Grace and Gravity: Architectures of the Figure

(Paperback)

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How do we live well The first sentence of Grace and Gravity raises the fundamental question that constantly occupies our mindsand 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 sourcesmonkeys, paintings, lamp posts, octopuses, tattoos, bleeding fingers, rose windows, robots, smart phones, spirits, saints, and fossilswith 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.

Reviews

[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 turns 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) *

Author Bio

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.