Sanford Kwinter

The transformation of our environment is now taking place at a faster rate and on a larger scale than we are capable of tracking. The recent surge of concern about the so-called inatural world has led to little more than a proliferation of bromides about conservation. Theoretical notions like the Anthropocene may pose as critical advances, but from the point of view of changing the grim trajectory on which we are presently set they are extraordinarily unambitious. The contributors to The Naturing Cosmos argue that only by going beyond the cultural and metaphysical frameworks that brought us to this point can we ever hope to address the crises that now face us. What is required of us is nothing short of a change of mind: a fundamental reassessment of the intellectual patterns that determine our attitudes towards and relationship with the world around us.In pursuit of just such a transformation, The Naturing Cosmosinaugurates a major new dialogue between philosophy, design theory, and ecology. The opening essays in this collection build on the work of three philosophers of nature—Baruch de Spinoza, Alfred Whitehead, and Gilbert Simondon—whose thought shares a powerful commitment to removing the false separation of human being from the wider being of the world. The contributors then place those singularly modern thinkers in relation to animist and Indigenous worldviews in order to develop an understanding of the world as abundant in beauty and value, and as demanding to be put in service to itself and not only to us. The essays also engage the ways in which worldmaking practices—art, design, cosmovision—can orient themselves toward life, thereby expanding our sensory enjoyment of the world rather than simply degrading it. Proposing as it does a radical revaluation of existing ways of thinking and being, The Naturing Cosmos is a crucial intervention in some of the most urgent debates of our time.

This monograph will not only provide exhaustive documentation of O-14's design and construction but delves further into the complex interrelationships this architectural model weaves between technology, expression and politics in the context of the 'nowhere place' of the global city. The book is both an account of a design's realisation and a manifesto, and contains Jesse Reiser's explanatory and theoretical texts on the tower as well as a number of critical essays.

An exploration of twentieth-century conceptions of time and their relation to artistic form.In Architectures of Time, Sanford Kwinter offers a critical guide to the modern history of time and to the interplay between the physical sciences and the arts. Tracing the transformation of twentieth-century epistemology to the rise of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, Kwinter explains how the demise of the concept of absolute time, and of the classical notion of space as a fixed background against which things occur, led to field theory and a physics of the "event." He suggests that the closed, controlled, and mechanical world of physics gave way to the approximate, active, and qualitative world of biology as a model of both scientific and metaphysical explanation.Kwinter examines theory of time and space in Einstein's theories of relativity and shows how these ideas were reflected in the writings of the sculptor Umberto Boccioni, the town planning schema of the Futurist architect Antonio Sant'Elia, the philosophy of Henri Bergson, and the writings of Franz Kafka. He argues that the writings of Boccioni and the visionary architecture of Sant'Elia represent the earliest and most profound deployments of the concepts of field and event. In discussing Kafka's work, he moves away from the thermodynamic model in favor of the closely related one of Bergsonian duree, or virtuality. He argues that Kafka's work manifests a coherent cosmology that can be understood only in relation to the constant temporal flux that underlies it.