Spinoza and Architecture
This dissertation is the first systematic monograph that explores untapped potentials germinating between Spinoza's philosophy and architecture. This exploration is grounded on the premises that there is a latent architectural treatise underlying Spinoza’s philosophical oeuvre, which has the potential to engender new ways of conceiving and constructing architecture, while architecture has as much to offer for Spinoza scholarship, as Spinoza for architecture. The monograph explores these reciprocal potentials in two books. The first, “Onto-Epistemological Treatise,” deals with problems of ontology and epistemology, meditating on intricate questions of being and thinking. The second book, “Ethico-Aesthetic Treatise,” addresses elaborate problems of ethics and aesthetics, ruminating on complex processes fusing the art of life with the life of art. These two books operate through multiple research trajectories that include: [1] analyzing Spinoza’s philosophical concepts in their formal structure, [2] studying their historical evolution in comparison to rival as well as confluent modes of thinking (Aristotle, Plato, Plotinus, Al-Hallaj, Ibn Arabi, Duns Scotus, Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger), [3] unearthing latent spatial traces and interweaving implicit architectural connections therein, [4] extending Spinoza’s critical analyses to expose problematic tendencies in canonical architectural discourses and practices (Vitruvius, Alberti, Filarete, Giorgio Vasari, Marc-Antoine Laugier, Étienne-Louis Boullée, Le Corbusier, the Fletchers), [5] widening Spinoza’s conceptual lens to reveal consonant approaches across diverse aesthetic fields (Piranesi, László Moholy-Nagy, Theo van Doesburg in architecture; Paul Cézanne, Paul Klee, Francis Bacon in painting; Georg Büchner, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf in literature; Pina Bausch, Joan Littlewood, Iannis Xenakis in performing arts; Edgard Varèse, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen in music), [6] and zooming in on confluent architectural scholia to uncover overlooked potentials of singular buildings like Cedric Price’s Fun Palace and urban histories such as Re_ad Ekrem Koçu’s Istanbul Ansiklopedisi [Istanbul Encyclopedia] with the help of original archival materials and previously untranslated sources. In addition to such analytical contributions, the relevance of this research finally lies in its generative undertaking, which pertains to playing latent potentials discovered at the intersection of Spinoza’s philosophy and architecture in new settings, for today and tomorrow.