Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey
fcuriel@itesm.mx
Luis Barragán’s philosophical working itinerary between 40’s and 50’s
The most famous architectural works of Barragán are houses and gardens
built between the 40’s and 50’s. During this period, Barragán began one of his most
important architectural periods, coinciding with the generally critical reviews of
modern architecture developed in the 20’s and 30’s.
Barragán, like most architects of his time, practiced under an ideological and
philosophical way of thinking which challenged concepts of mechanistic,
functionalist and technological utopias that were current in modern architectural
ideas of that era.
Today, at Barragán’s House-Studio, the personal library of the architect is
maintained as part of his personal archive. Barragán’s library is composed of nearly
2,400 books and 640 magazines about many subjects such as architecture, arts,
literature, philosophy, anthropology, and many more. Through a complete analysis
of his personal library, we realized that Barragán left some kind of marginalia on
many books and magazines like: underlined paragraphs, notes, folded pages,
photos and magazines’ pages.
These evidences in Barragán’s books and magazines let us suppose a large
variety of conclusions about his philosophical and moral doctrine based on certain
authors such as Marco Aurelio, Pascal, José Ortega y Gasset, Aldous Huxley, Cyril
Connolly, which truly defined the ideology supported in his architectural and
landscape works during the 40’s and 50’s.
This paper analyses multiple ideas that Barragán took from these authors
contributing to a better understanding of the ideological discourse in Barragán’s
work.
In 2012, I presented my PhD dissertation: Luis Barragán’s library: 1925-1980. In 2013, I

was invited to give a lecture at Tecnológico de Monterrey’s Museum about Luis Barragán’s
cultural influences. In the same year I started working at the Postgraduate School ITESM as
a teacher of the Master in Architecture and New Urbanism. During this period, I gave a
lecture at Cancún and Playa del Carmen Society of Architects. These lectures became lately
an article: Fronteras Difusas: arquitectura, ciudad, arte y paisaje, which was published in
Sinápsis Social Revista Científica de Sostenibilidad, v.1, no.1, April-September 2014.
33

Natalia Solano-Meza
Faculty of Architecture, University of Porto
carambolagroup@gmail.com
The creation of the School of Architecture at the University of Costa Rica

from the perspective of power, knowledge and nationalism
The School of Architecture at the University of Costa Rica was created in

1968 and opened its doors in 1971. It was the first architecture school in the
country. Its creation opened a debate regarding the role of architecture in the Costa
Rican society, its capacity to solve social needs and its autonomy.
The creation of the School was marked by an intellectual argument between
its founders and the high structures of the University of Costa Rica. This paper
explores this conflict from two philosophical perspectives.
First, I use Michel Foucault's ‘power-knowledge’ definition to analyse the
struggle between the emerging School against the University apparatus. Reviewed
archived documents show that such conflict originated in the way in which the
School challenged traditional education through an anti-curricular pedagogical
model, critical of an educational system serving a political and cultural program.
Secondly—to provide context—I recur to Costa Rican philosopher
Alexander Jimenez. I apply his concept of ‘ethnical metaphysical nationalism’ to
support the idea of the School defying not only education, but, a series of
institutionalised values regarding politics, territory and nationality. Research reveals
that the University of Costa Rica was a fundamental instrument in the transmission
of a supposedly social democrat project. I suggest that, paradoxically, the School's
intention was not political but aimed to open a space for the practice of architecture
in Costa Rica, and, to allow the discipline to contribute to the solution of persistent
national problems: housing, urban planning, local construction.
I conclude that the School's original objectives remain unfinished, as its
ideas started to yield to the pressure of the academic structures towards 1974. In
spite of this, I argue that the School creation served to introduce the idea of
architecture as an autonomous discipline able to contribute independently to Costa
Rican society.
Natalia Solano Meza is a third year PhD student at the Faculty of Architecture of the
University of Porto, Portugal. Her research focuses on the relationships between
architectural practice, pedagogy and politics. Her thesis approaches the creation of the
School of Architecture where she graduated from, the School of Architecture of the
University of Costa Rica. The thesis addresses relationships between architectural
education and practice. She has published articles in magazines such as the HABITAR—
Costa Rican Architects Journal, DOMUS Magazine for Mexico and Central America,
LUNCH — the Architecture Students Journal of the University of Virginia, amongst others.
34

Isabella Moretti
Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau
moretti@bauhaus-dessau.de
The Body in the Architectural Clinic: a Phenomenological Experiment
The human figure has certainly inspired architects and city planners since
the early beginning, either figuratively or metaphorically. As ideal figures, they
escaped manifestations of humanity, be it sickness or malformations. It is the
modern architect who introduced health into architectural discourses and included
it in the core of the contemporaneous research programme. The body stopped being
a symbol and started being inductively shaped by scientific management and
environmental standards.
Explicitly opposed to the use of statistics, Paul Virilio calls for more clinical
experiments in architecture. In the 1960s, Claude Parent and Paul Virilio were
determined to revolution architecture by introducing the concept of The Oblique.
In inclining floors and walls, usable surfaces, which they called ‘habitable
circulations’, were maximised and transformed into a continuous ground that
encouraged exercise and body consciousness. They developed an experiment - the
Pendulum Destabiliser No 1 - to test what psycho-physiological consequences
living on sloped surfaces might generate. Being themselves the subjects, they
wanted to monitor the lived and isolated experience in order to document the shifts
in musculature, rhythms, and behaviour. Due to political incompatibilities, Parent
and Virilio broke their partnership in may 1968, and the experiment was not
conducted.
In this paper, I will reconstruct the limitations and parameters of the
experiment, drawing parallels to the clinical investigations of the German physician
Kurt Goldstein, whose studies and therapies on patients with frontal lobe injuries,
were of major relevance for philosophers and phenomenologists Maurice Merleau-
Ponty and Georges Canguilhem. In doing so, I will outline the importance of
environmental stimuli for the construction of behaviour.
Isabella Moretti is a Research Assistant at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation investigating the
relation between body-image, dance and the production of space, currently framed in the
dance congress held in Magdeburg, Germany, in 1927. She graduated as an Architect from
the University of Buenos Aires, and holds a MSc on Design Research from the Humboldt
University in cooperation with the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences.
35

Danilo Manca
University of Pisa
danilomanca30@gmail.com
Socrates as Architect. On Valery's Eupalinos
Between 1919 and 1923 Paul Valéry wrote some pseudo-Platonic dialogues
with Socrates as main character. In one of them, Eupalinos, Socrates and Phaedrus
continue their dialogue in the afterlife. Phaedrus told Socrates the story of
Eupalinos, an architect who conceived his art as a form of self-consciousness.
Seduced by that story, Socrates envisages how would have been his life whether he
became architect instead of philosopher: ‘an architect was within me and the events
let him unfinished’. Starting from this dialogue, I will deal with the architecture as
metaphor of philosophic activity. In particular, I will focus on three points: 1. The
architecture as the building of its own self; 2. The architect as the metaphor of the
demiurgic activity of philosopher; 3. The architecture as a way to experiment all
potentialities of human creativity.
By describing architecture as the building of its own self, Valéry elaborates
that which Nietzsche had said in Twilight of Idols by referring to architect as the
interpret of the will to power. Valéry sees in the myth of Orpheus erecting Thebes'
walls by playing cithara a sublation of Nietzschean dialectic between Dionysian
music and Apollonian sculpture.
When Socrates envisages himself as architect likens philosophic activity to
that of the Demiurge: the philosopher composes his work of art as the Demiurge
did with the Universe. The most representative figures of this idea of philosophy are
Leonardo Da Vinci and Edgar Allan Poe. To Valéry, the origin of philosophic
activity is the same of the artistic one: the poietic impulse of the human being.
Leonardo and Poe have experimented the various possibilities of poietic impulse
and by doing this they made themselves able to be many men in only one life.
I am actually PhD student at the University of Pisa in Theoretical Philosophy and

Philosophy of Literature. I am also Assistant at the Chair of Aesthetics. In 2013 I edited the
book Il velo scolpito. Dialoghi tra filosofia e Letteratura (ETS Publishers). I just wrote a book
on Valéry and Borges. The Quarrel between Inspiration and Composition, forthcoming.
Since 2014 I coordinate the research center Zetesis (http://zetesisproject.com) and I am the
editor in chief of the new International Journal Odradek. Studies in Philosophy of Literature,
Aesthetics and New Media Theories.
36

Clemens Nocker / Clara Archibugi
La Sapienza University of Rome
clemens.nocker@gmail.com
Self organised architecture as the disclosure of place identity
Space is never neutral: it affects and is affected by the subjects who cross it.
Architecture is the space produced by human kind, as a form of art and as a form
of abode, always within this compromise, which distinguishes living from
inhabiting the world. If architecture becomes exclusively a form of art, it loses its
function and it is destined to contemplation or abandon. On the other hand, an
architecture that is merely functional will make humans who deal with it feel
superfluous and unrelated to the place.
Two theorists, Marc Augé and Rem Koolhaas, seem to agree that the
contemporary urban landscape has become more and more generic. According to
the French Anthropologist Marc Augé, an extended number of ‘non-places’ are
created in the new urban landscape: anonymous and interchangeable places in
which people are nothing but passers-by and to which they do not connect
emotionally. While these ‘non-places’, as distinguished from private properties, are
theoretically spaces of interaction of plurality, the exchangeability and anonymity
of the subjects within these spaces makes them decline from citizens to customers.
These spaces seem private, not simply in the sense of property privatization but in
the sense of de-priving them of their civic value, by which these – with their art,
monuments, architecture – were meant and built.
Our purpose is to analyse the lack of feeling caused by the “non-places” in
relation to a completely different typology of space, which seems to emerge as a
response and protest of the expropriation of public space pursued by capitalism. It
is the kind of space related to the ‘commons,’ with the characteristics of
accessibility, decision-making processes, collective care and production of culture:
in other words, the possibility to define and be defined by the alternative production
of spaces.
Clara Archibugi is currently attending a Master Degree in Philosophy at Sapienza

