I’m curious about how architecture can convey a philosophical attitude or worldview. So I would like all of your opinions on what a certain design might express, a design I am about to explain to you. Imagine a skyscraper, 70 stories high, rectangular and flat, straight up, and then at around the 4oth floor the building itself folds forward slightly, as if there was a crease in the structure, and the top part is leaning forward at a slight angle, say a 12 degree angle, just enough to appear to defy gravity. A building people will live in, a residential tower. Sleek, minimal and metallic, the only odd feature is the crimp in the middle. What weltenschuang/philosophy/symbol might this express to you? How you answer reveals as much about you as it does about the architecture. I am highly intrigued by some of the recent threads here, I would love to see who has the most compelling response. Consider which philosopher might approve of such a design. This is not some student looking for help on a homework assignment. I am a designer by trade who loves popular philosophy, and I guess you could say Ayn Rand only goes so far. (And Wittgenstein’s sister’s house is nothing more than a carefully calibrated box.) Please respond!
I’m not clever enough to do it, but I think the best responses you might get will be humourful ones based on humourous analogies between a bent building and certain philosophers. Im not sure a building can have a philosophy in the strict sense, for my part. 
Hi, Typhoeus. Firstly, I don’t know what you mean by “popular philosophy”, but stop reading Ayn Rand - it’s rubbish.
Someone will surely tell you who the famous hunchback of philosophy was.
Surely you know that Wright, Philip Johnson and everyone in the Bauhaus school were consciously expressing a worldview. Every artist does that - some seem more aware of it than others.
If the effect is to be gravity-defying, I will go with Nietzsche, because he was so light on his feet.
If the effect is supposed to be lighthearted or whimsical, Johnson should actually design it - most of his buildings look like gargantuan toys.
faust
This is actually an interesting topic, which branches out in myriads of directions. However, I’m afraid that the number of parameters involved is so big, that it would take an immense effort to scratch the surface of architectural mentalities. And I’m sure others have done it before.
I’m thinking of the relation between cultural, temporal, political, geographical coordinates, which all affect an ensemble of buildings’ architecture. One useful example would be gothic cathedrals, whose architecture is known to express religious aspirations. Actually, a building is a mirror not only of the philosophy of an era, but the whole of its cultural tensions. One need only take a glance at the dominant architecture in former Eastern Communist countries in order to get an idea of the ideologies prevalent in the last decades.
Ah, yes, the pigeon-breasted metronome of Konigsberg. Not sure exactly what kind of dwelling appealed to him.
Modern times give us the likes of Frank Gehry, whose works I really don’t like. He wants to shock, but only manages to make me wish I hadn’t eaten so much at my last meal. I’ve watched several pictures of buildings designed by him and found no harmony or grace whatsoever, just galopant megalomania and loads of ‘bling’. Muah.
Mucius Scevola you seem qualified to guess at a few philosophers who might inspire such a building, please try. No wrong answers here, I’m nmore interested in the connection, the reason for the choice. Faust, elaborate on Nietzsche, your answer seemed flippant. I think Nietzsche might be a candidate though.
I don’t read Rand anymore, popular philosophy is just a phrase. A straight modern building that bends at a slight angle in the middle. Einstein? Kant? Heideggar? Why? Exercise your brain a bit, this is a fun test. Not a test to see who’s fun.
Yeah, it’s me, thought I’d come out with it. But I’m not staying, just want to check back and see the brilliant answers you all come up with. Hopefully you’ll keep it focused on my question, which does in fact mean a lot to me. I am that building. Best, Gamer.
Derrida.
Here’s why,
Most, if not almost all towers are designed in such a manner so as to appear unique or different in some way, while still keeping the general assemblage of a building.
Different shapes, but they all go up. In some ways philosophy could be similar in this regard. Most philosophers are striving towards something in some way. Plato is a massive apartment condo, wittgenstein is the monorail, Kant the assorted government buildings…
With the bent building however, we are examing what it means to be a building in itself. Do we want to go up? Are we even going up? What happens when you put a stick halfway into water? It looks like its bent. The Derrida building represents the water… the fluidity of meaning. All the other buildings think they are going up, but the bent buildings indicates that no, they are not! Universally they are just pointing in 1 of any one of the 360 degreeish directions. The bent building points to somewhere and nowhere at the same time, it defies gravity and classification.
Gamer, where have you been? Good to see you here again…
All buildings embody ideas, if you abstract a little bit for yourself…
Furthermore, philosophy is indeed very similar to building a structure…a structure of thought/feeling/deconstruction…Philosophers if they could have an alternative career would probably make great architects…at least in theory…
Indeed - buildings and philosophy - are tp broad subjects which allow us to come into reality a bit more clearly i.e. the issue of pratical application of philosphical ideas…all you have to do is look at society, the city, the street you live in, its design, structure, layout…to see hidden ‘thought structures’ ‘latent thought’ ‘ideological structure’.
