Towards a Critique of Architectures Contemporaneity

Pursuing historical analogies between nineteenth-century theories and the current practices captivated by digital reproducibility, this book offers a critical take on architectures contemporaneity through four essays: tectonics, materiality, cladding, and labor. Fundamental to this proposition is the historicity of Gottfried Sempers theorization of architecture amidst the outpouring of new materials and construction techniques during the 1850s. Starting with Sempers differentiation between theatricalization and the tectonic of theatricality, this book examines thematic essential to architectures self-representation. Even though the title of this book recalls the Semperian Four Elements of Architecture, its argument encapsulates a unique historico-theoretical project probing the tectonic of theatricality beyond Semper. The invisible tie between technique and labor is the cord running through the four subjects covered in this book. In exploring these subjects from the theoretical standpoint of Marxian dialectics, this books contribution is focused on, but not limited to, the topicality of labor today when its relationship with capital has been further obscured by the prevailing digitalization of commodity exchange value, starting roughly in the 1990s. Each essay examines Sempers theorization of architecture in contradistinction to the ways in which technologys mediation has dominated architectures representation. Burrowing through the invisible tie between technique and work, asymptomatic of architectures predicament in global capitalism, Towards a Critique of Architectures Contemporaneity advances the scope of architectural criticism beyond the exhausted formalism and architectures turn to philosophy circa the 1980s and the present tendencies for presentism. It will therefore be of interest to researchers and students of architectural history and theory.