Lars Spuybroek

The Architecture of Continuity
Essays and Conversations

Design: Joke Brouwer, Paperback, Illustrated (b/w), 292 pages, 14 x 20 cm
English edition, ISBN 978-90-5662-637-2, € 22.50

In association with V2_Publishing

With the support of the Netherlands Architecture Fund and the Prins Bernhard Culture Fund

'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,' says Lars Spuybroek in the introduction to the first, fully theoretical account of his innovatory work. The state of contemporary architecture is the product of a 150-year battle between the Polytechnic and the Fine Arts that has forced us into today's stalemate, one in which architecture is caught in the gaping chasm between a materialistic high-tech and an expressionistic formalism. Nevertheless, Spuybroek's aim is to mend such a rift by rethinking technology as part of our sensory apparatus, materiality as the realm of activity and agency, and structure as the product of genesis.

Building on Gottfried Semper's materialist theory of architecture, Spuybroek takes us from a philosophy of technology to a surprisingly historical argumentation that insistently revives the words of John Ruskin, William Hogarth and Wilhelm Worringer. The book includes several probing essays alongside extensive conversations in which we can see Spuybroek refine and sharpen his arguments, He makes statements such as 'No, I am not a Gothic Revivalist, but almost,' or 'We should use new instruments to address old architectural problems; not to create new problems,' and even 'We should reinvent tectonics, not do away with it.' In a period of calm with regard to architectural theorization this book makes a refreshing return to the basics, thereby realigning theory, methodology and architectural form.

Lars Spuybroek is the principal of NOX, an architecture & art studio in Rotterdam. He is also a Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta where he holds the Thomas W. Ventulett III Distinguished Chair in Architectural Design.

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