THE ARCHITECT AND THE ANIMAL: 20th CENTURY ENCOUNTERS International Workshop
9-10 April 2021 @ Princeton Athens Center & Zoom Organizers: M Christine Boyer & Kostas Tsiambaos
Aino Aalto and a crane in the garden of her house in Riihitie, 1939. Photo: Eino Mäkinen © Alvar Aalto Foundation
PROGRAMME
Friday 9 April
15.00 CET Dimitri Gondicas / Princeton University Welcoming remarks
Kostas Tsiambaos / National Technical University of Athens Introduction
SESSION I
15.20 Viola Bertini / Università Iuav di Venezia Time, Place and Man. The Role of Animals in Hassan Fathy’s Drawings
15.40 Martin Søberg / The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts John Hejduk, Animals, and the Anthropological Machine
16.00 Martín Cobas Sosa / FADU - UdelaR and Princeton University A Report on the Creature, with an Appendix on Venomous Zoology
16.20 Respondent: Cameron Wu / Princeton University
16.40 Discussion
End of day 1
Saturday 10 April
SESSION II
15.00 CET Aron Vinegar / University of Oslo Mollusks, Shells and the Stained Soul of Modern Architecture
15.20 Kostas Tsiambaos / National Technical University of Athens Buildings as Animals, or, Eschatological Perspectives of Modern Greek Architecture
15.40 Respondent: Spyros Papapetros / Princeton University
16.00 Discussion
Break
SESSION III
17.00 M. Christine Boyer / Princeton University An Asinine Tale [Equus asinus]: Le Corbusier’s donkeys
17.20 Manuel Orazi / University of Ferrara Animals in the Humanistic Thinking of Yona Friedman
17.40 Gabriele Mastrigli / University of Camerino Piero and the Dog (and other Stories): Superstudio and the Narrative of Living Nature
18.00 Respondents: Marshall Brown and Spyros Papapetros / Princeton University
18.00 Discussion
End of the workshop
ABSTRACTS
Time, Place and Man. The role of animals in Hassan Fathy’s drawings Viola Bertini Hassan Fathy was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1900 and passed away in Cairo in 1989. During his long career he designed more than one hundred and fifty projects, among which houses, religious and public buildings, and several villages. In parallel to his architectural production, Fathy gave birth to a series of paints, mostly watercolors, which can be assumed as a kind of manifesto of his whole architectural poetics. Some of these drawings directly refer to his projects, some others are instead an invention of landscapes and architectures, where a logical realism and poetic realism overlap and tend to coincide. The two-dimensional geometric representations coexist in fact with the dimension of the fable, which is frequently conveyed by the inclusion of symbolic elements borrowed from popular culture and antiquity. These elements, which are mainly flora and fauna, have multiple values. Firstly, the plants and the animals populating Fathy’s drawings are often a quotation of Pharaonic wall paintings. This choice, remarked also by the two-dimensional representations and the frequent combination of plans and elevations, expresses Fathy’s aim to create a link with the Egyptian past, that is the original matrix of his culture and the spiritual starting point from which designing a true Egyptian architecture. A need to question time emerges, meaning to relate with the past in order to create a new architecture which is made by figures rooted in memory. Secondly, these elements are aimed to express an idea of place. Silver fishes in the lake Qarun, a camel caravan in the desert, oxen or ducks in the Egyptian countryside are all simple but iconic elements, which both refer to the physical place and to its symbolic value, that is the Egyptian and Arab context where Fathy’s architectures are specifically situated. Eventually, these elements, as quotations of Pharaonic depictions, are capable to convey other meanings. That is, for example, the case of Hathor, the cow goddess of fertility, and the Ibis, whose presence in the New Gourna watercolor is conceived to symbolically support the project’s success and to protect the housing units. The myths and the beliefs related to these symbols were handed down from antiquity to popular culture. Therefore, their presence in Fathy’s drawings can be intended as a tool to create a dialogue with the people, between the architect and the man. Man who is the measure of all things, and the architecture depicted is always and firstly intended to serve him. Starting from the analysis of several Fathy’s drawings, the paper aims to investigate the multiple symbolic values that animals assume in his paints: the relationship with time, the idea of place, and the dialogue with man. Finally, it will be explored how the use of an ancient language, clearly expressed by the way in which animals are represented, is a tool to give new purposes and meanings to architecture.
