Lecture no 10 // A book about architecture without pictures

Thursday, Juni 23, 2022, 6 to 9 p.m.

Martin Kieren
The twohundred books about architecture
De Re Aedificatoria.
A poetics.

A book about architecture without pictures: The author Martin Kieren has written an idiosyncratic, an irritating book. His texts are intended as a contribution to a discipline commonly referred to as "architectural theory", which initially means nothing more than concentrated "thinking about architecture". It provides only two hundred formal "images of thought" and twenty-five poetically open "images of space", grouped as a constellation around an invisible core: that of the profession of architecture.

Martin Kieren and Matthias Noell, Professor of Architectural History and Theory at the UdK Berlin, introduce the book in conversation.

It is an attempt to free the discourse from the ballast of a swollen annotation apparatus that is increasingly distancing itself from its essence, the nucleus of the profession.
There is no first text here, nor is there a logical order to a chain of argumentation; all the text-figures built here are equally arranged in a "loose association".

The two hundred books on architecture move - in terms of the brevity of the text modules as well as their formal radicalism - between manifesto and book of hours, between meditation and aesthetic theory ...it resembles a collection of moments fugitif. The author, however, speaks of a poetics - this aims at "making". -