University of Rome, focusing on what concerns contemporary public sphere, right to the
city, direct democracy processes and independent cultural production, under the influence
of Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida and Günther Anders.
Clemens Nocker is an Architect/ Urbanist from Austria currently based in Rome. He studied
architecture at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in the studios of Greg Lynn/ Zaha
Hadid and received a degree in Urban Studies from the 4Cities programme which took
place in Brussels, Vienna, Copenhagen and Madrid. Since 2014 he is a PhD Fellow in
Architecture Theory at Sapienza University in Rome.
37

Andrew P. Steen
University of Queensland
andrew.steen@uq.edu.au
Charles Jencks’s Entry into the Arena
The ‘Letters to the Editor’ in the May 1966 edition of Arena: The
Architectural Association Journal includes a submission by Charles Jencks. This
letter was Jencks’s first published work in the United Kingdom. It addresses an
article from April’s edition of Arena: George Baird’s ‘Paradox in Regent’s Park: A
Question of Interpretation.’ Baird’s article develops an argument for architectural
semiology based around an ostensibly mismatched couple of buildings sited around
London’s Regent’s Park: Denys Lasdun & Partners’s Royal College of Physicians;
and Llewelyn-Davies & Weeks, and John Musgrove’s Zoological Society of London
building. Jencks’s letter laid the foundation for the then-doctoral candidate's
authorial status within the lively and combative architectural discourse of the time.
This paper analyses Jencks’s mode of authorship in relation to that presented
by Baird. It exposes key differences between the rhetoricality of Baird’s article, and
Jencks’s critique. The paper interrogates the manner in which the use of language
can direct a reader’s attention, and shape their conceptualisation of architectural
theory. Through this discussion, the often-overlooked issue of writerly style in
architectural discourse receives focus, and the idiosyncratic author function of
Jencks gains articulation.
Andrew P. Steen (BA (UQ); BBEnv, BArch (QUT); MPhil, PhD Candidate (UQ)) is a member
of the ATCH research group. Steen's PhD thesis, ‘The Figures of Charles Jencks, ‘Semiology
and Architecture’,’ is due for submission in August 2015. Steen was awarded an MPhil in
2011 for his thesis ‘Re Made in Tokyo.’ Steen's other publications include the journal article
“Radical Eclecticism and Post-Modern Architecture” (Fabrications 25:1 (2015)); and
SAHANZ conference papers "Guerrilla in the Midst: The Universitas Project and a New
Type of Institution” (2015), “Operation Marginalia: Translations of Semiology and
Architecture” (2014), “Jencks’s Semiological History: ‘Pop — Non Pop’” (2013), and
“Epigraphs, Poetics, Architectural History” (2012).
38

María Rivo-Vázquez
Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
maria.rivo@usc.es
Walking with Michel de Certeau. Jesuit architecture and city
‘Bernard loved the valleys, Benedict the mountains; Francis the towns,
Ignatius loved great cities.’ According to Thomas M. Lucas SJ this is an old Jesuit
proverb which, I think, clearly expresses the strong bond between the Society of
Jesus and urban settings. In fact, the establishment of most of its colleges followed
a precise urban strategy. Thus, even though limited by numerous circumstances
such as the patron and the inhabitants’ wishes, the frequent reluctance of previously
settled religious orders, and the urban layout, the Jesuits used to achieve significant
locations inside the walls of the cities. And this, along with the orientation,
dimensions, configuration and iconographic elements of their façades, makes it
evident that the Order carried out a quest for representativeness –or, from Evonne
Levy’s perspective, ‘propaganda’– that is paradigmatic of the cultus externus
promoted by the Counter Reformation. In other words, they strove to show their
peculiar white wall/black hole to as many people as possible. Therefore, to consider
aspects like the urban layout and its unfolding, viewpoints, transit dynamics,
space's current and past functions, or toponymy can be very useful to better
understand Jesuit architecture. This paper aims to analyse some Jesuit urban
establishments by using the wandering gaze of Michel de Certeau.
María Rivo Vázquez holds a B. A. in Art History (2011) and a M. A. from the Universidade
de Santiago de Compostela (USC), where she is currently working on a PhD about the Jesuit
Architecture in Galicia. She has published “En el ocaso patrimonial. Sobre protección,
conservación y restauración en la revista Galicia Diplomática”, in La huella impresa
(Fernández Martínez, Carla (coord.) and Monterroso Montero, Juan M. (dir.)), Alvarellos
and USC, Santiago de Compostela, 2014, pp. 347-364; and “Crux Criticorum. La fortune
critique de la Cathédrale de Saint-Jacques dans l'historiographie Galicienne du XIXe
siècle”, Compostelle, 16 (2013), pp. 55-84.
39

Alexandra Areia
ISCTE-IUL / DINÂMIA-CET
xanaareia@gmail.com
What is an architect? The singular case of Manuel Graça Dias

and his multiple selfs
This proposal of communication departs from two seminal texts by Roland

Barthes and Michel Foucault — “Death of the Author” (1967) and “What is an
Author?” (1969), respectively —, in order to question some of the idiosyncrasies of
being an architect, particularly within the Portuguese realm. Undoubtedly, both
texts need to be understood at the light of, firstly, the literary realm they mainly aim
to address, and secondly, the historic context in which they emerged — which
coincides with the events surrounding May’68 in Paris. For Roland Barthes, the
birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author, which embodies
a strong rejection to the “Author-God” figure present in romantic literary criticism;
as for Michel Foucault, the “author function” was essentially a characteristic of the
mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a
society.
By transposing some of the concepts and ideas of both essays into current
architectonic debates, this communication aims to reflect on the “architect
function” through a systematic analysis of Manuel Graça Dias’s work. In fact, for
Foucault, the question of “What is an Author” (and, in this perspective, that of the
architect) should be linked to the function of the author’s name — that performs a
certain role with regard to narrative discourse, assuring a classificatory function —
and also to the question of what constitutes a “work” (oeuvre) — If an individual
were not an author, could we say that what he wrote, said, left behind in his papers,
or what has been collected of his remarks, could be called a “work”?
In the case of Manuel Graça Dias, an architect divided between several
forms of discourse production (construction, drawing, writing, teaching, film,
television, radio, etc) and that also nourishes a peculiar appreciation for some
“architecture without architects”, one could inquire: How to delimitate Manuel
Graça Dias architectonic practice, when it is scattered through a plurality of
multiple selfs? What ultimately constitutes his “work”? Finally, what defines him as
an Architect?
Alexandra Areia, Architect. Researcher assistant at DINÂMIA-CET and FCT Scholarship

holder; Phd Candidate at ISCTE-IUL; Gained a masters degree from the Metropolis program
of UPC and CCCB, Barcelona, in 2007; Studied at École d’Architecture Paris Val-de-Seine
in 2002-03; Graduated in Architecture from University of Minho in 2004. Programmer at
Arquiteturas Film Festival Lisbon; Co-editor of Passagens Magazine (ISCTE-IUL,
Caleidoscópio); Co-editor and writer of Fanzine Friendly Fire. Has published in Jornal
Arquitectos, Artecapital and Homeland, News from Portugal; presented communications
on the seminars On the Surface and Intersections at FAUP.
40

Giorgio Ponzo
Leeds Beckett University
G.Ponzo@leedsbeckett.ac.uk
Of canopies and roofs. Framing uninterrupted spaces
In his book In the World Interior of Capital Sloterdijk (2013) describes how
Western civilization managed, over the course a 500 years long process, to build
up a global system of communication and exchange that ended up enclosing the
whole planet into one psychotechnical construction.
What actually helped European states to displace their power across the
globe was a series of material and immaterial constructions – defined by Sloterdijk
as ‘canopies of globalization’ – that exported value(s) and meaning of motherlands
into previously inhospitable spaces.
In March 2015, Google presented the project (by Thomas Heatherwick
Architects and BIG Bjarke Ingels) for the redevelopment of its headquarters in
Mountain View. The project seems to take literally Sloterdijk’s reading of the
process of globalization where a series lightweight constructions frame the basic
values of a community (the Googlers) in an indifferent environment (American
suburbia): gigantic transparent membranes aim to cover large stretches of natural
landscape and to host a series of movable and adaptable structures that will host
not only the ‘workspace,’ but also a series of facilities and amenities to be shared
with the people of the surrounding neighbourhoods.
It is possible to look at how Google headquarters project appropriates and
transfigures the character of past radical projects (Scott, 2007) that aimed to frame
production processes within large scale continuous structures (Pimlott, 2009) –
from 1954 Mies’ Convention Hall Project in Chicago, to 1960 Buckminster Fuller’s
geodesic dome over Manhattan, to 1969 Superstudio Continuous Monument and
1970 Archizoom No-Stop City; the paper will look at Google project to see which
features of Sloterdijk’s ‘canopies’ it is able to embody (‘the poetics of the ship’s
hold,’ ‘the religious network,’ etc.) pointing at a disappearance of boundaries
between different kinds of spaces (natural environment, urban space, interior,
workspace, leisure space) and proposing a worldview of an all-encompassing
architecture that can only be lived from within.
Giorgio Ponzo is PhD candidate at the Leeds School of Arts, Architecture and Design at
Leeds Beckett University where he teaches as part time lecturer. His research focuses on
architecture, both as theoretical and material construction, as mirror of the processes of
‘production’ that characterize the contemporary condition of the ‘knowledge society.’
Giorgio studied architecture at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam (2009-11) and at the
Technical University in Torino where he graduated cum laude in 1999. Giorgio taught at
the Technical University in Torino, at the Berlage in Delft and at the HIT in Harbin (China).
41