An Asinine Tale [Equus asinus]: Le Corbusier’s Donkeys M. Christine Boyer Why did donkeys hold a role in Le Corbusier’s meandering thoughts about cities and architecture? He even writes autobiographically about donkeys. Is it because a donkey carried Christ into Jerusalem and henceforth became a symbol of martyrdom, a sufferer for humanity? This lowliest of beasts is more often a symbol of foolishness, stubbornness, sometimes stupidness. Is this why Le Corbusier pronounced near the end of his life “I am an honest donkey”? A donkey is a pack-animal – a core technology for moving goods especially in the mountainous terrain of the Mediterranean basin. Le Corbusier’s donkey tales begin with his early unpublished manuscript “Le Construction des Villes” (1910) where he praises the meandering paths laid down by donkeys. In a chapter on “She’s and He’s” in Voyage d’Orient (1911), he worships the young women and little donkeys of Istanbul — a quixotic juxtaposition of incongruent exotica. But by the time “Urbanisme” is published (1925) he reverses his thoughts on the road of the pack-donkey: now this stupid, lazy animal meanders along, zig-zags to ease his climb, always trying to gain shade. He takes the line of least resistance. While man is rational, he thinks ahead and seeks the straight line. Le Corbusier drew images of donkeys as he traveled about: images of placid, tranquil animals, appreciated for their hard work grinding grain, pressing olives, pulling carts—for resisting modernity and keeping to traditional ways. The donkey becomes an image of Sancho Panza riding his donkey Dapple, a down to earth, faithful companion to Don Quixote who goes about tilting windmills astride his horse, Rocinanta. Then again a reversal as he scrutinizes nature to penetrate its laws: the law of the meander, a geological law, seen from an airplane, breaking through resistances, seeking eventually the straightest route. There is a lot to learn about the meandering path, sequential movement, and variety of views, expectations and curiosities witnessed in the promenade architecturale and all of its subroutes. And of course, the meander becomes a parable for man’s life and the path to self-knowledge: long years of faithfulness followed by decadence and collapse. All of which leads us to Le Corbusier obscure text, Le Poème de l’angle droit (1955).,in which Le Corbusier tries to make a syncretic union of the animalistic route, a fusion of opposites. “Life must force a passage burst the dam/ of vicissitude. It cuts through the / meander pierces the loops/ …. The current is straight/once again.” This paper will explore the various meanings and their implicit associations to be made from Le Corbusier’s donkey references.
A Report on the Creature. With an Appendix on Venomous Zoology. Martín Cobas In the beginning, a particular type of Amerindian myth goes, there were only human beings, and human and animals were not yet distinct. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics What does the Kreatur do to architecture? A Report on the Creature investigates the space of the creature and its architectures from an anthropological standpoint. It thus addresses the rich history of Kreatur –from its Western theological incarnation (recapitulated by Rilke and Benjamin) to its Brazilian variations, and dwells on a singular creaturely modern milieu: Brazil, this paper argues, was born creaturely. Triggered by creation (as Kreatur ), taxonomy (as specimen ), pharmacology (as antidote ) zoomorphism (as the will to animal metamorphosis) or tragedy (as monster ), by rhetorical declination or fantastic imagery, the creature exposed our own animality and helped articulate the threshold between nature and culture, a master schism of Western metaphysics. The creature became a tool of translation in a modernizing society in search of a topical idiom. Crucial in this respect was the work of Italian-born Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi (née Achilina Bo, 1914- 1992), whose interest in animals –whether in creaturely, Indigenous-craft, or pet and collectible form –too often intersected her ethno-anthropological project, recalling Clarice Lispector’s animal call in her novel Água Viva (1973), in which the narrator speaks to animals not to humanize them but to animalize herself. In Bo Bardi’s work animals and architecture are enigmatically interlocked. A case in point is her collaboration with the Instituto Butantan (São Paulo’s biologic research center and house of a world-renowned collection of venomous serpents), an unbuilt project for the institution’s reptile diorama and a curious epigone: a collage that portrays a tumultuous scene of a group of men battling with giant serpents. But what is at stake in it: the mythical creature of Christian theology or the Amerindian animistic ontology? A Brazilian Laocoön of sorts? By tracing the rich iconography surrounding Bo Bardi’s Butantan — from dioramas to historical tourist postcards and scientific materials — this paper seeks to elaborate on the cross-fertilizations between the creature (i.e. venomous serpent) and the body qua body, the body-architectural (space) and the body scientific. Neither exclusively a matter of scientific inquiry nor public voyeuristic pleasure, the multifarious ways in which the creaturely was addressed in modern Brazil cannot be categorized as merely insular or metaphorical but are rather to be understood as continuous