Dialogue between a philosopher and an architect in the presence of an observer

Исследование выполнено при финансовой поддержке РНФ в рамках проекта № 24-28-01707 «Современная философия архитектуры в Италии»

Abstract

In the history of humanitarian knowledge there are many examples of intellectual conversations between philosophers and architects: Le Corbusier and Jane Jacobs, Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman, Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel, etc. All these dialogues were attempts to reflect new challenges of time, important events and actual ideas, i.e. they were conducted not with the aim of developing a universal theory, but in order to solve specific problems of the current moment. As a result, on the one hand, some questions of both philosophy of architecture and theory of architecture were partially clarified, and on the other hand, these discussions contributed to raising new, more complicated questions. In the 1980s, P. Eisenman and J. Derrida created the project “Chora L Works”, which included literary and architectural discourses sounding like “voices”, with Derrida acting as a designer and Eisenman as a writer. The result was a multi-voiced “architecture-polylogue.” This project has faded into oblivion, but it has left a sense of understatement, a “fold” of plissé, in the dust of which, in a Deleuzian way, the whole logarithm of a great epoch can be contained. The article presents a dialogue between the St. Petersburg philosopher Valery Savchuk and the St. Petersburg architect Aleksey Levchuk, conducted with the help of the art historian Zhanna Nikolaeva. This dialogue is a kind of continuation of the established intellectual tradition.