Susana Ventura
University of Porto
susanapventura@gmail.com
Towards an intensive architecture:

how do we compose intimacy in architecture?
The present paper aims to define an aesthetic category yet inexistent in the
theory of architecture named ‘intensive architecture’, which results from an area
common to philosophy (aesthetics) and architecture, understood in the light of
Deleuze’s work. Thus, a work of architecture is an example of intensive architecture
if it composes a bloc of sensations through its own proper means (architecture
devices), mastered by an architect’s composition. A sensation may be, for instance,
a sensation of intimacy, silence, contemplation, lightness or other, which a work of
architecture has the ability to sustain through time. As Adolf Loos once said of the
work of art: it should affect us until the last heartbeat of the last man. However, one
should not confuse sensation with senses. An intensive architecture is not that type
of architecture usually said to be related to the senses (as Pallasmaa describes),
inasmuch as sensation has primarily a direct impact on the nervous system, hence
each and every organ is a receptacle of sensation, and not only those of the senses.
And as sensation is ‘the being of the sensible’, it always obeys to an aesthetic
composition. In music, for example, there has been a perpetual desire to compose
silence, probably with one of its culminations and highlights in John Cage’s 4’ 33’’,
but how do we compose silence, in architecture? Or intimacy? Through which
means, which forms, which artifices, which materials?
The works of Adolf Loos and Kazuo Shinohara are some of the examples to
be analysed where one finds intimacy as an architectonic sensation, a sensation
that fills the space independently of time and seasons. Wherefore, the experience
of the work in place (the empirical experience that has been in the foundations of
the phenomenological thought so mistreated by architecture experts) and a
knowledge of our own body are important, when these are deeply connected to the
philosophical concepts of sensation and sensibility.
Architect, writer, curator & post-doc researcher. Currently, developing a post-doc research
project untitled "Towards an intensive architecture" at The Faculty of Architecture of the
University of Porto. Awarded in 2014 with the Fernando Távora’s Prize. PhD in Philosophy
– Aesthetics, Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of Nova University Lisbon (FCSH-UNL,
2013), with the thesis "Architecture’s Body without Organs", supervised by Philosopher
José Gil, which included research residences at the architecture studios of Diller Scofidio
+ Renfro, Lacaton & Vassal and Peter Zumthor. Architecture Graduate from Coimbra
University (darq – FCTUC, 2003). Curator of “Habitar Portugal 09/11” (“Inhabiting Portugal
09/11”). Shortlisted in the international competition for Chief Curator of the 3rd edition of
The Lisbon Architecture Triennial. Invited participant at the Portuguese Representation in
the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale as architect editor of the section “Detached” of
Homeland – News From Portugal.
42

Teresa Lousa
teresa.lousa@gmail.com
The sublime through architecture
While the sublime had its origins in the Longinus’s text On the Sublime, it is
only in the eighteen century that such term has developed as an aesthetic category.
The word has its origin in the Latin language, meaning literally to be ‘raised or high
up’.
The sublime is aesthetically conceived as something that has such a
magnitude or intensity, that our ability to understand stays temporarily
overwhelmed. The concept is either considered an obsolete and outmoded concept
related to the past, or it is seen as a revivalist concept understood in a similar way
as it was in the eighteenth century. The long trajectory of this concept led it to
several evocations as part of a process always present in the Architecture.
Kant was perhaps the most systematic developer of this concept. Although
for such philosopher, Kant the sublime was more related to the Nature, that kind of
feeling can also come to us through Architecture: the sense that arises when
imagination faces the demand to provide an aesthetical apprehension of totality in
a single moment, like in a glimpse, can in fact happens to someone who beholds a
pyramid or that stands in the interior of St. Peter's cathedral in Rome. In this kind
of situation, we can become overwhelmed because we cannot comprehend in a
glance the whole that we are facing.
We can find evocations of the Sublime in contemporary Architecture in
aspects such as: manipulation of scale, monumentality or the use of shade and light.
The sublime can also arise in the attempt of presenting what cannot be presented.
Quoting Lyotard, ‘the immanent sublime, that of alluding to the non-demonstrable’
can be present in the abstraction or in the absence of form as a vehicle to evoke
infinity or absoluteness.
Teresa Lousa (1978); PhD in Sciences of Art (University of Lisbon 2013); CIEBA’s Integrated
Researcher; CEFI Researcher, Sociedade Espanhola de Estética e Teorias da Arte - SEyTA
Associate, Master Degree in Art Theories 2005 (FBAUL); Degree in Philosophy 2000
(FCSH); Teaches Aesthetics I and Aesthetics II in FBAUL since 2008 as Assistant Professor.
Has recently published a book based on her PhD thesis Do Pintor como um Génio na obra
de Francisco de Holanda, and also several papers in peer reviewed journals. Has
participated in various international colloquia in the academic context.
43

Lucy Elvis
National University of Ireland Galway
L.ELVIS1@nuigalway.ie
Hermeneutics, Architecture and Belonging
For many aestheticians, architecture occupies a difficult position within the

pantheon of the arts. Hegel’s normative approach leaves architecture limited in its
truth-disclosing capacity due to its brute physicality. This paper argues, with
Gadamer, that this physicality is fundamental to architecture’s role in establishing
a space for the emergence of all other art forms. As such, architectural space creates
a space for the creation of and encounter with all other forms of cultural expression.
Architecture, therefore, both includes decoration and is, in its very nature,
decorative. It is bound to imposing its aesthetic content and then foregrounding its
contents in order to facilitate the encounter between viewer and art work.
Gadamer’s interpretation of architecture thus requires a rehabilitation of
ornamentation which refutes Hegel’s separation of ornament in his reading of
architecture. Ornamentation becomes inseparably related to the harmony of the
architectural work as the whole, its ‘komospoeisis’. This reciprocity between
ornament and the work as a whole is an analogue of the relationship between
architecture and ‘bildung’. Once shaped by culture, architecture becomes the
‘house’ in which culture is established and sustained. As a result, Gadamer restores
the connection between art and the ethical life of a community that is lost in
Romantisicm.
The paper makes reference to selected passages from Truth and Method, On
the Relevance of the Beautiful and other select essays by Gadamer. Although for
such a brief presentation an exhaustive account of the advantages of a hermeneutic
approach to architecture cannot be provided, the paper suggests that it is perhaps
incorrect to debate its position within the pantheon of the arts, for as the metaphor
suggests, it remains the foundational space of culture itself; the site in which culture
and community are brought not only into being, but into question.
Lucy Elvis holds a BA in Art History from Leicester University (UK) and MA in Visual Culture
from Lunds Universitet (Sweden). She is currently a recipient of the Galway Doctoral
Scholarship. Her current research is concerned with philosophical attempts to ‘deal’ with
architecture as an art, and the problems and pitfalls that these encounter in light of (among
other things) the necessary functionality of building and architecture.
44

Filippo Maria Doria
TU Delft
filippo.doria@gmail.com
Blindness and Representation
Voir; savoir; povoir: since the outset of western culture, the genealogy of the
word ‘Idea’ (εἶδος = ‘form’; ‘appearance’; ‘what is in sight’), associates the possibility
of constructing knowledge with human vision (εἴδομαι = ‘to see’; ‘to know’).
Accordingly, the elaboration of architectural projects is frequently mediated
by artefacts that convey information by means of visual perception. However, these
artefacts always encode non-visual epistemic dimensions embedded in the project.
The standard modes of architectural representation: section, floor plan and
elevations are in fact ab-ocular gazes that never show an artefact as it would appear
to the eye, but rather unveil the logical and narrative relations between different
parts and spaces. Moving from these premises, this paper explores one aspect of
architecture drawing whereby the power of the eye abdicates to other cognitive
processes. In this context, the notion blindness serves as a metaphor for elaborating
a theory of architecture drawing as a mnemonic practice, rather than a visual one.
In the paper, I will examine the seminal work of Jacques Derrida The
Memoires of the Blind, where the author demonstrates the relation between
descriptive drawing and mnemonic recollection. In the case of architectural
drawing, the primacy of memory over perception is all the more evident since the
represented object does not imitate a pre-existent model. With reference to Howard
Gardner’s Frames of mind, I will also discuss what are the specific forms of memory
at play in the elaboration and comprehension architectural drawing. In the last
section of the paper, I will consider the role of memory in John Hejduk’s drawings,
focusing on the representation of time in his project for the 13 Watchtowers of
Cannaregio.
Filippo Maria Doria is an architect. He holds a MSc. in architecture (TU Delft) and a BSc.
in building architecture (Politecnico di Milano). His work has been recognized in
international completions such as: Terraventure research completion in 2009 (1st prize),
Solar Decathlon 2012 (finalist) and Netherlands Archiprix 2014 (1st prize). In 2015 he was
awarded with the Hunter Douglas Award for the world’s best graduation projects in
architecture. In 2009, he worked as research assistant for the Department of Landscape
Architecture, TU Delft. In 2013-2015, he worked for Import/Export Architecture, an
Antwerp-based office for architecture and urban design. In December 2014, He started a
PhD at the Department of Architecture of the TU Delft. His research focuses on
representation theory and its implication for architectural design. Since then, he co-
authored the second issue of Modi Operandi, to be published by Architectura and Natura
Press.
45

