Overview

‘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.

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9781474243865

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Reviews

The Sympathy of Things is a stirring call to action; an amazing reconstruction of the ideas of the Victorian sage John Ruskin; and, above all, a visionary look at the inner life of things. Lars Spuybroek makes the case that aesthetics is first philosophy, and proposes a radical new aesthetics for the digital age. -- Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University, USA If Spuybroek, like Ruskin, does not shake your design and aesthetic concepts, you haven't understood him. -- Charles Jencks ... the term 'brilliant' is often misused in reviews, but the opening chapter on 'the digital nature of gothic' is truly scintillating ... -- Stephen Kite Architectural Research Quarterly This is a dazzling, provocative, baffling, and sometimes vexing manifesto. The Sympathy of Things is an unforgettable book. Carlyle Studies Annual ... hundreds of threads that make an astonishingly rich tapestry ... Ruskin has at last found an interpreter with the breadth of learning and a poetic imagination to make his perceptions relevant to our own day. Architectural Review ... exhilarating to watch elements of Ruskin's thought being taken on ... The Sympathy of Things is energetic, well written and full of examples. -- Matthew Reynolds Times Literary Supplement

Author Information

Lars Spuybroek is Professor of Architectural Design at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, USA. He is the author of NOX: Machining Architecture (2004), The Architecture of Continuity (2008), Research & Design: The Architecture of Variation (2009) and Research & Design: Textile Tectonics (2011). He is an award-winning architect with his practice NOX.

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