"A seminar for cultural theorists who don't yet know they are architects."
At the beginning, then, they/we are already inside, it is not clear who is they and who is we: it is a matter of not knowing already, of delaying knowledge in scientific honesty. Or else it is a case of false consciousness - to be amended. They/we will feel, at the end, as if we had always already known. A seminar, perhaps, on the split of consciousness that is the deja vu. As Gaston Bachelard articulates the dialectics of interiority and exteriority: "Space is nothing but a 'horrible outside-inside'." (Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press 1969, 218) A seminar, thus, on the history of spatial discourse, and on its effects in terms of the social; a seminar, no less, on the uncanny.
"It is a seminar on architectural social theory."
The program: not to describe houses, their building techniques or geometrical challenges, but to provide data from a virtual fieldwork, where social theory is rubbing shoulders with the phenomenologist, the psychoanalyst and the psychologist, a fieldwork, therefore, of ordered space as it is taking place. As Emile Durkheim writes in Elementary Forms of Religious Life: "Space could not be what it is if it were not divided and differentiated." (New York: Free Press 1960, 15) A seminar, then, not only on theories of difference.
"As technology, as urban discourse, as professional practice, as symbolic history, as environmental intervention, architecture is among the most fundamental of social facts."
Positing the order of space as a kind of "fait social total" in the tradition of Durkheim, perhaps, the seminar itself enacts a spatial opening, the instituting of these registers - technology, urbanity, professionality, in their symbolic, historical, environmental interventions in the transcendental field that is called, by extension, simply architecture. An analysis of what can take place in space. Also, what is taking place is an opening towards the interpreting practice that is art. As McLuhan put it, "the artist is the historian of the future because he uses the unnoticed possibilities of the present." (Marshall McLuhan, "Third Program in the Human Age", Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations. New York: Something Else 1967, 17) A seminar, consequently, as the practice of a theory of the future.
"Architecture is the materialization of spatial abstraction into the built environment of social life."
Pitting the abstract against the material, but the materiality of an abstraction that is social life. Playing on the distinction, familiar and troubling since time immemorial, between architecture as already practiced by them or us, and architecture as already inhabited prior to any notion of practice can be divorced from dwelling, being, let alone thinking it. Reading, for instance, Gaston Bachelard's Water and Dreams (Boston: Beacon 1983), where the relation between water and space is one of form and imagination. One hypothesis being that water is ahistorical in that it predates most "creation". Imagination, as Bachelard put it, antedating memory. The waters of Lethe, as they used to say, strip the dead of their memories - and from the deeds that will survive them; but Mnemosyne, the well of remembrance, is fed from that same very source.
"While architecture intrudes more pervasively into the reconstruction of society than does social theory, architecture is a mode of social theorizing, and social theorizing is a mode of architecture."
A word, then, about the construction of this web. The site consists of texts and images chosen in pursuit of the elusive point of reference which gives rise to architectural social theory. The textmorsels, thinksnippets, and images follow a logic of annotation which is not elevating one thesis, one design, or one concept to the status of a closed space of writing, nor is this an attempt to level a foundation for such a pursuit. What is a stake is a relentless questioning of the discourse which makes its not so concentric ripples once one finds oneself already within the predicament of an architecture of the social. In an effort to keep the structure open for supplementary work, hypertextual links will provide leads to contexts inside this site and outside of it; arbitrary cut-off points will be countersigned by further reading, and wherever a document ends without this helpless deictic gesture, the browser is expected to select a link which will take the reading onto another tour de Babel.