Reflections on Pragmatism as a Philosophy of Architecture
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7480/footprint.11.1.1796Abstract
Two recent collections on architectural theory and practice invoke the name of pragmatism as marking the hope of a new more intimate alignment of theory and practice after a period of what I call ‘philosophical vampirism’. This paper examines what role the philosophical tradition of pragmatism might play in relation to architecture. I argue that pragmatism is best understood as a method of overcoming intellectualist and metaphysical obstacles to clear thinking as opposed to a philosophical ideology of some kind. Against Rem Koolhaas’s argument for post-criticality I show that we are always already critical. Pragmatism’s task is to make criticism better. I end by invoking the craft ethos as articulated by Richard Sennett in his book The Craftsman (2008), as perhaps the best model of what a pragmatist architecture might look like.
References
Allen, Stan, “Stocktaking 2004: Questions about the Present and Future of Design” in The New Architectural Pragmatism, Saunders (ed.), 101–106.
Barthes, Roland, “The Death of the Author” in Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977).
Blake, Casey, “Afterword: What’s Pragmatism Got To Do With It?” in The Pragmatist Imagination, Joan Ockman (ed.), 266–7.
David Bromwich, Romantic Critical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
Dewey, John, Experience and Nature [1925], Later Works: vol. 1, Jo Ann Boydston & Larry Hickman (eds.) (Charlottesville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985).
Dewey, John, Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1920).
Harries, Karsten, The Ethical Function of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).
Hays, Michael K., “Critical Architecture: Between Culture and Form,” Perspecta vol. 21 (1984): 14–19.
James, William, “Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking” [1907] (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1975).
Kolb, David, “Has Architecture Lost its Bearings?”. The text is available on-line: http://www.dkolb.org
Rem Koolhaas, “‘Life in the Metropolis’ or ‘Culture of Congestion'” Architectural Design vol. 47, no. 5 (August 1977).
_______Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for New York (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).
_______S,M,L,XL (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995).
Lahiji, Nadir, The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
Loos, Adolf, “Architecture” [1910] in Adolf Loos: On Architecture, Daniel & Adolf Opel (eds.) (Riverside: Ariadne Press, 2007), 73–85.
Lehman, Maria Lorena Lehman, Sensing Architecture, 2012, Found on-line at: http://sensingarchitecture.com
Macarthur, David, “A Kant-Inspired Vision of Pragmatism as Democratic Experimentalism,” in Gabriele Gava & Robert Stern (eds.), Pragmatism, Kant & Transcendental Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2015) 67–84.
_______“Science and the Value of Objectivity” in Giancarlo & Sarin Marchetti (eds.), Facts and Values: The Ethics and Metaphysics of Normativity (London: Routledge, 2016).
________“Metaphysical Quietism and Everyday Life,” in G. D’Oro & S. Overgaard (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Philosophical Methodology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 270–296.
Murdoch, Iris, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 1970).
Ockman, Joan, “Pragmatism/Architecture: The Idea of the Workshop Project” in The Pragmatist Imagination, Joan Ockman (ed.), 16–23.
_______(ed.) The Pragmatist Imagination (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000).
________“One for the Sandpile,” Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 62 no. 3, (2009): 26–27, 99.
Peirce, Charles, “The Fixation of Belief,“ in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, Justus Buchler (ed.) (New York: Dover, 1965).
Rorty, Richard, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).
Saunders, William S., “Introduction: Accept, Resist, or Infect? Architecture and Contemporary Capitalism” in The New Architectural Pragmatism, vii–xvii.
_______(ed.) The New Architectural Pragmatism (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2007).
Sennett, Richard, The Craftsman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008)
Somol, Robert & Sarah Whiting, “Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism,” Perspecta, vol. 33, Mining Autonomy (2002), 72-77.
Weber, Max, “Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy” [1904] in The Methodology of the Social Sciences, E. A. Shils and H. A. Finch (ed. & trans.), (New York: Free Press, 1949).
West, Cornell, “Race and Architecture,” in The Cornell West Reader (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999).
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations. 2nd ed. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958).
_______Culture and Value, Revised 2nd ed. Trans. Peter Winch (Oxford:Blackwell, 1998).
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.