Karan August | Delft University of Technology (original) (raw)

Papers by Karan August

It is possible to see the city as a chaotic and organic coalition of juxtaposed forms, containing... more It is possible to see the city as a chaotic and organic coalition of juxtaposed forms, containing remnants of past generations’ dreams and disappointments. However, on the socio-political scale, a rhythm of collective ordering continuously gains momentum without the need for conjuring hidden committees or transcendent laws. The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus provides a useful insight into the overly echoed threat of Friedrich Nietzsche’s theory of eternal return of the same, noting that in the current epoch, ‘technicity [...] eliminates the marginal practices on the basis of which new worlds could be disclosed and dooms us to what Nietzsche already saw as the eternal return of the same’ (Dreyfus 2003: 17). Theorists often employ the fear of forever reliving the same existence as the most poetic of warnings and yet with the vagueness of recalling a dream. There is something immediate for us today in Nietzsche’s doctrine from a century ago. As the patterns of socio-political organization spin upon their axes, habits and emerging ways for individuals to live as themselves and each other are pulled within the form, categorized, labelled, stamped and stowed, stabilizing all practices and avoiding shifts to other styles of existence. This chapter focuses on the role of architecture in motivating the care to create new worlds.

This topic has festered in the peripheral sightline of my mind since I returned to the states las... more This topic has festered in the peripheral sightline of my mind since I returned to the states last year. After being elsewhere for over a decade, returning to California in 2017, the year Donald Trump took office, was something of a culture shock. After adapting to the new smells on the public footpaths and the shortfall of public housing, I began to look more closely at the 'average' people walking around. California, even northern California, is favored with endless sunshine. I had not seen three days of sunshine in a row since leaving many years before. However, I will gladly admit that the pleasure of such weather rapidly wears thin, particularly with weeks of days in the high 30s, tipping over to the 40s; and naturally when the wildfire season sets in-but that is the topic of a different article. All of this sunshine informs the range of acceptable clothing, and items that I have previously considered undergarments, are warn openly in public. Short trousers, tank tops, flip-flops, and bennies seem to be a staple. Ok, perhaps that is not fair, not everyone wears flip-flops and bennies; but most do show a significant amount of skin; and upon this skin are countless tattoos. At first, I only noticed the tattoos on hipsters at posh cafes. Once I became more adapted to my new settings, I started to notice tattoos on almost everyone, regardless of the other social grouping indicators. Tattoos showed up on many; such as the mother of three in the waiting room at the vet with multiple tattoos; the businessman in the car next to mine at the red light; the volunteer docent at the botanical garden in his 60s; the doctor at the medical centre; the sorority sisters jogging along in the park with ponytails and pastel colored jogging gear; the women sitting next to me at the opera, and so forth. It is rarely one tattoo, but multiple tattoos; often sleeves covering an entire arm or a piece covering the entire back, chest-plate, or neck. I began to wonder how people who have had tattoos for decades and had been identified as

Amsterdam University Press eBooks, Dec 5, 2018

Amsterdam University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2018

Availability Statement:I hereby consent to the above thesis being consulted, borrowed, copied or ... more Availability Statement:I hereby consent to the above thesis being consulted, borrowed, copied or reproduced in accordance with the provisions of the Library Regulations from time to time made by the Academic Board. Signature Date Karan August Deposit Statements: I agree to Victoria University of Wellington having the non-exclusive right to archive digitally and make publicly accessible this thesis. Creator/Contributor(s) I am the sole creator of this work as a whole and can archive digitally and make accessible the work. I own the intellectual property rights inherent in the work as a whole. I have explicitly acknowledged in the work any significant contribution made to the work by others and the sources that I have used. Third Party Content I declare that if this work is archived digitally and made accessible, it will not be in breach of any agreement with a third party that has or is entitled to publish this work. Verification I am supplying the digital file that is a direct equivalent of the work which is described and referred to in this declaration. Preservation and Distribution I agree to Victoria University of Wellington having the right to keep this work in any file format and copy the thesis and transfer it to any file format for the purposes of preservation and distribution.

