Lars Spuybroek Book order

How do we live well? The first sentence of Grace and Gravity raises the fundamental question that constantly occupies our minds-and of all those who lived before us. Paradoxically, the impossibility of answering this question opens up the very room needed to find ways of living well. It is the gap where all disciplines fall short, where architecture does not fit its inhabitants, where economy is not based on shortage, where religion cannot be explained by its followers, and where technology works far beyond its own principles. According to Lars Spuybroek, the prize-winning former architect, this marks the point where the “paradoxical machine” of grace reveals its powers, a point where we “cannot say if we are moving or being moved”. Following the trail of grace leads him to a new form of analysis that transcends the age-old opposition between appearances and technology. Linking up a dazzling and often delightful variety of sources-monkeys, paintings, lamp posts, octopuses, tattoos, bleeding fingers, rose windows, robots, smart phones, spirits, saints, and fossils-with profound meditations on living, death, consciousness, and existence, Grace and Gravity offers an eye-opening provocation to a wide range of art historians, architects, theologians, anthropologists, artists, media theorists and philosophers.

'If there is one thing we can learn from John Ruskin, it is that each age must find its own way to beauty' writes Lars Spuybroek in The Sympathy of Things, his ground-breaking work which proposes a radical new aesthetics for the digital era. Spuybroek argues that we must 'undo' the twentieth century and learn to understand the aesthetic insights of the nineteenth-century art critic John Ruskin, from which he distils pointers for the contemporary age. Linking philosophy, design, and the digital, with art history, architecture, and craft, Spuybroek explores the romantic notion of 'sympathy', a core concept in Ruskin's aesthetics, re-evaluating it as the driving force of the twenty-first century aesthetic experience. For Ruskin, beauty always comprises variation, imperfection and fragility, three concepts that wholly disappeared from our mindsets during the twentieth century, but which Spuybroek argues to be central to contemporary aesthetics and design. Revised throughout, and a new foreword by philosopher Brian Massumi, this is a new edition of a seminal work which has drawn praise from fields as diverse as digital architecture and speculative realism, and will continue to be influential as it wrests Ruskin's ideas out of the Victorian era and reconstructs them for the modern age.

Examines popular elements of modern architectural design, offering insight into the extensive research that informs the latest innovations in design and construction, in an essay-complemented, lavishly illustrated account that places an emphasis on the trend in mass-customization.

In the introduction to this first theoretical account of the Rotterdam architecture and art studio NOX, principle Lars Spuybroek writes, "That buildings are made of elements does not mean that architecture should be based on elementarism; we should rather strive for an architecture of continuity that fuses tectonics with experience, abstraction with empathy and matter with expressivity." Building on Gottfried Semper's materialist theory of architecture, Spuybroek takes us from a philosophy of technology to a surprisingly historical argument that recalls John Ruskin, William Hogarth and Wilhelm Worringer. The book includes several probing essays alongside in-depth conversations in which we can follow Spuybroek as he refines and sharpens his arguments. In addition to running NOX, Spuybroek is a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.