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  • Rosalyn Deutsche

    Not-Forgetting. Contemporary Art and the Interrogation of…

  • Rafi Segal, Marisa Morán Jahn

    Design & Solidarity. Conversations on Collective…

  • 51N4E (Hg.)

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  • Morten Paul

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  • David Vaner, Ilka Ruby (Hg.)

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  • Helen Thomas (Ed.)

    Architecture in Islamic Countries. Selections from the…

  • Carolin Amlinger, Oliver Nachtwey

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  • Nicholas Mirzoeff

    White Sight. Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness

  • Brandon LaBelle (Ed.)

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  • Réka Patrícia Gál, Petra Löffler

    Earth and Beyond in Tumultuous Times. A Critical Atlas of…

  • Matthias Ballestrem and Lidia Gasperoni…

    Epistemic Artefacts. A Dialogical Reflection on Design…

  • Chris Lee

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  • common room, Cornelia Escher

    Negotiating Ungers 2 - The Oberhausen Institute and the…

  • Gülşah Stapel

    Recht auf Erbe in der Migrationsgesellschaft

  • James Bridle

    Die unfassbare Vielfalt des Seins

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    UFO. Unidentified Flying Object for Contemporary…

  • dérive N° 90 (Jan-Mar/2023). Zeitschrift für Stadtforschung

  • Mojca Kumerdej (Ed.)

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    Dream Lovers. The Gamification of Relationships

  • Steven Warwick

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  • Martín Ávila

    Designing for Interdependence. A Poetics of Relating

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  • Malcolm Miles

    Art Rebellion. The Aesthetics of Social Transformation

  • Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler, Victoria…

    Design History Beyond the Canon

  • Laurene Vaughan

    Designing Cultures of Care

  • Deborah Ascher Barnstone

    The Color of Modernism. Paints, Pigments, and the…

  • Craig Martin

    Deviant Design. The Ad Hoc, the Illicit, the Controversial

  • Felix Stalder, Janez Fakin Jansa (eds)

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  • Marion von Osten, Tyna Fritschy

    Marion von Osten: Knüppel aus dem Sack. Tyna Fritschy: Das…

  • Andreas Butter, Thomas Flierl (Hg.)

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    Marion von Osten. In the Making: "In the Desert of…

  • Valerio Olgiati

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  • Junius Frey, Yuk Hui

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  • Birgit Schneider

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  • Dimitra Kondylatou, David Bergé (Eds.)

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  • Redaktion Protocol

    Protocol 13. Adrenalin

  • Pavillion de Arsenal, Paris

    L'Empreinte de l'habitat / Housing Footprint

  • Nicolas Dorval Bory, Guillaume Ramillien

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  • Michael Chanan

    From Printing to Streaming. Cultural Production under…

  • Erica Borg, Amedeo Policante

    Mutant Ecologies. Manufacturing Life in the Age of Genomic…

  • Deborah Fehlmann, Astrid Staufer (Hg.)

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  • Stephan Trinkaus

    Ökologien des Prekären. Zu einer Theorie des Haltens

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    Passing Images. Kunst in post-digitalen Zeiten

  • Isabell Lorey

    Democracy in the Political Present. A Queer-Feminist Theory

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    Mensch ohne Welt. Eine Soziologie spätmoderner…

  • Laura Tripaldi

    Parallel Minds. Discovering the Intelligence of Materials

  • Ashley Dawson

    Aussterben. Eine radikale Geschichte

  • Evi D. Sampanikou, Jan Stasienko (ed.)

    Posthuman Studies Reader. Core Readings on Transhumanism,…

  • Mindy Seu (ed.)

    Cyberfeminism Index

  • Maria Muhle

    Mimetische Milieus. Eine Ästhetik der Reproduktion

  • David Grubbs

    Good night the pleasure was ours.

  • Nicholas Thoburn

    Brutalism as Found. Housing, Form, and Crisis at Robin Hood…

  • Andreas Schätzke

    Verzweigte Moderne. Beiträge zur Architektur des 20.…

  • Kuba Szreder

    The ABC of the projectariat

  • Judith Butler

    What World Is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology

  • Andrew M. Shanken

    The Everyday Life of Memorials

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    Gordon Matta-Clark. An Archival Sourcebook

  • Wolfgang Thöner, Karoline Lemke (Hg.)