João Almeida e Silva
University of Porto
joaocasilva@gmail.com
The semiotics of the kitchen
Hans Robert Jauss, in Aesthetics of Reception (1964), considers the work of

art as a system defined by production, communication and reception. This triangle
weaves a dialectical relationship between author, work and user, and moves the
act of fruition for two main areas: the one implied by the work itself and the one
which is interpreted by the user (and its context). Since the moment the work is
reinterpreted and reproduced (Benjamin, 1936) - and considering that architecture
has always been correlated with media (Carpo, 2001) - we can assign to the work,
now reproduction (Colomina, 1988), an important role in mediation (sometimes
even interference) between the author and user (receptor) via the work's
manipulation in relation to its original purpose.
From the variety of reproduction modes, we will study those that relate to
the architectural work, specifically the ads published in architectural specialized
magazines, those that constitute, in a semiotic way, a decisive mechanism on
creation and diffusion of style. With starting point in Greimas and Courtés (1979),
we will trace an overview of the advertisements published on magazine
Arquitectura between 1958 and 1988, and we will take the kitchen (specifically its
components, types and protagonists) as an example. We will make a semiotic
analysis of the images of domesticity that constitute them, referring the proposed
models and underlying lifestyle. On the one hand, we will demonstrate that the
kitchens ‘exposed’ by the ads follow a clear intention on create desire in the
observer-user (here, also consumer) through the systematic use of a narrative
anchored in the promise of an ‘unavoidable happiness’; on the other, we will find
that, therefore, these ads have played a unique role in the dissemination of
architectural models, particularly in terms of the interpretation of style and
aspirations of an entire population. This way, we will check that advertising is a
mechanism that decisively acts in the intermediation between production (the
author) and reception (the observer-user).
João Almeida e Silva (Tondela, 1980), architect (FAUP, 2005) and PhD student (FAUP,
since 2012), develops thesis on the theme ‘Publicidade revista 1946-1988: interferências
entre publicidade e arquitectura’ under supervision of Prof. Manuel Graça Dias. Has
published regularly the results of his research in several architectural magazines (Arq/a,
Artecapital, Resdomus or Passagens) and had won a research grant to study the japanese
domestic spaces (Fundação Oriente, 2013). Has also worked with several architectural
offices (Balonas Menano S.A., Porto, 2006-2012; Sou Fujimoto Architects, Tokyo, 2013)
and has been awarded with first prize on the contest Tec-Empreende to develop a prototype
on ‘liveable advertising’ (Anje/Inesc, 2011-2013).
46

Mateja Kurir
Independent researcher
mateja.kurir@gmail.com
On home (das Heim) in Heidegger’s philosophy
The question of home (das Heim) can be seen as one of the privileged
questions in Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. I will try to open and discuss the topic
of home through a specific threshold, through a particular point of view, that could
bring some new light into the understanding of Heidegger’s perception of home
and could possibly extend the predominant reading of his concept of dwelling and
of architecture itself. This specific point of view is the concept of das Unheimliche,
usually translated to English as the uncanny and regularly taken by Heidegger as
the term for the translation of the Greek word deinon, as it was presented in four of
his texts and lectures, namely Being and time (1927), Introduction to Metaphysics
(1935), Hölderlin's Hymn ‘The Ister’ (1942) and Building Dwelling Thinking (1951).
To be able to lay down the complexity of the topic, I will attempt to draw a
terminological map of Heidegger’s intertwined understanding of the term das Heim.
Through an analysis of Heidegger’s understanding of the concept of das
Unheimliche in the above mentioned texts, I will try to give an answer to some
pertinent questions, such as: What is das Heim in Heidegger’s philosophy? What
defines and constitutes home and (un)homely in modernity? And ultimately, can
architecture build a home for a man of modernity?
Dr. Mateja Kurir is an author, theoretician and project manager. She obtained her PhD
‘Architecture in philosophy; the reflection of architecture as a contemporary art form in the
hermeneutic and structuralist philosophy of the twentieth century’ in 2014 at the
Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana (Slovenia). In 2015 she
was a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Architecture of the University of Leuven
(Belgium). Her primary field of interest is the theoretical positioning of architectural
modernism in philosophy. She published numerous articles related to architecture and
philosophy, concerning also on the theme of das Unheimliche.
47

Maki Iisaka
Texas A&M University
m.saka@tamu.edu
Henri Poincaré and William James in the sensible space of Togo Murano
I will examine the connections between the architecture of the Japanese

architect Togo Murano (1891-1984), the philosophical movement of pragmatism,
and the development of topology in mathematics.
The beginning of the 20th century witnessed parallel developments in
mathematics and philosophy. The mathematician Henri Poincaré was developing
a new kind of understanding of continuity that began with an examination of
sensible space, setting the foundation of which would later be called algebraic
topology. At the same time, the philosopher William James was advancing his ideas
about the continuity of experience as a series of temporally contiguous events,
which were later incorporated into a philosophy of pragmatism that attempted to
understand the world through ‘conceivable effects of a practical kind.’
In Japan, James's philosophy was embraced by the writer Soseki Natsume
and the philosopher Kitaro Nishida, and also permeated the literary and intellectual
community in the early 1910s through the work of Henry Bergson. I will
demonstrate how James adapted Poincaré's mathematical formulation of continuity
and how this whole set of ideas is manifest in the work of Murano, who was drawn
to the philosophy of pragmatism on multiple fronts: through his travel to the United
States in the 1920s and 1930s, through the work of the philosophers Bergson and
Odo Tanaka (who studied with John Dewey), and in his professional experiences
as a commercial architect. Examples to be discussed include the Chiyoda Insurance
Headquarters (1966) and the Nissay Theatre (1963), which exhibit flexible
compositional qualities based on an intuitive engagement with space, suggesting
that non-Cartesian topological composition naturally arises from the pragmatist
approach to design.
Maki Iisaka is a fourth year PhD student at Texas A&M University. Her dissertation focuses
on the post-war work of the Japanese architect Togo Murano. She is interested in how
Murano's often confounding ideas and methods has been received in Japan and abroad,
and how this reception can be framed in relation to the issues of representation, tradition,
commercialization, and architectural discourse. In September 2014, she presented part of
her work at the Ponja-Genkon 10th anniversary symposium organized by the Japan Society
and New York University. She has a master's degree in mathematics from University of
Toronto, Canada.
48

Marissa Lindquist
Queensland University of Technology
m.lindquist@qut.edu.au
The Sublime, Affective Process + Architectural Production
A year before Kate Nesbitt’s Theorising a New Agenda For Architecture

(1996), the author penned a chapter on the significance of the sublime and its
contribution to post-modern architecture via the uncanny or disturbing through the
theories of Vidler and Eisenman (Nesbit, 1995). Twenty years on, we see its on-
going presence within the contemporary works of artists Kapoor, Ellison and Viola.
Eisenmann and Libeskind aside, explicit reference to the Sublime whether through
architectural praxis or theory appears to have been trumped by ecological
derivatives and associated transactions, as catalyst for new architecture and
architectural thinking.
For Edmund Burke (1757), the Sublime was seen as a leading, an
overpowering of self to a state of intense self-presence, often leading to a state of
otherness. To experience the sublime is to experience affect, physiologically over-
whelming the mental faculties through intensities of astonishment, terror, obscurity,
magnificence, and reverence. Key here is Burke’s articulation of the stages of the
sublime encounter, particularly so, its implications for the process of production
which architectural theorists appear to have overstepped in their valorisation of the
sublime object.
This paper seeks to resituate the sublime within the context of architectural
production. Through concepts such as material thinking, bodies and making
strange, the paper explores a shift in focus toward affective processes traced from
Burke’s inquiry. Rather than proposing strategies solely for affect within the work
itself, the focus lies upon the designing experience, where blockage and desirous
forces are critical partners in the process of production, as revealed through recent
studio programs entitled Strange Space.
Marissa Lindquist is an award winning architect with over 10 years practice experience
and lecturer at the School of Design, Queensland University of Technology. In 2008 she
was awarded the Dulux Study Tour for emerging architects in Australia. She formed part of
the editorial team for the international IDEA Symposium [2010] entitled Interior Spaces in
Other Places, Brisbane, Australia, and is recognised for her creative practice through
publication within the 2012 Venice Biennale Australian Pavilion Catalogue. Marissa is
currently undertaking her PhD focusing upon neuro-imaging, architecture and emotion,
with specific interest in the visually impaired. Her teaching practice dwells on the margins
of interiority, perception and craft making. She sits on the Executive for the Design and
Emotion Society, Australian Chapter.
49

