Vesper No. 9 | The Adversary | Fall-Winter 2023
Kris Pint
Reparative Architecture
Keywords
Alienation, modernism,
object-oriented ontology, psychoanalysis, reparative reading
By considering the architectural object as a
non-relational and non-human adversary, its reparative function is
paradoxically revealed. Reparative is understood here in the sense Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick gave to it, as the possibility to use cultural artefacts in a
creative, transformative way to deal with inner conflicts and negative affects.
Reparative architecture is thus not only related to well-being and the
improvement of the built environment. Architecture can also become reparative
when it functions as a projection screen on which feelings of frustration,
melancholy and unhomeliness can find an external form. Precisely because it
wants to think beyond the human, object-oriented architectural theory allows us
to examine this aspect of the architectural object as an antagonistic force.
Two cases will briefly illustrate this: the melancholic geometry of Marianne
Brandt’s Bauhaus teapot (1924) and the sublime indifference of
Étienne-Louis Boullée’s cenotaph for Isaac Newton (1784).
contacts
t. +39 041 257 1542