Overview

One of today's foremost art historians and critics presents a view of architecture and the city through the twin lenses of cultural theory and psychoanalysis. Hubert Damisch whose work on the history of perspective, the notion of imitation, and the question of representation has emerged as the most important body of critical thought on painting since, perhaps, Meyer Shapiro's collected essays, here engages a subject that has been of continuing interest to him since 1970. In the field of architecture, this book has been awaited for a long time; in the fields of art history and cultural studies, it will be welcomed as a powerful argument for utilizing in an urban context interpretive approaches developed for the analysis of spatial and visual phenomena. Though architecture has served since Descartes as a structural analogy for philosophical discourse and has played a similar role in literature, contemporary studies on architecture have tended to be very specialized, with little regard for their accessibility to scholars in the humanities and social sciences. This book, however, with its solid grounding in architecture and urban theory and its profoundly humanistic approach, will prove deeply rewarding to specialist and generalist alike.

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9780804732468

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The reader is invited to pass from philosophy to architecture, from antiquity to the modern era, from Europe to America, from Herodotus to Tocqueville, from Descartes to Freud, to say nothing of references, explicit in these instances, to times when I frequented dark theaters, encounteredAmerica, its incomparable cities and spaces, and traveled to Berlin. - from the Author's Preface

""The reader is invited to pass from philosophy to architecture, from antiquity to the modern era, from Europe to America, from Herodotus to Tocqueville, from Descartes to Freud, to say nothing of references, explicit in these instances, to times when I frequented dark theaters, encounteredAmerica, its incomparable cities and spaces, and traveled to Berlin."" - from the Author's Preface

Author Information

Hubert Damisch teaches at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Among his books published in English are The Judgment of Paris and The Origin of Perspective.

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