José Aragüez: The Building - lecture at the gallery VI PER

On Friday, November 8, 2017, at 7:00 PM, a lecture by Spanish architect José Aragüez will take place at the VI PER gallery, Vítkova 2, Prague 8. Since 2014, he has been leading the international project The Building, which has organized two symposia - at the Architectural Association in London and at the architecture school at Columbia University in New York - as well as a theoretical seminar at Cornell University. The results of this work culminated in a book published by Lars Müller Publishers in November 2016, which will also be the topic of this discussion.

What is the relationship between construction and architectural thought? How can one speak of construction as a place where discourse arises? What does it mean to state that architectural thought is a form of knowledge? Can architectural thought bring forth discursive knowledge that is specific and yet also generalizable? Over the last few decades, the history and theory of architecture have made significant progress in pushing their boundaries and expanding their audience. However, the flip side of this expansion is a notable shift in focus away from the object, along with a certain neglect of architectural thinking itself. At the other end of the spectrum, discussions have focused exclusively on the design process, and the results often turned out to be self-referential or limited only to the area of practice and studio teaching. The book bridges these two currents by mobilizing the theme of "construction," which generally belongs to the latter line of thinking, while addressing the aforementioned expansion.

Forty-three contributors from Europe and the USA, including deans, leading academics, architects, historians, theorists, philosophers, and doctoral students, engage with these and related questions through the examination of key architectural structures that have emerged in Asia and the West since the late 1980s to the present. They look at these structures through a whole spectrum of themes, both intra- and meta-disciplinary: these include similarity, value, iconography, objectivity, the theme of the city, boredom, and digital technology. In this way, this publication suggests paths by which buildings can create conceptual frameworks with an influence that transcends architecture and intersects with other areas of knowledge and practice. Such areas include the history of culture and knowledge, philosophy, literary theory, the city, art, and design as a whole.

José Aragüez is an architect based in New York. He is a professor of architecture at Columbia University and a doctoral candidate in the history and theory of architecture at Princeton University. He studied architecture and urbanism at the Universidad de Granada in Spain and Advanced Architectural Research at Columbia University in New York. He has previously worked for Antonio J. Torrecillas (Spain), MVRDV (Rotterdam), and Idom/ACXT (London). He has presented his work worldwide (in Europe, North America, and the Middle East), taught at Cornell, Princeton, and the Universidad de Granada. His projects, partially presented at the Lisbon Architectural Triennale 2013 and the Venice Architectural Biennale 2014, have received numerous awards and grants from institutions including the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), the Barr Ferree Foundation, the Spanish government, and Columbia and Princeton universities.

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