"Continuity, Complexity, and Emergence: What is the Real for Digital Designers?" Perspecta, n° 42, "The Real", 2010, pp. 147-157. (original) (raw)

Architecture Thinking in a ‘Post-truth Era’: Recalibrations through analytic philosophy

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