architectural philosophers.

[disclaimer: this is just plainly casual.]

woah, suddenly even i don't know what to make of everything discussed for the competition. should have figured that bringing in (french) philosophy at any point would invariably complicate matters! seriously though, we should do some reading up on the few philosophical concepts if we were to include the terms in our submission. stray arm-chair philosophising, which even i am guilty of, is fine between us, but at some point we really need to know what we are talking about.

this reminds me of two separate stories.

it has always been important to me to engage in some amount of philosophy in both my work and life seeing as how i'm a highly cerebral person who doesn't take to irrationality lightly. (i can suffer stupidity, but irrationality is quite a whole different diagnosis.) although in recent years, i've grown a little wary of what i say, avoiding as much as possible to drop too many philosophical ideas; french ones, especially, as they are not nearly as easy to comprehend due to the way they evolved in thought. often, architectural--or in fact, design in general--discourse has grown suspect with its active engagement of other fields of study. don't get me wrong, i fully appreciate the result of it -- i am after all the one who wants to go into theoretical research, just not entirely convinced of it not, well... being self-reassuring "bullshit". as Bierut discusses:

It follows that every design presentation is inevitably, at least in part, an exercise in bullshit. The design process always combines the pursuit of functional goals with countless intuitive, even irrational decisions. The functional requirements — the house needs a bathroom, the headlines have to be legible, the toothbrush has to fit in your mouth — are concrete and often measurable. The intuitive decisions, on the other hand, are more or less beyond honest explanation.

the other story was regaled back in school by a lecturer (memory failure, so it's a draw between Phil and Qiaos) about a public lecture that Derrida gave at one of the Ivy Leagues. apparently this big-named architect, whose architectural discourse is steeped in Derrida's philosophy, attended the event hoping he'd finally have the opportunity to meet his idol. what the architect didn't know then was that Derrida was apparently not only acquainted with said-architect's own writings, but actually also felt that his philosophy on deconstruction had been mangled. so when the philsopher found out that the architect was out to meet him, Derrida apparently did everything possible to keep himself occupied and away from this star architect.