Knowledge in the Making

Abstract

This essay addresses questions of feeling and experience in design using Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958) as a theoretical foundation. Starting with a close reading of the Prologue and the sections on “the social realm” and “action” in Arendt’s book, I raise questions about the hegemony of science and technology in design discourses today. Pointing to the recent work of the architecture firm Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, I explore the desire today for ever more transparent, thin, and weightless buildings and interiors, which approximate or replicate in architectural form and volumetric space the multitudinous “interfaces” we navigate on a daily basis. Pointing again to Arendt, I ask if there are alternative models. In overviews of the architecture and the philosophies of Louis Kahn and Paul Rudolph, I align them with Arendt, and argue that they engaged her concepts of natality, plurality, and action in various ways, and further, that in their work their aspire to create a “durable” rather than a virtual world. In approaching Rudolph, I offer a close reading of a seminal 1970 essay on his work by the architectural critic and historian Sybil Moholy-Nagy, who I argue, similarly employs Arendtian ideals in her analysis of Rudolph’s work.