Contemporary Perspectives on Architectural Organicism: The Limits of Self-Generation

The project explores organicism in modern urban planning and architecture, focusing on the problem of stopping in design processes and the legacy of style in the nineteenth century. It retains the ideology of endless self-generation but explores new forms of critique and emergent subjectivities in a contemporary world. The book is of interest to researchers and professionals in architecture and art history, historians of science, visual artists, and scholars in the humanities.

Format: Hardback
Length: 264 pages
Publication date: 07 June 2023
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

This project emerges from a series of questions and discussions surrounding organicism, particularly in the context of two critical strands related to the discourse of organic self-generation. The first strand revolves around the problem of stagnation in the design processes throughout history, while the second explores the organic legacy of style in the nineteenth century as a dominant aesthetic ideology. The epistemologies of self-generation outlined by enlightenment and critical philosophy served as the foundation for the discursive formations of modern urban planning and architecture. The concept of the organism was believed to calibrate modernism's infinite extension.

In contemporary architectural organicism, the language of biological sciences is not employed, as it was in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Instead, the focus is on portraying complex systems, such as computational/informational, geo/ecological, or even ontological/aesthetic 'networks'. While some aspects of modernity from the past are retained, such as the ideology of endless self-generation, the project aims to explore organicism for new forms of critique and emergent subjectivities in a contemporary, post-pandemic world.

The essays collected in this book offer a diverse range of critiques of the modernist notion of endless growth in various fields, including architecture, literature, philosophy, and the history of science. These essays span a broad spectrum, from theoretical and speculative to analytic and critical, and cover a wide range of topics, from studies of the history of modernity to reflections on our contemporary world. Rather than advocating a return to the romantic forms of nineteenth-century naturphilosophie, this project seeks to probe organicism for fresh perspectives and alternative subjectivities in the modern era.

Weight: 670g
Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781032015712