with strategies of resistance (political, cultural, and otherwise) — i.e. constitutively and not derivatively. The creature introduced a sense of estrangement in that which was ostensibly familiar and, conversely, released a kind of intimation of affect (or humanity?) in that which was alien, unknown, mysterious. It exposes the nature of the other — or multiple others. It is the threshold of humanity and animality. This study draws from a Brazilian ethno-anthropological tradition — with which Bo Bardi was well conversant — that culminates in Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s Métaphysiques cannibales (Cannibal Metaphysics, 2009), a project that further developed the notions of “multinaturalism” and “perspectivism” that had been introduced in previous works as key markers of a non-Western metaphysics and in which — not incidentally — the creature emerges as a de/re-ontologizing of the modern, in Viveiros de Castro’s words, the less “universal” of all the ontologies, and thus the less equipped to accommodate difference, i.e. the other: our co-being. I will conclude by characterizing the creaturely modern in a threefold way: as a displacement from effect to affect, from metaphor to metonymy, and from a narrative rhetoric to a visual one. Animals were not simply animals; they were bestowed with agency.
Piero and the Hermit Crab (and other Stories). Superstudio and the Narrative of Living Nature (a conversation with Gian Piero Frassinelli). Gabriele Mastrigli The presence of animals in the narrative and iconography of Superstudio, is one of the characters of their multiform metaphoric language. From this point of view animals for Superstudio are tout court nature, i.e. the representation of what architecture is destined to embrace and, literally, comprehend. Although cows, horses, dogs or monkeys appear simply as sparring partners in architectural collages – living things opposed to the monumental background (or foreground) of squared volumes – they often become characters of tales tuned as parables. In those narratives, that belong mostly to period of the so-called Fundamental Acts (1971-1974), animals are part to the more general category of living nature, read as the counterpart of rationality. In such a category – that ends up including also man – architecture is not anymore represented in abstract and monumental forms, but is investigated as an anthropological fact in which modernity is questioned to speak about the real functioning of the system, basically its “life”. The essay is written as a conversation on these themes between the author and Gian Piero Frassinelli, the “anthropologist” of Superstudio, and include references to some tales written by Frassinelli himself in which animals play a specific role.
Animals in the humanistic thinking of Yona Friedman Manuel Orazi In the long life and career of Yona Friedman (1923-2020), animals have been a constant stimulus for his theoretical research. Especially the holistic sight of the dog was at the basis of Utopies réalisables (achievable utopias), his main book published in French in 1975, a text that criticized the endemic autism of architects. Moreover, Friedman’s interest in mythology was developed following a course by Károly Kerényi in Budapest during World War II and remained a crucial issue in his thinking: that’s why imaginary animals were often used as examples or decoration in some of his work, including books – like Vous avez un chien? C’est lui qui vous a choisi(e) (2004). In the end, Friedman’s humanistic ideas and concepts on mobility, participation or physics were built in time also through the observation of the animal world.
John Hejduk, Animals, and the Anthropological Machine Martin Søberg Animals and their representations occur in various stages of the American architect John Hejduk’s (1929-2000) oeuvre, particularly in its very early stages during the 1950s and in its mature stages from the 1980s and onwards. They do so in different ways: 1) As part of the functional program of projects, for instance in the design of a zoological park i.e. as houses and environments for animals. 2) As part of Hejduk’s imaginary world-making, expressed through drawings, in which animals accompany, juxtapose, and/or contrast human beings. This can be seen, for instance, in the projects Bovisa, the Lancaster/Hanover Gate, and Berlin Night, part of Hejduk’s explorations of the relations between objects/subjects or subject/subjects, like the man and the lion in the House of the Zoologist in his Bovisa drawings. 3) Finally, animals occur on a formal symbolic level, in creaturely, zoomorphic fabrications (Søberg 2016). In this paper, I will focus on the second one of these strategies, that is, on what we might term the ontic/ontological investigations in Hejduk’s work, his interest in life forms. I will do so through the lens of Giorgio Agamben’s critique of what he terms the anthropological machine which creates a caesura between humans and animals (Agamben 2004). According to Agamben, this machine captures and suspends in order to establish a specifically human Dasein. Hejduk’s projects and fabrications are concerned with this caesura, critically exploring how distinctions are created – and possibly transcended. Following this, I propose that Hejduk’s work might help us reconceptualize human-animal relations at a time where such reassembling seems crucial to future human and animal existence.
