Grace and Gravity: Architectures of the Figure

Table of Contents:
Preface 1. The Grace Machine Of the Figure and the Gap Grace and Figure Grace and Gift Grace and Habit Grace and Play 2. Foot Space and Hand Space Of the Planar and the Granular Gap and Room Foot Space and Rhythm Hand Space and Things Crooked Hephaestus and Phenotechnology 3. Caves and Chests Of Mimesis and Physis Gap and Trap Ornament and Apparatus Caves and Mimesis Chests and Physis 4. Figurate and Spectral Architecture Of the Lithic, Ferric,and Plastic Hard and Soft The Spirit and the Lithic Automatism and the Ferric The Soft Machine and Plastic 5. Grace and Gravity Of Pain and Sweetness Beautiful Things and Beautiful Moments Caryatids and Spinal Columns Sweetness and Sweet Spots Fate and the Dandies of Suffering 6. Automata and Thaumata Of Puppets and Pied Beauty Medium and Media Lights On and Lights Off Color and Consciousness The Octopus and Decadent Media Theory 7. Jumpology and Falling Of Grace and Disgrace The Gentle and the Brutal Jumpology and Simultaneity Falling and the Simulacrum Things Falling and Breaking Things 8. The Stone Reckoner Of Counting and Recounting Stone and Fabulism Stone and Luminosity Stone and Reckoning Stone and the Book Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Lars Spuybroek is Professor of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, USA, where he teaches design methodology and aesthetic theory. He is the author of NOX: Machining Architecture, The Architecture of Continuity, Textile Tectonics, The Architecture of Variation, and The Sympathy of Things.

Review :
[Grace and Gravity] raises the discussions on the digital turn in architecture out of its largely administrative, historiographical condition to a spiritual, daringly ambitious, quick and genuinely exciting, and also ethical new level, that gives us a taste of how the digital turn's somewhat narcissistic preoccupation with the production of "novelty" might be overcome. As he ranges from Minoan bull-leaping imagery to Beatles lyrics and back again, via Thomas Aquinas, Martin Heidegger, and St Paul, there is a relentless breathlessness to the text. This is part of its joy … This is a book in which there is much (as Spuybroek's own responses to Italian architecture would have it) 'blossom, flourishing, efflorescence, flowering'. Lars Spuybroek is one of the freshest and most original voices in our contemporary intellectual world. Grace and Gravity is a truly exceptional and quite extraordinary book. The reader comes away from encountering it with their minds instructed and their lives enriched. It is so much more than a merely 'academic' book and it can be appreciated on many levels. It is a book to savour and one can only be grateful for such a work. "In comparison to his earlier work, Grace and Gravity is both more sweeping and more intimate ... An ambitious volume." Natura semper facit saltus, nature always makes leaps. In this impressively erudite book, Lars Spuybroek shows that these leaps are not across sheer void, but a 'thin, ghostlike film' that does not quite belong either to the parts or wholes of things. Against the recent dogmas of continuity and immanence, he invites us to a new understanding of his key term, grace. Throughout Grace and Gravity Spuybroek displays a gift for synthesizing complex ideas in ways that do not reduce or deny their difficulties but rather behold them in simultaneity ... [This] is a trip eminently worth taking while listening to the workings of his mind. Spuybroek wrote a beautiful book. Thanks to this book I can understand architecture better.