Possibilia: Possible Worlds and the Limitless in Architecture
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7480/footprint.11.1.1186Abstract
Speculative architectural projects, by definition, challenge the viewer to understand the relationship between the fictionalised world they portray and the possible states of affairs that have come into existence for the project to ‘exist’. It is the question of how a speculative project can ‘exist’ in our understanding of the world in a meaningful, non-trivial fashion that is the subject of this article. Employing some basic structural clarity from contemporary modal logic, and from studies in fictionality, it is possible to see a renewed value in the ‘worlds’ that speculative projects describe, and to understand the profound philosophical value in imagining an existence in an ‘other’ world.
References
Cache, Bernard. Earth moves: the furnishing of territories, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1995.
Cowherd, Robert, ‘Notes on Post-Criticality, Towards an Architecture of Reflexive Modernism’, Footprint, #4, Agency in Architecture: Reframing Criticality in Theory and Practice, Spring, 2009.
Dawson, Paul, "Ten Theses against Fictionality." Narrative 23, no. 1 (2015): 74-100.
Dick, Phillip K. The Man in the High Castle, Mariner Books, 2012.
Doležel, Lubomir. Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, John Hopkins, 2000.
Doležel, Lubomir, ‘Possible Worlds of Fiction and History’, New Literary History, Vol. 29, No. 4, Critics without Schools? (Autumn, 1998), pp.785-809, 1990.
Frege, Gottlob. Begriffschift (Conceptual notation and related articles), Trans by Terrell Ward Bynum, Oxford University Press, 1972.
Kripke, Saul. Naming and Necessity, Cambridge University Press, 1972.
Lewis, David. Counterfactuals, Harvard University Press, 1973.
Nielsen, Henrik Skov and James Phelan and Richard Walsh. "Ten Theses about Fictionality." Narrative 23, no. 1 (2015): 61-73.
Russell, Bertrand. Principia Mathematica, Cambridge University Press, 1903.
Scofidio, Diller and Renfro, Blur Building, Exposition Pavilion: Swiss Expo, Yverdon-les-bains, 2002, http://www.dsrny.com/projects/blur-building
Tarski, Alfred. Introduction to Logic and to the Methodology of the Deductive Sciences, Dover Publications, Mineola NY, 1946.
Woods, Lebbeus. Radical Reconstructions, Princeton, 2001.
Woods, Lebbeus, “WAR AND ARCHITECTURE: The Sarajevo window,” Lebbeus Woods (Blog); https://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2011/12/02/war-and-architecture-the-sarajevo-window/
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.