Buildings as Animals, or, Eschatological Perspectives of Modern Greek Architecture Kostas Tsiambaos While metaphorical uses of animal figures are strong and frequent in modern Greek literature (from the monkey in Iakovos Pitzipios’s Xouth the Ape to the bear in Angelos Sikelianos’s Sacred Way) as well as in modern Greek painting and sculpture (from Nikos Engonopoulos’s lions, cats, and horses to Natalia Mela’s roosters, rams, and bulls), the poetic depictions of animals in the Greek architecture of the 20th century have not yet been explored, although references to and representations of animals appear in texts, sketches and drawings amongst some of the most important modern Greek architects. Through the examination of specific texts and projects by Dimitris Pikionis, Aris Konstantinidis, Takis Zenetos, and Aristomenis Provelenghios I will illustrate the ways in which animals serve a critical-theoretical purpose as they are used in order to question the value, content and identity of modern architecture and expand its anthropocentric limits. In particular, I will examine a few case studies in which animals participate –as projections– in an eschatological discourse, in the sense that they become agents of a post-human, post-historical narrative of an imaginary future in which the practice of architecture and the role of the architect will be radically altered, if not totally extinct. Having in mind the second of the “three blows to human narcissism” (Freud), namely the anti-anthropocentric implication of Darwinism, as expanded by Alexandre Kojève’s comments on the end of history, I will show how modern Greek architects’ reflective gaze on animals in relation to architecture may provide a new hermeneutic horizon for modern architecture at moments when the boundaries between the animals, the architects, and their buildings start to dissolve; only by “becoming animal”, to follow Deleuze and Guattari, architects and their buildings could avoid the biopolitical control of history, economy, art, technology, and even transcend (their own) death.
Mollusks, Shells and the Stained Soul of Modern Architecture Aron Vinegar This paper will undertake a broadly Hegelian attempt to think about the figuration of the mollusk and the shell as a way of accounting for the strange subject matter of modern architecture. Clearly, this is not an obscure topic; many of us are aware of the ubiquitous references to shells and mollusks evidenced across a vast range of architecture, theory, art, philosophy and poetry. Needless to say, most of these instances grapple with the metaphysical dualities that are also at the heart of modern architecture: subject and substance, plenitude and void, exterior and interior, opening and closing, exposure and shielding, self-preservation and death-drive, individual and collective. I want to bear down on this metaphysics by looking at the mollusk and shell through some “stages” of Hegelian philosophy that are inseparable from a certain form of theatrical staging that is intrinsic to the movement of Hegel’s writing and philosophizing. Some of the “scenes” that I will be emphasizing are: his account of the “constructive instinct” in the Philosophy of Nature, in which animals excrete products of their own activity; his treatment of habit in the Anthropology section of the 3nd volume of his Encyclopedia; and his discussions of the “beautiful soul” and “absolute spirit” in the Phenomenology of Spirit. In particular, I want to develop what I will call a kenotic anaesthetics of the shell and mollusk, drawing on the Greek word kenosis, that Hegel translates into German as Entäußerung in the Phenomenology of Spirit, following Luther’s German translation of this word that appears in the New Testament (“Letters to Philippians” 2:6-8), where the latter describes Christ emptying himself of his divinity in order to become flesh. Entäußerung has been variably translated into English as exteriorization, externalization, relinquishing, objectifying, realizing, or alienating. But I prefer to work towards an interpretation of this concept that emphasizes its process of exceeding, overflowing and especially staining. In doing so, I will not limit myself to historical and contemporary architectural and artistic examples that explicitly engage with the mollusk and shell, but will also engage those that exemplify this material act of spilling out and staining without recourse to the shell. The shell is therefore but one instance of a larger trajectory of thinking architecture’s kenosis.