Nuno Crespo
New University of Lisbon
nunoccrespo@fcsh.unl.pt
Rational and irrational in architecture. The Wittgenstein House

and the poetic possibility of architecture
There can be identified two primal forces or tendencies in thinking / doing

architecture. One relates to a will-to-design or, if one prefers, a will-to-order. It is
an normalizing idea that expresses a desire-of-object and demands from
architecture a strict and rigorous rationality that denies any possibility of chance,
error or deviation from original rational plans. The other force or tendency involves
an understanding of architecture as a response to the reality with which it has
always to negotiate and to which design must always conform and adapt. Here the
architecture gesture opens itself to the manifold possibilities that reality presents
and that demand attention. What happens is not only the necessary openness of the
architecture project to the contingent materialist reality, but also the question about
it’s poetic possibility, ie., how can we speak of a poetics of architecture when its
all about responding to reality? The conflict between these two forces is founder of
architecture as we know it and its articulation allows to discuss and identify key
aspects of contemporary architecture production. This discussion is brilliantly
inaugurated by Jan Turnovski that takes the Wittgenstein’s House as the most
brilliant example of the discussion here at stake.
In this conference I intend not only to go back to this discussion highlighting
its main aspects, but also to contextualize it in Wittgenstein’s definition of
architecture and showing how Wittgenstein’s philosophy and work as an architect
allows to access the core issues of the relation between not only between
architecture and philosophy (cf. Architecture is like Philosophy, he states), but also
ethics and aesthetics. The purpose is not to establish an illustration relation between
philosophical reflection and architecture design process, but to show how
Wittgenstein philosophy allows to spot some essential key elements that help
building a synoptic view of contemporary architecture production. Which, as we
will be able to see trough a set of examples, cannot be reduced to a group of styles,
schools or normalizing tendencies, but is characterized by individual attitudes and
exemplary cases requiring new analysis methods and vocabularies.
Nuno Crespo (b. Lisbon, 1975) studied philosophy and aesthetics at Lisbon New
University. Currently is associated researcher at Instituto de História da Arte FCSH/UNL
where he coordinates a research group about art, criticism and politics. He teaches art
theory and aesthetics at Lisbon New University and is invited lecturer at Art College of
Coimbra University. His current research interests are the relations between architecture,
art, philosophy and criticism. Besides the academic career he works as free lance art critic
and art and architecture curator.
50

Frederike Lausch
Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
lausch@kunst.uni-frankfurt.de
Changing the Architectonic of Philosophy.

Rajchman's Interest in Folded Architecture
‘The rise of Deleuze [in architecture] was not a natural phenomenon, but an
institutionally structured one,’ writes Karen Burns in regard of the influence of
Anyone Corporation in the ‘Deleuze-after-Derrida’ narrative in architectural
history. In all the major publications about the concept of ‘folding’ in architecture
the philosopher John Rajchman, member in the editorial board of ANY magazine,
appears as a kind of facilitator expediting the relationship between architecture and
philosophy. What is his interest in folded architecture? I will argue that he believes
in an enhancement of philosophy through a “new” architecture, as if both of them
working together might change the architectonic of our thinking and thereby
philosophical working and writing.
According to Frederik Stjernfelt there is no self-liberation from metaphors of
architecture in science, so what Rajchman tries is not to release but to renew the
architectonic of philosophy, which he identifies with a rigid Kantian schematism.
Through ‘provisional points of contact and alliance’ architectural and philosophical
constructions could speak together a ‘new and foreign idiom no longer belonging
to the recognized languages of either.’ Then, once the architectonic becomes
‘looser, more flexible, less complete, more irregular, a free plan in which things
hang together without yet being held in place,’ it will effect the philosophical field
so that the questions of how to construct a work or a life can acquire new shapes.
Thus the story of architecture and philosophy connected via sharing the
topic of ‘folding’ during the 1990s is not necessarily the one of architects
appropriating Deleuze’s philosophy for formal or organisational innovation, but
also one which incorporates the actions and intentions of philosophers alike.
Frederike Lausch studied Architecture at the Bauhaus-University in Weimar/Germany from

2007 to 2014 including a study abroad at the Middle-East-Technical-University in
Ankara/Turkey. From 2011 to 2012 she studied Philosophy at the Friedrich-Schiller-
University in Jena/Germany. Currently she is a PhD student in the DFG-research group on
‘Media and Mimesis’ and working as a research assistant at the Art History Department of
the Goethe-University in Frankfurt am Main. This year she published her Master’s thesis on
biographies of architects from the former German Democratic Republic. She was editor-
in-charge for HORIZONTE – Journal for Architectural Discourse in 2013.
51

Pedro Ferrão
pedroferrao@campus.ul.pt
Meaning in architecture
Louis Sullivan’s dictum that ‘form ever follows function’ has been taken as
normative, and thus to mean that whatever form a given building will have must be
determined by the function it is meant to serve. From such an understanding of the
phrase the conclusion was drawn that ornaments are not to be permitted in a sound
construction of whatever kind, for the very simple reason that an ornament has no
function. To draw this conclusion we are not allowed, not only because this is a
piece of invalid reasoning, but also because Sullivan himself had ample use for
ornament.
I wish to suggest that whether the phrase was to be taken as normative or
descriptive is of absolutely no importance. I shall argue that what Sullivan is talking
about is not a matter of how buildings are or should be built, but of how buildings
are supposed to mean, that is, how it is that a building can be said to have a
meaning: it is not a dictum about the process of building, but about the process of
understanding any architectonical structure.
This being satisfactorily, I hope, argued for, I shall then try to show that
Sullivan is wrong: first, because form and function are not the only attributes of a
building to be taken into account, for an account of intentions (of the architect and
the client(s)) is also required; and secondly, because none of these needs have pride
of place, the elements that confer meaning to a building are to be taken ‘as a
corporate body,’ to borrow Quine’s phrase − the meaning of a building will be the
answer to the question, ‘Why this form for that function?,’ and that answer will yield
the description of an intention. This is what makes architecture an art.
Graduate student at the Programme in Literary Theory of the Faculty of Letters of the
University of Lisbon.
52

Ricardo Miguel
LanCog Group, Center of Philosophy of the University of Lisbon
ricardomiguel@campus.ul.pt
An autonomist view on the ethical criticism of architecture
It is a fact that there is ethical criticism about art. Art critics, the general
public and even artists themselves point out moral flaws in artworks while
evaluating them. Philosophers, however, have maintained a hot debate on the
meaning of such criticism. This debate can be understood as a disagreement about
the kind of relation between the artistic value of artworks and their eventual moral
value. While some claim that moral value can contribute to artistic value
(moralism), others claim that there cannot be such a contribution (autonomism).
Since at least some works of architecture are artworks, that debate also extends to
architecture (though the debate can still be meaningful about non artistic works). A
moderate moralist view claims that some works of architecture have moral
flaws/merits that bear on their artistic evaluation. In an apparently promising
version, the contention is that some moral flaws/merits are aesthetically relevant. In
this paper I argue for an autonomist view. I start by distinguishing the views in
debate, pointing out a greater theoretical simplicity of autonomism and explaining
why the burden of proof is on the moralist side. Then I argue that the apparently
promising version of moderate moralism either begs the question against
autonomism or is compatible with it. On one hand, an intimate relationship
between moral value and artistic value clouds the distinction between moral and
aesthetic properties; on the other, the autonomist can accept that those properties
which are simultaneously moral and aesthetic bear on the artistic evaluation of
artworks but not qua moral value. That is, they do not count as moral properties
but as aesthetic ones.
Ricardo finished is Mestrado em Ensino de Filosofia (Master of Arts in Teaching Philosophy)

with a report in which he analyses the option of teaching aristotelian logic or propositional
logic in portuguese secondary education of philosophy. His aim was to claim that this
option is not pedagogically irrelevant and that teachers should opt to teach propositional
logic. He is mostly interested in ethics, philosophy of logic and philosophy of mathematics.
He is now pursuing his PhD (at ULisboa) with a topic concerned with the moral status of
nonhuman animals and the problem of replaceability.
53