Gamer, sorry if you did not appreciate my tone. Seems to me if you exercised your own brain enough, you would know what I am talking about. Also sorry if I am having more fun than you would like.
So, piss off.
f
A reasoned creation presupposes intent.
Every intent has a philosophy.
Thanks Gobbo, I found your answer useful, in addition to being focused and participatory. You said Derrida, and you said why you said Derrida. Faust said Nietzsche, and said why, although light on his feet could mean a number of things. Some might say Nietzsche walks with the thundering juggernaut steps of Zarathustra himself, so if you mean Nietzsche, please elaborate. Thousands of years ago we made pyramids - a structure exalting basic geometry, glorified teepees, a crude lean-to reminiscent of caveman avoiding rain; children stacking cups on the playroom floor are as qualified as any pre-mummy mogul of yore. What creatures now build inverted pyramids and live in them? Ferral white-collar children sour of befouling their paper cups with old structures – Old Necessity has become a recessive and ugly King dethroned, monuments desecrated; teepees are the mottled unravelled shrouds over pronated ghosts; nature and the laws of the universe are passé and unfit for residence. We rent the liquidity of meaning, it is home and prison for inmates in collosal bizarro keys that fuck the sky and unlock new doors in the heavens of hell. Where do we live? Why is the building crimping its seductive fuck you? What is it inciting? Who lives there and why? At what cost?
See folks?
Say what you will about him. (And God knows I have). But the man can write.
Jerry you can read it as verbal agility, or a poetic phrasing of an existential question that can’t be asked in any other way, or you can read it as a desperate plea for help marketing one of my client’s new highrise condominium projects. All three readings would be correct. Given your particular bent I’d prefer you take the third reading and bend with it.
Yes, the third. Of course.
Finally. A practical use for ILP.
Well played.
(I’d have to see at least an artist’s rendering. And I’ll need the address for where to send the invoice).
Decide which member name to use and stick with it
This is Kierkegaard, in all his naked glory, dancing foxtrot with his ideas, crooning the only song he knows. The one about Christ the Paradox. It is Christ who shuns proof and flails shallow refutations, cutting through time like an arrow dashing through the air; Kierkegaard attempts the same. He himself wouldn’t agree us talking about kiekegaardish in past tense. As Existenzphilosphier by excellence, it becomes his mystic mission to yank himself from the magma of things. To traverse space and time, piercing it, yearning for perpetual self-actualization. To defy historicity by challenging the instant moment., to dig to the very roots of existence, in order to mark a rupture in temporality.
Hegel, eat your heart out.
Ok, so this is Hegel. The entire monolithical structure seems to resemble Hegel’s philosophical stream on more levels than thought.
Hegel’s philosophy inspired dialectic materialism to a bearded man, whose ideals would be pursued later in the twentieth century by half-witted communists. Up until 1989, Romania was part of the eastern block of communist countries, who shared between them the same obsessions and frustrations. Applied sommunism sought only to forever kneel man under the grub of his own apparent freedom. This monolithic building was build in Bucharest to honor the victory of socialism (over man, say we), and affirm the prevalence of state controlled personnas. A whole neighbourhood had to be wiped out in order to build this massive building. That meant that an entire slice of our capital’s history had to be completely erased in order to make way for the new existent.
The sheer size of the building is awe inspiring. It is actually the second largest man-made construction after the pentagon. It symbolises globalization, the disappearance of inequities under the protective arm of the state. Hegel’s system had also the pretension of embounding the entire spectre of what is real and rational. It is considered the third largest system of Western thought, after Aristotle’s and d’Aquinas’s.
At the time it was built, the People’s Palace aimed to be the guerdon of a successful new order of things, the hallmark of an ideal order in state. In Hegel’s philosophy, reason guerdons itself. In Hegel’s view, his prodigious system was to consummate the semnification of the human race’s universal history and rethink the Creator’s thoughts.
However, Hegel erred in that he only evaluated the historical landscap in reference to what he knew about his present day reality. He couldn’t be a prophet, so his own limitations become a sign of authenticity. The People’s Palace attempted to be the symbol of a nation and ber testimony of its inhabitants. The irony lies in that while the building was ridiculously gigantic and ludicrously luxurious inside, the people were supressed by poverty and forced to endure spiritual decay. The People’s Palace never actually served the “people”, as it betrayed the grandomany of their rulers.
Of course, Hegel himself lived in no more than a small tool-shed, not far from his own construction.