In the aftermath of a normalized Foucaultian world with an all encompassing web of biopower, one ... more In the aftermath of a normalized Foucaultian world with an all encompassing web of biopower, one remaining hope is to cultivate nimbleness. Nimbleness is an embodied aesthetic sensitivity to the material presence. Cultivating nimbleness is a particular style of cultivation; it is to willfully gather together one’s self in the wake of a formative force far richer than the derivative web of living power relationships of human embeddness within a horizon of social, economical, political and historical subjectivating power relations; which are chronicled and labeled by Michel Foucault as the normalizing practices of biopower. In other words to have freedom, one must start by rejecting the categories and labels normally internalized in order to relearn to learn from the material presence. Such a style of cultivation is a means of resisting normalizing power relations which co-opt cultivating practices to engross their own dominance which has had the by-product of an impotence to negate the gross material injustices present. This normalizing style of cultivation is a prevalent, corrupted, semblance which denies the importance of beauty for that of efficiency, rejects non-human purposiveness, and limits its measure of ethics to short term economical pragmatism. The thesis acknowledges that something is awry with the world and that giving care to beauty might help. The aim is to examine the event of Beauty as depicted by the philosopher Immanuel Kant and to apply this characterization to elective architectural spaces such that it may motivate individuals to cultivate their own nimbleness in relation to a formative force of nature. However given the revealed need for sensitivity to the particular material presence, the thesis can not be a rule book or catalog for beautiful design. Rather it is a rehabilitation for architects who are already heterospatially curious, with the desired outcome of architects cultivating their own nimbleness to reflectively judge as a ground up, multi-node, rhizomatic means of resistance to normalizing power practices as manifest in bad architecture.

The philosophies of substance presuppose a subject which then encounters a datum. This subject th... more The philosophies of substance presuppose a subject which then encounters a datum. This subject then reacts to the datum. The process ontology presupposes a datum (firstness) which is met with feelings (second- ness), and progressively attains the unity of a subject (thirdness). It is in this sense that our bodily experience is primarily an experience of the dependence of the actual presentational immediacy upon the virtual causal efficacy, and not the other way round. To put it bluntly, the world does not emerge from the subject, but processes of subjectification emerge from the interactions between the body and world. The chapter is meant to provide the basis for the panel that will stage an encounter between cognitive neurosciences and architecture.

Ancient and Modern Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West, 2018

This issue of Footprint explores the potential role of analytic philosophy in the context of arch... more This issue of Footprint explores the potential role of analytic philosophy in the context of architecture’s typical affinity with continental philosophy over the past three decades. In the last decades of the twentieth century, philosophy became an almost necessary springboard from which to define a work of architecture. Analytic philosophy took a notable backseat to continental philosophy. With this history in mind, this issue of Footprint sought to open the discussion on what might be offered by the less familiar branches of epistemology and logic that are more prevalent and developed in the analytic tradition. The papers brought together here are situated in the context of a discipline in transformation that seeks a fundamental approach to its own tools, logic and approaches. In this realm, the approaches of logic and epistemology help to define an alternate means of criticality not subjected to personalities or the specialist knowledge of individual philosophies. Rather the vari...

What does it mean to be a good citizen today? What are practices of citizenship? And what can we ... more What does it mean to be a good citizen today? What are practices of citizenship? And what can we learn from the past about these practices to better engage in city life in the twenty-first century? Ancient and Modern Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West: Care of the Self is a collection of papers that examine these questions. The contributors come from a variety of different disciplines, including architecture, urbanism, philosophy, and history, and their essays make comparative examinations of the practices of citizenship from the ancient world to the present day in both the East and the West. The papers’ comparative approaches, between East and West, and ancient and modern, leads to a greater understanding of the challenges facing citizens in the urbanized twenty-first century, and by looking at past examples, suggests ways of addressing them. While the book’s point of departure is philosophical, its key aim is to examine how philosophy can be applied to everyday life for the betterment of citizens in cities not just in Asia and the West but everywhere.