Lena Galanopoulou
National Technical University of Athens
galanopoulou.lena@gmail.com
‘I’m a cage in search of a bird’ / architectural intention and guilt
This lecture is a commentary on the freedom of the architect and human in

general, in relation to architecture. Architecture, as a social derivative, has social
responsibility. And society, as much as responsibility, enforces commitments. As
part of the treatise, self-commitment is considered to be the only possible
commitment. That being said, the analysis comes from the liability a human
designer or user has, as part of a ‘whole’, towards the ‘whole’ which carries him.
The purpose is not the quest for the ‘perfect liability’, but the evaluation of any
responsibility that comes off as motivational or inhibiting power, as intention or
guilt. The subject is approached by the words of Franz Kafka: ‘I am a cage in search
of a bird’, which occurs as a starting line. This phrase operates as a matrix that
generates philosophical questions, architecturally oriented. Guided by the trimer of
the proposal (the ‘cage’, the ‘in search’ and the ‘bird’), an alternative reading of the
‘architectural phrase’ and of its components, is being provided. The ‘cage’
recommends the architectural piece, the ‘in search’, the pursuit of a shelter and the
‘bird’, the user. Beginning with that phrase, but with alternative interpretations,
three different sequels are given. Named ‘punishments’ because they embody the
guilt from which the architect is unable to run, under the pressure of the
responsibility he is carrying. The different possible outcomes lay the philosophical
groundwork for determining the intention and the point from which it becomes a
guilt. Since intention and guilt are internal processes, analysis is personified and is
more of a guess than a treaty. More so, it inevitably concerns personal architectural
(if not) experiences and recordings. This study is a reading of intentions and guilt
inherited by Modernism and its early contradiction to the postmodernism of today.
It’s also a general conjecture about the way the sense of responsibility influences
the design process over time. It is a contemporary perspective on the philosophy
and ideology of the 20th century that still affects the design and ways of habitation
among other things.
Lena Galanopoulou is working on her master in Architecture at National Technical

University of Athens (NTUA). Her theoretical thesis concern primarily freedom and its
relation to architecture. Her research is focused on how architecture can embody timeless
philosophical questions. During her studies she writes articles submitted in national papers.
The right to the city and the ways the citizen can reclaim the public space are themes of
exceptional interest and consist a subject of study for the years to come. In March 2015
she presented her thesis at NTUA with excellence. Beyond the academic walls, she has
worked in architectural offices and participated in several competitions.
54

José Carlos Cardoso
University of Évora
cardos.josecarlos@gmail.com
A common blind spot
Take seriously the conjunction from Philosophy and Architecture requires

us to think from there what is unthought in the reciprocal movement of their
becoming and force us to think.
In this paper we will try to show, in order to sketch what could be termed as
a common blind spot, a particular and quite subterranean lineage of the thought of
space (and its corresponding space of thought) from Kant to Deleuze through
Heidegger. In ‘Von dem ersten Unterschiedes der Gegenden im Raume’, from
1768, Kant debates, before the gestalt switch of the Dissertatio, the question of
absolute space arguing that ‘to generate the first ground of the concept of regions
in space’ we must chart the relations of the space to the intersection angles of our
body. The region, Gegend, consists in the map of relations of the situations system
to the absolute space. Heidegger think the same concept of region, using the same
word, from Sein und Zeit to Die Kunst und der Raum, as a network of placements
and orientations, come-and-go [spazieren] between space and body, performing
the place in-between [topos], spacing [das räumen] an encounter. Deleuze receives
and transforms this problem, in order to think this dynamic in his genetic moment,
(re)working and creating concepts like the refrain [ritournelle], haecceity and
territory.
This architecture of concepts, emerged from an affective cartography, it will
help us, as well as some art works peering the same blind spot, to tackle the ultimate
question – what it means to orient oneself in space and in thinking? – in a whole
new way.
José Carlos Cardoso is a researcher, art critic and curator. With a Philosophy degree and a
master degree in Contemporary Philosophy, develops a PhD research. International
speaker for more than a decade, it has focused on the relations between ontology, art and
aesthetics. In 2014 he edited the volume Pessoas e Lugares – Pensar com as práticas
artísticas. Um catálogo; in 2015 will come out the volumes Deleuze and the problem of
literality, Corpo de Pensamento. Pensar com José Gil, and a special issue of Deleuze Studies
entitled The orientation in thinking: Deleuze, before and beyond.
55

Ricardo Santos Alexandre
ISCTE-University Institute of Lisbon
rfsae@iscte-iul.pt
Is space a part of being?:

reassessing space through Japanese thought
In this paper I will briefly develop an ontological theory of space based on

the interpretation of two concepts in Japanese Philosophy: basho (place) and fūdo
(milieu), coined by two 20th century Japanese philosophers, Nishida Kitarō and
Watsuji Tetsurō, respectively. For this, I will refer - mainly, but not only - to
Augustin Berque’s exquisite interpretation of the logic behind fūdo and further
develop and articulate it with my own interpretation of the logic of basho, in order
to help us reassess the way we think about space.
Both concepts derive from a particular way of relating to space in Japanese
culture, that is accessible through some aesthetic concepts present in its arts,
literature and poetry, that tends to turn the individual, first, towards his surrounding
environment, and then, with space acting both reflexively and experientially, to
himself. The logic of basho tells us that the subject, to be a subject, must be part of
a predicate, or else, he is not a subject at all. The logic behind fūdo is that a true
awareness of space is not built from thinking about it - since we are already
objectifying it and, therefore, understanding ourselves as being detached from it -,
but from being in it, experiencing it and letting it act reflexively.
What we can conclude, but most important of all, learn from the articulation
and interpretation of these two concepts is that space is certainly more than just a
receptacle where human beings exist, move, act, or interact with each other - it can
also be thought of, to some extent, as being part of the individual himself.
Ricardo Santos Alexandre. BA in Asian Studies (FLUL-UL, Portugal). Currently: MA

Anthropology (ISCTE-IUL, Portugal).
56

Litao Zhou
The University of Sheffield
Lzhou11@sheffield.ac.uk
Architectural Heterotopias: Socio-Spatial Practices of Alterity
‘Heterotopia’ is an unintelligible and elusive term in aspects of spaces and

architectural practices. This paper will majorly focus on the demonstration of
‘heterotopias of space’ from the position of ‘Alterity’ and spatial practices of
otherwise by Spatial Agency as alternative approaches to criticise architecture
practices under Chinese both formal and informal urbanism, particular in Chinese
urban context.
Firstly, heterotopias will be explored from major philosophers such as
Foucault (first introduced heterotopias into philosophy along with power-spatial
discourse), Lefebvre (utilised heterotopias as distinctive spatial practices to
transform existing dominant power in producing/reproducing spaces), Edward Soja
(related heterotopias to the Thirdspace) and Kevin Hetherington (heterotopias were
spaces embracing heterogeneous human agents within transformative possibilities
to be transgression). Eventually, the properties of spatial heterotopias are transient,
contingent, resistant, transgressive, and transformative will be summarised. The
article will demonstrate how such properties of spatial heterotopias (intertwined
with diasporic power-relations without alienation) can maintain transformative
codes within multiple actors’ agents as affect in a certain socio-political context.
Through critical thinking of philosophers’ interpretation of heterotopias, the
new definition of heterotopias in spaces will be refined in the architectural and
urban domain that has embedded into a socialised, culturalised, urbanised and
institutionalised context. Reasons that architectures and spatial physicality can be
seen as heterotopias in different periods will be explored in a certain urban or social
context. The exploration will be explicated in aspects of socio-power relations in
distinct scales and layers impacting the production of space. The case of paradox
products of Chinese urban village as informal urbanism produced and managed by
multiple landowners and transient migrants in Shenzhen will be expounded. The
methodology of ethnography, feminism, agency and mapping will be used to
explore hybridity of becoming of subjectivity through various narrative spatial
stories. Based on these spatial stories, the paper will excavate controversies in
different groups. In addition, ‘Hybridising Subjectivity’ of these groups in spatial
heterotopias of transforming will be explored.
In the final part, the ‘turn’ spatial heterotopias to be a critical architecture,
based on refined definition, the article will elaborate architecture design process to
invent concept of spatial heterotopias from alternative (critical or creative) spatial
practices by multiple actors. In addition, essay will demonstrate why it is
impractical to from permanent architectural typologies/spaces/programs to theorise
architectural heterotopias. In this part, Spatial Agency will be employed as both
human and non-human spatial strategy to challenge fixed spatialized codes,
57

maintaining or achieving transformative possibilities that involve within
heterogeneous and diverse actors’ cooperative productions.
B.Arch at Anhui University of Architecture in China (2006-2011). MA in Architecture

Design at University of Sheffield, UK (2012-2014). Candidate of PhD by Design at
University of Sheffield (2014-). Publication: Two chapters will be published in this year: 1.
socio-spatial practices of alterity in Chinese urban villages, at University of Edinburgh,
Architecture of Alterity, Cambridge Scholar Publishing; 2. Mapping Subjectivities of
Becoming within embedded socio-spatial practices in Gangxia Urban Village, will be
published this end of the 2015.
58

