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Zeynep Celik Alexander's stunningly original study of the intersection of emergent laboratory psychology, new pedagogical credos, and artistic practices in late nineteenth-century Germany, is a landmark analysis. Her elegant and complex arguments are as rich in their thick cultural historical description of a nineteenth-century ocular culture as they are suggestive of alternative genetics for such key modernist explorations as formal abstraction and the embrace of the spatial as the essence of architectural experience. This is a richly documented provocation that suggests nothing short of a new datum for the emergence of architectural modernism and its pedagogical settings from public schools to the Bauhaus. --Barry Bergdoll, Columbia University For decades modern design was criticized for its orthogonal logic, disembodied rationality, and overconfidence on the power of the mind. In this groundbreaking study, Zeynep Celik Alexander lucidly counter-argues that modern historians, designers, and pedagogues drew from the anti-intellectual aesthetics of bodily movement, psychological feeling, and unconscious intuition to produce a new experiential subject through the interrelated strategies of looking and drawing in response to a new host of political motivations. From Kant to Freud and from W lfflin to Behrens and Moholy-Nagy, this is a genuinely interdisciplinary study on the epistemological formation of twentieth-century design education that is both accessible as well as profound. --Spyros Papapetros, Princeton University Through sheer force of erudition and archival imagination, Zeynep elik Alexander brilliantly demonstrates the convergence around 1900 of aesthetic philosophy, psychology, and modernist design pedagogy in an experimental epistemology based on bodily movement. As she shows, this paradigm recalibrated longstanding philosophical antinomies like mind versus body in a manner that casts bright historical light on today's renewed interest in affect and embodiment. Dramatically revising our understanding of German formalist aesthetics during the long nineteenth century, Kinaesthetic Knowing tracks neo-Kantianism's alter ego from Helmholtz to Freud, from Wundt to W lfflin, and from Obrist to the Bauhaus. This is intellectual and cultural history of the highest order, from the ground up. --Reinhold Martin, Columbia University Kinaesthetic Knowing is extraordinary. A critical history of design education, this book is exceedingly learned, smart, knowing, original, and, for all that, accessible and well-written. Its impact will be as broad and deep as the work itself, reaching audiences in architectural and art history and theory, as well as German cultural history and the history of science, plus all readers interested in how disciplines establish their values, boundaries, and interrelations. --Daniel M. Abramson, Boston University

Zeynep Celik Alexander's stunningly original study of the intersection of emergent laboratory psychology, new pedagogical credos, and artistic practices in late nineteenth-century Germany, is a landmark analysis. Her elegant and complex arguments are as rich in their thick cultural historical description of a nineteenth-century ocular culture as they are suggestive of alternative genetics for such key modernist explorations as formal abstraction and the embrace of the spatial as the essence of architectural experience. This is a richly documented provocation that suggests nothing short of a new datum for the emergence of architectural modernism and its pedagogical settings from public schools to the Bauhaus. --Barry Bergdoll, Columbia University For decades modern design was criticized for its orthogonal logic, disembodied rationality, and overconfidence on the power of the mind. In this groundbreaking study, Zeynep Celik Alexander lucidly counter-argues that modern historians, designers, and pedagogues drew from the anti-intellectual aesthetics of bodily movement, psychological feeling, and unconscious intuition to produce a new experiential subject through the interrelated strategies of looking and drawing in response to a new host of political motivations. From Kant to Freud and from Woelfflin to Behrens and Moholy-Nagy, this is a genuinely interdisciplinary study on the epistemological formation of twentieth-century design education that is both accessible as well as profound. --Spyros Papapetros, Princeton University Through sheer force of erudition and archival imagination, Zeynep Celik Alexander brilliantly demonstrates the convergence around 1900 of aesthetic philosophy, psychology, and modernist design pedagogy in an experimental epistemology based on bodily movement. As she shows, this paradigm recalibrated longstanding philosophical antinomies like mind versus body in a manner that casts bright historical light on today's renewed interest in affect and embodiment. Dramatically revising our understanding of German formalist aesthetics during the long nineteenth century, Kinaesthetic Knowing tracks neo-Kantianism's alter ego from Helmholtz to Freud, from Wundt to Woelfflin, and from Obrist to the Bauhaus. This is intellectual and cultural history of the highest order, from the ground up. --Reinhold Martin, Columbia University Kinaesthetic Knowing is extraordinary. A critical history of design education, this book is exceedingly learned, smart, knowing, original, and, for all that, accessible and well-written. Its impact will be as broad and deep as the work itself, reaching audiences in architectural and art history and theory, as well as German cultural history and the history of science, plus all readers interested in how disciplines establish their values, boundaries, and interrelations. --Daniel M. Abramson, Boston University

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Zeynep Celik Alexander is an architectural historian. She teaches at the University of Toronto.

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