by Marc Belderbos | Vol 26 (1/2) 2008
This paper on architecture and its effect on the subject tries to clarify the main arguments that support the title: “Architecture, infinitive augury”. Having established the argument –what is architecture about – and having indicated its essential aspects , the author strives to establish what is specific about architecture: Architecture does not exist; architecture consists. Architecture grounds the spirit. Architecture is real and is not realistic. Nothing of culture exists outside architecture. Architecture, inaugural event,… In the third part of the paper, entitled ‘subject of architecture’, the author treats this theme by traversing around fifty maxims which allows us to consider contemporary space and the subject as in-finite of an in-fini-tive architecture of pure “augury”. The main argument is probably the development of the statement by the architect Louis Kahn: “Purity lies in the incompletion.”
Download full text
by Viviana M. Saint-Cyr | Vol 28 (1/2) 2010
We will try to demonstrate that the experience of Abbot Suger de Saint-Denis, creator of Gothic architecture, based on the logic of Lacanian sublimation, comes from the elevation of an object to the dignity of the Thing (Lacan, 1986 [1959-1960]: 133). On the one hand, this experience is a misguided elevation: Suger arrives (Lat. “surgit”) at the truth via material things, but also Suger (Lat. “surgit”), in architectural terms, ascends as the subject of desire. On the other hand, this experience illustrates the dichotomous relation between elevation/descent and creation/destruction in the sublimation that we call “sujerienne”. The architecture of Abbot Suger innovates and this singular experience allows us to address the choséité (thingness) of the architectural object: the void. It also allows us to relate the elevation of sublimation to elevation in architecture. And this highlights the correspondence between elevation of sublimation and the development of the imaginary representation of the Thing. This development cannot take place without an act of creative destruction of the Subject.
Download full text