Ancient and Modern Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West, 2018

Phenomenology offers a conceptual framework that connects and strengthens the architect' s in... more Phenomenology offers a conceptual framework that connects and strengthens the architect' s intuitive understanding of the human experience of space with the theorist's more critical approach. Phenomenology is an ideal vehicle for architectural theorists to avoid the friction between first-hand or subjective experience and generalised or abstracted accounts of experience. In this thesis I extract an account of the human experience of space that is implicit in the Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Pontys work. I consider how this understanding has been employed in architectural scholarship and practice. In particular, I argue that the human body renders the richness of space through deliberate engagement with the indeterminate and independent possibilities of the world. In other words, as the body intentionally engages with the world, it synthesises objects that create determinate spatial situations. I account for Merleau-Ponty's depiction of the body' s non-rule governed, non-reflective, normative directiveness towards spaces and elements, and label it the thinking body. Furthermore I examine how the philosophical theory of Merleau-Ponty is represented in the explicitly theoretical works of Juhani Pallasmaa. In turn I then consider how the thinking body is physically and conceptually realised in the buildings of Carlo Scarpa. Finally I find that Juhani Pallasmaa's description of the phenomenological experience of space is incompatible with Merleau-Ponty's. The strategic importance of these different accounts emerges when projecting their implications for designed space. Pallasmaa' s account points towards an architecture that prioritises sensory experiences synthesised by the mind. The design focus of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy leads to spatial practices in line with Carlo Scarpa, that are sympathetic to the causal qualities of an intentional bodily engagement with spatial situations. In accord with Merleau-Ponty I argue that human body is our medium for the world and as such creates the spatial situation we engage with from a formless manifold of possibilities.

Bracken, G., Ancient and Modern Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West. Care of the Self, Volume I. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,, 2019

It is possible to see the city as a chaotic and organic coalition of juxtaposed forms, containin... more It is possible to see the city as a chaotic and organic coalition of juxtaposed forms, containing remnants of past generations’ dreams and disappointments. However, on the socio-political scale, a rhythm of collective ordering continuously gains momentum without the need for conjuring hidden committees or transcendent laws. The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus provides a useful insight into the overly echoed threat of Friedrich Nietzsche’s theory of eternal return of the same, noting that in the current epoch, ‘technicity [...] eliminates the marginal practices on the basis of which new worlds could be disclosed and dooms us to what Nietzsche already saw as the eternal return of the same’ (Dreyfus 2003: 17). Theorists often employ the fear of forever reliving the same existence as the most poetic of warnings and yet with the vagueness of recalling a dream. There is something immediate for us today in Nietzsche’s doctrine from a century ago. As the patterns of socio-political organization spin upon their axes, habits and emerging ways for individuals to live as themselves and each other are pulled within the form, categorized, labelled, stamped and stowed, stabilizing all practices and avoiding shifts to other styles of existence. This chapter focuses on the role of architecture in motivating the care to create new worlds.

In essence, one could argue that philosophy and architecture make natural bedfellows, as they see... more In essence, one could argue that philosophy and architecture make natural bedfellows, as they seek to understand some of the most fundamental concerns of human existence: the issue of shelter
as the first architectural gesture is but a small step away from the ethical question: how do we wish to live, or what is the good life? The desire to house our institutions in purposeful, representative and significant edifices is intimately linked to issues of aesthetic judgment, and the question of how we perceive beauty (or a lack of it). At the same
time, philosophy also questions our means of questioning, our means of the very discourse of inquiry through the study of knowledge and logic. The four core branches of philosophy–metaphysics, ethics,
logic, and epistemology–have spawned count-less further specialisations, which ebb and flow in popularity. While architecture thinking has freely adopted and adapted the continental philosophies
of metaphysics and ethics, the domains of logic and epistemology have been less visible. While we acknowledge the limitations of a simplified distinction between two ‘camps’ of thinking, this issue of Footprint sought to open the discussion on what might be offered by the less familiar branches of epistemology and logic that are more prevalent and developed in the analytic tradition.

For full article, please see: http://footprint.tudelft.nl/index.php/footprint/article/view/1801/1926

The papers brought together here are situated in the context of a discipline in transformation that seeks a fundamental approach to its own tools, logic and approaches. In this realm, the approaches of logic and epistemology help to define an alternate means of criticality not subjected to personalities or the specialist knowledge of individual philosophies. Rather the various articles attempt to demonstrate that such difference of background assumptions is a common human habit and that some of the techniques of analytic philosophy may help to leap these chasms. The hope is that this is a start of a larger conversation in architecture theory that has as of yet not begun.

