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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

  • Beatrice Lampariello, Andrea Anselmo,…

    UFO. Unidentified Flying Object for Contemporary…

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

  • Mojca Kumerdej (Ed.)

    New Extractivism

  • Alfie Bown

    Dream Lovers. The Gamification of Relationships

  • Steven Warwick

    Notes on Evil. Steven Warwick

  • Martín Ávila

    Designing for Interdependence. A Poetics of Relating

  • Rosi Braidotti, Emily Jones, Goda…

    More Posthuman Glossary

  • 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)

    From Commons to NFTs

  • Marion von Osten, Tyna Fritschy

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

  • Andreas Butter, Thomas Flierl (Hg.)

    Architekturexport DDR. Zwischen Sansibar und Halensee

  • Sabeth Buchmann, Susanne Leeb, Peter…

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

  • Valerio Olgiati

    Built

  • Junius Frey, Yuk Hui

    Kosmotechnik und Kommunismus

  • Birgit Schneider

    Der Anfang einer neuen Welt. Wie wir den Klimawandel…

  • Dimitra Kondylatou, David Bergé (Eds.)

    Public Health in Crisis. Confined in the Aegean Archipelago

  • Redaktion Protocol

    Protocol 13. Adrenalin

  • Pavillion de Arsenal, Paris

    L'Empreinte de l'habitat / Housing Footprint

  • Nicolas Dorval Bory, Guillaume Ramillien

    Visible, Invisible

  • 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.)

    Wohnen im Einklang. Strategien zum Bauen im Lärm auf…

  • Stephan Trinkaus

    Ökologien des Prekären. Zu einer Theorie des Haltens

  • Edited by Moises Puente. Introduction…

    2G 86. Arquitectura-G

  • Marie-France Rafael

    Passing Images. Kunst in post-digitalen Zeiten

  • Isabell Lorey

    Democracy in the Political Present. A Queer-Feminist Theory

  • Alexandra Schauer

    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

  • Doreen Massey (Eds.: David Featherstone…

    Selected Political Writings

  • Gwendolyn Owens, Philip Ursprung (Eds.)

    Gordon Matta-Clark. An Archival Sourcebook

  • Wolfgang Thöner, Karoline Lemke (Hg.)

    Bauhaus. Sprachrohr der Studierenden. Organ der Kostufra.…

  • 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

  • Cache

    Ware Reinheit. Cache 02

  • Brandon Labelle (Hg)

    The Listening Biennial Reader. Vol. 1: Waves of Listening

  • Arch+ Zeitschrift für Architektur und…

    Arch+ 250.The Great Repair. Politiken einer…

  • Judith Siegmund (Hg)

    Handbuch Kunstphilosophie

  • Gleb Albert, Brigitta Bernet, Svenja…

    Im Krieg. Ukraine, Belarus, Russland. Geschichte der…

  • Hermann Funke

    Architekturkritiken 1962-2003. Hermann Funke

  • Stephanie Herold, Harald Engler,…

    Das Kollektiv. Formen und Vorstellungen gemeinschaftlicher…

  • Achille Mbembe, Felwine Sarr (eds)

    To Write the Africa World

  • 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)

    Walking from Scores

  • Tsvetelina Hristova, Brett Neilson and…

    Data Farms. Circuits, Labour, Territory

  • Lenka Veselá (Ed.)

    Synthetic Becoming

  • Stavros Stavrides, Penny Travlou (Eds)

    Housing as Commons. Housing Alternatives as Response to the…

  • Christiane Rösinger

    Was jetzt kommt. Christiane Rösinger. Ausgewählte Songtexte

  • Pier Vittorio Aureli, Martino Tattara

    Dogma. Living and Working

  • Baburov, Djumenton, Gutnov, Kharitonova…

    The Ideal Communist City

  • Briana J. Smith

    Free Berlin. Art, Urban Politics, and Everyday Life

  • Hg. Oliver Clemens, Jesko Fezer, Kim…

    An Architektur Archive

  • Andri Gerber, Martin Tschanz (Hg)

    Sprengkraft Raum. Architektur um 1970 von Esther und Rudolf…

  • Christian Dehli, Andrea Grolimund

    Kazuo Shinohara: The Umbrella House Project

  • Boris Groys

    Becoming an Artwork

  • DeForrest Brown, Jr.

    Assembling a Black Counter Culture

  • George Papam, Phevos Kallitsis, David…

    The Beach Machine. Making and Operating the Mediterranean…

  • Yuma Shinohara, Andreas Ruby (Hg.)

    Make Do With Now: New directions in Japanese Architecture

  • Zara Pfeifer

    ICC Berlin. Zara Pfeifer

  • Florian Heilmeyer, Sandra Hofmeister (…

    Berlin. Urbane Architektur und Alltag seit 2009

  • CuratorLab (Ed.)

    Assuming Asymmetries. Conversations on Curating Public Art…

  • Michael Rawson

    The Nature of Tomorrow. A History of the Environmental…

  • András Szántó

    Imagining the Future Museum. 21 Dialogues with Architects

  • Hiuwai Chu, Meagan Down, Nkule Mabaso,…

    CLIMATE. Our Right to Breathe

  • Patricia Ribault

    Design, Gestaltung, Formatività

  • Martina Baum, Markus Vogl (Hg.)

    Täglich. Warum wir Öffentlichkeit, öffentlichen Raum und…

  • Stuart Hyatt, Janneane Blevins &…

    Stations. Listening to the Deep Earth

  • Anne Davidian, Laurent Jeanpierre (Eds.)

    What Makes an Assembly? Stories, Experiments, and Inquiries

  • Ingo Offermanns (Ed.) Dokho Shin &…

    Graphic Design Is (...) Not Innocent: Scrutinizing Visual…

  • Silke Langenberg (Hg.)

    Upgrade: Making Things Better

  • Christiane Sauer, Mareike Stoll, Ebba…

    Architectures of Weaving

  • Wilfried Wang (Hg.)

    On the Duty and Power of Architectural Criticism

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