Teresa Stoppani – författare

This book argues that architecture and the city and their processes can be better understood by drawing categories from disciplines that exceed the architectural and urban cultural context. It performs an open intellectual reading that traverses architecture and architectural theory, but also art theory and history, cartography, philosophy, literature and cultural studies, to unfold a series of ‘figures’ that are ambiguously placed between the representation and the construction of space in architecture and the city. The paradigm and philosophy, the island and the city, the map and representation, the model and making and the questioning of form performed by dust, are explored beyond their definition, as processes that differently make space between architecture and the city and are proposed as unorthodox analytic techniques to decipher contemporary spatial complexity. The book analyses how these ‘figures’ have been employed at different times and in different creative disciplines, beyond architecture and in relation to changing notions of space, and traces the role that they have played in the shift towards the dynamic that has taken place in contemporary theory and design research. What emerges is the idea of an ‘architecture of the city’ that is not only physical but is largely defined by the way in which its physical spaces are regulated, lived and perceived, but also imagined and projected.

Concerning architecture and the city, built, imagined and narrated, this book focuses on Manhattan and Venice, but considers architecture as an intellectual and spatial process rather than a product. A critical look at the making of Manhattan and Venice provides a background to addressing the dynamic redefinition and making of space today. The gradual processes of adjustment, the making of a constantly changing dense space, the emphasis on forming rather than on figure, the incorporation of new forms and languages through their adaptation and transformation, make both Manhattan and Venice, in different ways, the ideal places to contextualize and address the issue of an architecture of the dynamic.

This book argues that architecture and the city and their processes can be better understood by drawing categories from disciplines that exceed the architectural and urban cultural context. It performs an open intellectual reading that traverses architecture and architectural theory, but also art theory and history, cartography, philosophy, literature and cultural studies, to unfold a series of ‘figures’ that are ambiguously placed between the representation and the construction of space in architecture and the city. The paradigm and philosophy, the island and the city, the map and representation, the model and making and the questioning of form performed by dust, are explored beyond their definition, as processes that differently make space between architecture and the city and are proposed as unorthodox analytic techniques to decipher contemporary spatial complexity. The book analyses how these ‘figures’ have been employed at different times and in different creative disciplines, beyond architecture and in relation to changing notions of space, and traces the role that they have played in the shift towards the dynamic that has taken place in contemporary theory and design research. What emerges is the idea of an ‘architecture of the city’ that is not only physical but is largely defined by the way in which its physical spaces are regulated, lived and perceived, but also imagined and projected.

In the age of post-digital architecture and digital materiality, This Thing Called Theory explores current practices of architectural theory, their critical and productive role. The book is organized in sections which explore theory as an open issue in architecture, as it relates to and borrows from other disciplines, thus opening up architecture itself and showing how architecture is inextricably connected to other social and theoretical practices.The sections move gradually from the specifics of architectural thought – its history, theory, and criticism – and their ongoing relation with philosophy, to the critical positions formulated through architecture’s specific forms of expression, and onto more recent forms of architecture’s engagement and self-definition. The book’s thematic sessions are concluded by and interspersed with a series of shorter critical position texts, which, together, propose a new vision of the contemporary role of theory in architecture. What emerges, overall, is a critical and productive role for theory in architecture today: theory as a proposition, theory as task and as a ‘risk’ of architecture.

In the age of post-digital architecture and digital materiality, This Thing Called Theory explores current practices of architectural theory, their critical and productive role. The book is organized in sections which explore theory as an open issue in architecture, as it relates to and borrows from other disciplines, thus opening up architecture itself and showing how architecture is inextricably connected to other social and theoretical practices.The sections move gradually from the specifics of architectural thought – its history, theory, and criticism – and their ongoing relation with philosophy, to the critical positions formulated through architecture’s specific forms of expression, and onto more recent forms of architecture’s engagement and self-definition. The book’s thematic sessions are concluded by and interspersed with a series of shorter critical position texts, which, together, propose a new vision of the contemporary role of theory in architecture. What emerges, overall, is a critical and productive role for theory in architecture today: theory as a proposition, theory as task and as a ‘risk’ of architecture.