For full issue see:
http://footprint.tudelft.nl/

Amsterdam University Press eBooks, Dec 5, 2018

Amsterdam University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2018

Ancient and Modern Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West, 2018

Bracken, G., Ancient and Modern Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West. Care of the Self, Volume I. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,, 2019

For full article, please see: http://footprint.tudelft.nl/index.php/footprint/article/view/1801/1926

For full issue see:
http://footprint.tudelft.nl/

for conference presentation at the AHRA 2015, This Thing Called Theory Leeds Beckett University, ... more for conference presentation at the AHRA 2015, This Thing Called Theory Leeds Beckett University, School of Art, Architecture and Design 19th to 21st of November 2015.

for conference presentation at: MoMoWo Symposium 2018 International Conference Women's Creativity... more for conference presentation at: MoMoWo Symposium 2018 International Conference Women's Creativity since the Modern Movement (1918-2018): Toward a New Perception and Reception Politecnico di Torino -Campus Lingotto, Turin, Italy 13th-16th June 2018

for conference presentation at: 5th International Conference S.ARCH 2018 Venice, Italy, May 22-24... more for conference presentation at: 5th International Conference S.ARCH 2018 Venice, Italy, May 22-24, 2018. Local governmental planning and building regulations significantly impact current practices in architecture. Most of such regulations are dense collections of rules reached by compromise, committee, and amended over years and without a clear aesthetic or ethical unity other than to conserve the present status quo. These regulations address the potential architect and builder as adding or altering the existing fabric of the urban environment via one project at a time. But what happens with the urban environment is almost completely destroyed? 2017 brought an escalation of environmental disasters that destroyed large scale urban environments. Hurricanes, flooding, earthquakes, and fires damaged entire neighbourhoods, towns, and islands. Existing planning regulations are not adequately prepared for reconstructing large scale-areas at once. Such regulations can be improvement by requiring a more wholistic approach and specialised planning regulations for post-disaster rebuilding schemes. It is an issue of many fronts and clearly not alone a problem for architects. Planning and building regulations are not technically our responsibility; at least not ours alone. However the training, capacity to envision something that does not yet exist and communicate a unified idea through its component stages, positions architects to be active community members who can and perhaps should, influence and improve planning regulations. Without attempting to design a detailed utopia, what methodology and insights can architects offer to specialised post-disaster rebuilding schemes? Considering the 2017 California Wild Fires, the talk will open the discussion to how particular ecological concepts and environmental measures can be employed at the level of local governmental planning and building regulations .

Abstract for presentation at the ISPA's 2014 Autonomy Reconsidered conference, July 2014.

Abstract for presentation at the Third Dubrovnik Conference on the Philosophy of Art, April 2014.

Granting that we are constantly bombarded with various forms of popular culture with little room ... more Granting that we are constantly bombarded with various forms of popular culture with little room for reprieve, how is it that the popular discourse of philosophical aesthetics seems to offer little insight to the increasingly pervasive artist renderings of this 'lower' art form? Recently, aestheticians and philosophers have been turning their gaze to new domains of human creative activities, i.e., comics, advertisements, pornography, popular music, video games, etc. Yet – the question still burns regarding the relationship between aesthetics of the canonical, high culture and low, popular culture. Do they have different methodologies or just different subjects of inquiry? We warmly invite papers that reconsider the value and methods of aesthetics of popular culture and art – broadly understood – by exploring new concepts and fields of inquiry. Given the explorative mandate of the papers — no specific methodology or philosophical orientation is required in submissions. Selected papers will be published in a special issue of the newly emerged peer-and blind-reviewed open access online journal Popular Inquiry: The Journal of Kitsch, Camp and Mass Culture. The conferences will be hosted by the University of Warsaw, Poland and is co-organized with Aalto University, Finland. Suggested topics (which should not be seen as restrictive, but more as an invitation): – avant-garde popular culture – art from the point of view of popular culture studies – aesthetic properties and concepts of popular culture

Ambiances, Alloaesthesia: Senses, Inventions, Worlds. E-conference. Proceedings of the 4th International Congress on Ambiances, 2020

The philosophies of substance presuppose a subject which then encounters a datum. This subject th... more The philosophies of substance presuppose a subject which then encounters a datum. This subject then reacts to the datum. The process ontology presupposes a datum (firstness) which is met with feelings (secondness), and progressively attains the unity of a subject (thirdness). It is in this sense that our bodily experience is primarily an experience of the dependence of the actual presentational immediacy upon the virtual causal efficacy, and not the other way round. To put it bluntly, the world does not emerge from the subject, but processes of subjectification emerge from the interactions between the body and world. The chapter is meant to provide the basis for the panel that will stage an encounter between cognitive neurosciences and architecture.