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  • Carolin Overhoff Ferreira

    Dekoloniale Kunstgeschichte. Eine methodische Einführung

  • Das Synagogen Projekt. Zum Wiederaufbau von Synagogen in…

  • Ramon Amaro

    The Black Technical Object. On Machine Learning and the…

  • Magdalena Jadwiga Härtelova

    It Is: You Appeared Once. A Story about Potential…

  • Bénédicte Ramade

    Vers un art anthropocène

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  • Brandon Labelle (Hg)

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  • Arch+ Zeitschrift für Architektur und…

    Arch+ 250.The Great Repair. Politiken einer…

  • Judith Siegmund (Hg)

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  • Hermann Funke

    Architekturkritiken 1962-2003. Hermann Funke

  • Stephanie Herold, Harald Engler,…

    Das Kollektiv. Formen und Vorstellungen gemeinschaftlicher…

  • Achille Mbembe, Felwine Sarr (eds)

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  • Angela McRobbie, Daniel Strutt,…

    Fashion as Creative Economy. Micro-Enterprises in London,…

  • Amit Prasad

    Science Studies Meets Colonialism

  • Guillaume Blanc

    The Invention of Green Colonialism

  • IDEA Magazine

    IDEA 400. Graphic Design Recollections & Records:…

  • Nathaniel Marcus

    Breathing Room. A dialogue with Lakuti & Tama Sumo. Ein…

  • Jörg Schröder, Riccarda Cappeller,…

    Circular Design. Towards Regenerative Territories

  • Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago

    Against the Commons: A Radical History of Urban Planning

  • Donika Luzhnica & Jonas König (ed.)

    Prishtina in 53 Buildings

  • Elena Biserna (Ed)

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  • Lenka Veselá (Ed.)

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  • Christiane Rösinger

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  • Andri Gerber, Martin Tschanz (Hg)

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  • Christian Dehli, Andrea Grolimund

    Kazuo Shinohara: The Umbrella House Project

  • Boris Groys

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  • DeForrest Brown, Jr.

    Assembling a Black Counter Culture

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    The Beach Machine. Making and Operating the Mediterranean…

  • Yuma Shinohara, Andreas Ruby (Hg.)

    Make Do With Now: New directions in Japanese Architecture

  • Zara Pfeifer

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  • Florian Heilmeyer, Sandra Hofmeister (…

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The Sympathy of Things

The Sympathy of Things. Ruskin and the Ecology of Design
‘We have to find our way back to beauty,’ writes Lars Spuybroek in the introduction to The Sympathy of Things. In this book Spuybroek argues that we must ‘undo’ the twentieth century – the age of minimalism, abstraction and genocides. This leads him to the aesthetical insight of the nineteenth-century English art critic John Ruskin, from which he distils pointers for our time.
In Ruskin’s work, Lars Spuybroek has discovered a treasure trove of concepts in which the beauty of things is determined by a combination of variation, imperfection and fragility. Through these qualities, things once again earn our sympathy and friendship. A sympathy, Spuybroek argues, that not only occurs between human beings and things but also between things themselves: “Sympathy is what things feel when they shape each other.” Like Ruskin, Spuybroek seeks a world that is dedicated to composition and beauty, where things are governed by what Ruskin called the “law of help.”
Step by step, Spuybroek addresses Ruskin’s five central dual themes: the Gothic and work, ornament and matter, sympathy and abstraction, the picturesque and time, and ecology and design. He wrests these concepts from the Victorian context and compares them with ideas of later aestheticians and philosophers. The Sympathy of Things is the log of an exploratory journey into beauty. Spuybroek writes in a clear, accessible language that is by turns precise, elegant and moving, zooming in on the fascinating details of Gothic architecture, complex African textile patterns and the wallpaper designs of William Morris. The Sympathy of Things will leave no one unaffected. The book is not a mere critique but rather the first fully thought-out, positive aesthetics of a new generation who face the task of sustainably designing the 21st century.
Lars Spuybroek is Professor of Architectural Design and holder of the Thomas Ventulett Distinguished Chair of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. He is the author of The Architecture of Continuity (2008) and Research & Design: Textile Tectonics (2011).
"We are living through a change in paradigm, in the age of the flexible machine, where the concepts of matter, spirituality and design are under re-negotiation and we need such fearless thought to jolt complacency. If Spuybroek, like Ruskin, does not shake your design and aesthetic concepts, you haven’t understood him.” - Charles Jencks, author of The Language of Post-Modern Architecture
“The Sympathy of Things is a stirring call to action; an amazing reconstruction of the ideas of the Victorian sage John Ruskin; and, above all, a visionary look at the inner life of things. Lars Spuybroek makes the case that aesthetics is first philosophy, and proposes a radical new aesthetics for the digital age .” - Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English, Wayne State University, Detroit and author of Without Criteria


Lars Spuybroek
The Sympathy of Things
NAi, 2011, 978-90-5662-827-7