Forthcoming

Quarterly Architecture Essay (QAE)
Volume 3, issue 4
Summer 2008
Richard Patterson: The Birth of Space
Due Out: November 2008

ISSN 1832-8237

The term ‘space’ did not enter aesthetic discourse until the latter part of the nineteenth century. Space thus appeared at precisely the time of the collapse of Classically grounded Western iconographic and figurative tradition. The advent of spatial discourse thus marks one of the boundaries between Modernism and the past. But this is not to say that what came to be thought of  as spatial practices only commenced at that time. Something was already there upon which practitioners and theorists could reflect and explore. Perhaps, as in the case of Mr. Jourdain, it was a case of being amazed to discover that space had been the medium through which artistic expression had occurred all along. As such, it appeared to be something given and natural, the equivalent of a scientific, autonomous object. But as this discourse developed, it is worth noting that ‘space’ was on the verge of being rendered fundamentally problematic by science.  

The argument presented in this piece suggests an aetiology for the concept of space in linguistic practice, initiated in mediaeval pedagogic practice related to logic, rhetoric and dialectic and developing through degrees of reification as visual and topological metaphors of order in the generation of maps and networks through the imposition of an arborescent structure that came to dominate aesthetic principle. These tendencies are argued to have been definitively articulated in the theoretical prescriptions for the visual arts of Alberti and the material works of Brunelleschi, from the pictorially discrete, linear sequences of narrative to formally integrated visual compositions. It is argued that this involved not so much a turn away from the authority of discourse, as a turn from the primacy of temporal or narrative sequence to that of the formal unity of its paradigmatic structures. A final section identifies the alternatives and variants of these structures in the Aristotelian principle of the ‘plot’, and the standards of formal value judgment in his articulation of the rules of tragedy.

Quarterly Architecture Essay (QAE)
Volume 4, issue 2
Winter 2008/09
Peter Macapia: Again and Again – origin and space
Due Out: January 2009

ISSN 1832-8237
 
In what sense can we question space? Where can we point to raise questions about it? And how do we do that architecturally as such? This essay looks at the transformation of space as an architectural and political concept through a series of case studies since the Renaissance. The essay argues that the political concept of public space has no architectural meaning outside of geometrical and topological techniques. In order to explore this position the author identifies a series of critical projects in which transformations in sociopolitical phenomenon of space are generated through experimentation with alien, bizarre, and the Otherness of geometrical and topological codes.

Quarterly Architecture Essay (QAE)
Volume 3, issue 2
Winter 2007/08
Thomas Mical: Mies and Negative Theology
Due Out: postponed

ISSN 1832-8237

This essay rethinks the techniques of affirmation and negation with Mies’ unbuilt avant-garde projects in light of their medieval aesthetic sources, particularly the Augustinian model and the prior four-fold negation of John Scotus Eriugena, where materialist negation is also spiritual affirmation. As a textual demonstration this schema (the logical square of opposition as the Greimascian semiotic square) will incorporate the recent debates between Jean-Luc Marion and Jacques Derrida concerning negative theology (as the unspeakable / unrepresentable absence grounding theological discourse), The result will be a nuanced re-reading of the layers and modalities of negation present in Mies’s early oeuvre, as a meta-critique of naïve minimalism.