Jordi Vivaldi

The notion of “object” has been largely debated by architects and architectural theorists in recent years. It is regularly mentioned by avant-gardist designers and students, particularly in relation to the emerging philosophical stream known as Object-Oriented Ontology. This seminar contributes to this discussion by tracing back the impact of “object’s” philosophical reflections in architectural practice during the last 100 years. It locates this relation in the work of 12 relevant architects that have explicitly used the term “object” in his architectural discourse. While in some cases this utilisation is the result of importing and re-interpreting a specific “object”’s concept from other disciplines such as Philosophy, Psychology or Art, in other cases is the architect himself who proposes it. This seminar articulates this relation by associating each architect’s practice with a key philosophical text in which a relevant thinker exposes a specific “object”’s approach. Object’s relation to architecture in the last 100 years is not only relevant as a source of new insights in order to understand and underpin current architectural discourses, but serves as well as an illustration of the benefits, risks and challenges of transdisciplinary transfers. This seminar shows that philosophical concepts are helpful tools to approach architecture in a novel and fruitful way and they will certainly enhance the architect’s critical skills when designing and thinking about his/her discipline.