Throughout human history, people have imagined inanimate objects to have intelligence, language, and even souls. In our secular societies today, we still willingly believe that nonliving objects have lives of their own as we find ourselves interacting with computers and other equipment. In On the Animation of the Inorganic, Spyros Papapetros examines ideas about simulated movement and inorganic life during and after the turn of the twentieth century—a period of great technical innovation whose effects continue to reverberate today. Exploring key works of art historians such as Aby Warburg, Wilhelm Worringer, and Alois Riegl, as well as architects and artists like Fernand Léger, Mies van der Rohe, and Salvador Dalí, Papapetros tracks the evolution of the problem of animation from the fin de siècle through the twentieth century. He argues that empathy—the ability to identify with objects of the external world—was repressed by twentieth-century modernist culture, but it returned, projected onto inorganic objects such as machines, automobiles, and crystalline skyscrapers. These modern artifacts, he demonstrates, vibrated with energy, life, and desire of their own and had profound effects on people. Subtle and insightful, this book will change how we view modernist art, architecture, and their histories.

On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life

Arts & Photography

Papapetros, Spyros

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

Thinking through early twentieth-century cartoons, the kaleidoscopic drawings of Saul Steinberg, the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and other children's entertainment, Puddle, Pothole, Portal explores the coexistence of disparate elements within shared spaces. Gags betray complex meanings and sociopolitical satire, and unrelated objects, locales and avatars interact in the same dimension. As screens, passageways and shadows populate both physical and virtual realms, we question whether they are reflections or traces of the objective world, obstructions, fantasies or entryways into other realms. Contributing artists are Olga Balema, Joachim Bandau, Camille Blatrix, Teresa Burga, Antoine Catala, Abigail DeVille, Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, Judith Hopf, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Allison Katz, Mark Leckey, Maria Loboda, Win McCarthy, Danny McDonald, Marlie Mul, Mick Peter, Chadwick Rantanen, Lucie Stahl, Saul Steinberg, Keiichi Tanaami, Lina Viste Grønli and Jordan Wolfson.

Puddle, Pothole, Portal

Daney, Serge

Katrib, Ruba

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

SculptureCenter

On the study of prearchitecture that took place after WWII.\nCan there ever be a world before architecture? Is there an arche--origin, beginning, or authority--that precedes the appearance of architectonics? This book argues that such a pre-architectural state became a central object of investigation by architectural historians and practicing architects in the aftermath of world historical events and major epistemological revolutions.\nConfronted by the ravages of war and omens of modern architecture's own ending, architects like Frederick Kiesler tried to trace the origins of human design by exploring the foundational techniques of human and animal building through conversation with paleoanthropologists and evolutionary biologists of the first half of the twentieth-century. At the same time, historians like Sigfried Giedion attempted to reinterpret a number of recently discovered prehistoric monuments, if only to corroborate theoretical principles that were already in use by modernist art and architectural critics.\nAfter WWII, the narrative of Prearchitecture moves progressively backwards to the middle of the nineteenth century when the term "prearchitectonic" was coined even before the institutional emergence of prehistory as a discipline of scientific research. Gottfried Semper wrote about the "prearchitectonic conditions" of peoples from eras preceding the historical civilizations of the Near East, expressed through smaller structures such as ceramics but not yet through monumental structures. For Semper, "prearchitectonic" elements described not a single temporal period but a general structural condition that survived the inventions of history and of architecture.\nUltimately, the study of prehistoric origins could uncover not only the causes of modernity's present crisis, but also the signs of architecture's futures past. By juxtaposing the fossils of prehistory with postwar cosmic anxieties and prognostications of a post-histoire, what is ultimately invented is a pre/post/erous history--a fictional prehistory of future architectonics. Pre-architecture is not simply "not architecture;" it is what architecture could have become but ultimately disavowed. The same unfulfilled potentialities haunt not only the distant past but also architecture's anxious present that periodically circles back to an aborted prehistory.

Pre/Architecture (Sternberg Press / Critical Spatial Practice)

Sternberg Press

The expert contributors to this lavishly illustrated volume, devoted entirely to Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion of 1929, address here for the first time the forgotten contexts of the Pavilion’s genesis. Habitually thought of as an abstract, unpolluted, and splendidly isolated building—a precursor of Mies’s American period—the Pavilion is revealed here as a thoroughly European work, perhaps less pristine but more authentic. Mies and Lilly Reich were commissioned to design not only the Pavilion but also more than one hundred thousand square feet of German stands spread throughout the Exposition. By examining that work in addition to the Pavilion itself, the contributors present a far-reaching reinterpretation of the whole. They also explore connections with the mass media, highlight the work’s antecedents and meaning in the history of architecture, and analyze the current pavilion, a reconstruction of the original built in 1986. No other critical study offers a comparable overview of Mies’s work in Barcelona.

Mies van der Rohe: Barcelona-1929

Capdevila-Werning, Remei

Colomina, Beatriz

Lahuerta, Juan José

Martínez De Guereñu, Laura

Neumann, Dietrich

Neumeyer, Fritz

Robbers, Lutz

Rodríguez Pedret, Carmen

Tenov Books

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