Philosophy & Architecture International Postgraduate Conference 2015

I am thrilled to announce that I will be speaking at this year's Philosophy & Architecture International Postgraduate Conference. The presentation is under the title "The inbetween clearing of architectural design" (abstract bellow).

The conference takes place on the 5th and 6th of November, in Lisbon. For more information, please check https://philosophyarchitecture.wordpress.com/

Philosophy’s traditional categorization of architectural design amongst various forms of fine arts is both an inadequate assumption for its genuine theoretical comprehension and dangerously misleading for its practice. This critical claim has been voiced by more and more philosophers and designers in recent years, yet both struggle to present a solid, coherent, holistic alternative which convinces one another and even themselves. The detachment of architectural design from the arts implies opening a space of its own, under its specific norms and purpose, but it is one impressively hard to pin down and remarkably apt to slither through any attempt to do so.  The challenge is then to articulate architectural design’s own proper space as a discipline. Within and through philosophical discussion, it is shown to yield a unique role of ontological representation and reconfiguration partially shared by, but ultimately beyond, that of art. The fundamental difference, and defining characteristic, of architectural design as a discipline is its inbetweenness: inbetween science and art; abstraction and utility; determinacy and indeterminacy; theory and practice; ontical and ontological; beings and Being; and modes of Being. In this mediatory space is its realm, one which touches and moves all others, yet is irreducible to and uncategorizable under any other than its own.  This reflection as such also occurs in the inbetween, specifically of philosophy and architectural design. The grounding reference author is Martin Heidegger, whose work found translation into design through the (mis)interpreter Christian Norberg-Schulz. Though both architectural theory and ontological thought grew beyond these thinkers – as does this exposition – the first coherent expression of architectural design’s inbetweenness discloses itself in their work.