Architectures of Time

Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture

Sanford Kwinter

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English

MIT Press
23 August 2002

Theory of art; History: theory & methods; History of Western philosophy; Philosophy: epistemology & theory of knowledge

Series: The MIT Press

An exploration of twentieth-century conceptions of time and their relation to artistic form.

In Architectures of Time, Sanford Kwinter offers a critical guide to the modern history of time and to the interplay between the physical sciences and the arts. Tracing the transformation of twentieth-century epistemology to the rise of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, Kwinter explains how the demise of the concept of absolute time, and of the classical notion of space as a fixed background against which things occur, led to field theory and a physics of the ""event."" He suggests that the closed, controlled, and mechanical world of physics gave way to the approximate, active, and qualitative world of biology as a model of both scientific and metaphysical explanation.

Kwinter examines theory of time and space in Einstein's theories of relativity and shows how these ideas were reflected in the writings of the sculptor Umberto Boccioni, the town planning schema of the Futurist architect Antonio Sant'Elia, the philosophy of Henri Bergson, and the writings of Franz Kafka. He argues that the writings of Boccioni and the visionary architecture of Sant'Elia represent the earliest and most profound deployments of the concepts of field and event. In discussing Kafka's work, he moves away from the thermodynamic model in favor of the closely related one of Bergsonian duree, or virtuality. He argues that Kafka's work manifests a coherent cosmology that can be understood only in relation to the constant temporal flux that underlies it.

By: Sanford Kwinter
Imprint: MIT Press
Country of Publication: United States
Edition: New edition
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 15mm
Weight: 431g
ISBN: 9780262611817
ISBN 10: 0262611813
Series: The MIT Press
Pages: 252
Publication Date: 23 August 2002
Recommended Age: From 18
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Professional & Vocational , A / AS level , Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Sanford Kwinter is a New York-based writer. He teaches design in the School of Architecture at Rice University.

Reviews for Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture

Readers of Deleuze will be attracted to this book's complexity. Architectures of Time poses real problems for use in considering modern culture and our own: How shall we understand the pressure of events? What constitutes a grasp of nature? How does a historical example help us? In the course of Kwinter's case studies, both time and design come alive. --Molly Nesbit, Department of Art, Vassar College