About the Book
Architecture Post Mortem surveys architecture’s encounter with death, decline, and ruination following late capitalism. As the world moves closer to an economic abyss that many perceive to be the death of capital, contraction and crisis are no longer mere phases of normal market fluctuations, but rather the irruption of the unconscious of ideology itself. Post mortem is that historical moment wherein architecture’s symbolic contract with capital is put on stage, naked to all. Architecture is not irrelevant to fiscal and political contagion as is commonly believed; it is the victim and penetrating analytical agent of the current crisis. As the very apparatus for modernity’s guilt and unfulfilled drives-modernity’s debt-architecture is that ideological element that functions as a master signifier of its own destruction, ordering all other signifiers and modes of signification beneath it. It is under these conditions that architecture theory has retreated to an 'Alamo' of history, a final desert outpost where history has been asked to transcend itself. For architecture’s hoped-for utopia always involves an apocalypse. This timely collection of essays reformulates architecture’s relation to modernity via the operational death-drive: architecture is but a passage between life and death.
This collection includes essays by Kazi K. Ashraf, David Bertolini, Simone Brott, Peggy Deamer, Didem Ekici, Paul Emmons, Donald Kunze, Todd McGowan, Gevork Hartoonian, Nadir Lahiji, Erika Naginski, and Dennis Maher.
Table of Contents:
Contents: Introduction: the way things are, Donald Kunze; Driven into the public: the psychic constitution of space, Todd McGowan; Dead or alive in Joburg, Simone Brott; Building in-between the two deaths: a post mortem manifesto, Nadir Lahiji; Kant, Sade, ethics and architecture, David Bertolini; Post mortem: building deconstruction, Kazi K. Ashraf; The slow-fast architecture of love in the ruins, Donald Kunze; Progress: re-building the ruins of architecture, Gevork Hartoonian; Adrian Stokes: surface suicide, Peggy Deamer; A window to the soul: depth in early modern section drawing, Paul Emmons; Preliminary thoughts on Piranesi and Vico, Erika Naginski; Architectural asceticism and austerity, Didem Ekici; 900 miles to Paradise, and other afterlives of architecture, Dennis Maher; Index.
About the Author :
Donald Kunze, Penn State University, USA, C. David Bertolini, Louisiana State University, USA and Simone Brott, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Donald Kunze, Todd McGowan, Nadir Lahiji, David Bertolini, Kazi K. Ashraf, Gevork Hartoonian, Peggy Deamer, Paul Emmons, Erika Naginski, Didem Ekici, Dennis Maher.
Review :
'In the wake of global financial cataclysm and impending ecological catastrophe, architecture's role within the reproduction of contemporary capitalist relations has assumed a new urgency today. Collecting together a sparkling and adventurous series of essays, Architecture Post Mortem explores architecture's current confrontations with ruin, apocalypse and survival, in ways that provoke new political and theoretical questions at every turn.'David Cunningham, University of Westminster, UK
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`In the wake of global financial cataclysm and impending ecological catastrophe, architecture's role within the reproduction of contemporary capitalist relations has assumed a new urgency today. Collecting together a sparkling and adventurous series of essays, Architecture Post Mortem explores architecture's current confrontations with ruin, apocalypse and survival, in ways that provoke new political and theoretical questions at every turn.’
David Cunningham, University of Westminster, UK
'This collection of essays tracks the interaction of architecture’s literal and metaphorical deaths, says Jon Astbury … there are some standout pieces, Simone Brott’s “Dead or Alive in Joburg” unpicks the 2009 film District 9 to reveal its parallels with South Africa’s urban realities and, consequently, the concept of violent urbanism'. Building Design Online
