Architecture as Metaphor

In Architecture as Metaphor Kojin Karatani detects a recurrent will to architecture that he argues is the foundation of all Western thinking traversing architecture philosophy literature linguistics city planning anthropology political economics psychoanalysis and mathematics.Kojin Karatani Japan''s leading literary critic is perhaps best known for his imaginative readings of Shakespeare Soseki Marx Wittgenstein and most recently Kant. His works of which Origins of Modern Japanese Literature is the only one previously translated into English are the generic equivalent to what in America is called theory. Karatani''s writings are important not only for the insights they offer on the various topics under discussion but also as an example of a distinctly non-Western critical intervention. In Architecture as Metaphor Karatani detects a recurrent will to architecture that he argues is the foundation of all Western thinking traversing architecture philosophy literature linguistics city planning anthropology political economics psychoanalysis and mathematics. In the three parts of the book he analyzes the complex bonds between construction and deconstruction thereby pointing to an alternative model of secular criticism but in the domain of philosophy rather than literary or cultural criticism. As Karatani claims in his introduction because the will to architecture is practically nonoexistent in Japan he must first assume a dual role: one that affirms the architectonic (by scrutinizing the suppressed function of form) and one that pushes formalism to its collapse (by invoking Kurt Godel''s incompleteness theorem). His subsequent discussions trace a path through the work of Christopher Alexander Jane Jacobs Gilles Deleuze and others. Finally amidst the drive that motivates all formalization he confronts an unbridgeable gap an uncontrollable event encountered in the exchange with the other; thus his speculation turns toward global capital movement. While in the present volume he mainly analyzes familiar Western texts it is precisely for this reason that his voice discloses a distance that will add a new dimension to our English-language discourse.