Maria Mantzari
National Technical University of Athens
mmantzari@pspa.uoa.gr
Spatial dimensions of the Freudian uncanny
In this paper, I will attempt, reading the essay «Das unheimlich», written by
Freud in 1919, to seek the spatial dimensions of the Freudian uncanny. I will
examine examples where certain urban experiences may give rise to uncanny
feelings. Can the uncanny be considered as the class of frightening spaces that leads
us back to what is known and familiar? If we perceive this feeling as the mark of
the return of the repressed, which places may trigger us uncanniness?
The first signs of an awareness of the uncanny within the architecture,
displayed through the field of literature in a series of short stories written by Edgar
Allen Poe and ETA Hoffmann and continued from the 19th and early 20th century
when the city turns into a metropolis and the person subject to estranged
metropolitan mass, till its postmodern version.
Beginning with a lexicographical approach of the Greek term ανοίκειο so as
to understand its semantic field, this paper continues with the analysis of castration
complex, fear of death and the mirror stage throughout specific spatial
constructions. I focus my study on ruins, digital architecture and certain building
examples designed by Bernard Tschumi, Coop Himmelblau and Daniel Libeskind,
approaching what we might call the aesthetics of the fearful and the aesthetics of
anxiety, hoping to broaden the ways we analyze and understand the world we live.
Maria C. Mantzari is currently a phd student in the National Technical University of Athens
– School of Architecture (GR) focusing on habitat’s Greek history during the 20th century.
Her previous academic training in Athens and Paris includes three Master degrees on
Architectural Engineering, Urban Planning and Spatial theory. She has attended various
workshops, conferences and seminars covering issues of her main research interest
including urban sociology, forms of emancipating spatial practices and urban communing.
The last three years she works as a curator of public programs in the National and
Kapodistrian University of Athens.
59

Madeleine Kennedy
Newcastle University
madeleine.jessica.kennedy@gmail.com
Exhibitions as Philosophy
Many art exhibitions seek to contend with philosophical questions or

concerns, most often through a written narrative illustrated by the art objects on
display. Another more interesting approach, however, is to use the inherently
spatial medium of the exhibition to communicate philosophical ideas through
sensory means. In 1985 the philosopher Jean Francois Lyotard curated an exhibition
with just that intention, creating minutely arranged scenographic spaces which
embodied his postmodern analysis of the human condition. Significantly Lyotard
did not consider the exhibition an illustration of his written philosophy but as a self-
sufficient work of philosophy in itself. Entitled Les Immateriaux, that exhibition has
now prompted the question whether there may be more exhibitions which have set
out, whether explicitly or not, to present a work of philosophy through the
immersive vehicle of exhibitions. Using Jean Francois Lyotard’s 1985 exhibition as
a reference point, this paper uses a handful of case studies to explore the possibility
that exhibitions can be works of philosophy. Further, it asks what the criteria should
be to distinguish exhibitions as works of philosophy from exhibitions about
philosophy, and posits a possible answer: that an exhibition can only be a work of
philosophy in itself when it is the design of the space, rather than any written
content, which is utilised as the main method of communication.
I received my MA in Curating the Art Museum from The Courtauld Institute of Art, and my
MA in Art History and Philosophy from The University of St Andrews. I am an associate
staff member at Newcastle University, where my role as Keeper of Art at Hatton Gallery
enables me to curate exhibitions which communicate significant ideas and pose problems
to the viewer in a manner akin to the modes of thinking I learned whilst studying
philosophy. My writing has recently been published in Stedelijk Studies, and I have articles
forthcoming in the journals Architectural Research Quarterly and Immediations.
60

Matías García Rodríguez
Santiago de Compostela University
matias.garcia.rodriguez@usc.es
What Does It Mean to Have an Architectonical ‘Idea’?

Chaos, Infinity and Composition in Félix Guattari
Nietzschean post-structuralist aesthetics has conceded a rather important

place for architecture, particularly through (and apropos) the work of Félix Guattari.
Also, it is probably within this tradition where we could find the most
«architectonical», or rather, spatial way of thinking in the context of continental
philosophy. In order to properly grasp the sense of what architecture means to the
late Guattari (and to Deleuze), thus being able to understand the still radically
opened possibilities provided by him both to aesthetics scholars and architects, we
should pay attention to:
1) The differences between ‘art’, ‘science’ and ‘philosophy’ in Guattari and
Deleuze, their necessary relationship with chaos, and why architecture is here
singularly relevant.
2) The dialectics between chaos and infinity within architecture, and the
relevance of the notions of ‘consistence’, ‘reference’, ‘composition’, and the couple
percept-affect.
3) The topology of the concept as ‘hétérogenèse’, and the intimate
correlation between architectural ideas and «events» (the concept as a
‘constellation d’un événement à venir’), as well as between concepts in general and
their «plan d’immanence».
4) The inseparableness of architecture and urbanism in Guattari’s notions of
‘idea’, art and territory (indeed, what does it mean to think within architecture?).
In relation to the works of Carlo Scarpa and Shin Takamatsu (both analyzed
by Guattari) as well as others explicitly influenced by Guattari-Deleuze, such as
Toyo Ito, Kazuyo Sejima, or even Rem Koolhaas, we will thus synthetize Guattari’s
contribution to the aesthetics of architecture, as well as outline its relevance for
both current Philosophy and Architecture.
Matías García Rodríguez is a member of the Department of History of Art at the University
of Santiago de Compostela. MA in History of Art (2012), he is currently a PhD student in
Philosophy with a thesis on the aesthetics of Félix Guattari. His interests revolve around
the links between Aesthetics, Politics, and Subjectivity, particularly within the frame of
Post-Structuralist discourse, about which he has published various papers (in journals such
as Fedro, Ápeiron, or Forma) and gave several presentations at Portugal, Spain, and France.
61

Marion Roussel
GERPHAU / ENSA Paris La Villette Université Paris 8
roussel.marion@hotmail.fr
Between Terrestrial Maintenance of Bodies and Space Odyssey:

The Architectural Relevance of Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres
Since their publication, the three volumes of Peter Sloterdijk Spheres have
become a major source of reflection for architectural theorists. The question of the
explicitation of inhabitation, or concepts such as anthropogene, absolute and
atmospheric islands are invoked to proceed to a reading of the housing crisis that is
shaking our disenchanted (post)modernity. As for us, we would like to propose to
link Sloterdijk thinking as it appears in Sphere with digital architecture. To our
knowledge, this subject has not yet been processed. Nevertheless, Sloterdijk’s three
volumes seem to offer a toolbox as well as particularly productive analysis paths to
think both the representations conveyed by digital architecture and the discourses
that surround its productions. In particular, the philosopher’s statement that
architecture, as a tool to reconfigure the human sojourn on Earth, establishes
‘islands’ similar to waterproof suits, inhabitations similar to space capsules –
separating us from an exterior that seems toxic – is very relevant with American
architect Greg Lynn blobs, or Zaha Hadid architecture.
By virtue of their strange, spiky, complex, biomorphic or futuristic forms,
their often smooth and shiny textures, and the lack of dialogue with their
implantation sites that they often exhibit, these architectures are frequently
described as spaceships landed on Earth. Beyond this mainly formal observation,
we propose to consider the ‘journey’ of this space travel theme, since its emergence
in the 1960’s and 1970’s experimental architecture to nowadays digital
architecture, from the tracks offered by Sloterdijk. While the cosmos broke out,
while nothing seems to retain us on the ground anymore, have we not to deal here
with a story of exile, nomadism, attempted return, a story about a rebuilding of a
world in which we could inhabit again as humans?
Architect graduated from the School of Architecture of Normandy (ENSAN). Post-Master

degree in architecture and philosophy (ENSAPLV). PhD Candidate in Architecture at
GERPHAU (ENSAPLV / University of Paris 8). Last publications: Forthcoming. Life and
Death of Cyberspace, or When Technology Grabs a Cyberpunk Novel. In G. N. Vlahakis,
K. Tampakis, Science & Literature. Forthcoming. De l’androïde à l’avatar: chairs étranges
du cinéma de science-fiction au XXe siècle. In S. Walon, J. Bloch, B. Flores, Les
représentations troublées des corps au cinéma. Paris: L'Harmattan. 2014. Devenir-liquide,
devenir-alien. Des devenirs-autres des corps dans l’architecture de Marcos Novak. Le
Philotope, 10, pp.149-153.
62

Céline Bodart
GERPHAU / ENSA Paris La Villette Université Paris 8 / Université de Liège
bodart.celine@live.fr
The Twelfth Camel and the Legacy of

the Deconstruction in Architectural Practices
Most of recent anthologies on architectural theory concede that the

encounter between architects and the derridean philosophy of deconstruction has
marked a kind of turning point in our architectural practices. Yet this specific
episode of our late history seem still provoke a floating discomfort in the French-
speaking part of the contemporary architectural debate. It is as if no one could
assume what this disciplinary crossing of the mid-eighties both has produced and
has not succeeded in producing. So now, thirty years later, how to be the
architectural heirs of a theoretical legacy which precisely cannot be bequeathed as
such?
Through the so-called fable of “The Twelfth Camel” (V.Despret), my research
work is to construct a sort of 'twelfth camel' for the French architectural discourse
in order to help it accepting the heritage of its history. The twelfth camel here
proposed would be a book; the inedit translation of Mark Wigley's essay, “The
Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida's Haunt”. But forced exorcism of the
Derrida's haunt twenty-five years later by this translation is not to constitute an
archive of what the deconstruction has been for architecture. Rather, the proper
concern of that project is precisely to refresh the narrative power of such a meeting.
It is an artefact from which new ways to inherit this historical turning of architectural
theory can be built.
Within the framework of the conference, this ongoing research would be
presented through its methodological invention issued from “The Twelfth Camel”,
and be displayed the first conditions of existence given to it through a large
spectrum of different forms. Considering theory as a living material for creation, it
would not be a matter of theorizing a reflexive practice but stating this theoretical
approach as an architectural practice.
Céline Bodart is an architect; post-master in 'Architecture and Philosophy' (ENSA Paris La

Villette); graduated of an Experimental Program in Arts and Politics, Sciences Po Paris (dir.
B.Latour and V.Pihet) in 2014. She is a PhD candidate in Architecture at University of
Paris8 and at University of Liège since 2012. Working at the interface between philosophy
and architecture, her doctoral research focuses on a specific episode of recent architectural
history marked by the crossover of these two practices under the influence of the derridean
deconstruction. She actually serves as a research assistant in Gerphau-Lab. (UMR-CNRS
7218 Lavue).
63

Vicente Esteban Medina
Alfonso X University
d31251@hotmail.com
The Construction of Philosophical Thought Deconstructivist.

