On Architecture

184 pages. Architecture is a philosophical puzzle. Although we spend most of our time in buildings, we rarely reflect on what they mean or how we experience them. With some notable exceptions, they have generally struggled to be taken seriously as works of art compared to painting or music and have been rather overlooked by ph ilosophers. In On Architecture , Fred Rush argues this is a consequence of negle cting the role of the body in architecture. Our encounter with a building is fir st and foremost a bodily one; buildings are lived-in, communal spaces and their construction reveals a lot about our relation to the environment as a whole. Dra wing on examples from architects classic and contemporary such as Le Corbusier a nd Frank Lloyd Wright, and exploring the significance of buildings in relation t o film and music and philosophers such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, Fred Rush argues that philosophical reflection on building can tell us something importan t about the human condition.…