BIOS
Viola Bertini Viola Bertini graduated in Architecture at Politecnico di Milano and obtained a PhD in Architectural Composition with dignity of publication at the Doctoral School of Università Iuav di Venezia, with a thesis on the relationship between tradition and modernity in the work of Hassan Fathy. She currently is a research fellow at Università Iuav di Venezia, where she is also a teaching assistant. Starting from 2013 she was a lecturer at Politecnico di Milano, teaching Architectural Design, Typological characters of architecture and Architecture and Urban Design. She was a research consultant at the American University of Beirut and visiting researcher for short periods at CIDEHUS - University of Évora. Bertini is the coordinator of the scientific secretariat of the international network of schools of architecture Designing Heritage Tourism Landscapes and participates in the research activities of the Iuav Cluster Cultland | Cultural Landscapes. Member of the scientific committee of the magazine Officina *, of the editorial board of the Designing Heritage Tourism Landscapes series and tutor in the Doctorate in Architecture, city and design of Università Iuav di Venezia, she participated as a tutor and general organization at several design workshops and presented her research in many international conferences and seminars. Among her latest publications: S.S. Damluji, V. Bertini, Hassan Fathy. Earth & Utopia, (Laurence King Publishing, London 2018) and J. Rocha, V. Bertini, (edited by), Architecture, Tourism and Marginal Areas (Lettera Ventidue, Siracusa 2020).
Martín Cobas is Professor of Architectural History and Design at FADU- UdelaR (where he served as Associate Dean) and a researcher at the Institute of the History of Architecture. His Ph.D. dissertation (Princeton University School of Architecture, 2020) was on the historical intersections of anthropophagic, baroque and magical discourses in the “creaturely” origins of Brazilian modernity and the construction of a critical visual and spatial ontology. He is co-editor of Vitruvia and his writing has appeared in specialized journals (Architecture & Culture and PLOT, among others), and is currently completing a book on the work of Uruguayan engineer Eladio Dieste. Honors include the Archiprix International Graduation Project Award, Glasgow, 2005, and the Julio Vilamajó Prize, 2012. Cobas is a founding partner of Fábrica de Paisaje, whose work has received several international awards and has been exhibited in Buenos Aires, Medellín, Mexico City, Barcelona, New York, Montreal, Reggio, and the Venice Architecture Biennale.
Gabriele Mastrigli is an architect and critic based in Rome. He teaches Architectural Theory and Design at the University of Camerino. He also taught Architectural Theory at Cornell University and at the Berlage Institute of Rotterdam. His articles and essays appear in Il Manifesto as well as in various magazines including Domus, Log and Lotus international. He edited Rem Koolhaas’s collection of essays Junkspace (2006). He curated the annotated edition of Superstudio’s texts and drawings (Superstudio – Opere 1966-1978), as well as the retrospective show Superstudio 50 (Museo Maxxi, Rome 2016).
Manuel Orazi is adjunct professor at the Accademia di Architettura USI in Mendrisio with a course on "City and Territory." He works as editor of architecture, landscape and planning books for the publishing house Quodlibet based in Macerata. He published Yona Friedman, The Dilution of Architecture (Park Books, Zurich 2015). He collaborates with Domus, Log and is curating the exhibition Carlo Aymonino. Loyalty to Betrayal. Architecure, City, Drawings at the Triennale in Milan (May-September 2021).
Martin Søberg, PhD, is Associate Professor in architectural theory, poetics and artistic research at the Institute of Architecture and Culture at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen, Denmark. Trained as an art historian at the University of Copenhagen, he holds a PhD in Architecture and specialises in architectural representations, media and poetics, particularly in 20th and 21st century architectural culture. He is currently completing a monographic study of the Danish modern architect Kay Fisker (forthcoming, Bloomsbury, 2021) and is co-editor of the books The Artful Plan: Architectural Drawing Reconfigured (Birkhäuser, 2020), What Images Do (Aaarhus University Press, 2019), Terræn: Veje ind i samtidskunsten (Aarhus University Press, 2019) and Refractions: Artistic Research in Architecture (Architectural Publisher B, 2016). He is chair of the Danish Association of Art Historians.