Jacques Derrida and Architects: The Circle of MoMA,
Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi
The thought of Jacques Derrida, deconstruction, has left traces beyond their
discipline, has crossed the philosophical corpus and has inseminated subjects as
Food, Fashion, or other more academic, as Politics and Law.
Between disciplines inseminated by the thought of Derrida are highlighted
called Mechanical Arts: Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. But beyond
establishing links with painters like Adami and Titus-Carmel, and its influiencia in
undecidable sculptures by Gordon Matta-Clark, Derrida and deconstruction he has
had great impact on the Architecture.
The interest by deconstruction in Architecture generated numerous meetings
and written, leading to the relevant exposure Deconstructivist Architecture,
organized in 1988 at the MoMA in New York. The exhibition included works from
seven studies of architects: Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Rem Koolhaas, Peter
Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, Coop Himmelb(l)au and Bernard Tschumi. From this
exhibition, his works were labeled Deconstructivist Architecture, and them, The
Circle of MoMA. However, of these architects, only Tschumi and Eisenman
maintained contact with Derrida.
The competition of the Parc de la Villette in Paris linked to Derrida with
Tschumi and Eisenman. This relationships intensified the receipt of the philosopher
in the Architecture, making Derrida published his writings Why Eisenman Writes
Such Good Books?, A Letter to Peter Eisenman, The Philosopher and Architects,
Intertextuality and Metaphor, Changes of Scale, or together publication Choral
Work.
This paper aims to clarify and develop above underlined links between the
thought of Derrida and Architecture, and analyse how they have expressed such
philosophical approaches the proposals of these architects.
Vicente Esteban Medina is an Architect by the Univ. Nacional de Tucumán, PhD-Architect

by the Univ. Politécnica de Madrid, Master in Philosophy by the Univ. Nacional de
Educación a distancia, and PhD-Philosophy by the Univ. Complutense de Madrid. His
background ranges between architecture and philosophy and focuses its research on the
deconstruction and the works of Jacques Derrida, point of contact established between
both disciplines. At the same time, he teaches and lectures on Argentine and Spanish
universities.
64

authors’
names
65

Filipa Afonso 8
Inês Moreira 11
Carlos Jacques 12
Dirk-Michael Hennrich 15
Moirika Reker 16
Sandra Escobar 17
Victor Gonçalves 18
Luciana Fornari Colombo 20
Lidia Gasperoni 21
André Patrão 22
Mahroo Moosavi 23
Tamanna Ahmed 24
Khuat Tan Hung 25
Philippe Zourgane 26
Ramona Costea 28
Aleksandra Paradowska 29
Emilia Jarosova 30
Philipp Kampschroer 31
Ana Luiza Nobre 32
Fernando Curiel Gámez 33
Natalia Solano-Meza 34
Isabella Moretti 35
Danilo Manca 36
Clemens Nocker / Clara Archibugi 37
Andrew P. Steen 38
María Rivo-Vázquez 39
Alexandra Areia 40
Giorgio Ponzo 41
Susana Ventura 42
Teresa Lousa 43
Lucy Elvis 44
Filippo Maria Doria 45
João Almeida e Silva 46
Mateja Kurir 47
Maki Iisaka 48
66

Marissa Lindquist 49
Nuno Crespo 50
Frederike Lausch 51
Pedro Ferrão 52
Ricardo Miguel 53
Lena Galanopoulou 54
José Carlos Cardoso 55
Ricardo Santos Alexandre 56
Litao Zhou 57
Maria Mantzari 59
Madeleine Kennedy 60
Matías García Rodríguez 61
Marion Roussel 62
Céline Bodart 63
Vicente Esteban Medina 64
67

authors’
names
(in alphabetical order)
68

Aleksandra Paradowska 29
Alexandra Areia 40
Ana Luiza Nobre 32
André Patrão 22
Andrew P. Steen 38
Carlos Jacques 12
Céline Bodart 63
Clemens Nocker / Clara Archibugi 37
Danilo Manca 36
Dirk-Michael Hennrich 15
Emilia Jarosova 30
Fernando Curiel Gámez 33
Filipa Afonso 8
Filippo Maria Doria 45
Frederike Lausch 51
Giorgio Ponzo 41
Inês Moreira 11
Isabella Moretti 35
João Almeida e Silva 46
José Carlos Cardoso 55
Khuat Tan Hung 25
Lena Galanopoulou 54
Lidia Gasperoni 21
Litao Zhou 57
Luciana Fornari Colombo 20
Lucy Elvis 44
Madeleine Kennedy 60
Mahroo Moosavi 23
Maki Iisaka 48
Maria Mantzari 59
María Rivo-Vázquez 39
Marion Roussel 62
Marissa Lindquist 49
Mateja Kurir 47
Matías García Rodríguez 61
69

Moirika Reker 16
Natalia Solano-Meza 34
Nuno Crespo 50
Pedro Ferrão 52
Philipp Kampschroer 31
Philippe Zourgane 26
Ramona Costea 28
Ricardo Miguel 53
Ricardo Santos Alexandre 56
Sandra Escobar 17
Susana Ventura 42
Tamanna Ahmed 24
Teresa Lousa 43
Vicente Esteban Medina 64
Victor Gonçalves 18
70

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philosophy &

keynote speakers’ abstracts 7

special session’s abstracts 14

Maribel Mendes Sobreira

Center of Philosophy of the University of Lisbon

Adriana Veríssimo Serrão

Ana Vaz Milheiro

José Bragança de Miranda

José Duarte Gorjão Jorge

José Jaraíz Pérez

Luís Santiago Baptista

Margarida Brito Alves

Manuel Graça Dias

Luís Santiago Baptista

Metaphysical Architectures and Architectural Metaphysics

The relationship between Medieval Philosophy and Architecture in the

Filipa Afonso is an Invited Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the

Derrida on architecture: the (im)possibility of deconstruction

On disturbances, figurations, allegories and

Architecture, as a field of knowledge and of practice, has its wide theoretical

Playing in space: Profaning architectural practice

This reflection on architecture was inspired by the eruption of occupations

Foundation and Possibilities of Philosophy of Landscape

Philosophy of Landscape is a relatively recent area in the Humanities,

The dialectic between city and landscape

The aesthetic ecology of environment

Sandra Escobar, graduated in Philosophy, holds a Master degree in Aesthetics and

Friedrich Nietzsche, from Landscape to Architecture

Tracing connections between the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas

Luciana Fornari Colombo is a faculty member of the Department of Architecture at the

Diagrammatic thinking in architecture

In order to explain how architecture has an own spatial reflection, I would

The inbetween: on the essence of architectural design

Philosophy’s traditional categorization of architectural design amongst

Developed in the 17th century, ‘Transcendent Theosophy’ as defined by the

Mahroo Moosavi is a PhD Candidate in Architecture in the Faculty of Architecture, Design

Vihara Architecture:Defining the existential foothold of

‘When we treat architecture analytically, we miss the concrete

Manifestation of ancient Vietnamese philosophy concept in architecture

Rewriting Another Modernity from the Global South Viet Minh

Plant life is central in the development of modern spatial operational

Philippe Zourgane is an architect, researcher, assistant professor of Architecture and Theory

The architecture of the memory. The memory of architecture

Architecture, where from, where to? Memory is as a modus operandi in

Architecture as public policy. Nazi architecture in occupied Poland

Dealing with time, place and memory in contemporary architecture

Using the example of temporality and approach to time I would like to

Post-war reconstruction and spaces of memory in German cities.

In summer of 2015 the owners of North Station (Nordbahnhof) asked the

Philipp Kampschroer holds a B. A. in General and Comparative Literature and Philosophy

Max Bense: Intelligence as Mobility

The series of four travels of German philosopher Max Bense (1910-1990) to

Luis Barragán’s philosophical working itinerary between 40’s and 50’s

In 2012, I presented my PhD dissertation: Luis Barragán’s library: 1925-1980. In 2013, I

The creation of the School of Architecture at the University of Costa Rica

The School of Architecture at the University of Costa Rica was created in

The Body in the Architectural Clinic: a Phenomenological Experiment

Socrates as Architect. On Valery's Eupalinos

I am actually PhD student at the University of Pisa in Theoretical Philosophy and

Self organised architecture as the disclosure of place identity

Clara Archibugi is currently attending a Master Degree in Philosophy at Sapienza

Charles Jencks’s Entry into the Arena

Walking with Michel de Certeau. Jesuit architecture and city

What is an architect? The singular case of Manuel Graça Dias