Lars Spuybroek Merges Grace with Gravity in New Book

December 7, 2020 | Atlanta, GA

In his new book Grace and Gravity: Architectures of the Figure Professor Lars Spuybroek pushes the boundaries of architecture theory far beyond the comfort zone of academia, expanding it into a world where octopuses, monkeys, and horses are equally mixed with smartphones, cars and robots.

“It is not a philosophy of architecture, but architecture itself as a philosophy,” he states in the preface to the book, “which allows us, architects, to raise fundamental questions in a completely new context of media, mythology, ecology, religion, and technology.”

“In classic philosophy, gravity was always opposed to grace,” says Spuybroek, “but in my book, they are interdependent, as are stillness and movement or, in architectural terms, structure and ornament.” This view leads him to a much broader analysis where the world of technology merges with that of appearances, a form of analysis where observations on architecture are interspersed with sections on pain, laughter, play, and lying.

Spuybroek teaches design methodology and aesthetic theory in the Georgia Tech School of Architecture and his designs are in the collections of the most important architecture museums in the world. In Spuybroek’s The Sympathy of Things: Ruskin and the Ecology of Design, he discusses beauty in a nonhuman context. In Grace and Gravity, Spuybroek escalates his research in aesthetic theory by developing a “nonhumanities” that decenter the position of human consciousness.

“Lars Spuybroek is one of the freshest and most original voices in our contemporary intellectual world,” says philosopher Keith Ansell-Pearson, “Grace and Gravity is a truly exceptional and quite extraordinary book. The reader comes away from encountering it with their minds instructed and their lives enriched. It is a book to savor and one can only be grateful for such a work.”

Order Grace and Gravity: Architectures of the Figure here.