Kostas Tsiambaos is an architect, Assistant Professor in History & Theory of Architecture at the School of Architecture of the National Technical University in Athens (NTUA). He is chair of do.co.mo.mo. Greece. His research has been published in international journals (The Journal of Architecture, ARQ, Architectural Histories, ARENA JAR) and collective volumes. His recent books include From Doxiadis' Theory to Pikionis' Work: Reflections of Antiquity in Modern Architecture (London & New York: Routledge, 2018) and Ambivalent Modernity: 9+1 texts on Modern Architecture in Greece (Thessaloniki: Epikentro, 2017). In the fall semester of the academic year 2019-2020, he was a Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Research Fellow at Princeton University working on ‘Animals in Modern Greek Architecture’.
Aron Vinegar is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas (IFIKK), University of Oslo. He has two forthcoming books: Subject Matter: On the Anaesthetics of Habit and Other Unsettling Remainders (The MIT Press, Short Circuit Series, 2022), and a co-edited book with Kamini Vellodi, Grey on Grey: On the Threshold of Art and Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press, Refraction series, 2022).
OUTLINE
One of architecture’s main objectives is to ensure the best possible conditions for the protection and development of human life. At the same time, architecture has always referred to animals in various ways. Even as, throughout history, the most important architectural creations were dedicated to the glory of gods, animal figures persistently featured as reminders of the sacred, the irrational, the monstrous or the evil. In ancient Greek temples Gods and semi-Gods were put side by side with lions and horses; in Gothic cathedrals saints and holy figures stood next to wolves, lambs and pigs; in the churches of the 18th and 19th centuries owls, swans, fish, deer, etc. were used as symbols that communicated common mentalities and religious beliefs, promoted ethical and aesthetical norms and ideals, and performed as reflective-critical comments on human creation and life.
In the 20th century the presence of animals in architecture gradually receded as positivism and functionalism prevailed. However, one could still find various references to and representations of animals in the work of the architects of the 20th century. From the pack-donkey in Le Corbusier’s The City of Tomorrow (1929), and the goats in Dimitris Pikionis’s Aixoni (1957), to the horses in Superstudio’s Atti Fondamentali (1972), and the spiders in Lina Bo Bardi’s Intermezzo per bambini (1984), the animal as a latent model, paradigm, metaphor and symbol comes to serve a critical-interpretive function.
This workshop aims to launch a discussion on the animal in the history and theory of architecture of the 20th century by reconsidering the animal as a vital symbol/signifier/qualifier for the human, as the ‘negative’ or the ‘other’ of the human. In this framework the words “negative” and “other” do not indicate something inferior or less important than the human but, on the contrary, something substantial and meaningful, a missing link or an archetype, an object which expands, completes or even mirrors the notion of the human. How can we re- think animals beyond their se (or the use of parts and attributes of them) as mere formalist inspirations for architectural design which are often empty of content, identity, and meaning? How can we re-consider the various references to animals in the architecture of the 20th century as an alternative field of research for architectural history, theory and criticism? How can we re-interpret the entangled, convoluted representations of animals as objects of the architects’ sublimation but also as reflections of their ethical position; as concerns of citizens active in the cultural and political environment of their age?
The workshop considers animal references and representations as symbolic constructions and parts of an imaginary ecology that at the same time perform as rhetoric devices. Within this context, alien, fantastic, holy, wild, idealized, and exotic creatures appear as typical objects of otherness; as models, paradigms, and metaphors in a discourse that attempts to critically question the identities, definitions and boundaries of modern and postmodern architecture. A mapping of these images, references and representations, as well as a documentation and interpretation of their function during the creative process, will be one of the workshop’s main targets. The interpretive charting of these nonhuman creatures will not only allow for a better understanding of the architects’ ideas and intentions but will also help locate their oeuvre into a broader context, and in correspondence to other cultural centers located in a complex global network of influential intellectuals.
A thorough examination of specific case studies will illustrate the ways in which these references to animals serve a critical-interpretive purpose through a reflective extension of a predominantly humanistic/anthropocentric science and art, such as architecture is. How are animals used and in which context? What is their latent programmatic, philosophical and ideological content? In which ways do they express critical stances against modernity? How do they relate to local myths and indigenous identities? How do they defend cultural history and tradition against the threats of globalization? What kind of unconscious doubts, resistances, challenges and anxieties do they cover?
The workshop entitled “The Architect and the Animal: 20th Century Encounters” aims to provoke a fresh and rich dialogue on a contemporary, but neglected, topic, by inviting novel and daring contributions that challenge and expand the established discourse, and by providing enough material for the production of a scholarly edited volume, to be submitted for publication by an established, international academic press.