Bare Architecture

Located in that intimate and transitory sensation between losing and finding oneself in a world, Chris L. Smith presents a poetics of poststructuralist thinking-with-architecture. He unfurls the delicacy of a bare life of architecture emerging between spasms of embodied subjectivity and designed milieus. Smith elegantly demonstrates how the productions of architecture arouse desire at the same time as dissipating the subject in its relation to space. He elaborates an aesthetics for architecture that treats every spatial encounter as hyper-sensory and extraordinary. -- Hélène Frichot, Associate Professor and Docent Director of Critical Studies in Architecture, Royal Institute of Technology, University in Stockholm, Sweden Chris L. Smith’s passionately written Bare Architecture is proof of what it means to be done with the principle of non-contradiction. His schizoanalysis lives up to the promised logic of the included middle where (or is it when?) here-and-now actively coexists with otherwise-or-whatever. At last one can wholeheartedly recommend the long-overdue clinical critique of architecture’s proverbial propensity for over-coding. Most importantly, the reader (to come) is given the sense of what the architecture of immanence does. -- Andrej Radman, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Architecture & the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands A brilliant book. In Bare Architecture Chris L. Smith describes architecture as a vehicle for departing from a spatial and temporal present; allowed to stray, to be set adrift, the body arrives at new formations by letting go of the here and now. In escaping, architecture and body become dislocated senses of form and force. Written with intellectual rigour and grace, Bare Architecture is an astonishing piece of research. * Claudia Perren, Director, Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, Germany *