Grace and Gravity

Architectures of the Figure

Lars Spuybroek (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)

$66.99

Paperback

Not in-store but you can order this
How long will it take?

Availability Information

We source books from suppliers in Australia and overseas. For books we don't currently have in stock, the time it takes to get them from our suppliers can vary widely - from a few days to a few months - so we check each book with each supplier to determine the expected time it will take to be supplied to us.

We then advise you accordingly. If the time taken to get any book is too long for you, you can let us know and we will cancel or adjust your order, and refund as required.

To find out the anticipated arrival time for specific items prior to ordering, please contact us by phone or email:

Phone +61 2 9264 3111, or 1800 4 BOOKS (1800 4 26657) if outside Sydney:
option 1 Abbey's Bookshop (Crime, History, Science, Kids & more) • info@abbeys.com.au
option 2 Language Book Centre (ESL & Foreign Languages) • language@abbeys.com.au
option 3 Galaxy Bookshop (Sci-fi, Fantasy, Romance, Graphic Novels) • sf@galaxybooks.com.au

QTY:

English

Bloomsbury Visual Arts
26 November 2020

Theory of architecture; History of architecture; Philosophy: aesthetics

How do we live well? The first sentence of Grace and Gravity raises the fundamental question that constantly occupies our minds—and of all those who lived before us. Paradoxically, the impossibility of answering this question opens up the very room needed to find ways of living well. It is the gap where all disciplines fall short, where architecture does not fit its inhabitants, where economy is not based on shortage, where religion cannot be explained by its followers, and where technology works far beyond its own principles.

According to Lars Spuybroek, the prize-winning former architect, this marks the point where the “paradoxical machine” of grace reveals its powers, a point where we “cannot say if we are moving or being moved”. Following the trail of grace leads him to a new form of analysis that transcends the age-old opposition between appearances and technology. Linking up a dazzling and often delightful variety of sources—monkeys, paintings, lamp posts, octopuses, tattoos, bleeding fingers, rose windows, robots, smart phones, spirits, saints, and fossils—with profound meditations on living, death, consciousness, and existence, Grace and Gravity offers an eye-opening provocation to a wide range of art historians, architects, theologians, anthropologists, artists, media theorists and philosophers.

By: Lars Spuybroek (Georgia Institute of Technology USA)
Imprint: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
Weight: 968g
ISBN: 9781350020849
ISBN 10: 1350020842
Pages: 456
Publication Date: 26 November 2020
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Preface 1. The Grace Machine Of the Figure and the Gap Grace and Figure Grace and Gift Grace and Habit Grace and Play 2. Foot Space and Hand Space Of the Planar and the Granular Gap and Room Foot Space and Rhythm Hand Space and Things Crooked Hephaestus and Phenotechnology 3. Caves and Chests Of Mimesis and Physis Gap and Trap Ornament and Apparatus Caves and Mimesis Chests and Physis 4. Figurate and Spectral Architecture Of the Lithic, Ferric,and Plastic Hard and Soft The Spirit and the Lithic Automatism and the Ferric The Soft Machine and Plastic 5. Grace and Gravity Of Pain and Sweetness Beautiful Things and Beautiful Moments Caryatids and Spinal Columns Sweetness and Sweet Spots Fate and the Dandies of Suffering 6. Automata and Thaumata Of Puppets and Pied Beauty Medium and Media Lights On and Lights Off Color and Consciousness The Octopus and Decadent Media Theory 7. Jumpology and Falling Of Grace and Disgrace The Gentle and the Brutal Jumpology and Simultaneity Falling and the Simulacrum Things Falling and Breaking Things 8. The Stone Reckoner Of Counting and Recounting Stone and Fabulism Stone and Luminosity Stone and Reckoning Stone and the Book Notes Bibliography Index

Lars Spuybroek is Professor of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, USA, where he teaches design methodology and aesthetic theory. He is the author of NOX: Machining Architecture, The Architecture of Continuity, Textile Tectonics, The Architecture of Variation, and The Sympathy of Things.

Reviews for Grace and Gravity: Architectures of the Figure

"[Grace and Gravity] raises the discussions on the digital turn in architecture out of its largely administrative, historiographical condition to a spiritual, daringly ambitious, quick and genuinely exciting, and also ethical new level, that gives us a taste of how the digital turn’s somewhat narcissistic preoccupation with the production of ""novelty"" might be overcome. * Theory, Culture & Society * As he ranges from Minoan bull-leaping imagery to Beatles lyrics and back again, via Thomas Aquinas, Martin Heidegger, and St Paul, there is a relentless breathlessness to the text. This is part of its joy … This is a book in which there is much (as Spuybroek's own responses to Italian architecture would have it) 'blossom, flourishing, efflorescence, flowering'. * Art & Christianity * Lars Spuybroek is one of the freshest and most original voices in our contemporary intellectual world. Grace and Gravity is a truly exceptional and quite extraordinary book. The reader comes away from encountering it with their minds instructed and their lives enriched. It is so much more than a merely ‘academic’ book and it can be appreciated on many levels. It is a book to savour and one can only be grateful for such a work. * Keith Ansell-Pearson, University of Warwick, UK * ""In comparison to his earlier work, Grace and Gravity is both more sweeping and more intimate ... An ambitious volume."" * Aesthetic Investigations * Natura semper facit saltus, nature always makes leaps. In this impressively erudite book, Lars Spuybroek shows that these leaps are not across sheer void, but a ‘thin, ghostlike film’ that does not quite belong either to the parts or wholes of things. Against the recent dogmas of continuity and immanence, he invites us to a new understanding of his key term, grace. * Graham Harman, SCI-Arc, USA * Throughout Grace and Gravity Spuybroek displays a gift for synthesizing complex ideas in ways that do not reduce or deny their difficulties but rather behold them in simultaneity ... [This] is a trip eminently worth taking while listening to the workings of his mind. * Log (52) * Spuybroek wrote a beautiful book. Thanks to this book I can understand architecture better. * Helden van de Geest (Bloomsbury Translation) *"